I am one of the most gullible coin collectors. When the U.S. Mint gives us a list of coins or medals, I look them over an make a list of those that I would like to add to my collection. I am grateful for the Enrollment feature that collectors can get several of coins that are annual releases and because of this, I have been able to add each of the American Silver Eagle releases, however, they don't go far enough. The Enrollment helps them decide how many coins they will produce for the Enrollment purchases, which also guarantees a sales figure they can work with to prepare their budget. The more coins they allow to be in the sellers Enrollment, the more information they can work with. They can also control how many coins the collectors can purchase of each coin. Maybe they have looked at it and it doesn't seem feasible. I was also thinking that instead of cutting sales off when the maximum number of coins have been sold, they could set up a lottery system and every caller gets a number (like the military draft in 1968 and later). They might be able to eliminate the "bot" purchases. Anyway, they need to figure out a system that the average citizen might be able to get at least one coin. Oh yeah, I don't know how many collectors bought or tried to buy the latest two-coin set that has American Silver Eagle Two-Coin Reverse Proof Sets, but I signed on about 2:30PM and went right in and didn't have any trouble getting one. Maybe not everyone is as gullible as I am.
Good luck making any government affiliate efficient in any form. Don't want to be that guy, but I'm going to be that guy.
The US Mint thrives on the system they have. They are able to fabricate rarities and produce revenue for themselves and their dealer partners. I look at all these releases to be commemoratives, not actual coins used for commerce. I don't collect commemoratives anymore.
The lottery system won't change what we have now. No matter how you look at it, you've still got an item with higher demand than supply. Allocating it by who is lucky enough to get through their overloaded website or allocating it randomly via pulling orders out of a hat, end result is the same. Some people are lucky and others are not.
I quit collecting anything the mint has to offer. I'm not going to fight for anything modern to keep my sets complete. They lost many collectors because of the games they play and they don't care.
At this point it isn’t really about finishing sets to me. it’s about picking up new coins that I feel will garner interest in the future. I like to think I would wait about a decade but for some of these uglies it will be much longer. for example, the 2021 Morgan’s. I didn’t get one but I do think that it will be a popular coin as far as these commemoratives go in the future. time will tell but buying from the mint with the intent of building a set is a losers proposition in today’s world. I can’t speak on the past, though.
The mint will find that to most of the current new collectors, collecting is a passing fantasy. When these new collectors realize that mint products tend to lose value rather than gain, the fantasy will end. Where will the mint and the authorized purchasers be?
Another thought came to me about the Mint. There has been a lot of complaints concern "bots". I'm not sure how it works, but I think that someone has developed a software "Patch" that bipasses the Mints security system allowing buyers to purchase more that the restricted number of coins or sets. From what I have read about the "bots", when they get their coins, they are sold on some online store and then, we collectors, pay huge prices on their coins. I was looking at a listing by a coin dealer selling the two-coin silver Reverse Proof T1 & T2 ASE's for almost $400. I looked closer and the T1 ASE was a bullion coin. I can't remember what the T2 was. As I mentioned earlier, I bought the Mint's Two-Coin ASE T1 & T2 Reverse Proof for $175. What a mark-up. As my father taught me years ago, "A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted." Although I Pay a lot of money for the ASE - W & S as well as the Uncirculated coin because I like them and can afford them. If it weren't so, "This Fool and His Money Would Soon Part." Thanks for your info. I hope there will be more so that I could learn more.
I think it’s important for everyone to remember that the US Mint employees don’t personally profit at the expense of customers. The profit the US Mint makes selling coins is legally required to go towards paying off the national debt. A lot of people act like the Mint is greedy or something but it wouldn’t make sense for the employees to be greedy if they get paid the same regardless of sales numbers.
I just wish they hadn’t done the 2021 Morgans in .999 silver. :/ In my opinion it would’ve been a much cooler coin if it was the same metal composition as 1921 and earlier Morgan Dollars with 10% copper. Then the coins would look and feel the same as their much older brothers. Hopefully milk spots won’t be a problem like with .9999 fine Canadian Maple Leaves.
Plus the complaints would just change to the lottery is rigged blah blah. No matter what people are going to complain so they should just keep doing what they're doing with exciting products. If the products is unlimited everyone complains that its over produced and if it drops on the secondary market they complain it was over charged etc. When its over produced no one wants it, when its limited and everyone wants it people complain if they missed out Realistically what people want is something limited, that they can easily get, that everyone else wants, which just isnt realistic
There is a near zero chance that the mint site was hacked to allow more coins purchased than the household limit allows. Even if an order could be placed for more than allowed, it would be caught during billing and shipping. What is likely is that a person uses different addresses or possibly address variations to make multiple orders within the household limit. There have been complaints about bots, but no proof that they are in widespread use. The Mint uses Cloudflare that supposedly is able to weed out a significant percentage of bots. It's most likely dealers (and collectors) telling their friends to buy the low mintage coins and promising them a set profit. When the V75 coins were for sale, there were ads on Craigslist looking for people to try and buy them. Any time there is something that can be flipped for a profit there are non-collectors buying them for a quick profit. Homeless people were hired by dealers to wait in line to buy the gold JFK coins when they came out.
Just thought I'd throw this in. I was curious if the mint decided on a actual date that they will start shipping out Morgans in October. Anyone want to take a guess what the answer is?
If the site had run as it did for the Morgans, you wouldn't have gotten one. You basically lucked out this time as the site had a total melt down for the first hour and a half and then started working so that most people could get through the check out process an hour and a half into it. They then sold about 1 to 2k a minute until they were gone in the final 45 minutes or so. There's no way to know what's going to happen when they have a release like this. Something was going on and you just expect them to be gone in 15 to 30 minutes. But at one per household and individual accounts all logged in to get them one at a time, it bogged the whole process down enough so that you could log in 2 hrs into it and still get them. Mainly because so many were shut out for the first hour with locked up computers. I couldn't even get the homepage to load for some time. I had to sign back in several times to get back to the cart for chances to checkout and finalize. The process took an hour for me.
What if someone opened another account with another email address, a different name (My name is James but everyone calls me Jim) and a different mailing address? Or a different credit card. I'm sure that the Mint can't eliminate all duplicate accounts. Still, each account could only get the number of coins allowed, but still could double the number of coins? Having been an auditor for many years, I can think crooked with the best of them.
Being an auditor for many and NOT being able to think like a crook would render you somewhat ineffective
Yes if you have another mailing address and separate credit cards you could order more than one. People do that all the time having friends or family do it. In this case I seriously doubt many friends/family were going to stick around for the hour it took for the site to start functioning
It doesn't go toward paying off the national debt, it merely goes into the Treasury's General Fund and becomes available for current expenses.
