Wheat Cent Population Census

I'll start with the punch line ... then explain ..

Based on my roll-search data there are approximately 1.833 billion Lincoln wheat cents in circulation today.

It might be helpful if you read my long ago post on the statistics behind the concept I dubbed 'circulation obsolescence' ... this is the tool that roll searches can use to answer questions such as yours.

http://www.coincommunity.com/forum/...PIC_ID=58454

To the data ... admit my weakness is only 54,750 Lincoln cents searched ... not a large enough data set (21.5+ boxes) to make conclusive statements.

But is should be enough data to answer your question ...

I find Wheaties ( LWC) at a rate of 0.39% ...

The total population of all Wheaties minted 1909-1958 is 25,817,950,007 coins ... call it 25.818 billion and I will round off going forward in this post.

The Lincoln memorial cents added another 427.507 billion coins ...

The 2009- 2012 Lincoln cents have already added an astonishing 17.679 billion coins ... note that within 2 years the total mintage of Lincoln cents post 2008 will exceed the entire mintage of all 50 years of wheat cents.

Anyways ... total mintage of all Lincoln cents ever struck through 2012 is 471.003 billion coins ... of which the Wheaties comprise 5.48% of the total mintage.

Did you read my post on circulation obsolescence.

The LWC has a circulation obsolescence of 92.9% .... meaning 7.1% are still in circulation ... hence my estimate of 1.833 billion coins still waiting to be found.

Ask me again when my data set is 500,00 coins.

Enjoy

David

Of course you didn't stifle the discussion, nickelsearcher. You have enhanced it. Didn't mean to be slow to reply, later on in the afternoon got busy for me. I did a similar estimate but didn't factor in the continuing mintage of new coins.

I estimated a 3.85% survival rate. Again, sorry to respond so late.

Figures never lie and liars never figure, nah nah... BIG GRIN. But no, I doubt most of us knew of a 2.5 year old post. Yes, NS, that's about what we are trying to do.

We all realize that year over year some percentage of the survivors are found and saved. So in 2.5 years or five years or decade from now we would expect to see the percentage decline relative to the injection of new coins (current mintage) and the extraction of what's being pulled out of circulation by wear and tear, ordinary losses and CRH.

Keeping this to a smaller period than "all my searching" gives us nearly point-in-time data. But my data or WheatChaser's or whomevers data individually is useless. It depends on the specific sourcing of the bank(s) we use, etc. so without many people's data you can't tell if what one person is seeing in one part of the country is really normal or is abnormal. So I offered to do some light weight analysis. With enough data you can expect (the law of large #s) that the average of the samples TENDS towards the average of the whole.

Although I make the mintage of wheats 24.7 billion (Numista data) or 5.3% of the total mintage through 2012. 158.2B Copper Wheats and a small amount of steelies (1B or 0.2% of the total 468B). Could be that I have 2012 #s where you have through 2009?

Cbass, these hoards of wheats being dumped is one of the reasons cent roll hunting still exists. Without a continuing flow of wheat cents being added from circulation, the combination of newly minted cents and CRH pulls would drive the circulating wheat population down exponentially.

Now I'm not saying that dumped collections are the ONLY reason, just anyone with a coin jar containing a wheat or two cashing it in is contributing to a new pool of potential finds. They are out there, but not forever. We will reach the peak wheat crisis someday, but fortunately Wheaties are constantly being fed into circulation...

The proof for our replenishment theory is the difference between actual find rates and the projected normal attrition at a fixed rate. There's a huge difference. BStrauss3 and I figured that in a perfect world where there was no hoarding or collection dumps and the wheat population depreciated at a fixed rate, by now there should be 1 wheat per 4000 cents.

As you can see by my poll, that is definitely not the case.

Absolutely... I suspect if we had true historical data the find rate would have drifted down until the advent of the coinstar type machines made it feasible to replenish the pot from everone's coin jars. ESPECIALLY the cent hoarders in a coffee can.

The truth is, there is no VERIFIABLE data for the replenishment, it is just a hypothesis. There is nothing else I can think of that would cause the Wheat cent find rates to be abnormally high EXCEPT replenishment. Any other logical theories would surprise me.

And for our other data on this, it can be found on my thread called "I got a solid box of 2013s. Now what?" Could someone post a link? I haven't quite figured out how to do it on my tablet...

Real interesting stuff BStrauss and I came up with.

So far, the weighted average is a little over 10 LWC's per box, for all respondents.