The dime is accompanied by a paper insert often printed with graphics on the front and a conversion table on the back. The table is intended as a suggestion, to aid the holder in converting the price of bartered goods between Federal Reserve Notes and the amount of silver within the card. Owing to the popularity and utility of the card, they often trade at values higher than the silver spot price.

Conception

Wallet Voting began producing Silver Dime [and Quarter] Cards in 2010[1] to provide a smaller-valued unit to compliment the rise of precious metal barter and to create a convenient educational tool for Austrian School concepts such as Gresham's Law, Inflation, and Subjective Theory of Value. They were influenced by innovators such as Shire Silver, American Open Currency Standard, Del Valley Silver, and Silver Circle movie project, with whom they have found the cards to be a valuable marketing tool for the upcoming film and tenth-ounce silver rounds.

Of particular influence to the Silver Dime Card project was the Liberty Dollar, from whose prosecution the risks of advertising a new coin as "current money" with a face value became evident[2]. For those reasons the Silver Dime Card was judged to be safer from legal challenge because it utilizes a Legal Tender coin and does not claim a certain value-in-trade. They observed that if it were illegal to mint a coin resembling US Currency, one might as well simply use the original coin but in imaginative ways. It has been suggested that trading in these pre-1965 "junk" coins allows the transaction to be reported at a face value significantly less than market value.

Silver Calculator App

In 2011 the What is This Coin Worth? project created a mobile app named "Silver Calculator" for Android and iPhone. It was conceived as a point-of-sale, live-update interface for precious metal barter. It has been continually updated to include international and nongovernmental coins and it has over 6,000 downloads. Multi-lingual versions are planned.

One of the first large-scale tests for the Silver Calculator App was in aiding vendors at the Free State Project's annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in June, 2011.[3]

The original Silver Dime Cards soon incorporated a link to the WITCW app by adding a QR code, and it is the signature feature included to this day as both a technical and quality control tool.