Revenant

Fingers crossed that mine will be here soon. I got the certificates over the weekend.

I hope you enjoy what you own though. 😆

People are crazy and dumb. There's a seller that keeps insisting that the Zimbabwe notes are going to shoot up in value one day even though interest in them and their value has declined as memory of the 2008 hyperinflation fades and theres little reason to think that trend will reverse.

If you're not prepared for things to take longer than advertised / estimated to get done you're liable to have a very unhappy life. The sfuff I could tell you about some of my recent experiences with AT&T.

The 20 Mark coin arrived a while back and I was really happy with how the coin looked in hand. I’d been a little concerned about unattractive marks on an MS62, but I was very happy with the look of this one. There’s a significant number of scratches on the high points but nothing I consider too distracting or detracting from the look of the coin when I look at it in person (pictures can always be a bit hit or miss with how good or bad they make a coin look under high magnification). As it happened, on the same day this arrived I also got a little tin miniature I’d ordered that is a knight painted up as a German knight. So, a German coin and a German knight (shipped from a mini painter in Russia that sells these things at very reasonable prices for the level of quality he delivers). Interesting and fun timing. I also (finally) doubled up on a trip to the post office - I had to mail a box for work and I finally made myself take my 10G coins, packed in a box with some CWT for grading and mail them to NGC. I'm looking forward to seeing all of those 10G coins back in their new matching holders. Getting myself to actually mail that off and thinking about it has been a surprising source of anxiety for me, which is probably what kept me putting it off for so long. The idea of handing over a box with thousands of dollars of old coins that I've been building / searching for over 12+ years made me nervous - even more so after what happened the last time I sent a big submission to NGC. The box ended up getting soaked and nearly destroyed and it was delivered to NGC being held together with shrink wrap. NGC called me when they got it asking me if I even wanted them to open it and continue with the grading, it had been mistreated so badly. That was over 10 years ago and I don't think I will ever forget that call. But the box is being shipped as registered mail now so I'm hoping it'll be treated better this time. We are currently in the middle of the 2nd week of Sam's 3 week intensive therapy sessions where he has 4, 4-hour PT sessions a week and he has to wear a cast for 2 weeks to force him to work with his right arm more. He's tired and exhausted and so is Shandy. I'm taking Ben to preschool and picking him up instead of her so Ben’s getting less Mom-time so he's more needy and my day /schedule is far more fractured and chaotic than it normally is. It's not easy, but we did manage to squeeze in a lot of celebrating of Ben’s 5th birthday the last week or so. He's been spoiled quite thoroughly with tons of presents from all the family, and now he's about to get Easter. Tons of new Beyblades for his collection and he is thrilled! I think I took the shot below about a week ago, he's been given like 4 more since then and there are 2 that had been missing for a couple of weeks at the time I took this and I have no idea where they got to. I think we're up to having 3 that are AWOL and I'm getting him a case to hopefully keep better track of them and lose fewer of them - not that it harshes his game to misplace one with this many to play with... Please don't think he's loved or spoiled though.

Sorry I'm slow to respond on this but life is a bit crazy and I have a lot of balls in the air. But I'll circle back on this.

I'm still slowly working on getting my father-in-law's coins organized and set up the way I want but these got my attention in a good way - some Italian 500 lire coins. It has "500" in braille in the legend / along the rim. The Italian 500 Lire, from what I read, was the first bimetallic coin and the first coin to feature braille. Seeing this got me thinking about something I read years ago about the FED / BEP / the US government being sued on the basis that the currency in the US doesn't do enough to provide "access" to the currency for the blind - there was no way for a blind person to, without help, tell the difference between a $1 bill and a $100. This was something I'd never given much thought to, but it does come up in a 1989 film my mother used to love called "Blind Fury." In the film a clerk at a store tries to cheat a blind man when he pays with a $100 bill by giving him low denomination bills in change - he's counting out in increments of $10 or $20 while audibly putting down $1 bills if I remember right. The issue also comes up in a more subtle way in Ben Affleck's Daredevil - you see him pulling cash out of plastic containers marked with the denominations in braille. He folds the different denominations in different ways - presumably so he can tell them apart in his wallet. Both of the above deal with currency - not coins. In the US I'd think coins would be easier based on different diameters and reeded vs plain edges on coins. I think the quarters and dimes still have rough edges where the penny and the golden dollars don't so in those cases touching the edge could help where diameters are close. (Is it bad that, as a coin collector, it has been quite a while since I handled much pocket change?) I'd never thought of braille numerals on coins before seeing this - and they were doing it in Italy in the early 1980s - 7 years before "Blind Fury" released, before I was even born. Side note, but, how sad for the Lire? In the late 19th century, 20 lire was about 0.1867 toz of gold. In 1931, 100 Lire was about 0.2546 toz of gold - about a 70% drop in the Lire in the aftermath of WWI? Just 60 years later this cheap little bimetallic was used to represent 500 Lire. Wow...

