Nalaberong's Weekly Coin Buys

Mail from the Netherlands from Numista user EddieVB!


My first commemorative 2-Euro coin! Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands abdicated in favour of her son Willem-Alexander in early 2013. This coin commemorates this royal changeover (the nice part about this system is that nobody has to die).

A few European coins.

Hungarian bimetallic - the bridge on the back is the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, the oldest permanent bridge across the Danube (opened 1849). Hungary has recently (2012) shortened its name from the Hungarian Republic to Hungary, and the coins have changed too, so mine is obsolete!

My first shield design 20p. Very shiny.


The uncirculated Brazilian coins I had been looking for!



And some Argentine commemoratives.

This Ecuadorian coin is the size of a Kennedy half dollar - Ecuador, like Panama, makes its own versions of American coins.

Peruvian commemorative, part of a series. This one has a nice anchovy design.

An Ecuadorian commemorative. As you can see, the sucre was losing value fast in 1997 (hence the new American-pegged coins in 2000).

Colombian coin, the new 2013 series all look great!

1942 one-year zinc from Bolivia - this is uncirculated, which I wasn't expecting! Bolivia was not really a part of World War II, but I guess they made this zinc coin anyway just to fit in. Or maybe they had lost money from their losing war with Paraguay a few years prior. This was the last we ever saw of this denomination before it was lost to inflation forever.


I also got stamps

Yesterday, I got to take the bus to the furthest-away (and probably best) coin store in Edmonton, only to find out that they were closing 2 hours early! So instead of 3 hours spent thoroughly digging through their enormous bin of world coins, I only got 1. But, I now know how to take the bus to that store any time I want.

The purpose of this visit was to pick up three commemorative silver dollars which will hopefully be going to a good home in Mexico. I got a great price for them, so that was good!




On to the 5/$1 mix, which is going to compose the rest of this post.

For the first time at this store, I struck silver! Here's a damaged .500 sixpence.

I assume this plastic token was once part of an American mint set; both sides are identical. Tell me if you know where it came from.

One of my favourite picks, a Spanish coin from a very awkward time. Spain really struggled for more than a century - a short-lived republic was replaced by a royalist Restoration in 1874, which was toppled by a second republic in 1931, which caused the Spanish Civil War, which led to Generalissimo (later King) Francisco Franco's brutal regime from 1936 on... but luckily, his son Juan Carlos I calmed things down and returned Spain to democracy in 1978 and is still in power as a constitutional monarch today. This coin is one of the sporadic later Restoration issues, which were mostly one-year types.

I have wanted a Thai 2-baht coin for a while, and I've found one! I think I read it on this forum, but this coin has "2" written on it with a marker. This is because it got mixed up with the slightly smaller 1-baht coin, which looked mostly the same. So, Thais everywhere started to deface these coins in order to make them look different. The problem was officially solved with a new brass-colour 2-baht coin, so mine is now obsolete. Still, it's fun to think that so many people joined in the defacement of these coins.

A new country: Eritrea! Formerly an Italian colony, Eritrea left Ethiopia in 1991. Neither country has done very well since then.

These come up on this forum a lot, because they look like Ottoman coins. But this is a holed brass replica, for use on sexy belly-dancing costumes. They would be strung together so that they would jingle a lot. In some parts of Yemen, Ottoman coins (and others) were also used on much more conservative folk costumes.

My happiest bimetallic find of this visit, this coin is only worth half of one Bahraini dinar. How much is that in Canadian dollars? $1.47!! Kuwait has the strongest currency in the world (Kuwaiti dinar, worth CAD$3.95 today!) but Bahrain comes a close second. Also, this coin looks great. Bahrain is a small island in the Persian Gulf, attached to Saudi Arabia by a very long bridge and home to a fairly repressive government. According to one of my friends, Bahrain is a terrible place to be following the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca because the airport is completely swamped by sweaty pilgrims going back home, but I have no idea how nice it is to visit at any other time of year.

I want all the coin types issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran, because they have great designs and are incredibly diverse. This puts me one coin closer to my goal. This formerly bimetallic denomination and design (which I had found in the very same bin some months ago) was soon downsized to this aluminum-bronze monometallic coin. Nowadays 500 rials won't even buy you the time of day and you'll be more likely to get some candies or a matchbook as change instead of this.

This Ugandan coin was caked with crap, but my ultrasonic cleaner got it off! Hooray! I don't have very many modern African coins, I always like to find coins less than 10 years old from far-off countries.

This Indian coin is not worth very much at all, but it's my first hexagonal coin!

Two Indian rupees, a thumbs-up design (I had been missing this one) and a commemorative. Again, modern Indian coins are avidly collected because of a high density of commemoratives, errors, and varieties. Get in while you still can - prices are most likely only going to go up as more and more Indians get into the hobby. Or at least, this is what I tell myself when I buy yet more Indian coins for no good reason.

