You Vs PCGS 20 Dollar 1908 No Motto St. Gaudens

I haven't seen or read anything about that, anything concrete ?

 

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There are television commercials selling $20 gold coins claiming that they are from "European hoards".

 

“Restrike” sounds way too official. From your previous posts it seems you bought counterfeits. Can you post pictures and tell us how you were able to determine they were not authentic?

 

Are they certified as such ? Otherwise, they could just be from years which had many of those coins return in the 1950's and 1960's (and later)....but you wouldn't have any idea if it came from South America, Europe, or some old lady in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

 

I can't read German so I may be a bit lost...but my definition of "restrikes" is using old raw materials (old coins melted down or raw gold from a source that made the old coins) and using them to produce modern replica coins.

For instance, I have a restrike of the 1855 Liberty Double Eagle....it's from the SS Central America horde. They used some of the raw gold ingots to make modern restrikes of the 1855's using modern technology. It's basically just 2.4 oz of 1850's California gold from the SS Central America re-struck today.

 

I have come to understand a restrike as using the same dies to strike the same coin at a later date. I've never seen a requirement for it to be "old metal" to be a restrike. Honestly, I think what you're describing is a forgery and should have the word "copy" on it. I'm open to differing opinions on this, it just doesn't quite sound right to me.

 

No, it's not a forgery it's a commemorative coin:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/S-S-CENTRA...924807?hash=item2162961947:g:5cYAAOSwMghdg9Cf

 

Sorry, but these are not restrikes. They're not made by the US government, they're not made with original dies. PCGS has a definition that agrees with that statement: "Restrike: An officially minted coin struck at a date significantly later than indicated on the coin."

Those may be commemorative, as in they commemorate something, but they're not commemorative coins. Here is how PCGS defines them: "Commemorative Issue: Special coin issues minted to commemorate a specific historical event or person and sold at a premium over face value. United States commemorative coins are legal tender and have sometimes been seen in circulation."

Source: https://www.pcgs.com/news/the-language-of-numismatics

 

Those gold pieces were made gold recovered for gold bars that were salvaged from the SS Central America. The company had them tried to market the gold bars, but the weight of the large bars was too much to sell to the general public. Finally they hit on this marketing strategy

These pieces are not restrikes because the original dies that were not used to strike these items. They are gold pieces with old recovered gold of the period, struck with copy dies bearing designs from the 19th century. From what I have seen, they are not all that popular with collectors.

 

Yup, they were called re-strikes because they used the raw gold from the ingots and bars. But unless the California Historical Society took control of the U.S. Mint, I know it's not a REAL restrike.

Actually, they WERE very popular with investors. They were cheaper than many of the coins from the SSCA. But with the coins originally selling for a 600% premium to gold (~$5,000 per coin), investors have lost money or at best broken even. The coins go for about $4,500 on average despite gold quadrupling in price since 2001.

This premium dissipation hit these pseudo-coins. Let's see if it soon hits the 1857-S's.

 

As he said!

 

It probably will because the graded population of these coins is too high to sustain the high prices.


There are a few reasons why the prices have held as long as they have.

• For type collectors this is the only source for MS-65 or 66 examples of the Type I $20 gold piece. It is virtually impossible to find a high grade example of this type among the piece that have spent their existence on dry land.
  
  
• The story of the SS Central America continues to grab collectors’ attention. Shipwreck coins in general seem to bring higher prices, even when they have seawater damage.
  
  
• A fair number of these coins have turned bad after they were “curated.” For some of the them, the copper in the alloy comes to the surface which results in often unattractive copper spotting. Despite the fact that the coin is in a holder with a high grade posted on it, the coin is a hard sell to knowledgeable buyers. The one exception was the “super nova” piece that brought over $300 k, but that was a very strange (in my opinion) exception.
  

 

Hope you are right, JM.

So far, they have brought up thousands (tens of thousands ?) of the 1857-S's and 18 years later the price has NOT collapsed (unlike the premium for those "restrikes" I mentioned). I guess considering the price of gold has quadrupled since the 1st batch was released you can say that the price has fallen relatively by comparing it to the premium to the underlying gold. But in absolute terms, and compared to other Type 1 DE's, the price has not fallen or fallen that much. Certainly no collapse.

We keep hearing about 119,000 1857-S's....how many have been brought up, how many are coming soon ? And if they dribble out over years or decades, it won't affect pricing. We need tens of thousands to hit the market all at once, IMO.

Great point, I forgot why there aren't many Mint State Type 1's, have to go back and re-read their stories.

Very true, but a normal premium should be 20-30% IMO for a sexy story, not 300% or more as with the 1857's.

Yes, good point....though I think the risk of coins "turning" (toning ?) is pretty much a first-few years risk, right ? Saw a piece by Doug Winter from 2010 saying that if a coin hadn't turned by then, it probably (?) was safe from doing so in the future.

It's now another 9 years later so the risk should be even less. The problem is going to be for the NEW COINS as they spent even more time underwater and haven't been seasoned yet.

 

Sorry for that. Please mind that I am not a native speaker . The fake coins were 1915 D (an impossible combination) and 1908 D. Both coins had a strange luster and there is no space between the insription and the edge. On top of that the Strike of the 1909 ist ,,blury''. And the diameter was a littlebit too huge.

 

Twenty dollars was a lot of money in the mid 1850s when coin collecting in the United States started to take off. A skilled worker made between $1.25 and $2.00 a day. Therefore $20 was from one and a half to two weeks and half weeks pay.

One could afford to set aside some cents in a coin collection, but $20 was way over the limit. Therefore these coins were used.

Of course they mostly sat vaults and were moved from one rich man's or wealthy merchant's account to another. Still they were rubbed and banged together which soon took them out of the MS-65 grade class.

I think that is a coin has not gone bad over a decade of proper storage that it is probably quite stable.

 

It doesn’t take a specialist to figure out those are counterfeits, but it’s good that you were able to return them. I’d recommend to only buy certified gold coins in the future.

 

Well, generically that is true of many coins that came over here.

But unless it is stamped on the slab, it probably isn't specified and it may or may not be true.

 

I wonder if people SAVED in these coins -- even poor people, but especially "middle class" farmers and other self-proprietors -- because banking was so risky (no FDIC, bank panics, runs, etc.).

Even in major cities, banks went under from 1850-1920. In rural, isolated communities (sparse telegraph coverage, hardly any phones) you'd probably be even less trusting of a bank's solvency.

 

Back to the OP (since I'm joining late), I was thinking ms63 & ms62. Seems the slab was a little inflated over my opinion.