Ten Days Of Your Favorite Coins

Looking good!

@AcesKings another beautiful classic!

Nice to see one of these threads again

Day 1 catchup

Here's one of my favorites. Not everything has to be high grade or super rare or valuable, as long as it's interesting, and I find this coin very interesting.

My best guess for the subject is that this is a funeral token/death commemorative. The amount of wear suggests that the engraving -- which is very ornate and detailed -- was done quite a number of years after this coin was struck.

Day #3 - Coin #3

"1900-O" Micro O mintmark
Counterfeit Morgan dollar / Privately Made
VAM 5

There is far too much story behind these fascinating issues to explain here, but said story involves organized crime and gambling, and perhaps corrupt/complicit employees on the take at the dying New Orleans Mint, and is well worth your Google reading time. Much of the lore is speculative in and of itself.

The coin is not genuine but was made to look like a heavily circulated Morgan dollar and these coins passed in circulation for years and years without ever being outed as fakes. Unlike most modern fakes it's decent silver and "rings" like silver, and the weight is close to the real thing, but there was still enough "profit margin" to incentivize getting these coins into circulation via casinos and gambling houses, among other avenues.

(Real coins were turned in or paid in by customers, and a couple of fakes would paid out in return along with real coins. This is not far from how modern small-scale currency counterfeit operations work.)

These coins are exceedingly scarce nowadays. I must have looked through thousands upon thousands of Morgans and this is the only one I've ever caught "in the wild."

Mark Twain $5