Revenant

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.

They always say "buy the coin, not the label." I think there was even an NGC article a while back that asked the question, "If TP grading went away tomorrow, would what I'm buying still have / hold value?" Consider that question carefully and if you're willing to lose all of that if that label suddenly no longer matters. There's a reason I never got into playing games with MS70 Silver eagles at marked up prices vs the 69s. It just seemed like a bad risk with the milk spots and everything else. I had a guy offer to buy a Libertad off me a few years ago that was one of the few from the year that was graded as MS69 at the time. I had gotten it graded myself, but I told him straight up that it had milk-spotted bad since I took the pictures I had posted in the registry and I didn't think it would grade as well anymore. He still wanted it and for a price I was happy to part with it for, so I let him have it.

Well… The US has never demonetized any old money or currency... yet. I guess we'll see. Never say never, right?

I can respect the fact that some people might find it objectionable, but, as others have said, it's a coin and this is a place for talking about coin collecting. Personally, I love German war eagles - which are often on their coins. I think they're awesome designs. I like those old stylized war eagles a lot more than I like some of what has been on US coinage in the last 70 years. That doesn't mean I like anything that happened in Europe in the mid-1940s.

When all this was getting started, we had a premie that was barely a year old and premies tend to have weak immunity, so we locked ourselves down far more severely than almost everyone we know. But we're pretty much done. We're tired of not having fun and going out and enjoying our lives. We're still hardliners on wearing masks in public but we're just seeing family again and Ben is back in daycare after almost a year away. We just finally hit our limit. I'm still not going to do a coin show until I can get the shot because I feel like that's just too many people too close in an indoor space, but we're going to the zoo again. Once I get the shot, I'm pretty much with you - this can't go on forever and if there's ever a time to ease up on this its once the vaccines are out. You want to have boosters / updates for new strains every year like the flu? Sure. I'll get that. I get my flu shot every year too. I'll probably still wear the mask most of the time when with strangers though - but I think we could do better and prevent a lot of illness that way just with the flu. I kinda hope that wearing masks if you aren't feeling well picks up hear like people have in Asia for a long time to limit disease spread in general. But then, I freaking hate the flu. I hate it!

While Shandy was napping with the baby, I let Ben have the TV and sat down to continue this project. Shandy sent a picture to her parents recently to let them know where some of our important papers (like our wills) were stored and all of my Father-in-law's coins were visible in the shot, stacked up nearby. I pointed that out to them, and my wife made the comment that my FiL would like seeing that and that knowing something was being done with them. That got me feeling motivated to continue with this after an elongated pause. So today I finished labeling these new additions and started mixing them in with what I had before from my grandfather and other sources. Today was focused on Germany and Italy, but I have a stack to work through for Spain, Denmark and Turkey - Turkey was a surprise. I wasn't expecting so much from Turkey. Working on this always seems to get me feeling oddly emotional because of what it is - a mixture of my grandfather's coins and coins given to my mother to give to me and coins friends from other countries have given me and now it'll include coins from Shandy's father and childhood. It's now a multi-generational thing that draws from both sides of my son's family that they will have the chance to be the 4th generation to hold and add to. There's always been that connection to my grandfather and now it will tie in with her father - a man I have learned over the years that I have more in common with than I would have guessed when I met him or when he briefly wanted to kill me for knocking up his daughter. Lol Flipping through this binder, I can't help but thinking I would have flipped over it as a kid. I would have been amazed and in awe. Ben did come over at one point and was briefly blown away by it. Lots of "wows" and "cools." He grabbed several coins off my neat stacks to show me and we talked about it briefly before he brought up the real reason for coming over - after 3 episodes Netflix had paused his show and he couldn't find the remote. Lol of course, none of the coins he picked up to look at were returned to my neat little stacks... I'm still not finished, but I'm getting closer. It is however becoming clear that I may need another binder - not a problem I was really expecting to have any time soon when I got that big 'ol thing a couple years back. There are several coins in the lot that I could call out just for being cool to look at. Some of these will probably get more discussion but I'll try to do at least a little better than a simple, "Hey! LookIt! Ain't it cool?!?" - Although I could totally see taking pictures of a bunch of the coins from Greece and sharing those just because.