Did you know that some 2p pieces are worth more than 2p Because they contain more than 2p's worth of copper.

Some 2p coins are copper plated steel, some bronze (97% copper). The bronze ones won't respond to a magnet and the copper content of those (6.9 grams) is worth about 3.3p.

This means that they could be comfortably used as a 1 Speso coin (1 Speso = 2.2 p on today's gold price).

Who would not accept any coin as payment of a certain sum if the coin were intrinsically worth more?

This leads me to wonder what other coins of the many that have been produced in various countries over the years can be acquired cheaply, in non-numismatic grades, and have a non-trivial scrap value. Probably few of those in current circulation, but perhaps many among those that have now been demonetised.

Such coins could be designated as certain sums in Spesoj, and their cost could be substantially less than getting minted (in small numbers) a coin specifically for Esperantists.

Of course, for the payment of large sums in Spesoj the British sovereign (or any fine-gold coin can be used). 1 sovereign = 10 Spesmiloj.

Why should you welcome the revival of the Speso?

Well if you live in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, Turkey, Argentina you wouldn't even hesitate for a moment about the desirability of a hard currency.

But even if you live in a country where your currency hasn't recently lost a large part of its value, you sensibly should be concerned about fiat currencies.

Have you stopped to think what the basis is for the furore over bitcoin? Forget about all the speculation, the driving force behind Bitcoin was the desire to wrest money out of the hands of third parties (central banks, governments, whoever).

Gold and therefore the Speso which is linked to gold (or any money that has intrinsic value) can 't be devalued by printing billions in paper money.

There has never been hyperinflation in any country whilst it has linked its currency to gold, whereas hyperinflations have been very common over the last 100 years - Google it for a list of countries.

I admire the attempt to put some life into the Stelo by our friend in Austria who has financed a 100 Stelo coin consisting of 1 oz of pure silver.

But the costs of this have put the asking price way above the intrinsic worth of the coin. So it is difficult to see it being used as real money. And If I wanted a 1 oz Silver coin, I could buy one from the Royal Mint at much closer to the value of its silver content.

I would love it if he declared the value of the 100-Stelo coin to be a certain value in Spesmiloj and support this by being ready to buy back any of his coins that he may have already sold at the Spesmilo equivalent.

One way of getting trust in a coin is it being worth more than its nominal value. Another way is the knowledge that you can resell it back to the source at a certain value.

Obviously the former method requires no act of faith. However the latter is workable.

When countries were on the gold standard the circulating money was not only gold coins, they had paper money also.

But although that paper money had no intrinsic value people were happy to use the paper money at full face value because they knew they could go the bank and exchange it for that amount in gold.

2 shillings in 1907 (when the Spesmilo was launched) is according to one website on historic UK inflation the equivalent today of £11.26.

2 shillings in 1907 was the equivalent of 1 Spesmilo.

Curiously, the value of 1 ounce of silver today (£11.58) is almost the same as 2 shillings in 1907

Thus, if the 100-Stelo coin (consisting of 1 oz of pure Silver) were to be used as money based on its intrinsic value then it wouldn't be unfair to consider it to be a 1-Spesmilo coin.

This would fix the Stelo-Spesmilo relationship at 1 Stelo = 1 Spesdeko. This would not only make conversions between the two Esperanto monetary units simple, but also, more importantly, it would give the Stelo a knowable value for all time (an advantage which it has not had previously).

If you didn't follow that reasoning - remember that the value of the Spesmilo is defined as that of a certain weight of gold (0.733 grams of pure gold), and what that value is in term of other currencies is knowable because there is now, and for the foreseeable future will be, an international market in gold.

If you don't believe that ask yourself why Central Banks all over the world hold substantial and in many cases growing gold reserves.

If you like the idea of using the bronze British 2p coin as a 1-Speso coin, or just want them as an investment,you might be asking yourself where you can get hold of them in quantity. I haven't tested it but I imagine that if you go to a bank and ask for 2p coins many of them will be the more modern copper-plated steel coins.

However if you live in a coastal seaside town with an amusement arcade full of coin operated machines, then judging from my experience a source of the older coins is the coin change machines in the arcade.

I put a 10 p coin in such a machine and of the 2 p's that it disgorged half of them were the bronze 2 p's.

I imagine that there is a lot of recycling. People who win 2 p's from the coin operated amusements take them to the arcade change bureau to get higher face value coins rather than walking around with a pocketful of coppers.

The international value of any commodity based money for which there is a free market is in principle open to the fluctuation in the value of that commodity.

But I think that in practice any fluctuations in the price of copper would be unlikely to make the intrinsic value of the bronze 2 pence coin less than the declared nominal value of 1 Speso, nor, if the price of copper were to rocket, to encourage speculators to buy up the stock to melt it down, nor - obviously- lining up to trade in their 'Spesoj'.

It is true that, In the early 80's when the price of silver shot up after attempts by the Hunt brothers to corner the market in silver, a large portion of the remaining stock of 25 Stelo coins in silver were sold off for their scrap value and melted down. But this was because the issuers (UL) had not managed to persuade the Esperantist to buy them and use them as money and UL needed the money.

The problem with the Stelo was always that its value was uncertain. If it had been linked to gold (like the Speso) and the issuers had stood ready to buy back the Stelo at its worth in gold equivalent, the history of Esperanto money might have been quite different.

Up until the early 70's the US dollar was formally linked to gold at $35 to an ounce, and widely accepted, then as now, outside the US, so rationally any Esperantist wanting an international money could simply have used the dollar. The Stelo which was launched in the 1940's didn't solve a problem.

But today with no national currency linked to gold, and so many fiat currencies losing much of their value through Central bank/Government mismanagement, the revival of the Speso does solve a problem. That there is a problem with fiat currencies is only confirmed by the enthusiasm for crypto-currencies

I seems to me a bit of a fluke that the 2p coin happens to have a face value equal to 1 Speso (according to today's sterling price of gold).

It also seems a matter of chance that the sterling melt value of the 100 Stelo coin taking into account the current price of silver, should be the equivalent in today's money of the 2 shillings of 1907 (which in turn was then equal to 1 Spesmilo).

However there is another coincidence which suggests the 100 Steloj should equal 1 Spesmilo and that is that if you work out the sterling equivalent of 1 Spesmilo today on the basis of the current gold price it comes to about 24 Euros.

Now the declared value of the plastic Steloj is such that 100 Steloj is not that far from 24 Euro's - I can't remember now whether the Stelo was 23 or 25 cents when the plastic coins were being sold in the IJK's.