Does anyone know how long it takes for a new coin to get worn down to, say, G-4 or VG-8? Essentially I'm asking what amount of wear corresponds to what length of time in circulation. I would assume it varies based on the alloy of the coin, since gold is softer than silver or copper or nickel, but it would be neat to be able to estimate the time spent circulating from how worn the coin is.
Time has nothing to do with wear. I've seen some 1965 quarters in circulation that would still grade AU, and some 2000 quarters that are almost smooth.
I would think that those would have to be outliers; the 2000 probably spent more time in circulation than the 1965 did. There's a pretty strong correlation between how long a coin has been circulating and how worn it is.
It's not so much time in circulation, but how many transactions, etc. The 1965 quarter in AU has seen far fewer transactions than the 1965 quarter in VG. It may have set in an album or in a bucket of change for decades, and the other coin would have seen near constant circulation.
Time has nothing to do with wear, time in circulation DOES. In the case of the AU 1965 and heavily worn 2000 quarter the 1965 is much older but hasn't spent much time in circulation. It has had brief periods of circulation but has spent most of its life in a change jar. The 2000 entered circulation and stayed there constantly passing hand to hand and through machines until it was heavily worn.
Interesting thoughts... I'd think a lot would have to do with how we handled money as well. A lot of people don't carry change anymore (I always jingle a bit!), but a lot used to. Also it was common to pay for things in change "back when a candy bar cost a nickel" or at least a quarter in my day. With inflation we now pay in paper since there's hardly anything that is less than a dollar anymore. We have more machines using change and a period when slot machines only used change - so in Nevada, we'd see a lot of worn coins. When we were kids, we always carried a dime in our wallets for an emergency phone call, and I know I wore a few of them down pretty well (and a bunch were probably silver without me knowing it or caring!). Numismatics are a wonderful and practical history lesson that can't be tainted by politics, censorship or time. They exist and tell a tale no matter what.
Coins are said to last (by the people who make them) about 30 years. This number is arrived at based on many, many, decades of research and actual experience done by the mints of the world. And yes, it applies to coins of all metals. Now some might question that because in this day and age silver and gold coins are simply not used anymore of course. So few have any personal experience with them and thus they question and doubt what others may say. But wear is wear and it affects pretty much all coins the same regardless of their metal content. Silver and gold are not nearly as soft and susceptible to wear as many who have no actual experience over time with them "think" they are. They merely hear of the metals being described as being soft and that conjures up images and ideas in their minds that are rarely true or accurate. It's kind of like seeing people bite gold coins in the movies. Most think that was done, and yeah it actually was done, to see if the gold coin was soft enough to leave teeth marks in it, thinking that gold is "soft" so it would leave teeth marks and thus prove the coin was good. But that's not the case at all. Gold coins were bitten to make sure they were hard and no tooth marks could be left in them. Because if they were soft, that meant they were fakes. But just to give you kind of an idea of the hardness and wearability of gold coins here's a couple of pictures I took. This specific coin was carried in my pocket, every day 7 days a week, with other pocket change and a pocket knife. It was used on a regular basis as the coin being flipped in coin flips. It was tossed on the floor, dropped on the ground, fingered, rubbed, handed form person to person, used and abused as any other coin might be. And after 7 years of that this is what it looked like. And this is just one example as I did the exact same thing with several examples over the years. As you can see there is nothing but ordinary, even wear on the coin. There are no large dings or hits, no scratches, no dents. That's because gold coins are hard, not soft. Soft is a relative term when discussing metals. Yeah sure gold is soft as compared to steel, but in the common sense of the word it's pretty dang hard and takes a beating without showing any undue signs of it. edit - One thing I should add, the time period I mentioned would probably correspond to double, and maybe even triple, the amount of wear a coin would normally undergo when in circulation. That's because this coin, and the others like it, was constantly rubbing against other coins and objects for about 16 hrs a day, every day, as a result of being in my pocket. Coins in actual circulation spend the majority of their time sitting still, not moving, in a cash drawer, in a jar at home, or in a bank, and thus not undergoing wear. While this coin did undergo that wear basically all the time.
An interesting thought. I like your worn gold coin GDJMSP. How would plated or clad coins fair? For some reason I think it would be very unlikely to see them down to very good to poor grade as it would expose the inner core. Would like to see such example if anyone happen to have one. (not mutilated ones)
I don't know about a new coin, but this is what an XF quarter looks like after being carried as a pocket piece for 50 years.
