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Coins From Various Dealers at 2018 Baltimore Whitman Spring Coin Show
2018 American Numismatic Association Summer Seminar YN (Young Numismatist) Scholarship Auction Donation Request
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Thank you to all of my first 500 subscribers. To celebrate, here is a video about the Three Dollar Gold Piece.
This video focuses on the Three Dollar Gold Piece. The coin was designed by James B. Longacre, who also designed the Indian Head Cent and numerous other coins.
This series is especially rare – the highest mintage was in 1854, with only 138,618 coins struck. The lowest mintage was in 1881, with 500 coins struck. This is not including the unique 1870-S, which is part of the Bass Foundation Collection and can be seen in my video “Quarter Eagles and $3 Gold Pieces – Harry W. Bass, Jr. Collection at the ANA Money Museum”. Needless to say, every date and mintmark combination in this series is classified as scarce or above.
The 1870-S Three Dollar Gold Piece is unique – there are no other ones in any collection. The coin was sold in a B&R auction in October of 1982 and sold for $687,500 in EF-40. Today, the Red Book estimates the price of the coin, in EF, to be about $6,000,000.
The denomination was minted from 1854 to 1889. They were struck at Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dahlonega, and New Orleans.
The coin was authorized for striking by the Act of February 21, 1853.
Here is a quote from the straight from the Red Book –
“Today, some numismatists theorize that the $3 denomination
Would have been useful for purchasing postage stamps of the day (with their face value of 3 cents) or for acquiring 100 silver three-cent pieces (“trimes”), which were also in circulation at the time.”
All coin collectors know not to clean their coins but almost everyone else thinks it will help the value of their coins when the opposite is true.
Cleaning coins – Two words of advice DO NOT!
Any coin collector, who has been in the hobby, for more than a few minutes has been given this sage advice.
All of my numismatic or coin collecting videos are for new and experienced coin collectors. This video is for everyone who has some old coins hidden away, received coins as an inheritance, or received some coins as a gift.
There may be a point in time where you want to sell your coins. Your first thought may be – Oh, they look dirty or tarnished so let me clean them up before I try to sell them. Wrong! Do not do this. The pictures I will be showing during this video are ways some clean their coins – Do not use any of them.
Coins are not your old silverware collection that may sell for more if they look pretty. Coins have two types of value – numismatic and the value of the metal inside the coin.
No matter what you do to a coin except for cutting it up and reducing its weight will affect the metal value of the coin. There is a simple formula a buyer will use to determine the metal value of the coin. It has to do with the weight of the silver or gold in the coin times the price of silver or gold at the time of the sale. The purchaser will pay you a little less than that value.
The numismatic value is where the true value is to a coin collector. All coins will be graded on a 70 point scale by coin dealers and collectors. They can see past the dirt and tarnish a coin may have. Cleaning a coin will greatly or totally reduce the coins value down to the metal value of the coin.
An old silver dollar from the 1880s may have a value between hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars based on the rarity and the grade of the coin. The minute you clean it, the value could drop all the way down to the metal value of $25 or so. You just threw or cleaned you way to a loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Every coin dealer in the country can tell you many stories of people coming in to their shop and at first glance it appears they have a nice collection to sell. Sadly, at close inspection either with or without magnification it is obvious the coins had been cleaned. A possible $50,000 collection is now worth a few hundred dollars.
No matter what you use, soap and water, special cleaning solutions for silver and gold, dips, acetone, or chemical cleaning, most dealers and collectors will know very quickly if your coin has been cleaned. So please, do not clean your coins.
All coin collectors feel badly when they see what could have been a valuable coin reduced to a “hole filler” A coin we could normally not afford but will buy it at a very low price just to have the coin in our collection. Or a coin we will purchase simply as a way to buy a small amount of silver or gold.
Please share this video with everyone you know. Tweet it, facebook it, pin it, and email it. Most people have some old coins and it would be a shame to see them reduce the coin’s value which in turn hurts them greatly in their pocketbook while ruining a coin that could be cherished by a coin collector.
Thanks for watching and please subscribe to my youtube channel. Please share this video so more people can learn that they should not clean their old coins.
