Modern Coins Vs. "Classic Coins Only" Snobs.

The Model T theory: Well the Liberty Seated design was used on several coins for over half a century. the Draped Bust and Capped Bust designs were on everything from Half Cents to silver dollars and the capped bust design even included quarter eagles and half eagles. The barber design was on 3 denominations for 24 years (23 for the 1/2 dollar). I wouldn't say todays coins are less diverse. Dimes quarters and half dollars each have their own design. In terms of not changing design frequently enough? There's been 95 new quarter designs in the last 19 years. There were only 8 designs for quarters for the first 203 years of the denominations' history. (Draped Bust small eagle, Draped Bust heraldic eagle, Capped Bust, Liberty Seated, Barber, Standing Liberty, Washington and Washington with bicentennial reverse) It's true you could argue that that small handful of designs are better than all 95 of the new quarters, and that's fine. But today's quarters definitely don't lack diversity. The dime and half dollar are the only coin denominations that haven't gone through any kind of design changes in the past 20 years. Modern circulating coinage has essentially been reduced to 4 denominations (almost no one uses half dollars or dollar coins in change). I think considering that reduction our current coin designs are pretty diverse.

Well half change is better than no change. I think the variety of designs in that other half kind of make up for it.

Modern, classic, doesn't matter to me as long as it keeps the bidders with deep pockets away from the REAL classic (Greek & Roman) coins!

To the OP, sometimes it feels good to get things off your chest. I've got only a few pet peeves considering all the possibilities with The Hobby and human nature, and have unloaded here sometimes.




If this is the same Cladking as on another forum, I have learned more about modern coinage from reading his posts ca. 2003-2010 than anyone else. When Cladking speaks, listen!

It's a matter of possibility, so to speak.

A coin with a mintage of 2,000,000 and a population of, say, 50 in MS65 has a much smaller "pool" of potential coins which could be MS65, than one with a mintage of 200,000,000 coins.

Even then, the pricing for both classic and modern coins is still subject to the discovery of hoards (cf. the Treasury Morgan dollar vault releases and the Omaha Bank Hoard, to name two.)

In other words, in the majority of cases, the possibility of someone finding a previously-unknown MS66 Indian cent for any given common date is a great deal lower than the odds of someone finding a previously-unknown MS66 Lincoln Memorial cent for a common date. Going from 1/0 to 2/0 won't kill a modern coin, but going from 1/0 to 100/0 sure will, especially with the amount of coins being submitted combined with rampant gradeflation.

This is exactly the misconception I was addressing. Modern top coins don't work like that, they just don't exist very much as opposed to Morgans which are the ASE of the 1800s.

Try and find a top pop modern and send it in especially if you don't look at the couple obvious ones. You will have a very different perspective after with real world trying

No not at all. Do more exist yes assuming they haven't been ruined, but most will be ruined by far from beliefs like that.

For the sake of argument say 10k come out, how many people who get them do you think could realize it? Most people even collectors will ignore them, but a Morgan and they pay attention.

Very few will be realized and survive