Owner Comments:
Mintage: 50,100
This was the 9th coin purchased for this set (8th if you don’t count the 1875 graded MS67 by PCGS, which) - it was the 8th slot filled, purchased on 03/09/2020 after a week or so of back-and-forth attempted haggling with a seller on eBay. I got it and it formally joined its brothers on 3/12/2020
The thing that made this particular example perfect for my set is the fact that it’s in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number. It is the 4th 1959XX serial number in the set and the 5th in the set in an old fatty holder with a 19XXXX serial number. So, this is half or more of the set now, but I do not pass up high-grade, rare dates when they pop up just to fit with this theme. If a rare date from the 1880s pops up I go for it regardless of what serial number / generation of holder it is in.
The coin was listed with a “Buy it Now” price of $600, which was bit high in my opinion and higher than I was wanting to pay. The seller did have a “Best Offer” option, which I was hoping to use to haggle him down to about $480-525. But, before I could do that, he offered it to me - and the other person watching it - for $540 (+ shipping). Neither of us took it. That was still more than I wanted to pay so I offered $460. He came back with a counter of... $540! … Joy...
So, I waited a week...
It was during this time that I did some searching and found an old Heritage auction wherein a PCGS MS66 sold for $320 in Sept 2015 - when gold was about $1100. If you add the buyer’s premium and increase the cost of the coin to reflect the increased cost of gold (with gold at about $1,650/oz at the time) that put the value of the coin in the range of $500-575. The NumisMaster price guide (that you get through NGC) puts the coin at $475 in MS63 (but those prices are almost always inflated, and they list the same price for the common date 1876 and 1877s which usually don’t go for that much). That made the price the seller was looking for not entirely unreasonable, but it was still somewhat higher than what I’d really wanted to pay. Yeah, the PCGS graded coin from 2015 was an MS66 where this was an MS65, but this one is in an old fatty holder and those tend to come at a premium because of perceived upgrade potential.
I came back and offered $500. I was hoping he would budge a little - maybe give me the $525 I had hoped for? He countered with... $540! … Okay… so no budge on that at all then! I was somewhat annoyed at that point and conflicted on how to proceed – walk away or bite the bullet. Those seemed to be the only options left.
I sat on it and thought on it throughout that day, ultimately deciding to buy the coin for $540 later that night. Part of my reluctance had arisen from the fact that I had only paid $500 for my 1888 - which is the rarest issue and the key date of the series. But… the melt value of the coins had gone up by about $75 since I bought the 1888 and the 1888 was in a new-gen, pronged holder where this was in an old fatty, and, right or wrong, people do tend to ask for premiums for coins in old fatties. Also, while the 1888 is the rare key date of the series, this 1880 issue is by no means common and has the third lowest mintage of the series at just over 50,000 made.
While I would have preferred to pay a little less for it, at the end of the day this coin is too perfect for the set and too rare and hard to find for me to let this go over about ~5% / $25. As it happens, part of the reason I waited to make another offer and made the offer when I did was that eBay had given me a 5% eBay bucks deal, so I got $27 in eBay bucks to help lessen some of the heartburn over the price.
The obverse has a large die crack that runs between the K and one of the stars and several smaller cracks that radiate out from the K in Koning. I have a theory that all 50,000 of these were struck with a single pair of dies and that, once it formed, all the later strikes would have this crack. When it formed in the run and how many coins out of the 50,000 would have been impacted? I will probably never know.
Last Rev: 07/2020