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British Honduras Silver coins are still around in the hands of collectors.
even as small as 25 cent (Shilling) was silver until almost 1900.

LOL !!! Sounds like they are trying to make a person think they can have their cake and eat it too when the reality is the opposite. LOL !!!

So they force you to display it? In a govt. sanctioned museum? Or, can you do anything you want with it as long as you do not sell it, damage it, or take it out of the country?

This is true of most countries in the world. Most countries had honest money until the fiat money octopus created by the sinister bankers extended its ugly tentacles around the world and stole real money out of the pockets of the citizens worldwide and replaced it with legally counterfeited "money" with no intrinsic value.

I don't think that gold and silver are money any more than Titanium and osmium are money. They are shiny metals extracted from dirt which people decided to use for money.
Printed paper isn't money either unless people decide to use it for that reason.
For many years, including recently, you could buy Belize gold coins in denominations up to $100, but they didn't circulate because you could sell the metal for more than the coins, same reason folks melted down nearly every silver coin circulating in the US.
At one time they thought copper pennies would face the same fate during the copper shortage.

They can decide to use paper as money but will eventually run into problems because the use of paper as money breaks the rules of what will "work" as money over the long haul.

Below rules for what works as money is from the book Honest Money written by Gary North
http://www.garynorth.com/public/images/Honest%20Money.pdf

GARY LIKES GOLD AND SILVER SINCE THEY HAVE ALWAYS WORKED OVER TIME AS THE BEST MONEY

The Properties of Money
Why would grain have served as money? Because it had the five essential
characteristics that all forms of money must have:
1. Divisibility
2. Portability
3. Durability
4. Recognizability
5. Scarcity (high value in relation to volume
and weight)
Normally, grain doesn't function as money. Why not? Because of characteristic
number five. A particular cup of grain doesn't possess high value, at least not in
comparison to a cup of diamonds or a cup of gold coins. The buyer thinks to himself,
"There's lots more where that came from." Normally, he's correct; there is a lot more
grain where that came from. But not during a famine.
Why divisibility? Because you need to count things. Five ounces of this for a
brand-new that. Only three ounces for a used that. Both the buyer and the seller need to
be able to make a transaction. The seller of the used "that" may want to go out and buy
three other used "thats" in order to stay in the "that" business, so he needs some way to
divide up the income from the initial sale. This means divisibility: ounces, number of
zeroes on a piece of paper, or whatever.
Portability is obvious. It isn't an absolute requirement. I have read that the South
Pacific island culture of Yap uses giant stone doughnuts as money. They are too large to
move. But they are a sign of wealth, and people are willing to give goods and services to
buy them. Actually what are exchanged are ownership certificates of some kind.
Normally, however, we prefer something a bit smaller than giant stone doughnuts. When
we go to the market, we want to carry money with us. If it can't be carried easily, it
probably won't function as money.
Durability is important, too. If your preferred money unit wears out fast or rots,
you have to keep replacing it. That means trouble. A barrel of fresh fish in a world
without refrigeration won't serve as money. But there are exceptions to the durability
rule. Cigarettes aren't durable the way that metal is, but cigarettes have functioned as
money in every known modern wartime prison camp. Their high value per unit of
weight and volume overcomes the low durability factor. Also, they stay scarce: people
keep smoking their capital.
Recognizability is crucial if you're going to persuade anyone to trade with you. If
he doesn't see that it's good, old, familiar money, he won't risk giving up ownership of
whatever it is that you're trying to buy. If it takes a long time for him to investigate
whether or not it's really money, it eats into everyone's valuable time. Investigations
aren't free of charge, either. So the costs of exchange go up. People would rather deal
with a more familiar money. It's cheaper, faster, and safer.
So what we say is that any object that possesses these five characteristics to one
degree or another has the potential of serving a society as money. Some very odd items
have served as money historically: sea shells, bear claws, salt, cattle, pieces of paper with
politicians' faces on them, and even women. (The problem with women is the
divisibility factor: half a woman is worse than no woman at all.)
Money as

Good article. He is replacing excellent logic with experience however.
Paper money took the place of trade goods and metal because metal failed the portability test he cites along with other trade goods.
It also fails a forgotten test- stealabilty. In the days of bandits, which means all human history, it was not practical to ship gold on horses around the country. It was often stolen.
The rich gave you paper instead.These debt instruments could be redeemed only by you with the nobles so were not useful to steal.you could get a new one from the King if that happened.
You can test his logic by trying to spend a gold coin or a silver bar at the store today or a thousand years ago, and report back on the usefulness of shiny metal as money.
This is esp. true in that famine he mentions. Try handing a starving person a cup of shiny rocks or crystals he can not test instead of a cup of grain.
He mentions that there is not enough grain in the world without noticing that there is a lot more grain supply than gold supply out there.
Neither is sufficient or safe enough in the huge modern world. Numbers on paper and computers are safer, and are the only money supply large enough to work these days.
Even now I do not carry much money when I travel. I get it from machines as I go.
Still too many bandits.

On the original topic.
Last Spring I almost bought a house on Caye Caulker from Richies old partner. It included his treasure maps that came from old doc research and dragging a magnetometer all over the cayes.
Included the magnetometer too, and a pile of other stuff needed by those guys to find treasure. He had a gold and a few silver coins still hidden there at the house, but they were not in the deal.
Richies death kind of ended those efforts and the partner moved to Mexico.
Their biggest problem was too finding too much stuff to excavate with the GOB increasingly on their case. Just under the surface is a lot of old metal indicating innumerable shipwrecks, from findings to cannons and very few of those ships had gold or silver on them when they went down.

That's pretty interesting! Would be quite cool to have those items in one's possession.

Is the house still for sale with all the goodies?

Indiana

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