wabnoles

thanks for sharing

Hello Zalta... I assume you are familiar with Arabic or are from a Muslim country (judging by the Arabic writing below your message)? We get some very hard to decipher Arabic coinage from time to time so we could really use you on this board. Welcome.

Well got my coins for the month. In addition to the 17 silver nickels mentioned a little while back, I got my fill of foreign silver. Thisee here represents some low budget coin fun:

1701 Hungary Poltura

1820 Bavaria 3 Kreuzer

1902 French Indochina 10 Cents

1927 French Indochina 10 Cents

1931 Czechoslovakia 5 Korun

1952 South Africa 6 Pence

Three centuries, three continents, and three monarchs

represented in 6 coins.

You know I look around a lot on the internet and see these sellers offering rather common coins for uncommonly high prices and I always wonder how these guys ever sell anything if they sell anything at all. There's a difference between someone who is selling to make a living and someone who is selling just to unload a few coins I suppose.

I was up in Thomasville, GA making my first ever coin hunt out there when I came across a cabinet of old coins at an antique shop. Most of the stuff were overpriced as it tends to be in those places but what caught my eye was a bag of nickels titled "war time nickels $1 face value" and they were priced at $15... these were all around a good rating but I know enough about silver coins to know that if you find waritme nickels online for around $2 its a good price and these were at 75 cents each. Well after going thru the coins, I found that three of them were non silver 1941 and 42 varieties but the other 17 were all silver. I essentially bought 17 silver nickels for $14.85, which essentially makes them 88 cents apiece.

oh God pogs are definitely one of those items that at one point were considerec "collectibe" but fell by the wayside because the problem is the marketing of an item as a "collectible" usually results in a larger number of people buying and holding onto items and in effect defeating the rarity factor... I was watching a video the other day about a guy who got so obsessed with beanie babies that he ended up dropping over $100,000 on a bunch of items that he literally cannot sell now

My solid silver Scott Rolen coin is back home in Jacksonville (I live in Tallahassee). Its funny because I think I lucked out in a way since the odds of getting a silver coin was one in every 960 packs and the odds of getting a gold plate artist proof was about one in 248. There were 30 coins and 30 parallel cards in this set and the cards were actually custom fitted to hold the coins (which is why this coin is such good condition... I literally left it in the card it came with and doubt I ever handled it until a couple days ago). The 24 k gold coins in this set are actually exceedingly rare since there was only 1 for each player (i.e. 30 overall) and you had to send in for them and Pinnacle actually went out of business the same year these coins came out and so you only had a window of probably 5 or 6 months to redeem them.

As for cards I was really into the sports cards, primarily baseball, basketball, and football. There was a time when these were considered can't miss investments and I can remember reading articles about those cheaply made cards from the late 80s and early 90s where they were saying "yeah the prices might be a little low now but the market will eventually absorb them". I.e. the mentality was lets just keep running those printing presses and pumping out more mass-produced stuff. The market got really saturated too, with multiple companies all pumping out cardboard in direct competition with each other. I was a big basketball fan and actually had a decent eye for a 2nd grader (had a complete set of Dream Team basketball cards and the like)... my problem was my card storage system consisted of tightly wrapped rubber bands and my back pocket so even if they had some minimal value they're shot codnition wise lol. As for in-store promos, I recalled a basketball card promo by McDonald's back in the early 90s where you got 2 cards w/ each purchase or something like that but those cards were not worth that much then or now.

I did collect a few non-sports cards, primarily cards with comic book characters but the same problems plaguing the sports cards markets were also plaguing the non-sports stuff... cheaply made mass produced products. The older cards are worth more only because nobody kept them but these newer cards were and are not worth hardly anything because as "collector" items ppl felt inclined to hang onto them.

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Hey everyone

I was digging thru my closet when I came upon a long lost set of coins from my childhood that are not worth that much and are not of much interest to most ppl on this forum... a set of 1998 Pinnacle Mint coin/cards. For anyone not familiar, the good people at Pinnacle tried (and failed) to create a product back in the late 90s that would appeal to both card collectors and coin collectors and ended up creating something no one wanted (except me apparently). Me being a stupid kid tho thought this was the greatest idea ever conceived. My mother worked for the big evil tobacco companies back in the day refilling cigarette stands and replacing ads, etc. at different convenience stores and in return for helping her I would ask for a pack of those baseball coin cards (instead of money like a normal human being). At the time I was more into cards than into coins.

Anyway, I had for the longest time kept a solid silver coin separate but it wasn't until very recently when I was reading about Pinnacle Mint coins that I realized they had special subsets of these coins known as artist proofs and I recognized it immediately. I had a gold plated artist proof of Mo Vaughn (of which only 100 were made) and this was numbered 1 out of 100. Not sure if these were numbered in the order they were made (i.e. the 91st coin of 100 would be 91 of 100) but still a rare issue. Turns out the only coins with any kind of interest (besides of course the gold and silver) are these gold plate artist proofs but they're still not worth a lot lol. I essentially had my mom spend close to $50 or more on what was essentially one ounce of silver, a gold plate coin worth probably $5 on a good day, and a heap of worthless pieces of brass and cardboard lol. Great memories tho lol.

