What's Wrong With This Coin

They are interesting 'counterfeits' in that they actually were made of coin grade silver vs a cheaper metal. In short they were made with minimum profit and may indeed have just been an attempt to avoid commission prices when paying debts with silver bullion. I am puzzled by it all however and do not understand why the USSR didn't just come out with a silver coin, or if they had one, why not use it instead? My only conclusion is the motive may have been not just to avoid a loss of money when doing a transaction with the silver, but also to hide from the seller the identity of who it was doing the purchasing. Of course that falls flat when we look at which coin it was. What ten cent item would the Soviets want badly enough to use real silver, but also wish to hide the fact it was their dime? Clearly one doesn't pay for a multi-thousand dollar item with identical fake dimes. This leads to imagining an entire flotilla of fake coins, fake dimes, quarters (mentioned in the article (wonder if any of mine are those fake, dateless, quarters?) as well as Morgans and Peace dollars, possibly fake paper money and gold coins as well. Oh my, an entire mint (since they were struck) needs to be built.

This is a lot of trouble to go through. If they are/were going to go through the expense of using real silver but hide the origin of the coin, I am not understanding why they simply didn't exchange the silver for something like Swiss Francs, or even real dimes and quarters.

To me, the purpose of the counterfeiting exercise is still not understood.

 

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By making them of coin silver they would be harder to spot and more readily accepted. Cost was not really that much of an issue because by that time silver was pushing 25 cents an oz. So a silver dime with 2.77 grams of silver in it or .089 troy oz of silver would have contained 2.2 cents worth of metal for almost an 8 cent profit per coin. So you see why you wouldn't exchange the silver for real coins. Two oz of silver could get you five silver dimes, but could be used to make 20 silver dimes.

 

This is a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions that anything out of the ordinary is definitely a fake rather than just probably one.

 

What's really amazing about this quarter eagle / dime error is that it circulated to the point it was graded good without anyone spotting anything was wrong with it as to the soviet counterfeit I didn't realize they made them

 

During the Cold War counterfeiting of another govt.'s currency was a common act and more than one government engaged in such practice. What to me is interesting is that someone (assuming the foreign government connection is accurate, and that is to me still just a hypothesis until we see something from Stalin's NKVD archives acknowledging the fact) bothered to do it with coins rather than the more usual paper money.

 

So was this coin slabbed by NGC as a wrong planchet error?

With that much wear this coin must certainly have been in circulation quite a while and one can only imagine what value it was accepted at by merchants, a silver dime by its size or a silver 2 1/2 dollar coin.

 

Maybe the OP can post a pic of the coin in the NGC slab???

 

I have a 1923-D Mercury Silver Dime, any idea what it’s worth?

 

Full size

 

I'd say at least $30, possibly more. Now you just need a 30 D to go with it.

 

It is considered poor taste to "highjack" another's post. Start your own post.

 

Maybe you should write it down incase there is a "run" on your bank. LOL

 

I didn’t mean to hijack the post, I thought it was on topic. For the purpose of organization I posted here.

 

Necessity is the Mother of invention. Dumb check mates it every time.

 

?

 

@h.e.-pennypacker. You would probably get more replies if you started a new thread. If you do start a new one, IMO you should also include a reference stating it's a known counterfeit. (It's in the Redbook).

 

Thank you, I posted your reply in this thread: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/1923-d-silver-mercury-“soviet”-dime.377088/page-2