I've heard about the NFTs recently and the last week or so Yahoo Finance is blowing up my notifications about them. I have no words to describe how insane buying a tweet sounds. All I can do is scratch my head. I'm not touching any of it. Bitcoin made no sense to me and seemed like a bad idea at $7,000. At $60,000 it is just more proof to me that some people are just kinda gullible and dumb. But the NFTs? I just don't get why anyone would want that in it's current state as a "collectable." I did listen to an interesting podcast cast talking about the idea of using NFTs as a mechanism to transfer home ownership or car ownership instead of deeds and titles, but that ties the NFT to being a claim to a specific physical object that the NFT owner possesses and uses... it isn't a tweet you can see for free online.

Part of what I'm seeing is that the gold coins I've been wanting to buy lately are usually treated and sold as bullion with somewhat higher premiums - usually spot +20-30% - and they float up or down with spot. However, when the pandemic hit spot prices dropped and premiums exploded. Even when spot came back up the premiums never fully went back down, and a year plus later you still get much higher premiums on even new NCLT and that has also jacked up the premiums on the older gold coins.

Going for full sets of just about anything gold is out of my budget and beyond my current ambitions. I'm just going to keep adding these as I get a chance at prices I can tolerate. 😅

My guess - based on nothing but the value- is something like a 1-2 oz Silver 2020 NCLT. I'm excited to know for sure too though.

For what it's worth, I work with a group that has to order several plaques every year and it usually takes about a month after we make the order before we get the plaques. Then we have to make arrangements/ get them sent.out or distributed. We wait a month to get like 5-7 plaques. I can only imagine what kind of wait time NGC and PMG get when they're hitting some (likely, small, local, business with a combined order for about 60 plaques. Given this, I find their turnaround with the plaques to be surprisingly fast most years - jaw dropping fast some years. If you read my journals on the PMG side I already have my Best Present from them - it arrived before March 1st. The fastest I've ever gotten a plaque from them. But, as I said there, I'm sure the addition of the coins is adding another layer of complexity on to this in addition to just having more than ever to send.

I'll keep that in mind. These coins are nice to collect type coins of and they've largely replaced the Silver NCLT as my passion and graded coin / registry / "higher-end" collecting focus. 1) They're gold. 2) They're pretty. 3) There's a lot of nice, fun variety and 4) they're big enough to be enjoyable and not teany-tiny like a US gold dollar and they're still cheap enough to be reasonably affordable in nice grades. I have a Swiss 10F and I've wanted a 20F for a while but it hasn't happened yet. That'll probably be next. Then I might look into the 20 Kroner or the Peseta since you're bringing those up for me. I've been focused on Europe but maybe one of these days I'll branch into Latin America, like some of the Colombian gold issues from this period.

If you guys follow my journals you know I have two young boys that I'm trying to share the love of this with. I've been following this but I'd hate to take from this because I have a multi-generational, multi-national collection of coins to pass to them as it is.

Yup. I had to have this explained to me by a former-coworker that was a volunteer fire-fighter that had 2 or 3. He spoke of them and the subject with a fair degree of reverence. He kept trying to convince the director of our very small engineering company that we should make a limited run of them for our company. What the point of those would be or why anyone would make a challenge over claiming to have once been a part of our company was always a mystery to me. But he was a sales guy and I think he, in addition to other things, really wanted another coin in his collection and really liked spending company money instead of his own. 🤣

Not to get into a lot of this other stuff in the thread, but it's known that the measles shots given in the US from about 1980 to 1986 were not effective and didn't convey lasting immunity. As a result, all of my cohort SHOULD have gotten new sbots - A fact I didn't learn until about 2018/2019 when the US and Texas were having a bit of a measles outbreak. So my wife and I finally got new MMR shots a couple of years ago when we found this out when a screen of my wife's (pregnant) blood showed she had no measles resistance, and they couldn't give it to her until after she gave birth.