Looks like it is filed under Louis XIV for some reason but I'm not sure if that's what they're classifying it as or if that's the screen name of the person posting the photos

The top piece looks to be an 1871 early commemorative piece done by the US Mint and engraved by William Barber. I am not sure if these were a one year issue or if they had restruck these coins over a period of multiple years though. The other looks to be some advertising piece of the American General and Maryland Casualty Insurance Company

Thought I'd give an update as to where my coin collecting. One thing I always try to do is spend about $20 primarily on silver but sometimes non-silver coins catch my fancy. I invest roughly half in American and half in foreign coinage. Not a big spender but that is not required to have some fun. Got two small 18th century silver coins in beat up (but still surviving) conditiion, two small German state silver coins, a Greek 20 lepta done by Barre (is this the same Barre who was the French engraver and the designer of the long running Venezuelan Bolivar coinage or his brother?) and a set of four Bolivian 5 centavos that were copper-nickel btu I thought they were unusual because they had holes hand punched into the center of the coins that were original to the coins.

1764 Austria 7 Kreuzer

1797 Spain 1/2 real

1848 Mecklenburg-Schwerin 1/48 Thaler

1855 Hamburg 1 Sechling

1874 Greece 20 Lepta

1883 Bolivia 5 Centavos

I think that coin is Moroccan with its pentagram... it looks very similar to the Moroccan falus coins

I thought that the Egpyt 20 paras from that era were silver and this coin looks copper to me

I would look into Turkey... the first image looks very similar to the loop design on the obverse. The Arabic year looks like either 1255 or 1355.

Two years before this visit by Christian VII, he was married to the King's youngest sister, Princess Caroline Matilda, who was only fifteen years old at the time. He was a totally unsatisfactory husband, being dissipated and mentally subnormal and the Queen became involved in intrigue with Struensee, the court physician. As a result she was banished to Celle in Hanover where she died at the age of twenty-four"

If I'm not mistaken, she actually had a daughter by this doctor

lol well now you know why I never buy Chinese coins... if they are all sticking to magnets then that is a dead giveaway

I am not much an expert when it comes to authenticating coins (maybe others can help) but I can say those coins on the top are pre-1930 Chinese silver dollars (http://en.allexperts.com/q/Coin-Collecting-2297/Chinese-Coin-Id-Date.htm) they each contain roughly 2/3 of an ounce of silver so you have some money there. The two coins on the bottom right are 1904 Hupeh Province silver One Taels roughly once of silver each. According to Krause, those two coins are $400-500+ each (this is only a shot in the dark tho but I would look thru what items are selling for on ebay and other sites to get a more accurate reading on value).

The coin second from right on the bottom is (I believe) a 1934 (23) Chinese dollar and it is officially 90% silver. I would get that looked at by someone more familair with the vagaries of Chinese coinage. The one on the bottom left I am not sure abuout but it looks silver as is the rest of the coinage. All in all I would estimate that lot at about 4 or 5 oz of silver alone.

I would be very careful because those coins may not have been hers to sell and a lot of times ppl come up with these stories to cover for the fact something is stolen

btw I think these are "coins" in the sense of other modern gimmicky exonumia-type Franklin Mint related coins you can buy off the tv but not in my wheelhouse

Its funny because ppl think that well the bitcoins are hokey since they are strictly valued on whatever ppl decide they are worth but if you look at pretty much any currency or commodity out there the same rules really apply to that as well. Its also interesting because the way everything is set up, for every dollar made there is something owed to someone plus interest, which means that the system is one of perpetual debt and deficit. The one way govts go to pay their debts is to make more money, which further inflates the dollar/currency and creates in turn more debt in the form of weakening buying power and more dollars borrowed. With that being said, every type of currency and commodity on this earth is prone to some form of manipulation but at the advantage or disadvantage of another position, which is why its important to diversify as others have said.

I am curious as to how often you order from Amazon for coins? I generally don't like ordering grab bags of stuff w/o at least seeing what is in the bag. The blind purchases I usually make are for junk silver coins but I know from experience of having sold things on Amazon that they automatically add $3+ in shipping for an item, which would make these coins more expensive than the ebay route. I would like to know if there is an effective way of buying coins off Amazon.

lol wow I wish I could find such things... I'm happy if I find a rusty penny on the ground lol

I think the numbers on the back of this coin are rather unique and look like a really good anti-forgery device.... I'm not aware of any other coinage that has that kind of metallic pinstriping within the letters