Topic: Liberty Dollars held by collectors subject to seizure as contraband (Read 6556 times)

Senior citizens? The mentally handicapped? Kids?

Why should this company have been subjected to an extreme standard that no other minter of silver rounds, or maker of alternative currency, would ever be subjected to?

Look at the rounds several posts above, the ones that resemble American Eagles. Do you think fully-functional adults have never mistaken them for real Eagles, sometimes just because they neglected to turn them over?

Doesn't matter. Those things are still perfectly legal, and SHOULD be, because they are still different enough that simple familiarity and/or examination reveal what they are.

Side note: LDs are not coins. Calling private silver rounds coins IS illegal, and it's something neither NORFED nor Bernard von NotHaus did.

Funny enough my research into "Liberty Dollar" formerly known as NORFED lead me to Bitcoins. I have been following this organization carefully since 2007 before the initial threats and raids. This man was operating this business SINCE 1998 and just now they decide to bust him? This is classic protectionist thuggery by the federal reserve cartel. By the way, NORFED stands for "National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act". Why would an organization dedicated to ending the federal reserve try to emulate & counterfeit its money?  

I know damn well half of you condemning him didn't even read the summarized statement from The U.S. Attorney's office, let alone any actual case documents. If you did, you would see the prosecution CONTRADICTS ITSELF REPEATEDLY and is running a whitewash for the monopolistic criminal cartel, designed to control how we transact with each other thru threats of prosecution, confiscation, and other chilling effects. They tried it once but failed, so they found a new way to railroad them this time. Now a 70+ year old man will die in prison, and for what? Because he dared to compete with the PRIVATE bank known as the federal reserve using COMPLETELY LEGAL barter transactions?

It is kind of sickening to see all the ignorant and the trolls here attack this organization when this very well could be the fate of Bitcoin to be railroaded like this in the near future. I cant wait to see who is next in line to bash on Bitcoin users once they are deemed criminal by our glorious leaders.

How will the carefully crafted partly line sound-byte read then?

Who will be left to speak out for you and your rights?

Well if he changed  the wording of that to something else or leave it out, "trust in god" vs. "In god we trust" was TOO similar and fooled senior citizens and mentally handicapped people as well as kids. Erase it and don't call it coins, cuz that is a "coined" word now.

The real easy way of resolving this issue/problem is to ask all of the possessors of Liberty Dollar coins and currencies if they want to keep their property. If they want to keep the LDs, then apparently they don't feel they've been defrauded. Maybe they think it's a collectors item or some such thing.

On the other hand, if they truly thought that the LD's they have/had were not the property they expected them to be (some other currency), then they can go sue the guy who sold it to them and attempt to recover the property they exchanged it for.

Finally, and last but not least, perhaps whoever owns these LDs should be cautioned against attempting to claim they are something they're not to avoid the appearance of fraud. But isn't that just being obvious? Misrepresentation of any object as something it is not, in trade, risks a contract breach. Sounds like 'Contracts 101' to me.

How hard was that?

I could be mistaken but I seem to remember the promotional material on the website advocating trying to "pass" the coins at the USD equivalent of their face value without necessarily explaining that they were not government issued currency. By early 2008 the 1 oz silver coins were being issued as $50 denominations, far in excess of the market price for silver at that time ($10-20 over 2008) and a little more than even the recently set ~20 year high of $48.XX (it's around $40 today.) It's also worth noting that "associates" got the coins for 2/3 the price. http://web.archive.org/web/20081217005130/http://www.libertydollar.org/

Imagine receiving one of these as payment for something later in 2008 believing it to be a government issued coin and discovering later that the "$" face value was essentially meaningless: the issuer was no longer willing exchange it to USD  at any price (http://web.archive.org/web/20081218121525/http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/faqs/convertibility.htm) and the silver in it was only worth $10, a fifth of the face value.

As a consumer, you have the freedom to use anything you want as currency. All that's required is acceptance among users. Same goes for the business owner so long as the consumer does not take posession prior to payment. If the consumer does take posession prior to payment, then the debt is existing and seller must accept all denominations of the nations current money, but they can also accept other forms of payment as well.

You are free to choose the television channel you want to watch, not the currency you want to use. Thats for the government burocrats to decide (with guns and for your own good of course).

Also, in case I gave anyone the wrong impression, the above photo shows "generic" silver rounds from some unknown (to me) mint. They're regularly sold in the USA, despite the similarity to legal tender American Silver Eagles, and no one thinks anything of it.

Liberty Dollar rounds look more like




But (to try to bring us back on point) regardless of the case, does anyone really think that people who paid for Liberty Dollars and know exactly what they are should have their door kicked in and have their property stolen?

