Wide AM Population Numbers Question

An interesting point Coop.

I guess my question stemmed from my curiosity of how many WAM's will be around when the day comes that my son inherits my collection. I imagine that many of the WAM cents not pulled from circulation now or very soon will not survive another 10 years or so. Or at least will not survive in any desirable condition.

Given that, I imagine that the tallies, if there ever are any, will be coming close to their final numbers in the next decade. It's an interesting time to collect cents. Never before have collectors had to rescue coins from rotting to nothing and being lost forever.

I've thought about that a lot lately and as a result I've started keeping back every very nice AU shiny example of a Zincoln I find. Doing so has not created bags and bags of cents either. There are not many good ones out there. Of course most of us know this already and I imagine I'm not the only one storing back the good ones.

I also save nice BU examples, they may not help me much but maybe someday, somebody will be amazed at the rolls of BU he finds at a yard sale. It's a shame what the zinc cents look like after just a few years in circulation.

I don't know the population #s but for me the 2000 has been more elusive than the 1998.

Wow those are interesting numbers. Ok, assuming that 200,000 1999 WAM cents may exist. Then the odds of finding them opposed to the number minted cents total in 1999 is almost 1/59,000. Now that is figuring the total mintage of all cents from both mints which isn't exactly accurate. But it does give an Idea of how hard it is to find these.

I'm feeling so incredibly fortunate that I even found one now in the last 2+ years of searching boxes.

Well, the problem with assuming mintage for any die variety or variety is iffy at best because records of such things were never kept by the mint. Fir instance, it is possible that one die in 1999 was used for anything between a couple thousand strikes up to a million strikes. Make it two different dies, and your problem simply compounds.

When I stated that the number was probably over 200,000, it was simply a guess based on the minimum average life of a die striking zinc cents. There was nothing more to my number than that. There could have been 2,300,000 struck by two dies. That's why I said "OVER" 200,000.

Basically there is no realistic way to derive even substantially close scientific numbers regarding mintage of modern varieties - everything is pretty much a guess. The ONLY things we have to go on are the number of dies known, the relative die state of the latest coin from each die (to calculate approximate numbers of coins to the coin examined), and the given mintage for each issue. We can also assume some things regarding the number of coins reported to date, but that's a whole subject unto itself...

Pop reports from the grading companies are very bad indicators of actual mintage because of reholders, coins not submitted, etc. A VERY small percentage of known examples of most of the transitional reverse Lincoln cents were EVER holdered to begin with, and of the numbers shown in the population reports, a decent percentage are coins that were broken out of lower grade holders to take a chance on a higher grade holder.

Basically - all the way around - you are chasing a very quickly moving target trying to pin down any usable numbers in determining mintage. What about sealed bags? The 1992D Close AM is considered to be a very scarce coin. What about the chance that some guy busted a sealed bag of 1992D cents and is sitting on a hoard of hundreds of them? What about all the sealed bags that are still out there waiting to be opened? You never know...