How Many Official Mints Are There?

If you're just looking for a list of mints, you could check out Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mints

Only a handful of countries have their own mints. Chile, in south america, has their own mint. However, many if not ALL african mints, if you want to call it that, make of other government mints for their coins. Germany, both private and state owned mints make coins for those countries as an example.

Then you have the heavy weights as I call them, good ole US Mint, the RCM, The Royal Mint, to name a few of the well known mints. But, say like is it Croatia or one of those countries in the Baltic's also use a German state mint to make their coins.

In any case, it is fun to collect the country coins even if they didnt make it themselves . Have you see the nice Hippo coin that Rwanda is going to have? And let us not forget about the supreme Somalian elephant coins, also done by a German Mint

Here's a thread from a while back of world coins that folks have collected: https://goccf.com/t/183207

As I'm sure you're starting to realise, the concept of "official mint" is not something that is clearly defined, black-and-white. There is a whole spectrum of bullion issues, ranging from official bullion coins issued by official government mints, right down through to unofficial coins issued by private mints in the name of non-existent, unrecognized and de-facto anarchistic "countries".

It complicates things when countries source their coinage from more than one mint. Take Australia, for example. Here in Australia, we have the ROyal Australian mint, owned by the Federal government, which makes the circulation coinage as well as the proof sets, mint sets and many other made-for-collectors coins. Then we have the Perth Mint, owned by the Western Australian state government but holding the monopoly from the Federal government on production of "circulation-grade" bullion coins. Perth Mint issues commemorative NCLT coins for collectors as well, often in direct competition with the Royal Australian Mint.

Perth Mint produces the Kookaburra silver coins, the Nugget gold coins, the Koala platinum coins, as well as a few other niche-market bullion products that begin to blur the line between "bullion coin" and "NCLT for collectors", such as the recent series of silver bullion coins depicting various native animals. The Royal Australian Mint produces some one-ounce silver coins as well, such as the silver kangaroo or "skippy", but these are only made in NCLT quantity so as not to infringe on Perth Mint's monopoly.

Perth Mint also issues coinage in the name of other countries. Some of those coinage issues were commissioned by the country in question, others were dreamed up by Perth Mint's marketing department which then got the government of another country to act as a flag of convenience, rubber-stamping the "legal tender" nature of the coins.

Then there are the private mint corporations. They usually lack a government coinage contract in their own country, so the flag-of-convenience option is the only one open to them. Pobjoy Mint is a large British-based private mint, which uses the Isle of Man as its flag of convenience for its bullion issues. Are they "official"? Well, yes, it's all legal and above board... though very, very few of the IOM coins ever actually arrive on the Island itself.

Then there are the somewhat shadier corporate mints. Sunshine Mint makes a lot of the privately commissioned pseudo-legal-tender coins you're likely to find on the market, such as most of the coins from Liberia and Somalia - two countries that have long been riven by civil war, so it's very difficult to get actual information on whether or not the "legal tender" claims are true. Some government mints I'd also classify in this category; the Mint of Poland has issued some very questionable "coins" in recent years int he name of other countries, such as Nauru.

There are companies that sound like mints, but are actually just coin and bullion dealers; they don't actually make anything, despite having "mint" in the name. In this category I'd place govmint.com and the Macquarie Mint. The "New Zealand Mint" also is not a mint; it allegedly makes the Fiji silver turtles and other issues, but these are actually another Sunshine Mint product; Sunshine Mint even depict the Turtles on their website advertising their services.