Brinks Pulling Silver? Sure Seems Like They Are

You're saying you believe numbers lie, not the people? That seems odd...

Never the less, These coins have been worth more than their face value for around 50 years. Brinks isn't the only company that could cull with machines. And between them all, do you really think they have only cycled as little as 10%? 50%, or even 80%? I'm not saying they just dump the coins back in... However, when CRHs return coins, that actually does essentially happen with halves in particular.

I mean, these companies have the same coins circulate so much, you can see it from people getting their own spray painted coins back (I do not do this or support it! Just an example). Thats why we use the term "circulate," because it's all the same money going around and around in a circle.


Also, the post above your's is amazing evidence that culling for silver doesn't happen. There are other stories like his on this forum and youtube. Seeing people open brinks rolls with good bits of silver in them makes me really question if culling really happens. I mean, how could it?

We could actually use one of these known silver values to calculate the amount of silver that would been in the load of half dollars BEFORE being culled.

All we need for the calculation is
1. The number of silver someone finds
2. The accuracy of the sorter

Since we can consider rarities like finding half of all coins silver as being outliers, we will use a more common number. Lets assume someone opened a brinks box and found 3 silver. Not unheard of, so a fine number to show my point

Since the sorter accuracy is unknown, we can make multiple scenarios, one with 95% and 99% accuracy.

That means we will simply get a range of possible amounts that the load of halves may have had.

First, if the accuracy was 95% leaves us with 5%, the decimal for of the remainder would be .05 (5% in decimal form)

The reciprocal of .05 is 20. 3 silvers found x 20 = 60
To show the reverse math incase anyone didn't follow,
60 x 0.05 = 3
So after sorting a pile of 1000 halves with 60 silvers, you find the 3 remaining due to inaccuracy.

Do you really think that there is still THAT much circulating? Maybe. The numbers can't tell us that.


More on that later, lets continue.

99% accuracy would give us a remainder of 1%, 0.01 in decimal form, the reciprocal being 100

3 silvers found x 100 = 300

If the machines were 99% accurate, 300 silvers were in that pile before sorting.

So the question is, how much silver do you think is still out there? 60 per 1000? 300 per 1000?
Do you think modern machines have closer to 95% accuracy, or 99%?

I certainly think 95% would be low for this day and age. 1 mistake for every 20 coins? Seems unacceptable.

For fun, let's crunch the numbers for XavierofGreens find. He found over 30 rolls of silver in 3 boxes. About 130 per box.

95% accuracy on his find would mean about
130 x 20 = 2600 silvers sorted before giving Xavier his plunder!

Hard to find an explanation for something like this.

You could assume the machine broke for a day and stopped culling correctly, but do you really think brinks culls over 10 rolls of silver out per box and just had a momentary lapse for our buddy to be rained upon with silver?

Interesting discussion, especially the math. I agree that the calculations shown are based on certain assumptions. That doesn't mean they are incorrect. The basic premise is that if Brinks is culling silver with a machine that is reasonably accurate then all the silver would be culled in a relatively short period of time.

The only way to dispute that statement is to assume that there is a never ending supply of new coins while simultaneously assuming that Brinks lets many of those coins go through the factory without being culled. Both of those assumptions are highly unlikely, bordering on impossible.

I only meant that numbers and guns are both tools that cannot act, it is the person using it that acts. But that wasn't the main point of any of my posts, so yeah lets forget about that.

I'm getting more silver now than back in the silver run in '79/'80, especially with dimes. As a teen I was buying from the bank, and I was hitting the dimes good...don't recall pulling more than a few. I've found hundreds in the last few years though. Silver is constantly being dumped from collections and theft of collections.

I think the problem is that there are an ever increasing number of coin collectors (new collector out-numbering deceased collectors) and a static total number of silver coins. Thus the number of silver coins in circulation keeps decreasing. I believe Nickelsearcher refers to this as "coin obsolescence".

The logistics companiess do not pull silver, bank tellers definitely do. But with the way things are set up at logistics companies, there is no way to pull it (unless its outright theft essentially).

The discussion isn't "is brinks on some area somewhere pulling silver"
Some people are trying to say that brinks as a corporation is using sorting machines to pull silver on a wide scale.
The discussion is more about peoples reasons for believing whether or not they do or not, since no one really knows but brinks it seems.