I think this guy is right.  I can see how these coins would be easily confused for the "real" dollar coins.  I would have accepted one without a second thought, just because I handle dollar coins so infrequently that I would have easily mistaken this for the real deal.

So does this kind of stuff happen in free countrys?

But that's just it... added up to what? What was the crime?

Making silver rounds that borrow some common features of coins? That's done all the time, by all sorts of silver mints. It's a non-issue—no one cares. There was clearly no counterfeiting going on.

Creating an alternative currency? Again, it happens all the time. Ithaca Hours, Butte Bucks, REAL Dollars, BerkShares, Salt Spring Dollars and many more circulate in their communities unmolested by federal agents.

Ignoring the (glaringly obvious) possibility of simply being targeted by a biased system for any number of ulterior motives, the only realistic reason for going after Liberty Dollars was some notion of some folks, somewhere being defrauded. In an age where people get suspicious whenever I hand them an older dollar coin or a $2 bill, this seems like a hard sell to me.

I suspect most complaints were from people who greedily took the LDs, no questions asked, because they assumed the offerer mistakenly gave them something with a resell value higher than face value, and who were ticked to discover otherwise. That, or some of the people using LDs were fraudulently passing them off as U.S. legal tender—in which case, why go after the manufacturer instead of the actual fraudsters?


Thanks, I'll read this. My phone apps are having trouble opening the file though, so it'll have to wait until later.

I do not believe any one thing got him convicted. I believe it was the totality of the evidence that did it. Everything added up.

here is a copy of the case in pdf format

So it's not that it looks just like U.S. money... it's that it shares a name with a mid-1800s coin that most people have never seen or heard of? Funny, I don't recall that being mentioned in the write-up of the trial that I read (it's seriously becoming a nuisance that so many judges ban video cameras from the courts, I'd have paid to see the footage of this trial.)

And a quick question on that point: which is worse, calling your money "Liberty Dollars", or producing and selling silver rounds which look like this



but which are actually NOT really U.S. coins, and calling them "1/2-oz. Walking Liberties," while neglecting to put the phone number and website of the minter on the reverse?

I'm wondering where you draw your line.



I'll concede as to how Liberty Dollars could sound to some at first. Actually, Bitcoins reminds me a lot of LDs in that regard... complete with the whining about how the model is "unfair" to latecomers. But curiously, in both instances, the models that were implemented are pretty much the only realistic way to get the currency off the ground and make it work.

I take it you refer to his (admittedly contoversial) tactic of doing "the drop?"

I've just looked over the actual codes he was convicted of violating, and I'm not seeing how the jury did it other than through ignorance of the meaning of "current money" (although apparently "causing offense" to the US was also enough for them—heaven help us all.)

According to Black's 6th ed.:


The problem with saying that offering one's own currency to someone, or that even "doing the drop" violates the code mentioning current money is that it leads to clearly unintended absurdities.

If someone dropped a $10 Canadian dollar bill into a clerk's hand to pay for a burger, stayed silent, then explained it as being Canadian money when asked, have they also violated that same code? If not, what is the difference?

And we might as well get the word out to all users of Ithaca Hours... looks like they're all criminals now. Although I suspect that the Fed will leave them alone. No silver or gold to confiscate (and then try to resell on eBay!) from those folks.

(BTW - Do you have a link to that online pdf of the state's case?)

Then whole honk kong is illegal!!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_dollar

The problem is not that NotHaus created a new currency.

The problem was he created a competing currency, marketed it as such, and went into great detail how to surrupticiously mix them into the nations money supply unbeknownst to the average citizen (one tactic which he specifically described ways to do this by giving them as change from vendors).

It is not WHAT he did, but HOW he did it that was illegal.

Go read the states case (online pdf) - they outline it very well, and as much as I hate to admit it, the state was right according to the letter of the law.

He just went about it the wrong way.

Exactly. Again people, read up on it: there is quite a history of businesses, communities, and even individuals minting and printing their own money in the U.S. There is no law banning anyone from making their own money, it's the counterfeiting of US money that is criminal.

Anyone here can walk out their door and print out a million "Bob Dollars" or mint 1-oz. silver "Jane Dollars." Its perfectly legal, although whether the federal government comes after you depends more on how successful you are (I.e.: how threatening you are to them) than on the law.

The justice department cheated in order to gain that conviction. Bernard is a hero, not a criminal.

Its totally legal in the USA to frame a private currency as a valid currency. Its not legal to frame it as legal tender, which he did not, even denying publicy that it was legal tender.

I think the problem with them is the coin itself... it does resemble a walking liberty US dollar silver coin...  hence the problem.

He should have made a completely differing look and feel, and not put a demonitation on them.. or put one that is completely outside of what US currency uses.. perhaps literally call them units...

"redeemable for 1 silver unit"