Do the mintage numbers shown on NGC's site for each coin already take into account any official melts of those coins? Or, does "Mintage" simply mean the number of coins produced at the time of minting? I can see the former making sense as that would be the effective upper population of that coin. However, I can see the latter making sense, too, as all we know for sure are the Mints' mintage reports for that coin at the time of minting, as that's more factual. The exception that I can see is when the various Mints report that they immediately melted down some of the coins, or if years later the Mints reported the numbers of their leftover stock were melted down. For instance, NGC shows this below. The only reason for there to be an "est." next to the 2M mintage number is if that Mintage amount already takes into account the melted coins. Is that the correct way of looking at it, or is there some other way of looking at this? Thanks in advance!
It means minted. NOBODY knows how many of ANY coin were melted, neither by the mint (which just recorded gross dollar values) nor privately.
Yes, I did go over the implied caveat that no one will know how many were minted, as I specified that the Mint may melt an estimated number of coins and thereby create a new upper bound minted population. If folks privately melted down their coins, no one will know the actual number available. But, the estimated upper bound for what could be available after an official recorded melting vs what the mint initially produced is still in question (maybe NGC specifies that detail somewhere?).
NGC doesn't have the ability to count anything; all they have to go on are the figures the Mint releases.
This is relatively current (1966 Irish 10 Shilling commem) and should be better sourced... all I can come up with is that NGC couldn't easily find sources for neither the mintage nor the melting and so this is a bit of CYA.
Mint records aren't produced for collectors, they are mint records. Unfortunately that means the information isn't always the clearest. Sometimes a record is unavailable and mintage is inferred from other sources such as requested or delivered quantities. Records also don't always align with the date on the coin, but rather for a specific production period. Sometimes multiple years are reported together. So there are many reasons why a number might be listed as estimated.
