mint act

鋳貨法／ mint-act　—　Institutions

A law laying down how coins are to be made and to what standard.

Spanish eight reales (pillar dollar) — A photograph of the real thing this term names.

Flowing Hair dollar — A photograph of the real thing this term names.

The United States Coinage Act of April 1792 established the dollar as the unit of money, adopted a decimal system of one hundred cents to the dollar, and specified that one dollar was to contain three hundred seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver. The act also included a provision for the death penalty if mint officials were to secretly debase the coinage.

The Coinage Act of 1857 removed the legal tender status of the Spanish dollar, and the revision of 1873 quietly removed the standard silver dollar from the list of authorized coins. This provision would later be called the 'Crime of '73'.

⚠ The Ottoman Empire's 1916 Act for the Unification of Coinage demonetized all coins struck before the reform of 1844.