How many coins are out there?

jasonscoins

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Apr 11, 2013
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Okay, so I've been reading different things about silver coins and how a great percentage were melted down (I believe in the early 80s) and it was kind of depressing. Also, for every person on this board that coin roll hunts, there are probably 1,000 more doing the same thing who are not on this board. It got me to thinking how many coins are still out there to be found. Granted, I know the number will be constantly changing with people plucking them and then some coming back into circulation. I was just curious to see an estimate of how many silver coins (war nicks, dimes, quarters, halves and dollars) you guys think are still lurking in the wild. My personal opinion is several hundred million. Does that seem high or low? Thoughts?
 

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Dozer D

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Feb 12, 2012
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Just thinking about the quantity of the 1.5 dimes per box that I averaged in 2013, comes out to a mere .0006% (that six-thousandants of one percent) per box. Now if you apply that fraction to all the clad produced years (1965-2013 P & D's: excluding Proofs)as if it was say 100,000,000,000 (billion) @ .0006% = only 60,000,000 AG dimes remaining in circulation as of today. But one must remember that the silver quantities are being reduced daily by us CRHers.

I'll work up the numbers using current Red Book production quantities. Should be interesting to see what comes up as the answer.

I've worked out the possible numbers on dimes, with the followings assumptions: only clad dimes produced from '65-2013 P&D only, no S mint or S proofs, estimates for 2012 & 2013 were same as 2011, yearly numbers were rounded to nearest million.
FINDINGS: total mintages from 1965-2013 were 79,649,000,000 (that 79 billion pieces not dollars)[sources: from the 2013 issue of Red Book]. My AG findings for 2013 were 853 dimes(rosies&mercs), out of 523 boxes (1,307,500 pieces) for a finding percentage of .00065239%. Apply the .00065239 @ 79,649,000,000 comes to a possible AG remaining dimes of 51,962,211 pieces yet in the wild. YES, I know there are many more factors that should be taken into account, but I was only using my own find ratio from 2013. I know you guys are ready to TEAR this all apart, but don't take it as gospel anyway, was done all in fun of CRH.
 

RustyGold

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Aug 16, 2013
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I have at least a hundred silver coins in a can, from dimes to dollars, and I can bet there is another million other people that do too! So there's a hundred million silver coins in the cupboard!
 

GMan00001

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Dec 19, 2006
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I've worked out the possible numbers on dimes, with the followings assumptions: only clad dimes produced from '65-2013 P&D only, no S mint or S proofs, estimates for 2012 & 2013 were same as 2011, yearly numbers were rounded to nearest million.
FINDINGS: total mintages from 1965-2013 were 79,649,000,000 (that 79 billion pieces not dollars)[sources: from the 2013 issue of Red Book]. My AG findings for 2013 were 853 dimes(rosies&mercs), out of 523 boxes (1,307,500 pieces) for a finding percentage of .00065239%. Apply the .00065239 @ 79,649,000,000 comes to a possible AG remaining dimes of 51,962,211 pieces yet in the wild. YES, I know there are many more factors that should be taken into account, but I was only using my own find ratio from 2013. I know you guys are ready to TEAR this all apart, but don't take it as gospel anyway, was done all in fun of CRH.

I took your find numbers and applied them to my method (link to my method posted to this thread a couple posts earlier).

My math will be slightly off because of the following:
* I don't have my original spreadsheet at work, so I can't easily add the mintages from 2007 to present into my calculation. This means my numbers will be slightly low overall (more silver exists).
* You didn't break out how many were mercs and how many were rosies, so I guessed that from the 853 total, 20 of them were mercs and 833 were rosies.

Using those assumptions, my method shows there being 51,369,773 silver rosies left and 1,277,362 Mercs left. Again using the full mintages from 2007 to present would make these numbers slightly higher.
 

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