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Message:: [QUOTE="Conder101, post: 4900934, member: 66"]Well they need a denomination to be of interest to coin collectors.  Without a denomination they are just a medal and interest in them plummets.  The government tried 1oz and 1.2 gold "medallions" from 1980 to 84 to try and satisfy the collectors interest in gold bullion coins, wean them away from the Kruggerand, and sell off the US gold some of the gold stockpile.  It failed miserably.  Coin collectors just weren't interested in medals, and the government made the ordering procedure annoying.  So in 1986 we got the ASE and AGE. The next thing is you don't want the face value of the coins to be close to the bullion value because if the spot price falls you run the risk of the coins becoming worth more as money than metal and having them enter circulation or being returned for redemption.  This has happened to Canada on a couple occasions.  We had a similar problem with trade dollars back in the mid 1870's.  We made the trade dollar to ship excess silver from the overproducing mines in the American west to China where they were accepted at their silver weight value.  But when the price of silver fell they were now worth more as money in the US than they were as silver in China and they all started flowing back into the US where their limited legal tender status caused problems.[/QUOTE]