somebody with enough free time ought to start a company that could take a census of coin collectors. everybody could send in a record of their inventory of their coins: everybody: collectors; dealers; widows with dead husbands coins. then we'll see whats rare and whats common.
And just how are you going to convince me to provide that kind of detailed information to someone I don't know and personally trust to keep it out of the hands of bad guys wanting to rob me
We all need to get over "this not knowing you" syndrome. Everyone is invited over to my house for a poker game, I'll provide the food and beverages - Just bring your coins...:whistle:
It would never happen. You could never get all of the collectors, dealers and so forth to submit their private holdings for the sake of just knowing whats out there for rarity purposes. Just like satootoko said, you'd surely be setting yourself up because you wouldnt know these people from the next guy on the street. I think I'll just stick with believing auction and mint records and speculating how much has been melted over the years.
BTW - Maybe Heritage would offer a list of the most collected coins from their free DB software offered on their site. When that was mentioned as an option to catalog coins in a previous thread I thought the same as you Roy. If this is on-line, it is just a little too much information for an online location (even from a respectable business). That's a server someone is bound to try to hack.
Coinage86 - Please don't take my comments the wrong way. I just don't believe in putting too much information out there for others to use. People will try to manipulate that information to their own gain and that would be really bad for the hobby.
I've got to agree with the rest of the guys. Too much information on the net leads to trouble, it's a darn shame as I'm sure some of us have 'Wheel Horse' collections.
This is the way to do it. Every coin collector in the world, send me $1. I will give you my address. I'm ready to start now.
A census for many of the different coin series already exist, people have been doing them for years. All you need is the right books. Of course if you want an easier way, all you have to do is look up average prices for any date/mint combination. The lower the price, the more common it is.
Not only worries of the government and taxes.....but how about those 1964-D Peace Dollars that are hidden away. They certainly are not going to be reported!!
For two years I did the National Census of early date large cent collections. Naturally it was mostly EAC members participating. Now the EAC is known for our willingness to share information, and the census was open to all early date collections of any size (I had expanded the census. Before that you had to have 150 varieties to be included). Out of a membership of 1400, we had 108 collections reported. To help with security it was a "give to get" arrangement. The only way to get a copy of the census was to provide your own information, and the collectors addresses were not available. Collections were identified by initials. But in an open information sharing group we still achieved a less than 1% rate of participation. (But it did represent most of the major collections.) What do you think you'll get with a general census?
