World Coin Collecters Who Use Numista

Deciding which issuing authorities to include is strictly a matter of dates included and specific characteristics of an issuing authorities.

Some folks enjoy the many German States. Others include emergency money production. Collectors need to decide if they want the many NCLT or not.

You will learn so much by forming your own list of issuing authorities you would like to find as opposed to just a copy of someone else's decisions.

When collecting World coins, your own definition on what constitutes a 'country' is the best one.

You have to ask yourself yes or no:
German states
quasi modern countries
countries that no longer exist
is NCLT included
bank tokens
currency issuing authorities that covered many countries or states
how far back in time do you go?

I just opportunistically cherrypick all of the above, always looking for best value for money in what I purchase.
Except that I don't collect modern coins after about 1950, when silver was withdrawn from the World's circulating currency systems.

Most OFEC collectors never complete a set anyway, but they can build some very interesting collections for not too much money, and their collections end up being open ended and incomplete.
That's OK, because your collection is always living and growing.
That always keeps your interest alive.

Well, it depends on how you look at it. Numista has been doing a lot of restructuring with their country list, and they now have two counters: countries and issuers. I hope this explanation makes a little sense:

Imagine you have one coin from the Federal Republic of Germany, one coin from Saarland, and three coins from different German states. Numista would count all of those as only one country (the country of Germany). However, those would count as five different issuers (with each German state counting as a separate issuer). Obviously, with a system like that, there are much less countries then there are issuers; just looking at my own profile on that site, I have 78 more issuers than countries so far.

So, mcshilling, if you had 255 countries listed on that site beforehand, you probably have at least 255 issuers now. And with all of the countries being split up to count as separate issuers (like individual German states), you probably have more issuers than just 255.