Sort of, but not really. The issue here is mixing the ideas of "a dollar" with "a piece of gold worth a dollar" or "a piece of silver worth a dollar". They are not the same thing.
There's an abstract notion of 'Value: $1.00' that both a piece of paper and a piece of gold links up to.
Hopefully that is a clear explanation.
> that makes it unclear who the victim of this crime really is.
Ah, okay - sorry, I missed this. There isn't really "a victim" here per se; it'd be hard to point at a person and say that they were hurt by what this guy was doing. Rather, it's a crime because it has the potential to destabilize the rules of how our financial system works. And, by implication, how our political system works. Money and politics go together, everyone accepts this.
Government rhetoric (I guess) requires them to label it terrorism, but that's really stupid. They could have used it as an opportunity to explain how our economic system actually works. Of course, if you explain how the system works, people may ask deeper questions, etc.
OK:
You make an 8 gram silver coin and call it a "One Liberty Dollar". It will cost you $256 in silver alone.
You then trick a bank into accepting it, so they deposit it into your account with a value of $1.
The coin isn't a real US dollar, so you're guilty of counterfeiting currency. In reality, however, you've lost significantly more than you've gained, and the bank should be able to recover most of the lost dollar by selling the silver.
It's clearly criminal to pass off something that isn't a real coin as a real coin, and the you should be punished for that. But it seems logical to me that charges of conspiracy and terrorism should be weighed against the fact that any conspiracy certainly wasn't to your financial benefit - as counterfeiting conspiracies very much tend to be.
Other comments have suggested that the coins were indeed worth less than they were accepted for, so that makes it more clear cut. I still think the quoted paragraph is poorly phrased - it would have made sense to include that very simple fact.
I agree that the government's choice of language was extremely poor and wrong-headed. They certainly didn't do anyone any favors by just labeling the guy a terrorist and saying that's it.
I don't think it matters whether or not you lost money on going through with the act. If you want to throw your hard-earned money away to make a point, I suppose that's a privilege.