V75 GOLD Eagle - If You Tried Did You Get It?

So they sold 75000 units one at a time in an hour and 40 minutes. That is an average of 750 units a minute or 12.5 per second. Actually pretty good if you think about it. I think folks that live closer to where the website servers are located are going to have an advantage though. So really need to have more units available or some other solution. Don't necessarily have a great answer other than crank out more units...

 

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These stories make me feel better about giving up on the mint around 2013 and sticking to all Pre-33 Gold. Haven't looked back since.

 

That sure sounds like a hateful thing to say CC. Sorry you feel that way enough to out it into a post. And yes I too had to reply.

 

Not everyone says “how nice” to this flipping business. I fail to see where it does the hobby one bit of good. That’s my viewpoint and, with respect to other opinions, I don’t intend to debate.

 

The Mint made the ridiculously stupid decision to create an EXTREME RARITY with the GOLD V75 Eagle, using a Classic United States Coin Design - The Gold Eagle - and turning it into a "Limited Edition" Cabbage Patch Doll frenzy.

If there were a way to track it, I would bet money that over 90% of those who tried to buy them intended to flip them. And my being a PERSON and NOT A DEALER, I could have decided to KEEP IT once I received it.

But it must have "pleased you greatly" to post an extremely nasty message.

 

I hear you. And after what I went through attempting to get the SILVER V75 Eagle, it makes ZERO sense to me that the GOLD were sold out after 7 minutes. It took MORE than 7 minutes to:

1 - Log in from scratch (after having been logged in and getting booted out once the clock hit noon)

2 - Go through that Capcha Boat/Car guessing game at least twice (!)

3 - Enter your payment info after the website suddenly didn't have it anymore after it had it a week earlier

4 - Get through the Error messages that said you were "Banned" from the site (huh????!!).

I, too, suspect there was either:

a - Some nefarious back-deal going on; or

b - Some computer people who figured out how to "hack" and get around the system that the rest of us non-computer people were using.

Either way, it was unfair in the extreme. I'm going to complain to my Congress-person and my 2 Senators. This is the United States Mint - the place that prints our Federal Coinage and Federal Currency. It's not the "Frankin Mint" or eBay. And the systems used by the U.S. Mint need to be FAIR FOR ALL.

 

Speaking as someone who's been shoulder-deep in the entrails of Web protocols, probably not. This kind of breakdown is pretty much local to the server (or server farm) itself. Being able to get a failure message in 30ms instead of 300ms isn't going to improve your chances significantly, especially when it takes the server 30 seconds to get around to choking out that message.

 

So how many relays or servers does someone with an internet provider have to go through 2000 miles away as opposed to say 10 or 20 miles?

Edit: Or maybe that is the wrong question. It seems it might have more to do with having a higher speed connection or priority on a provider. So the quality of your hardware and speed of your connection/provider might tip the scales?

 

None of that should really make much difference, as long as your hardware and provider aren't broken enough to be dropping connections from your end.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a good analogy. But the wait at the server to generate a response or timeout is tens of seconds long. A fast, local connection will take just a few milliseconds to convey the response to you, and to convey your next request; a cross-country connection might take up to 100 milliseconds. That's still just a fraction of a percent of the server delay. The server delay is random, unpredictable, and not related to your location. In the face of that, a faster connection really doesn't gain you much.

 

You changing tunes doesn't change my opinion.

 

Curious why you think it was stupid.

 

Here's another opinion.

Maybe some opinions are better kept to oneself. Or at least presented without such apparent personal hostility.

 

Regardless of the conspiracy theories that get floated on forums the answer is much simpler and we already know exactly what happened. Their site simply isn’t built for that kind of volume and never will be because they only need it for a few minutes a year. The mint had their highest traffic ever for the gold coin. When you get overloaded things go wrong. Even Amazon has site issues when there’s to much volume.

 

1 - The Gold Eagle is a hugely popular coin, as is the Silver Eagle.

2 - The Gold Eagle has been a hugely popular coin for Over 30 Years and thus has a very large following of collectors, as does the Silver Eagle.

