When were the Golden Dollar minted?
Sacagawea dollar
Beginning in January 2000, the Mint began sending dollar coins to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores across the United States in order to help promote and circulate the coins. In total, $100 million worth of the dollars were shipped to the stores as part of the promotion. Some store owners criticized the Mint's partnership with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club as being unfair to smaller retailers. In response, Diehl noted that "every retailer and commercial establishment has the right to carry the Golden Dollar. The Mint's agreement with Wal-Mart is designed to encourage all retailers and commercial businesses in the nation to use the new Golden Dollar in everyday transactions."
1804 dollar
The Coinage Act of 1792, the legislation which provided for the establishment of the Mint of the United States (today the United States Mint), authorized coinage of multiple denominations of gold, silver and copper coins. According to the act, the dollar, or "unit", was to "be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver". The act went on to state that the coin would be struck in an alloy consisting of 89.2 percent silver and 10.8 percent copper. The purity and weight standards outlined in the Act were based on the mean of several assays conducted on Spanish milled dollars. However, the dollars were mandated by Spanish law to contain 90.2 percent silver, and most of the unworn examples in circulation in the United States at the time contained approximately more than the silver dollars authorized by the Act. In 1793, President George Washington signed into law a bill which declared Spanish milled dollars legal tender, provided that they weighed no less than , which meant that at the lowest weight allowed by law, the Spanish dollars would contain approximately 0.5 percent less silver than the United States dollar coins. As a result, the United States silver dollars and unworn Spanish dollars were largely forced out of circulation in accordance with Gresham's law; the lighter Spanish dollars were shipped in quantity for circulation in the United States, while the heavier pieces would be turned in to the Philadelphia Mint to be recoined into United States coinage to take advantage of the discrepancy in weight. At that time, silver bullion was supplied to the Mint exclusively by private depositors, who, according to the Coinage Act of 1792, had the right to have their bullion coined free of charge. As large silver coins were a preferred method of commerce throughout the world, especially China, a considerable number of the United States dollars requested by silver depositors were exported to satisfy that demand.