Silver in New Hampshire

There are many advantages of living with people who think as you. Especially if people who think like you value trade. Sometimes people forget about the wealth that trade brings. It is trade that allows the division of labor. This is the simple idea that a shoemaker can excel at making shoes and a potato farmer can excel at growing potatoes, and through trade both the shoemaker and farmer can have both shoes and potatoes. This specialization allows for more wealth creation than the farmer making shoes, or the shoe maker growing food.

People wishing to guard their wealth from inflation may buy gold and silver. Once bought it makes more sense to trade it then to sell it back for paper money. I will describe the extent that this has happened in New Hampshire.

Not everyone in New Hampshire accepts silver, but some do. Some people accept silver for rent. The result is demand for silver. This demand, makes silver more liquid. Specific people offer good prices for silver buying and selling. People here are acting as their own bank, buying silver when there is money to save and selling it when they need money. I have traded silver for books, bookshelves, food.

The rewards for people who have bought silver have been outstanding! The price has more than doubled since 2009. This has been a big boon for silver bugs. As USD prices go up, silver prices are going down.

Now you may not be able to get all of your needs taken care of with silver. However we are creating a nice pocket of a world where silver trades with those that will take it. For example at porcfest there was one individual who refused to use federal reserve notes. He made it just fine through porcfest. An interesting dynamic that happened at porcfest was the dynamic involving Shire Silver.

Shire silver is a laminated card that contains one or five grams of silver. At porcfest gram silver pieces were selling for about $2. Some people would only accept them for spot (around $1.20 at the time.) This setup created an interesting dynamic where some vendors were getting more business because they accepted a gram as $2. You could even get a gyro for three grams and a piece of baklava as change. Porcfest is like the rest of the year in silver transactions compressed into one week.

Other silver we trade include: one ounce fine rounds, half and tenth ounce rounds, U.S. mint silver dollars, old 90% silver U.S. mint coins, including laminated dimes, shire silver, shire gold. For big items gold can be traded.

To think that only one thousand people have officially moved. As people continue to move at an increasing clip, the Free State Project is already an interesting experiment and will only become more so.