3 - The Eagle coins themselves are going to have a Major Design Change next year. This makes 2020 the last full year of the Series itself.

4 - This is the FIRST time a "Privy" or special mark is being put on the Gold Eagle (and Silver Eagle), which makes it a collector's item just by the fact of it being the FIRST OF IT'S KIND Version/Variety of a Classic American Coin.

5 - World War II was a war Americans were and are PROUD of. We called our Vets, those working at home for the war effort or suffering at home due to the war "The Greatest Generation". Many of us had parents, grandparents, uncles, great-uncles, who lost their lives in WWII or who served and lived to tell about it and who we want to commemorate with an American Classic Coin minted in their honor.

Because of the above reasons it was not necessary to limit the Gold coin to a quantity under 2,000 (or to limit a Silver Coin to 75k) to garner EXTREME interest resulting in the Gold coin being sold out in 7 minutes (or the silver being sold out in 1.5 hours).

If someone at the Mint had thought it through, they would have realized that unlike typical commemorative coins or any other series or collections they sell, the American Eagle is a coin that has a following since the 1980's. People have been buying the Eagles as both Bullion & Collectors Items for over 3 decades. That means there are A VERY LARGE NUMBER of Eagle Collectors out there who WANT THESE COINS.

The Mint makes money on each coin THEY sell. They don't make money if the coins get resold on eBay for 4-5 times the amount it sells for at the Mint.

As a profit-guided operation, anyone thinking about it would have realized for all the reasons I listed above, that the Mint could have generated over 9 times the amount of profit on these coins by offering 7 times the quantity of Gold coins (and 2 times the quantity of Silver coins) and STILL have been sold out in 24-48 hours for both the Gold and Silver V75 Eagles.

They didn't even need to manufacture them all right now. Like the Moon Landing Coins that weren't shipped for months, they could have handled it the same way with delayed production. Those of us who are collectors would have been fine waiting for 4-5 months and the "flippers" could have still had their fun on eBay if they were the lucky ones who got theirs early and if there were people willing to pay more to have it quickly.

Someone over there at the Mint was sleeping on the job, or fell asleep on their couch during their work day while working from home after a night of binge-watching Netflix.

This was not a commemorative dollar, presidential medal, first lady medal, or half-dollar, or whatever. This Was THE Current & Classic American Bullion Coin Collected By People Around The World For Over 3 Decades. And the FIRST time it's being enhanced with a privy, in honor of World War II no less, with many people who have family members they want to honor with these Classic American Coins minted in their honor!

Why did nobody at the Mint realize that they would have COMPLETELY SOLD OUT in 24-48 hours after having minted or offered 7 times the quantity they listed for sale for the Gold V75 Eagles and 2 times the quantity for the Silver V75 Eagles?

They deprived many of us collectors a piece of our American Eagle collection (whether Silver or Gold). And they lost out on a chance to make a





wait for it....










MINT !!!

 

Here's a conspiracy theory:

What if the people making these quantity decisions at the Mint are themselves "Flippers" who are trying to make a huge 400% profit off of their eBay sales?

The Mint doesn't make Anything from severe limits of the coins generating an extreme shortage resulting in the coins selling for 4 times the Mint price.

The ONLY ones who benefit from this are the "Flippers" who make profits of 400%

Any investigative reporters out there interested in looking into this?

 

There's no conspiracy. It's exactly what I've said time and time again. You don't spend a ton of money to make your website work with a ton of traffic for 10-20 minutes a year

 

I was talking about the extremely limited quantity, not the slow website.

 

Thanks for that thorough and comprehensive answer. Excellent points. I can see where you are coming from in calling it stupid. Perhaps it was. Not sure what their goal or mission was when they created this coin, so I hesitate. But if their goal was to serve as many collectors as possible, then, yeah, it was stupid.

 

I'm not 100% sure, I could have missed a post, but the question remains, did anyone here score the gold V75? My cursory review of the posts says no one got lucky.