The New Hampshire gold money bill

House Bill 1342-FN-A-LOCAL, LSR 2086, was titled "AN ACT establishing a new system of coinage for the state". Its sponsors were Rep. McElroy of Hillsborough 61, Rep. Ingbretson of Grafton 13, and Rep. Itse of Rockingham 80. It was introduced on September 4, 2003 and referred to the House Commerce Committee. The bill's own printed header reads "2003 SESSION" and it is enacting-clause-dated "In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Three", while the General Court's bill status system indexes the same bill under session year 2004 and every docketed action on it fell in 2004. Both years describe the same bill; the divergence is recorded in full below.

The bill as introduced is not the document this domain became known for. As introduced it was a state minting bill. Its own analysis line reads: "This bill states that New Hampshire shall mint its own coins at a face value of $50,000,000." The operative section directed the state to mint one troy ounce gold and silver coins alloyed to 90 percent fineness, bearing the great seal of New Hampshire and the words "New Hampshire Legal Tender", and to put them into circulation as they reached the treasury.

The gold and silver currency text that made this domain notable was drafted separately, as an amendment intended to replace that bill entirely. It is described in the next section.

Two versions of a proposed new RSA chapter 6-D survive in Internet Archive captures of this domain. Both are recovered archival material rather than official filings, and neither has been matched against a document in the General Court's own files.

The earlier capture, taken July 10, 2004, holds a document headed "Draft Amendment to HB 1342-FN-A-LOCAL", marked "Rep. McElroy, Hills. 61", dated January 8, 2004, and numbered 2004-0038h. It opens by amending the bill "by replacing all after the enacting clause", and inserts a new chapter titled "Gold and Silver Coin".

The later capture, taken December 7, 2004, holds a fourteen page revision titled "Gold and Silver Coin and Electronic Currency". That file stayed at the same address until at least 2017, which makes it the version most outside links to this domain would have reached. It is republished here at /goldbill.pdf, unaltered, so the address resolves again.

The archived page that described it names the drafter as Edwin Vieira Jr., Ph.D., J.D., of Manassas, Virginia, author of Pieces of Eight, and dates the revised filing to Monday, October 4, 2004, for the following session. The only support for the drafting attribution and that filing date is this domain's own archived page and its own press release. No New Hampshire record confirming either has been located.

What the recovered text actually does is narrower than the campaign around it suggested. It is an opt-in scheme for transactions with the state, not a general legal tender law. Section 6-D:14 makes that explicit:

Absent such timely notification, the medium of exchange for any such transaction shall be legal tender of the United States.

The operative provisions, as recovered, run roughly as follows. Section 6-D:2 defines an Electronic Gold Currency as a fixed weight of gold held by a Payment Provider, and enumerates the coins that qualify as gold and silver coin, among them the American Eagle, the Austrian corona and ducat, the British sovereign, the Canadian maple leaf, the French 20 franc, the Mexican peso, the krugerrand, the Swiss 20 franc, and United States silver dollars of 371.25 grains fine. Section 6-D:3 requires the Treasurer to designate one or more Payment Providers and to run every state transaction in metal through accounts held with them. Sections 6-D:7 and 6-D:9 through 6-D:13 extend the option to taxes, state borrowing, purchases and sales of state property, eminent domain awards, court judgments, and wages and contracts. Section 6-D:16 provides for civil enforcement against officials who misstate the exchange rate, with a criminal penalty measured in silver coin rather than in dollars.

One provision was not optional. Section 6-D:8(I) would have required payments under RSA chapter 78, the tobacco tax, to be made in Electronic Gold Currency Units at the free market rate. The archived page states the reason plainly, that a mandatory stream was needed to keep the state's gold account funded.

It was killed. The General Court's official docket for HB 1342 records a hearing on January 8, 2004, a continued hearing on January 20, and a majority committee report of Inexpedient to Legislate on January 21, 2004 by a vote of 11 to 1. On January 30, 2004 the docket records a proposed floor amendment by Rep. McElroy, numbered 0265 and printed at House Calendar 10, pages 518 to 526. On February 5, 2004 the bill was removed from the consent calendar at Rep. McElroy's own request, and the Inexpedient to Legislate report was adopted by voice vote the same day.

The bill status record closes the matter: House status Inexpedient to Legislate, dated February 5, 2004, chapter number none. It never reached the Senate and it never became law.

A printed floor amendment numbered 0265 is the natural candidate for the recovered chapter 6-D text, but this site has not read House Calendar 10 and does not assert that the two are the same document. The recovered draft carries a different number, 2004-0038h.

The archived pages announce a revised bill filed on October 4, 2004 for the following session and say a bill number was expected within a month or two. No later capture of this domain records one, and no New Hampshire legislative record of a successor bill has been located. On the evidence available, the effort ended with the February 2004 vote.

New Hampshire levies no general sales tax, so a bullion or coin purchase carries no state sales tax there and never has. That has nothing to do with the gold money bill. It is a feature of the state's overall tax structure, and it would be the same if no sound money bill had ever been filed.

Gold and silver are not legal tender in New Hampshire. Two later attempts are on the record. House Bill 1674 of 2024, per its own official title, would have declared them legal tender and created a state bullion depository; the committee reported it for interim study and closed the file on October 31, 2024 with a report of Not Recommended for Future Legislation by a vote of 16 to 0. A secondary summary of the bill also describes it as authorizing a blockchain based electronic currency backed by the depository's metal, a detail the official title itself does not carry. House Bill 721-FN, filed in January 2025, would establish gold and silver as legal tender; the House referred it for interim study on January 7, 2026 and the General Court still carries it at that status, so it has neither passed nor been formally killed.

The full record, including the sales tax and state income tax findings and the date each was last checked, is on the New Hampshire state page.

The 2004 attempt and the bills moving through the states in 2025 and 2026 are asking two different questions, and reading the first as an early version of the second gets both wrong.

The recovered chapter 6-D was about the state's own transactions. It would have let a person elect to pay a tax or be paid a state salary in gold, through a designated electronic gold provider, at the market rate. It did not touch sales tax, it did not touch income tax, and outside dealings with the state it changed nothing.

The current wave mostly does two other things. Some bills declare gold and silver legal tender as a matter of state law. Others exempt bullion from state sales tax, which is the measure that actually changes what a buyer pays at the counter. Those two are routinely reported as the same reform and they are not, which is the subject of a separate guide. New Hampshire is a useful case precisely because it has one and not the other: no sales tax on bullion, and no legal tender recognition.

Where the 2004 bill does connect is in authorship and in shape. Dr. Vieira's drafting work, and the specie exchange and depository machinery the recovered text sets up, look a great deal like provisions that arrived two decades later. Texas built a depository in 2015 and attached a transactional currency to it in 2025. Arkansas carries both halves in a single 2025 act, which added a bullion depository framework and a precious metals backed electronic payment system to its legal tender statute. The 2024 New Hampshire bill would have created a state bullion depository alongside a legal tender act, and failed. Wyoming is routinely listed with those three and does not belong there. It has no depository in force and no transactional currency provision. What it has is a direction to the treasurer to hold specie inside a fund the state already ran, which is a different kind of law entirely. The depository guide gives that distinction its own section, with the documents. See also the guide to the 2025 and 2026 legislative wave and the guide to legal tender against sales tax exemption.