I don’t think anyone is going to confuse gold and silver coins with his phone number on them as government coins.
BTW, if the coins are real gold and silver how could they possibly be considered counterfeit?
“Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the ‘$,’ the words ‘dollar,’ ‘USA,’ ‘Liberty,’ ‘Trust in God’ (instead of ‘In God We Trust’) and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage.
IMHO, he screwed up using the dollar sign ‘$’ and using the word ‘dollar’, the rest of the charges were easily contestable.
More detailed article:
http://gata.org/node/9715
It's not the fact that he was selling gold or silver coins that's problematic. What's problematic is that the coins do bear some similarity to actual US coins. If he would have stamped Snoopy or Bugs Bunny on the coins, he wouldn't have been convicted.
The government alleged and argued (amongst other things) that the coins looked too similar to actual currency. The jurors agreed.
Amazingly, the Feds have used this case to extend the definition of “domestic terrorist” to include a guy that mints 0.999 fine silver “rounds” and encourages others to use them in trade. The guy’s fraud was not related to the weight and purity of his minted rounds, but to the allegation that the rounds could be confused with US coinage.
It is perhaps justified for a national government to protect its monopoly on seignorage by imprisoning and confiscating the wealth of private citizens that threaten its seignorage privilege. However, for the Feds to call this guy’s actions “domestic terrorism” is a real stretch, and strongly suggestive of just how scared the government is that its massive and multiple Ponzi schemes are about to collapse.