The Anderson – A Unit of Currency

By C. Anderson Miller on Day 1

I’ve been growing very concerned about the dollar becoming devalued as of late.  Therefore, I feel I can put some good old American Ingenuity towards the task of making us a new standard – one based in Gold (at least theoretically) like our last great currency!

Here’s my intial design:


I felt that it should say a few things quickly.  First, at the moment, I believe I’m more trustworthy than the government – hence “In Anderson We Trust”.  You’ve got to trust me to spend my currency.  On the back, is my promise.  “I won’t print more just to cover debt”. That’s how you get into trouble.  My currency will have a hard backing.

First – the process:

I printed my design onto magazines (printed in reverse) so that I could heat transfer them to the brass coins I had selected.

Then I scoured my coins:

Then I affixed the cut out of my design to the coin:

And then the heat press for 90 seconds!:

Uh oh!:
The coins weren’t flat, so they looked like this on transfer:

So I used two pieces of wood and a vise to flatten them!

Then they got re-heat transferred:

Then it’s on to their bath:

I’m going to leave this as a sidenote – because I picked up copper sulfate in a 7.5% concentration and not the 100% concentration I needed – so the heat transfer was really the last step. Ideally, the brass would’ve etched in that solution, but it didn’t because the concentration was too low. The gigantic motor was to trick the solution and the brass into thinking that it was doing something electrical, so that electrons would move through my cash.

The finished product!

So finally what have we got?

Cash!

But how much is it worth?

Well, it took me approximately 10 hours to make it, so 1 Anderson = 5 hours of my time.

If I value my prototyping skills at $20 per hour (I’m not that great at prototyping, but it’s a specialized skill), then they are worth $200 together, and there are only two. So they are worth $100 each. This does not consider materials, as once a process has been established, they are effectively $0.49 per coin to produce.

So what’s that in gold?

Well, as of this writing, the price of gold is $930.10 per ounce. This means that an Anderson is currently worth 0.10751 ounces of gold.

Let’s see how it holds up against the dollar!

-Anderson Miller

July 28th, 2008