silver proof coin sets real count??

First of all let's make sure what we are talking about here. I am talking about original Mint & Proof sets that are still in original mint packaging - and only those. And since you said silver Proof sets, I assumed you were talking about sets minted prior to 1965 - and only those.

Secondly, with those sets value is never, ever, established or determined based on the mintage of the sets. Value is based on how hard or how easy it is to find such a set - scarcity in other words - and the quality of the coins in the set.

And when I'm talking about values I am most definitely not talking about Red Book values. Red Book values, for anything, are worse than worthless. The coin market is what establishes values, for any coin, for all coins !

Now I suppose we need to define what the coin market actually is. The coin market, for the most part, is composed of dealers and the electronic dealer networks. And these dealers are all over the country and in some cases all over the world. And they buy and sell from each other all day every day. Those dealers define what the price of any coin is, and they define how the price changes, meaning whether it goes up or down and how much. And those prices and changes are reported every week in the CDN. That establishes the base line for all coin values.

I say base line because price can and will also vary somewhat based on quality because no two coins of the same grade are ever equal. So some will sell above the base line and some below it. But the base line remains.

Now some are going to ask - what about collectors, don't we matter or have a say in this ? Well, to a large degree, no we don't. And that is because 80% or more of all coins sold every day are sold from one dealer to another dealer. And that is the coin market.

But we as collectors do have an impact on the coin market for we are the end users. And what we are willing to pay, or not pay, helps determine what those dealers will ask or bid in the days and weeks following. But it still goes through the coin dealers.

Yeah sure, there are collectors who sell directly to another collector. But in point of fact this happens so seldom and so little that it has almost no effect on the coin market. And in reality there is no way it could for those sales are not recorded or reported. In other words nobody even knows they happened so there's no way they can effect anything.

Now when it comes to original Mint and Proof sets nobody can or will ever know how many of those sets were ever broken up. Yeah they know how many were minted, but that doesn't have anything to do with it because the number minted does not tell you how many still exist. Nothing will ever tell you how many still exist. But the current asking price for a given set tells you how hard or easy it is to find one of those sets. The higher the price, the harder it is to find one. The lower the price, the easier it is to find one. And of course the harder it is to find one is because there are fewer of them that still exist.

No you still don't know the actual numbers, but you do know which ones are the hardest to find because their prices are the highest.

 

The number of individual coins, their cost and their availability, has absolutely nothing to do with what we are talking about - which is original Mint & Proof sets. And the coin market is most definitely based on supply and demand - not just one or the other.

 

It's like ice cream, why do some like chocolate and others like vanilla ?

I collected original Mint and Proof sets for over 40 years. With the exception of the '36-'42 Proof Sets, and the '47 and '48 Mint Sets I had them all, and often multiples. But those particular sets, even in all of those years I only managed to find 1, original, 1941 Proof Set and it was so expensive I just couldn't buy it at the time. The rest I never even found. And that was after searching for thousands of hours at hundreds of coin shows, having many different dealers search for me, for quite a few years, and all of the countless hours I spent searching the internet, once the internet existed.

Putting together a set of sets has a certain appeal to it, for those who happen to like that particular flavor

 

Yeah, the Mint Sets came in those cardboard holders and looked like these - http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/331232707278?lpid=82

The early Proof Sets (1936-1955, '55 had both box and flat packs) looked similar to this. But not all of them have shipping labels on them either, the boxes are plain.




But with that set the box is original but the sleeves holding the coins are not original. The original sleeves were made of cellophane. These sleeves are made of plastic and have been used to replace the originals because it is not uncommon for those old cellophane sleeves to become brittle with time and crack apart.

There is much to know to be able to identify original sets. The boxes can be (and are) duplicated, the sleeves are replaced with plastic, and even the coins can be replaced. And as mentioned they can be rather expensive. I saw a few on ebay but none of them are completely original from what I can see. And the asking price is $950 - $995. And as you can see from the link above they are asking $1800 for that '49 set.