When is a coin not a coin?

You raise very good points @Conder101 (as usual). I will say your argument on the State coppers is a very good one, and hard to argue against. I suppose in those cases, they were officially issued by a state government, therefore legal tender within that state. I cannot say one way or the other if those coins were ever officially recognized, or would have been honored if presented in a different state.

As for your statement on the early Large Cents and Half Cents, I don't understand your point/question. Where each of these coins were issued by acts passed by the US government, wouldn't they fall under the term of Legal Tender for the United States? When the Large Cents were replaced by the Flying Eagle and Indian cents, did the government issue a new law that stated the previous Large Cents were no longer legal tender?

 

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Nope. Legal tender originally only included gold and silver coin. It's worth a trip to Google.

 

I was not aware of that little loophole. Very interesting! I"ll be doing some reading on that for sure this weekend! Thank you @-jeffB and @Conder101 ! I love this site for this very reason! Always learning something new!

 

Coin=legal tender, past or present.

 

If the definition is that simple, yap stones have got to be the biggest coins ever made.



I wonder if NGC will encapsulate them and grade them. Anyone has a 20 ton crane we can use to get one over to NGC?

 

We could pay off half the national debt with that.

 

A coin is not a coin when @dcarr makes it
(not ragging on Mr. Carr at all, just thought he might find it funny)

 

He states emphatically it's not legal tender, so it ain't a coin. I still like his overstrikes, regardless.

 

A coin by any other name is just a coin, or is it?

 

It's a bit late in the evening to try to analyze that.

 

They did (CACA sticker too!)

 

New Jersey did make theirs legal tender (which was why I didn't mention NJ in my last post) but the Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachussets coppers were NOT legal tender even within their own states.

So being legal tender has nothing to do with whether or not a piece is a coin.

 

A coin is not a coin when it is really a button.