That would make sense and explain why they all have the same agw. Clearly I need to look into this more. 😅 But, yeah, Italy, France, Switzerland and I think the Netherlands too are all the same and the British Sovereign, the US $5 coin and the Prussian 20 Mark all seem to be roughly equivalent. Now that I have more than 3 coins I think I want to build out a custom set for these because that set would take all of my 1-coin registry sets and present them in the way that I think of them. Edit: I take that back. The 10 Golden is about 5%ish more than the 20 Franc/Lire.

And that's $0.50 total, not each.

The 1882 20L coin arrived recently and I'm very happy to have it. It's a great addition to my growing set of smaller European gold coins from the late 19th and early 20th century - a group of coins I call my "golden nickels," because they're all about the size of a US nickel and because of what happened at around that same point in history with the "no cents" V nickels in 1883. It's a group of coins from the pre-Great War period that I think I'll always find endlessly fascinating. All of the currencies were pegged to gold and convertible to each other through gold, to the point that the Swiss 20 franc, the French 20 Franc and the Italian 20 Lire were the same gold weight (0.1867 ozt) and the coins were essentially interchangeable. The Euro and the unified currency zone was hailed as such a huge thing about 20 years ago, but, looking at these, I can't help but think it was less an accomplishment and more of a semi-return to what had existed previously. The third stimulus check was passed and we were amongst the first to get it, having already filed and gotten our 2020 return, so I got the green-light to order an NGC MS62 1913-A Prussian 20 Mark - from one of the last years they were made, heading into the conflict that made these coins endangered and then extinct as circulating currency. My French Rooster is also from that year. I'm really wondering lately - with what others have said about the world coin market and the coin market in general - and I'm wondering if these checks going to people like me, who are into collectables and who didn't suffer job loss or much hardship in 2020, is helping putting money and bids into the collectables markets and not just the stock market through things like Robinhood and WeBull. I keep hearing about surveys saying most people are saving the money and we're saving most of it to, but, if you get free money out of nowhere and you have a hobby you enjoy it's hard to not treat yourself a little. I decided to go with the 20 Mark over a Swiss 20 Franc for now, even though the 20F has been on my radar longer, because: - My wife also has a strong affinity for Germany - I already have a Swiss 10F from 1922 that has essentially the same obverse so I feel like the 20F adds less overall to my collection. - I love the look of the German war eagle on the reverse of this design. - It is from the reign of Wilhelm II and I just like Willems Wilhelms and Williams. 🤣 One nice thing is all of this is that most of these coins have been graded in more recent times and they're all mostly in newer gen holders l, which I'm hoping will mean several of them will soon go great together in a nice little display. Generic image just to show and conversation for now but I'm looking forward to getting the 1913 I ordered and seeing it in person.

Well, there ya go! 🤣

I hear ya, and I'm not an investor or dealer,, but there's a number of good coins you could get for that kind of money and I suspect you could buy it back for less later, if you're patient. I seek to maximize enjoyment more so than wealth. Lol

Hmm... good question? I'd say it was less than 5 so I'd say your "10+ is mostly safe" assertion is mostly valid in my experience.

I think anything nazi related is banned in Germany - so maybe the coins too. They don't seem to mess around with this subject.

I had a chat a year or so ago with a no-longer-active board member about the fact that a few years ago these went through a bit of a run-up interest / mini-bubble and then they came back down after a while. They're interesting to look at - I have some of the more modern pre-Euro coins but none of those and I have wanted some at various points in time. I may yet buy some just for conversation pieces with my sons as they get older. If you get into it you can get into a lot of fun with the different "marks" over the years with Marks from pre-German Prussia, the German gold mark, the paper mark, the mark of Weimar Germany, the Reichmark and the Mark of post-WWI Germany (my spelling fails me at the moment). I think the thing I'd most enjoy collecting seriously would be the hyperinflation notes from the Weimar Republic period.

I think the mintage caps on some these things and the artificial rarity is a bit silly. Most of these things come way down in price just a few years later. I don't think I'd pay hype-prices either. If I were you I'd be sorely tempted to sell the one if I could get $4K for it. It doesn't feel like that's going to stick long term - they usually don't.