What we explain across the glass, written down — what your scrap gold is actually worth, why the assay card matters more than the bar, and how licensed collectible silver gets priced.
Across the glass
debasementBefore there was a dollar defined in silver, there was a dollar defined in nothing. The Continental currency financed a war and then evaporated, and the men who wrote "gold and silver coin" into the Constitution had watched it happen.
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debasementHold a denarius of Augustus and one of Gallienus and you are holding the same name on two different things: one is silver, the other is a copper disc dipped in it. The road between them took 250 years, and every step was a budget decision.
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gold standardThe first thing Congress did with the word "dollar" was give it a weight: 371.25 grains of pure silver, or 24.75 grains of pure gold. Hamilton's design was elegant and had one flaw, and the flaw is the story of the next 80 years of American money.
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goldRun the periodic table through five tests (scarce, doesn't corrode, safe to hold, easy to divide, rare enough to matter but not so rare you can't find any) and one element is left standing. The habit is 5,000 years old, and it started with the chemistry.
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debasementDebasement is when the thing called a dollar, or a denarius, or a shilling, comes to contain less than it did, while the name stays the same. It has been done with a shears, a furnace and, now, a keyboard.
Read moreThe series
Counter Notes is the history behind the questions people ask across the glass: what currency debasement is and how it has worked from clipped coins to printed money, what the gold standard actually was and why it ended, how the dollar's buying power has moved since 1913, and the stories that follow gold and silver around — 1933, 1971, the Hunt brothers, the coins that left circulation.
Nothing here is a forecast and nothing quotes today's price; the live spot board at the top of every page does that. The notes are the long record, written the way the counter explains it: dates, figures and sources, both sides where the history has two camps.
When a note turns into a question about your own metal, the practical pages pick it up: how bullion is priced to buy, what the counter pays when you sell and how every piece is tested.
Before you read
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