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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 2508436, member: 112&quot;]The Russians minting the Netherlands ducats was absolutely nothing even remotely similar to the 1898 Mexican peso re-strikes. In the first place the 1898 re-strikes were minted by both US mints and Mexican mints to supply the govt. in China with coins because the nationalist govt. in China did not have the ability to mint coins themselves. And the Mexican mint supplied the US mints with the dies to strike the coins. In other words, the Mexican govt. not only gave the US Mint permission to strike these coins, they helped the US Mint do so. So, those coins were not counterfeit.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Russian govt. however made their own dies for the Netherlands ducats from scratch, and then minted the coins. And made new dies every year so their counterfeits would match the genuine coins. And they did so in secret, not only in secret from the Netherlands govt., but in secret from their own Russian citizens. They even used code words to describe the coins in the Russian mint documents to maintain the secrecy. </p><p><br /></p><p>The Russians quite intentionally counterfeited the coins of another country, and then passed those counterfeits off as coins having been minted by the Netherlands. If anyone had known the coins were being minted by the Russians the coins never would have been accepted. </p><p><br /></p><p>And that was the whole point of the Russian govt. minting the counterfeits. Their own coins were often not accepted. Netherlands gold ducats however, because of their reputation were readily accepted, without question, worldwide. And they were used in many countries in place of that country&#039;s own coins. And that&#039;s exactly what the Russians needed - coins that would be readily accepted anywhere.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now in the beginning the Netherlands wasn&#039;t even aware that the Russians were counterfeiting their coins. The secret was kept for 100 years or more. Then when the Netherlands found out, they made repeated, formal diplomatic requests to the Russian govt. to stop counterfeiting their coins. The Russians refused to do so. To combat the Russians the Netherlands themselves finally stopped minting the gold ducats in 1849. To counter this effort the Russians merely dated all of their counterfeits with the same date - 1849. And continued minting coins with that date until 1868, when they finally stopped.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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