Thoughts For A Lincoln Roll Checker

Well...hmm...your numbers are quite far off. Average copper cents to a roll is more like ten. Average 1983, 1984 or 1995 cent in a roll (from the East coast) is more like three.

NGC stats are not only inaccurate in themselves, but don't represent even a tenth of the actual number of doubled dies out there. Instead of counting all the ones already found, which you KNOW you cannot find in change, why not count only the ones that are NOT already found?

The 1995 DDO, for example....estimated mintage was around 750,000 coins. SUBTRACT the number currently known, roughly 50,000. You end up with 700,000 left out there. Using your math, chances would be 700,000:6,411,440,000 of finding one. That would be 1:9,159, or one in every $90 worth of 1995 cents searched. And I can tell you for sure even that number is VERY unrealistic. Give me $100 in unsearched 1995 cents and I'll produce a minimum of 20 doubled dies, and it would take me about an hour to find them, given the coins are already sorted for me and all you gave me were 1995 cents. Each coin goes for an average of $10 (that's AU/BU coins ungraded), so that's $200 per hour.

All the numbers are unrealistic, actually...and who does this for a living anyway? I mean, just searching through coins? I doubt anyone, they would starve to death.

No, this is actually a fun thing to do - it's the thrill of the hunt. The time spent is fun time, not time to make money. So what does it matter how much per hour we are getting for doing it? I go through more than a hundred thousand Lincoln cents per year, and I still make a decent living at what I do. Not only that, but I end up with a few thousand dollars worth of die varieties to sell.

think the diffrence is a hobby VS a job
my hobby is curently looking for funny cents for my collection not for sales
but possibly for trade and it takes me a better part of 2 weeks to do a box of cents

I have searched through about 110,000 total cents and found 2 or 3 1998 Wide AM's, and just found today a 2000 Wide AM. So either I am very lucky or your numbers are way off.

coppercoins...what do you base your opinion on, that the numbers are way off? to my knowledge, there are no mintage figures on any of these varieties. and I am another, who has looked thru at a minumum, approx 9,000.00 of cents (pennies) and have yet to find any of the ones under discussion.

oshelt,

Where do you live? A lot might have to do with your location. If you live west of the Mississippi (approximately) you would have a much harder time finding a lot of the coins listed here, as most are Philadelphia coins, and the Denver Mint supplies those areas.

Additionally, with odds of the 1998 Wide AM at 1:25,000,000 and the odds of a 1983 DDR at 1:13,000,000 this indicates that the 1983 DDR should be twice as easy to find as the Wide AM...that's simply not true. I have seen or heard of hundreds of accounts of people finding 1998 Wide AM cents in change, whereas I have only heard of a dozen or so 1983 DDR finds.

Basically there are a number of factors your numbers do not consider.

For instance...

1. Attrition of coins that are older. If mintage were exactly the same (which it really isn't) for 1964 cents and 2007 cents, I can guarantee you that you would find FAR more 2007 cents in change because most of the 1964 cents have been spent up. But if you are using original mintage alone to sum up chances of finding a 1964 cent, with identical mintages your chances would read to be equal for finding 1964 as opposed to 2007.

2. Unnatural attrition of early zinc cents. Given the same scenario above and include 1983 cents in your count (and lets assume again that mintage were identical between 1964, 1983, and 2007), I would venture to guess that your findings would be that the number of 1983 cents would about equal 1964 cents, while 2007 would still be FAR greater than either of the other two. Why? Because zinc cents from 1982 through 1988 were minted with very low quality control, and many of them have since rotted to extinction. This era of cents will forever be tougher to find for that reason. 1964 cents, on the other hand, are brass and do not rot. 2007 cents are far newer, are made with better quality than 1983 cents, and will always exist in greater quantity than 1983 cents. But counting mintage alone would say they should all exist in equal quantities.

3. Using populations from grading services. I know that's the only quantitative measure we have of many issues and die varieties, but they are simply too far off the mark to use in any scientific measure. Because NGC pops show 610 1983 DDR cents graded gives us NO indication of how many exist, how many of these 610 are regrades, or how many another company graded. It also gives us NO indication at all of how many are still in change waiting to be found. It also gives us absolutely no indication of how many still reside in sealed bags and rolls waiting to be found. Basically it gives us nothing at all, except the exact number of NGC labels printed for that coin ID.

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I rally don't mean to sound like I'm just here to poke holes in theories. I'm not. One thing I have done over the years is think of ways I can use numbers we do have to report on what I think is out there. I have been through all of this before time and time again, going through trying to write algorithms for programming to help decipher what could be out there. I have come to one final conclusion:

No matter what we try to do to quantify any results based on the numbers we have access to, our resulting data will ALWAYS be very far off the mark because the data we are fed is all garbage.

The Mint never kept die to die mintage figures.
Overall mintage figures divided by the number of dies used doesn't help.
Finding the number of dies used each year is cryptic at best.
The number of dies made is easy to find...now how many of the dies made were really used?
Finding out exactly how many coins could be minted with a die is difficult.
Grading companies only handle a very small percentage of high mintage coins...their numbers are useless.
Attrition is a guess at best. Nobody knows how many coins are lost each year.
Small undocumented changes in minting techniques can make large differences in survivability.

Wow...so many different things that have to be taken into account that aren't even measured within a 25% margin of error...basically results in no quantifiable way to make the statements in the first post of this thread. It simply doesn't hold water.

Just a thought, I also search through rolls and with out getting crazy, go through about 5000/week, that said, here on the east coast(N Y)I find /roll approx: 15-20 Pre 1983 Cents, sometimes more, and at least 5-8/ roll of rotted back to bank junk, at least 12-20 very nice post 1982's, give or take a cent here or there, of course the #'s differ /roll but this is basically what I find from bank box's and I only return the rotted ones, I do not sell coins, I love every minute of the "hunt" and keep the cent's, for the most part in rolls/ date, this is a WIP, ( work in progress ) as we speak.

I can see why their are people searching for profit and for the fun and everything in between, I just like to collect and search for that "one more coin.".......

northern NC?east or west side?