Gold bullion coins

The standard weights of bullion coins are: one ounce, half ounce, quarter ounce and tenth ounce. Other weight of gold coins available include twentieth ounce, one twenty-fith of an ounce, two ounces, ten ounces, and one kilo.

There are a number of gold bullion coins in circulation in the world. The attraction of these is that they retain near full bullion value regardless of either change of government or being transported outside their country of issue.

The major bullion coins:

Issuing Country	Coin	Available fractions	Fine gold content (full coin)
Australia	Nugget	10, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1	31.104 grams
Canada	Maple	1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1, 0.0667 (1/15th), 0.05 (1/20th)	31.104 grams
South Africa	Krugerrand	1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1	31.104 grams
United Kingdom	Britannia	1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1	31.104 grams
United Kingdom	Sovereign	1, 0.5	7.315 grams
United States	Eagle	1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1	31.104 grams

Note: 31.104 grams = 1 troy oz.

Gold coins were hardly produced anywhere between 1933 and 1965. Then, once the private demand for gold ownership had been nearly extinguished, it was finally the South Africans who started minting again in earnest from 1967. But there are still very few gold coins around, and currently there is nowhere that they circulate effectively as money.

There are practical problems with gold being used directly as physical legal money. It is too valuable to represent the smallest required unit of currency. For instance, in America, a dime (ten cents) is equivalent to rather less than 1/100th of a gram of gold. The physical size of a dime's worth of gold is a cube of edge 0.8 millimetres, i.e. about the size of a crystal of brown sugar. This is far too small to be practical. The smallest usable coin really needs a volume of at least 150 times larger. This makes token coinage a necessity.