Phatscotty wrote:and what coins started being minted in 1986....


That coin is only tender to the $5 value printed on its face. It probably has $1600 of gold in it at current prices but to get the $1600 out of it you'd have to take it to a gold broker and sell it for paper currency, you can't present it for payment of "all debts public and private." If the value is only set to the face value of the coin, not the value of the metal in it, it's just a novelty collector's piece, not a part of the money supply like gold coins in a gold-backed system.
Reagan had the mint get into the collectible coins business to unload all of the gold the U.S. government had laying around after Nixon decoupled the U.S. from the gold standard and Ford legalized private gold ownership.