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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lordmarcovan, post: 2956918, member: 10461&quot;]There are a lot of variables.&nbsp; Some denominations circulate more heavily than others.&nbsp; To the extent that coins are used at all in the US these days, one could argue that the quarter is the &quot;workhorse&quot; of commerce, and as such, many show their age over time.</p><p><br /></p><p>In bygone days, when coins had more buying power, some types circulated heavily.&nbsp; Look at how many Barber coins are &quot;worn slick&quot; down to AG, Fair, and even Poor condition.&nbsp; They were out there circulating until silver was withdrawn from circulation in the 1960s, so some of that stuff was circulating for 60, 70+ years.&nbsp; You can see the same thing with some early Lincoln Wheat cents when those turn up in circulation nowadays.&nbsp; Some of them have been out there circulating for almost 100 years.</p><p><br /></p><p>Spanish colonial silver coins from the 1700s often circulated for more than a century (up until 1857 in this country), so it&#039;s not uncommon for small denominations like half-reales and 1-real pieces to have gotten worn flat.&nbsp; I&#039;ve even heard them called &quot;razor blades&quot; sometimes, they got worn so thin.</p><p><br /></p><p>But there are exceptions.&nbsp; Sometimes during transitions, the last year of an old type or the first year of a new type got saved in larger quantities, so there are a lot more high grade examples to be found.&nbsp; (For example, 1883 &quot;No Cents&quot; Liberty nickels, 1938-D Buffalo nickels, etc.)&nbsp; Sometimes a certain date got hoarded by collectors not long after it was issued, also saving a large portion of the mintage from attrition (for example, 1950-D Jefferson nickels).&nbsp; Some coins went into vaults for decades or even a century or more and are therefore common in high grade (for example, many Morgan dollars).</p><p><br /></p><p>So there&#039;s really not any hard and fast rules across the board.</p><p><br /></p><p>Having been a detectorist for a long time, one gets to see an interesting cross section of stuff dropped over time.&nbsp; For instance, I&#039;ve seen Barber dimes come out of the ground so slick as to be barely readable (likely dropped in the 1950s or early 1960s, though the last Barbers were produced in 1916), but on the other hand, I once watched a buddy of mine ([USER=81808]@Aethelred[/USER]) dig a 1908-D Barber dime on one site that was so pristine it still had <i>mint luster </i>when it came out of the ground!&nbsp; It probably had AU55-AU58 details and can&#039;t have been lost much later than about 1910.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s interesting to think about all this, isn&#039;t it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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