I had convinced myself that clad coins were significantly harder, and wore significantly more slowly, than silver. I've heard others say this as well. I almost never see a clad quarter or dime worn down to G or VG. I think about all those slick Barber and Mercury dimes, SLQs, Barber and Walking Liberty halves, Buffalo and Liberty nickels... ...but hang on a second. Those nickels are made of exactly the same alloy as the outer layers of a clad coin! Or, for that matter, a contemporary nickel. So, why do we see so few slick clad coins? I can imagine a few reasons: According to this thread, the government still removes worn coins from circulation, albeit at a very low rate. Coins in general may be seeing less circulation, as inflation drives more transactions toward paper money, and (more recently) electronic payments become more prevalent. Modern mintages are enormously higher than mintages up to the mid-20th century. This would seem to imply more demand for circulating coins, but may just mean that there are more coins sitting around, and each individual coin is "doing less work". When was the last time you heard about a shortage of change? There was a big fuss about it back when we shifted from silver to clad coinage. There have been periodic "penny" (cent) shortages. But it seemed like those mostly arose because people couldn't be bothered to carry around and spend one-cent coins -- and rightly so, in my opinion. For the most part, cents go from the Mint, to the banks, to the stores, to the customers, to dresser drawers or jars or gutters. Increasingly, the same is true for higher denominations. Except for the ones that land in the gutters, there's not much opportunity there to accumulate "honest wear". (Of course, the Mint may have found a solution with the self-destructing copper-coated zinc formulation. Zincolns retire themselves, given a deep scratch or two and exposure to moisture...)
I was "dirt fishing" in a park in Chinook Wa. and got a penny signal, dug it and found a Zincoln in a vertical position corroded in half under the portrait's chin the bottom was gone completely. Lost it in my travels or I'd post it. I see plenty already rotting in gutters in Astoria...
One thing I have heard is that the relative wear on coins from the late 20's early 30's has to do with the depression and the added circulation of coins of that time.
The Raleigh Money Expo's educational exhibits this year include a study of date frequencies in cents and quarters pulled from circulation. It's a fantastic presentation, with big graphical exhibits of number vs. date (using actual coins as markers on the graphs) and deriving expected time in circulation, as well as time to travel cross-country from Denver to the East Coast. Any summary would not do it justice, but I'll try to capture some of the highlights tomorrow. I've gotten permission to take high-res photos of the displays, but I'll have to ask the presenter about posting them here. One bottom-line observation: they calculated a half-life in circulation for quarters of 56 years, much longer than the Mint's 30-year figure; for cents, they found a half-life of only 13 years.
I very much look forward to your post. I think the mint might be closer than you think. Right now I'd estimate the half life of quarters minted in 1965 as about 48 years but this half life is getting longer. What you may not realize is that these coins aren't wearing out and getting removed but rather they are individuially meeting with misadventure. Everytime a car is scrapped there are a few quarters lost in the cushions and mats. They get bent up being used for screwdrivers or other such fates befall them. But while these coins are waiting for their demise they are getting thinner and thinner every year. Before long the government will have to start removing these thin coins or they won't work in vending machines. If all the thin '65 quarters were removed today the apparent half life would be far shorter. You might say that these will seem to be around forever and then suddenly they're gone. Time don't fly, it bounds and leaps. Ya' don't know whatcha got till it's gone (don't it always seem to go?). I believe at current rates of wear (that are very slow) '65 quarters will start getting elusive around 2055 but one third of these surviving today are culls and collectors are starting to skew the grade distribution by picking off the nicer examples (nice F and better). There's another wild card here which is the preponderance of states issues in circulation now. Right now they account for only some 57% of quarters but as people begin to notice the scarcity of the older quarters and especially the scarcity of nicer coins and better dates the coins will be plucked out and the mint will replace them with new issues making the older coins seem even even scarcer and more desirable. The percentage of culls will continue to increase because there's no mechanism for removing bad coins. In as little as ten years a '65 quarter will appear only once in three rolls and will be only VG- condition with 40% culls. Things change more rapidly when people are paying attention.
If you could, and wouldn't mind, perhaps some video, too? Some video of the presenter talking about it would be cool.
The presenter might be around tomorrow, but I don't see an actual presentation on the schedule. (Also, I'm not a video guy -- my camera can record it, but I don't have steady hands or a very good attention span...)