This is a tiny little coin, but I like the Cuban peso convertible series. Canadians love going to Cuba, and they bring back government-sanctioned convertible money. The Cuban peso is for everyday plebes and is worth about 3 cents, while the Cuban peso convertible is for anyone with the coveted U.S. dollars and is worth exactly $1 USD. So this is a Cuban penny. It's very small and it's copper-plated aluminum, which means it won't get zinc rot like the American equivalent, and rising costs meant that Cuba later ditched the copper coating and just made these out of aluminum. So there we go, even the Communists make smarter decisions with their coins than the United States does.

The obligatory "face-value" pile. Bought for $1, exchange rate value is $11.95.

The last coin of the USSR! Every post-Soviet state had to come up with a new currency, except Russia, which kept the old ruble. Although this coin says "CCCP" (USSR) and "Gosudarstvenny Bank" (the Soviet-era Gosbank that controlled State finances) and has an all-red-looking flag flying over the Kremlin dome, it was never really used across the whole USSR. Most countries summarily abandoned their incredibly weak post-Soviet currencies (most only existed in banknotes, like the Latvian rublis, the Lithuanian talonas, the Ukrainian karbovanets, etc.) because of inflation and introduced much stronger currencies. But the Soviet/Russian ruble kicked around until the late 1990s, when it was revalued at 1000:1 and became the modern Russian ruble we all know and love. This coin has the same specifications as the Russian Bank coins of 1992 and 1993, but I have no idea if it circulated alongside them or not... or if it ever circulated at all. I've never seen any of these in circulated condition. Really just a last gasp for communism here.

This large Elizabeth II coronation medal is still fairly sought-after, and I always like to buy them for very cheap. Most stores sell these mixed up with the similar copper medallions from the 1927 Diamond Jubilee of Canada and the 1939 Royal Visit to Canada for something like $2.

All of today's bimetallic coins. I was looking for the Kazakhstani 100-tenge coin for a while.

The remaining mix.

My friend wanted me to buy as many 10-peso coins from this bin as I could for him. I think he wants to use them for evil purposes...

Thanks for reading!

I spent $9, $3 on unused stamps (plenty of nice old ones) and the rest covered this.

Priced $2 on the 2x2, I figured you can never have too many coins from the German states. This one's from the Grand Duchy of Baden, which survived as a constituent of the German Empire before being abolished in 1918. Now it's part of the modern German state Baden-Württemberg.

A quick dig through the "80% of face value" bucket, and I found my first British 2-pound commemorative! The hat guy is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, apparently Britain's greatest engineer. He placed second in a poll of "The Greatest Britons" for his role in building all kinds of things, including the Great Western Railway that connected London with the farther parts of England and Wales.

Also bought at "80% of face value" - a silver Swedish krone! Awesome! I now have 4 silver krones, with a fifth in the mail... maybe I should start trying for the full set.

Mysterious medal featuring the Cologne Cathedral (Der Dom zu Köln, apparently). No idea what it is and it's damaged but it's intriguing.

Obligatory miscellaneous picture. Some days it's too light, some days it's too dark, I'm still practicing my photography technique.

Argentinian peso. The middle part of this coin is a faithful rendition of Argentina's very first gold coin of 8 escudos. You may remember seeing my commemorative above from 2013, commemorating that coin's bicentennial. Most Argentine pesos feature an "idealized" design with regular lettering and a well-drawn design, while this 1995-C (the mark is tiny, in the little dots in the legend on the side with the sun) coin is more accurate and shows chunky lettering and cruder details. This was the only date to have this type.

5 centavos. This will have a good home in my antique late-50s Whitman folder of Mexican 5-centavo coins. I wish that they had stayed in the world coin-folder business - there are plenty of similar folders I would love to own!

A German Empire pfennig, it originally had blue rot (who knows what it was, maybe verdigris?) on it but I got it off in the ultrasonic cleaner. Excellent! This is a very simple coin.

Through good times and bad, the pfennig has always been very small... a complete set would be fun to put together, but not very well-organized (Empire, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Democratic Republic, Federal Republic, Euro-coins... oh my!) and also a huge pain (Germany has had at least 5 mint-marks per year, and it got worse when Austria was annexed and the Vienna mint put to work as "B").

5 Soviet/Russian notes for $3, unidentified and unlabeled - sure!

RSFSR note. Communist revolutionaries don't have very much money, so the ruble went through a typical inflationary cycle and was redenominated at least twice following the revolution.

A provisional bit of money that was printed in America (!), this is a bond that was used as currency in some parts of Siberia. I think it's worth more than $3 by itself, so hooray!

Three 40-ruble notes, near-UNC but with ragged edges.

I really like the notes, and the stamps will pay for a couple more swaps. I think this went pretty well.

What's the error? Is it that "POUNDS" is cut off?

Nice grouping.

I think your status is safe here, as long as you keep this thread current.

How could anyone take a baby monarch seriously? That's the point where I'd throw up my hands.

Very nice!