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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 5241955, member: 11668&quot;]I think you&#039;re misunderstanding the word &quot;redeem&quot;.&nbsp; Only the U.S. Treasury could redeem paper currency for gold or silver (taking that piece of paper currency out of circulation).&nbsp; Banks didn&#039;t redeem any currency at all.&nbsp; If you want to trade a $20 bill for a $20 coin, or for a different $20 bill, the bank teller might be willing to help you out, or he might ask you to quit wasting his time...but none of that has anything to do with the legal status of gold, silver, and/or paper currency.</p><p><br /></p><p>The practical answers to your questions were different at different times.&nbsp; In 1876, gold (and gold certificates) were still at a premium to other forms of currency, so nobody (including the U.S. Treasury!) would give you $20 in gold for $20 in silver, just like nobody today will give you $20 American for $20 Canadian -- they&#039;re both &quot;twenty dollars&quot;, but they&#039;re different kinds of dollars.</p><p><br /></p><p>After the resumption of specie payments in 1879, the $20 in silver and the $20 in gold were of equal value, so exchanging one for the other was sensible.&nbsp; At that point, it&#039;s just a matter of finding a bank teller patient enough to humor your weird preference for gold over silver.&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>As you hinted at in an earlier post, once gold dollars and silver dollars had traded at equal values for many years, it did start to look silly that some of our paper dollars were labelled &quot;gold certificate&quot; and others &quot;silver certificate&quot; (and still others several other names!); none of the distinctions had any *practical* significance by 1920 or so.&nbsp; But they were embedded in law, so they persisted anyway, long after they had outlived their usefulness.&nbsp; (And then they came back to bite the whole financial system whenever something out of the ordinary happened...see 1933, or 1964.)</p><p><br /></p><p>At various times, the Treasury made an effort to simplify the currency system by restricting certain denominations to certain types (e.g., all $1&#039;s were silver certificates for many years), but they didn&#039;t have authority to just discontinue a type; only Congress could do that.&nbsp; As late as the 1990s, the Treasury was still maintaining a vault full of carefully counted red-seal United States Notes, because Congress had yet to change the law requiring them to exist....[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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