1821 Brazil Is It A Legit Coin Or Fake?

Hondo Boguss thanks for your reply! the weight is 4.4 g and is quite tin.

Yes, there was a lot of variability for both weight and design in early 1800s Brazilian copper coins, both within a mint and certainly between different mints, as each mint seems to have been using its own weight standard, depending on how expensive copper was to acquire in that province.

There were also an awful lot of counterfeits. The quality of the counterfeits range from "awful" to "even better than the official government coins". When combined with the aforementioned variability in official coinage standards and unreliability of surviving records, it means that it's essentially impossible to tell if any one given coin is an official issue or a contemporary counterfeit.

This has in turn led to a general consensus among collectors of this period that it doesn't really matter whether it's counterfeit or not, just collect everything equally. This series is one of the few within numismatics where you can legitimately say "Counterfeit? Who cares?".

The proliferation of counterfeits eventually led the government to do a mass counterstamping of copper coinage. Everything in circulation was counterstamped, both fakes and genuine coins, and coins were assigned new values based on how close the weight of the coin was to the new weight standards.

Thanks Hondo Boguss and Sap for your expertise! It was very informative!