jtryka

1 hour ago, Just Bob said:

Nice find!   Which reverse is that?

It's the first one, the American Samoa Bat quarter!

I just got this one in change at the supermarket, maybe I should buy a lotto ticket!

2 minutes ago, kbbpll said:

Holy expletive, what do I win?

A heartfelt congratulations and hopefully some fun! 

Well, as I always like to point out, cameras seem to magnify gold flaws by about 30x while blurring out anything nice, which when added to my poor phone photography skills likely makes this one look far worse than it actually looks in hand.  That said, the first quess was the right one, as this one graded MS-62★ which was likely due to the prooflike cameo that wasn't quite enough for the PL designation.

I bought this coin recently since I thought it was pretty, so let's have some fun and guess the grade!

I've done that in the past and it was fun, maybe I'll do it for this one!

Where does the 0.998 come from?  Gold coins were only .900 fine, and the reference was to "crude gold, with its usual alloy" so likely something that was in the range of 90%.  The worst part about this proposed bill is the bureaucratic interference in normal commerce.  Often in mining towns of the west, gold dust was traded like currency (no comment on the scruples of those accepting the dust and the values they placed on it) so a law like this would make it illegal and force those miners to meet up with some insufficiently_thoughtful_person bureaucrat just to be paid for the result of his labor.

What does the edge look like?

On 7/15/2020 at 8:48 PM, bsshog40 said:

Did they stop making these for a while? I got mine back in January for the same ridiculous price. 

I don't know if they stopped making them, but there was about 4-5 months when they weren't available.  I missed the proof when it came out earlier but picked one up this week.  And yes, the price is too high, but I'm a collector, so I need to buy one for my collection.  I'm willing to "lose" $45 on this coin, but it's not like I'm buying rolls of proof silver eagles as an investment in silver bullion...

What a great story!  Thanks for sharing it and the photos of the coin.

Got these two over the past few weeks, unfortunately I had these die marriages, but they are at least upgrades!

On 6/1/2020 at 5:30 PM, Outhaul said:

World's Columbian Exposition Award Medal Saint-Gaudens/Barber with original aluminum case. As I understand it, the case is rare and the insert card is even rarer. Most of the cases were lost, destroyed, or simply tossed out. The insert card from Scovill was almost always thrown away or dried up and fell to pieces. At least this is what was related to me by a couple of serious medal collectors. I'm pretty new to medals (less than a couple of months) and this is only my third acquisition.

 

Very cool, the design of the 1992 Columbian half was modeled after this medal.

A while ago I bought some rolls of unc 1967 quarters and dimes, and the dealer and I just settled on the midpoint between to two since they were just selling for melt.  If I remember right it was somewhere around 4x face in US dollars.

I like the Libertad series for the designs and varieties, but I am old school and collect them in unc and put them in an album.  I've never been interested in adding the expense of slabs and someone else's opinion to my set.

7 hours ago, GoldFinger1969 said:

Mexico has some weird coin weights....I think their 50 or 100 peso coin from decades ago is like 1.3 ounces or something like that.

The 50 peso was about 1.21 ounces of pure gold, 37.5 g which makes sense with the peso-dollar peg at 2-1 it would have been roughly the equivalent of a $25 gold piece.  The 20-peso pictured in this thread was about the same size as a $10 gold piece.  It all makes sense when you consider the gold standard and fixed exchange rates.

Nice 1831 bust half!

It's never bad to find a silver dollar!

I started collecting Saints a couple years after the hoard came out, it was a lot of marketing and non-disclosure of key facts (like Wells Fargo lent their name to the hoard, but it was a private hoard stored in safe deposit boxes at Wells Fargo, but add that name and it would be easy to imagine they were discovered in the back of some vault or on a stage coach somewhere in the old west.  The reality was that I don't think these were much different than many of the European bank hoards, but they were of extremely high quality with a large number graded higher than MS-65, but ultimately all common date.

Here are my examples, since this is the first I've heard of the differing varieties, I can't be sure which I have, but feel free to speculate based on my crappy photos!

I joined ebay in 1999, never had a negative or neutral feedback but when the changed their fees and a bunch of other about 10-12 years ago, that was it for me.  I was out and never looked back.  now I just buy occasionally but don't sell there.

I'll guess "Choice Uncirculated" as part of that bank hoard.