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Message:: [QUOTE="Numbers, post: 1889574, member: 11668"]Before 1879, there was a big division between Gold Certificates and everything else.  U.S. Notes and Nationals were not redeemable in gold, and traded at a discount to gold and Gold Certificates.  At times during the Civil War, the discount was rather large, with $10 in gold/GCs buying $20 in USNs/Nationals.  As the economy got back on its feet after the war, the gap closed somewhat but remained significant. On January 1, 1879 the U.S. government resumed specie payments, and the USNs (and thus indirectly, Nationals too) became equivalent to gold.  From that point onward, there was little *practical* difference between the various currency types--if you had a government-issued $20 bill in your pocket, it was worth $20 to anyone, no matter what type of $20 bill it was.  There were still plenty of *legal* differences, in the form of rules about which types could be used for customs duties and for bank reserves and such, as well as restrictions on how much of each type the Treasury was allowed to issue; but over time these rules began to look rather silly since all the different types circulated pretty much interchangeably.  So, gradually, even the legal distinctions between the types were blurred by newer legislation. GCs and SCs were eventually discontinued (in 1934 and 1968 respectively) because the price of gold and, later, silver threatened to become high enough to break the equivalence of currency types again.  But Nationals and USNs and such were discontinued essentially because, after all of the legal changes, they had become so similar to FRNs that it wasn't worth the trouble to print these notes *and* FRNs too.  (I'm oversimplifying here, but that's the short version of the story.)[/QUOTE]

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