How Rare is Your Coin? The value of collectible coins hinges on two major factors: condition and rarity. Most collectors are familiar with she Sheldon Coin Grading Scale that ranks condition numerically from 1 to 70. But even a Mint State 70 coin may not be that valuable if it isn’t...

When the US Constitution was ratified in 1789, it authorized the government to establish a mint and issue a series of coins based on the new US dollar. Passed on April 2, The Coinage Act of 1792 provided for the coinage of silver and gold in both multiples (in gold) and fractions (in silver) of the ...

Notorious Counterfeiters-Part 9

Itzhak Loz and the Russian-Israeli Millions

In recent years, the best US counterfeits have been made overseas and smuggled into the country or used in foreign transactions. Some, known as “supernotes,” are printed by hostile foreign governments, ...

A Wallflower of a Coin At a time when one dollar could represent a couple days’ work, the quarter was a fairly considerable sum. Daily business was transacted in cents, rather than dollars, so a high priority of the new mint was getting smaller coins in circulation. The first quarte...

Minting early US coins was more straightforward than it became in later years. All coins were either gold, silver, or copper of a specific purity—90% in the case of gold and silver and 100% in the early copper coins. But times change, and so does the composition of coins. That has led to mistakes, e...

People come to counterfeiting money in many ways, but none more unusual than the path taken by Englishman Stephen Jory. After a prison term for making and selling bogus designer perfumes, Jory turned his attention to printing funny money. He was so good at it that he became the most successful count...

While the country’s pennies celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday in 2009, Congress was working on a design to replace the cent’s reverse motif once the party was over. It required the artwork to be “emblematic of President Lincoln's preservation of the United States of America as a single and...

The spoils of war are many, and when the US defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War (1898) the Yankees found themselves in possession of a number of Spanish colonies and protectorates including the Philippine Islands. This ended 333 years of Spanish rule that had seen the island nation evolve fro...