Post your 3 Cents please

Celebrating my 3,000th post ! I love 3 Cents . please post away . Here's mine :

 

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Congrats on 3000

 

I have an 1862 in AU 50.......................

 

That's Ok . I have a good Imaginary Mind .

 

Found it, sorry bout that.

 

Mine is in the mail, ask me again in a couple of weeks.

 

I will dig mine up.

 

Here are mine

 

Sorry, when I edited this it somehow turned into a double post. Please see post below instead.

 

Congrats on 3000 posts! I think it took me 2 years to hit 600. So I'll be there in another 10 years or so, if I'm lucky. Here are 3x3 cents.
Top: Type I, 0.750 Ag, 1853
Middle: Type II, 0.900 Ag, 1857
Bottom: Copper-Nickel, 1867



The 3 cent piece was an important step on the road to fiat money. Before that, the US was on a bimetallic system, with both gold and silver coins close to full bodied. The Gold Rush lowered the price of gold relative to silver, and pushed silver coinage out of circulation. The 3-cent piece was only 0.750 fine silver at first, and had a metal content well below face value: 0.60 oz ASW = 20 g of silver per dollar face. The larger silver coinage still had about 24 g of silver per dollar face. So this was some of the first silver "token" coinage issued by the US. It led the way toward the switch to a gold standard after the Civil War, with silver coinage no longer full bodied.

Token silver coinage with reduced metal content solved one of the chronic problems of bimetallism--in that which ever type of coinage, gold or silver, had relatively more metal value at the moment tended to be hoarded and not circulate. But this required building public trust to accept money which not worth as much by metal as the face value claimed, which was a gradual process. There were many missteps along the way!

 

So, that's what a Cameo 1883 looks like - my God, what a nice looking coin. And I thought my PF66 was nice looking.

 

That was a quick metal detecting trip @Inspector43