Checked out your site - pretty neat! So it's your primary business - it's where you derive most of your income? How and where are you selling it? How did you get people to trust the purity of the metal? Seems like a good idea!
I'd been involved with the Liberty Dollar since about 1999, and moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project in 2005. I had arranged a meeting of interested folks to see if we could all get together and promote it here when the raid happened. So the meeting became "what do we do now". We realized a centralized system wasn't the way to go, so we decided to figure out how to decentralize. Most everyone else drifted away, but me and a few others continued to work on it.
By the time the 2009 Liberty Forum came around, I had some prototypes. I went and showed them around, and got overwhelmingly positive reviews. By that PorcFest, I had the production models done and had borrowed enough cash to have a few thousand dollars worth. They sold pretty well, but since people were actually using them in trade all over the event, I had saturated the market and was left with about half of what I brought. It proved the cards were a hit, but my business model needed tweaking.
For the next year's PorcFest I asked people to pre-order. Some did, and I did have some in stock. And of course people still had theirs from the previous year. Since it was larger, more people wanted some, and there were a lot more vendors. Now I have people pay me first, then I order the metal, when the metal arrives I create the cards and ship them ASAP - usually takes less than 2 weeks to get to the customer.
I've also added co-branding where I make the cards with someone else's logo and info on the front, with my info on the back. I've done three of those so far.
I haven't really started working hard to sign up merchants, but hope to soon. There's now at least a few hundred people in New Hampshire that have some of my cards, and over $30,000 worth of it in circulation. It hasn't made enough to pay my daily bills yet, but I'm hopeful it soon will. I have sold them all over the U.S. and in a few other countries; all via the website.
As far as people trusting it, I really haven't had to do much. Most people are trusting, and accept it without much thought - just like with silver bullion or coins. (No one ever really does any serious testing of silver bullion. Most just look it over and judge the weight by hand. Some do the sonic drop test, listening for a clear ring. A very few actually weigh them. But no one ever bothers with an actual assay, which will destroy the coin.) But there's also the fact that if anyone ever found me cheating it would destroy my business, and people here know that this isn't just my business but also my mission. But there's another advantage of Shire Silver that helps as well: since the amounts (and thus values) are small, it isn't all that big a loss to assay a card here and there. You can burn away the plastic and take the remaining metal into pretty much any jewelry store and they can weigh and check it for content.
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