question about what I read on ebay....

kdkenn · 07-03-2009, 09:56 PM

Is this true?
The serial number is DC00006122*. These notes are very hard to find because the mint district is suppose to destroy any notes under a five digit number. The signatures on this note are Marin and Snow.

I don't understand why they would make them if they are supposed to destroy them? By the way I'm not buying just looking.

urbanchemist · 07-03-2009, 10:40 PM

usually the BEP use the lower serial numbers for special sets or promotions they sell. its all to make more money.

i also beleive its only newer notes that they dont release low serials to the general public in circulation. but i could be wrong

urbanchemist · 07-03-2009, 10:43 PM

here are a few examples.

hontonai · 07-04-2009, 12:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kdkenn

the mint district is suppose to destroy any notes under a five digit number.

IMHO that reference alone establishes the utter ignorance of your source.

What on earth is a "mint district", and what would anything related to the mint have to do with paper currency?

desertgem · 07-04-2009, 01:41 AM

Does her's being a star note make a difference? Not a paper guy.

Jim

urbanchemist · 07-04-2009, 05:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by desertgem

Does her's being a star note make a difference? Not a paper guy.

Jim

i dont think having the star makes any diffrence

lettow · 07-04-2009, 09:02 AM

There is no truth to the statement that notes under a five digit serial number are destroyed whether they are stars or regular notes.

I have the same question for this seller: "What is a mint district?"

Numbers · 07-04-2009, 01:43 PM

The seller appears to be very confused, but there *is* some tiny grain of truth under all of this....

There was an article in one of the hobby magazines a few years back about fancy serial numbers. A dealer who specializes in them pointed out that low serials aren't nearly as common as they should be. That is, he had contacts who worked in huge bank cash vaults, who had access to millions of new notes fresh from the FRB on a regular basis, and who saved the fancy serials for him. A number like 12345678 would turn up just about as often as it should: once per 96,000,000 notes (which meant that he got several of them per year!). But a number like 00000001 didn't turn up nearly that often; he estimated that there were only about a tenth as many low-number notes reaching the bank vaults as there should have been. Most of them were vanishing before they ever left the FRB.

He did some investigating and found that, sometime in the '70s, the FRBs instituted a policy of destroying the first pack of notes of each block, serials 00000001 to 00000100. Apparently somebody decided it was unseemly to have bank vault workers making personal profits by diverting such packs to dealers, so the FRBs just quit issuing them. The policy didn't apply to other kinds of fancy serials because they weren't selling for nearly as much, at least not back then. A low-number pack still gets out occasionally when the FRB workers aren't paying attention, but they seem to catch about 90% of them.

Separately, the first brick of each new series, serials x00000001A to x00004000A, is generally retained at the Treasury. The first 300 notes are kept on file for some kind of official purposes that nobody would talk about; the rest of the brick is offered to Treasury officials to purchase at face value. If there are any left, they eventually go into circulation (or recently, sometimes into BEP collector products). But again, this only applies to low serials with suffix A. It does appear to be true that the low-serial collector products which have A-suffix notes (almost) always start with 00000301 or higher, while the collector products with star-suffix notes sometimes start at 00000001.... There was a big to-do a few years ago when some very low A-suffix notes did get into one of the collector products unannounced; nobody seems to be sure whether this represents a change in policy or a mistake.

None of that, though, would affect the particular note you found on Ebay. So we just have another example of an Ebay seller who doesn't quite get it, I'm afraid....

kdkenn · 07-04-2009, 02:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numbers

The seller appears to be very confused, but there *is* some tiny grain of truth under all of this....

There was an article in one of the hobby magazines a few years back about fancy serial numbers. A dealer who specializes in them pointed out that low serials aren't nearly as common as they should be. That is, he had contacts who worked in huge bank cash vaults, who had access to millions of new notes fresh from the FRB on a regular basis, and who saved the fancy serials for him. A number like 12345678 would turn up just about as often as it should: once per 96,000,000 notes (which meant that he got several of them per year!). But a number like 00000001 didn't turn up nearly that often; he estimated that there were only about a tenth as many low-number notes reaching the bank vaults as there should have been. Most of them were vanishing before they ever left the FRB.

He did some investigating and found that, sometime in the '70s, the FRBs instituted a policy of destroying the first pack of notes of each block, serials 00000001 to 00000100. Apparently somebody decided it was unseemly to have bank vault workers making personal profits by diverting such packs to dealers, so the FRBs just quit issuing them. The policy didn't apply to other kinds of fancy serials because they weren't selling for nearly as much, at least not back then. A low-number pack still gets out occasionally when the FRB workers aren't paying attention, but they seem to catch about 90% of them.

Separately, the first brick of each new series, serials x00000001A to x00004000A, is generally retained at the Treasury. The first 300 notes are kept on file for some kind of official purposes that nobody would talk about; the rest of the brick is offered to Treasury officials to purchase at face value. If there are any left, they eventually go into circulation (or recently, sometimes into BEP collector products). But again, this only applies to low serials with suffix A. It does appear to be true that the low-serial collector products which have A-suffix notes (almost) always start with 00000301 or higher, while the collector products with star-suffix notes sometimes start at 00000001.... There was a big to-do a few years ago when some very low A-suffix notes did get into one of the collector products unannounced; nobody seems to be sure whether this represents a change in policy or a mistake.

None of that, though, would affect the particular note you found on Ebay. So we just have another example of an Ebay seller who doesn't quite get it, I'm afraid....

WOW Thanks for taking the time to explain that to me in such detail. I was just curious as to why they would make them if they were just going to destroy them.

CamaroDMD · 07-04-2009, 03:29 PM

Great post Numbers, I didn't know that! Thanks.

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