So I was pleasently surprised today when I opened my mailbox and saw on the front page of coinworld that there is, apparently, a wrong planchet error for the upcoming Monroe dollar. It was struck on the quarter planchet and is the same thickness as the quarter, too. I know what I am doing on Valentines day. ROLL SEARCH!!!
Good Luck...the contractor returned the error coins to the mint. I think the mint is looking for cheap advertising. Its the only way they'll get the darn things to sell is by getting all of us to start searching for errors......
I love howthe Mint suggests there's a remote chance that some of the errors may have managed to get out anyway. I can almost hear them thinking "wink, wink... we'll be able to sell tons of these if people actually believe that..." I once had a physics teacher who posted the hypothetical: "Suppose 1 in every million grains of sand on the beach was pure gold. That means the beach literally has tons of it. Why wouldn't people be all over the beach, trying to cash in? Because once you figure in how long it would take to actually get enough gold to be worth any reasonable amount of money, it would cost more to get it than the gold is worth." There's probably going to be at least 100 million Monroe dollars. Do the math. Maybe you'll get lucky, but don't bet on it. Roll searching would just seem like a waste... it would be the equivalent of buying 100 lottery tickets to improve your chances of winning... 100 times 1 in 4 million is still only 1 in 40,000. You'd be spending a whole lot of time on the practically infintessimal chance of finding something you're not even sure actually exists. Have fun!
The front page of Numismatic News that came today (dated Feb 19th) says that the contractor supposedly returned all of the errors. How could they know that?
Um, because the contracter said so? Have any evidence he's mistaken or lying? If I was working there I'd be severely tempted to pocket just one, but... if I got caught I'd at least lose my job and may end up facing jail time (stealing something that's property of the federal government carries some rather harsh penalties). If I ever tried to sell it the question would come up of where I found it, and the jig would be up pretty quickly. I mean it's possible, though extremely unlikely, that they missed a few. I just wouldn't bet on it. Since the coins were stamped on quarter planchets, they'd be undersize and underweight and pretty wasy to find with sorting machines. It would be pretty hard for even one to escape. I'll concede not impossible, but, good luck finding it, if it even exists.
Here's how you do it: Run an ad offering to buy Monroe dollars struck on quarter planchets. Later, when you offer your coins for sale and someone asks how you obtained them (knowing you were an employee with access to the coins) you can claim that you bought them all from unnamed people who answered your ad. It worked for Samuel Brown and the five 1913 Liberty nickels. (Brown worked at the Mint and very likely struck the five coins himself using dies prepared for use in case the Indian Head nickel was not approved. He ran an ad in The Numismatist offering to buy 1913 Liberty nickels and amazingly "bought" every known example.)
Of course there is a slight chance that some of these got out. Have you seen how coins are struck and then just tossed into huge containers and moved around the mint? Many of these could have been left sitting in the bottom of some of those large containers and moved to a different area or machine that was striking the same type of coins. I'm going to predict that some of these coins WILL be found in circulation. Also, it makes ZERO difference to the mint if some of these are found or not or even if it is suggested that some of these MIGHT be out there. The mint produces a certain amount of coinage for commerce and that's that ....... no more and no less. There is no "supply and demand" when it comes to coins struck for commerce. The government "orders" a certain amount and that is the amount that is made.
