A brief coverage of what a dollar is and why this specific one still matters. In fact a century commemoration one has been in the mint for 2021 specifically!
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The last true silver dollar, the Peace Dollar is emblematic of everything hard money (precious metal coinage) had to offer and where we went from there. Nowadays, one Peace Dollar goes for about fifteen or more bucks, and interestingly the Piece Of Eight, while not quite a Piece Of Sixteen I suppose, comes from the Spanish Milled Dollar, which is the dollar that got America to adopt a dollar as its standard.
Nowadays we go on our phones and tap a few buttons and money just flows by on its own. I saw in the update of Cash App that recently released that they added Bitcoin and investment wallets... once again tap some buttons and the money flows on. This is why hard money is such a fascinating concept to me-- what if silver did drop to a fifteenth of the price for whatever reason? After all, unlike gold, silver's a bit easier to measure the weight of value wise!
The wording is additionally indicative of that actual substance here. 'Dollar' comes from 'valley' it seems, and specifically means a piece of silver from a silver valley now in the Czech. The Spanish Milled Dollar took the name from that currency and the US borrowed from the Spanish Milled Dollar in turn. The Peace Dollar specifically is the last of its breed, to the point where it reads in God we trvst whereas the previous Morgan Dollar even has it as trust (being in lower case originally). When the US finally abandoned the silver standard (along with acid) in the sixties that spelled the end for not just the Peace Dollar, but all hard currency.
Now what does all this mean? No matter what it comes down to the fact that you as a physical entity are given the option to remain in the world of one's materially based transactions (back in the day metal was just "the money"). Nothing's stopping you from putting all your eggs in one basket of course, I even saw a Palladium Double Eagle that's officially minted so there's that. All US coins were legal to use according to a Mint Act from that era, but whether obsolete coins hold up in practice isn't always so clearcut. Not that it matters-- in the event the economy were to crash and Bitcoin doesn't save the day, cutting up a few silver dollars a la Piece Of Eight style is entirely understandable.
Not that we have to go that far, just that -not- putting all my eggs in one virtual basket and instead living in the world of whatever threshold of forgotten hard money (once even found a silver dime in a train station hall junk pile) has served in part as a fair counter to this high tech, fast paced world of the twenty twenties. The point of hard money is the gold and silver standards are alive and well and the symbology of the Peace Dollar lends itself a bit further in fact, though, since beyond spelling of trvst we find it to be a wholly metaphorical layout.
Lady Liberty at front, eagle with the word peace under it for the reverse. No real life figures or any of that, only the classic original symbols our country's currency are known for. Fitting for our last era of circulated precious metal coins. The honor system was alive and well at the time, and the coins still exist in large quantities. Personally, I may hold on to a bit of both silver and gold in addition to whatever digital assets arise.
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In fact I came across this information after looking at a dollar bill that came right before the classic design. As you can see, instead of the classic pyramid and eagle, we have have the words "one dollar" simple as that. I pondered over what it was like back before the pyramid with the eye reigned over American public discourse about money. What it was like when the precious metals were still just, the money.... And so I asked myself, what does the word dollar actually mean?
And here we are.
-Russly
