What's the purpose of putting the year on coins?

tjennings

And mintmark for that matter. The whole world does it. Is it done just for collectors? Does the average Joe care what year the change in his pocket was made?

kranky

An anti-counterfeiting device.

shirohniichan

So the government can keep its seignorage profits by encouraging collectors to take coins out of circulation and into plastic slabs.

CharlieB

And doesn't it just annoy you about all those
postage stamps that are not marked with the cent value?
How did that ever come to be?

tjennings

Anti-counterfeiting? I doubt having the year makes it anymore difficult to counterfeit. (Do coins even get counterfeited in large quantities??).

Seignorage profits: I imagine the amount of coins taken out of circulation by collectors is miniscule compared to total quantities minted.

4thStooge

How else would I know what coins to collect.


Seignorage profits: the difference face value and the cost of production.

shirohniichan

Every little bit counts.

Mikey

So that you can remember what year you were born.

baccaruda

yeah i have stamps from about 5 years (and about 86 postal rate increases) ago. there's no value marked on them. i asked a lady at the post office if these have like a "grandfather clause" and will always be worth a first-class mailing no matter what the rate increases to (i think the next increase is just going to be 1 year of indentured servitude to the USPS). she just laughed and said no as if the assumption was completely ridiculous.

shirohniichan

I think the Mint does it just to make collectors buy a bunch of coins and fret over minor details like that.

hookooekoo

Intreging question.

Can't come up with an answer on the year, but I thought one once read that the mint marks were added as something of a quality control, so if a bunch of "bad" coins were showing up in circulation, they would know who the culprit was (is sound good anyway).

RevCoose

A postal employee told me they print new stamps before the new price is decided upon.Hence non-denominational stamps for the first run.

GAT

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Don't give the wackos at the Mint any more goofy ideas. Already seen them destroy the value of First Day Covers, of which I own a lot. Next thing is they might, "find......errrrr mint more", of 1964 AH Kenndys. Braddick and the other board members will love that one.

nwcs

OK, here is my best guess. I believe it is more of an evolutionary development. When coins were first being hammered, it was common to commemorate events that occured previously and to honor whatever ruler was in charge on the coinage. Those commemorations were how people collectively remembered their history and its events. Over time, it it probably evolved into the practice of putting on the date when it was issued. To more precisely nail down when something was done. And the pattern representing the event.

If you look at the broader picture beyond coins, you see the same pattern. The ancients did not reckon time in the same way as we do. Their time structure was based on significant events that occurred in the past or present. Those events were their markers. Over time, this shifted into a desire to record history and the sense of a timeline emerged where it was important to record more precisely when things happened. It was an especially good innovation for civil matters.

Obviously this is an oversimplification, but I think not too inaccurate.

Neil

RLinn

Isn't it obvious? It is to keep fools like us from asking the questions you know we would ask. "Gee, this thing looks really old, when do you think it was made?" or "As long as we're on the subject, where do you think it was made?" After much blowhard speculation and sharing of combined ignorance, we would call in a third party friend (himself a self-proclaimed expert) only to have him encase the item in a piece of plastic memorialized with his opinion on the front and he'd charge us for the piviledge of knowing his view.

mdwoods

we would call in a third party friend (himself a self-proclaimed expert) only to have him encase the item in a piece of plastic memorialized with his opinion on the front and he'd charge us for the piviledge of knowing his view.

Cleverly put. Thanks, I needed a morning chuckle. Mark

morganbarber

You often hear statistics about the life expectancy of a coin vs. a paper dollar. These comparisons would be impossible if both types of currency were not dated.

kingmatt

for record keeping purposes. that's my guess

baccaruda

does the average joe care if there's an inedible piece of parsley next to his sandwich?

RNCHSN

Parsely IS edible!

Average Joe.

keets

i wonder if the date is to be able to tell when the coin was struck and the M/M is to tell where? just a wild guess. some things are just too simple.

al h.

Gilbert

Keets - "... on the head."

So the mint can keep up with its product (accounting and QC as hookooekoo mentions)

How does the date help prevent counterfeiting - one example might be if in 1905 you tried to spend a Morgan dollar dated 1905.

FullSteps

Why not put a barcode on coins instead of the date...this would help with quality control as any number of tidbits could be stored in the barcode and vending machines could use the bar code to differentiate the denomination

nwcs

It would wear off too quickly most likely. It'd have to be cameo in order to be read by a machine with light at the right angle. Or they would have to embed it somehow in a transparent portion of the coin that would have to be created for the purpose.

Bear

By placing the date on our coins, future visits to our planet by outworlders , they will be able to learn the actual date of the destruction of our world. A good thing for alien historians, dont you think? Bear

cladking

The federal reserve did a study of the quarters in circulation in 1997 before the
states coins were released. It was largely just to see how the coins were wearing
and what the attrition rates were. No doubt there are various people at the fed
who are interested in the numbers for various reasons and certainly the mint has
a lot of interest. There are differences in annealing, striking pressure, designs,
planchet preparation, etc, etc each year, so the mint probably has the most interest,
right after coin collectors.

Conder101

It is a traditinal holdover from the days of precious metal coinage. It was a way to keep the people charge with the creation of the rulers or nations coinage honest. You would want to collect random samples of a specific mint or coiners production and test them for weight and purity. Now you could ask the coiner to provide such samples (Several countries do or did this ourselves included) but they might not actually be "random". Or you could collect them from the marketplace. But how to make sure you get the right pieces? You wouldn't want to condemn a coiner for pieces produced by his predecessor or the coins produced by another current coiner. So they dated the coins for the year they were made and used other marks to identify the mint or person who produced them. This is no longer important since the metal is now only a fraction of the value of the coin but the dates and mintmarks still remain.

cladking

There have been dates on minor coins for many hundreds of years. It's hard to
believe it's merely tradition.

Conder101

Most of those "minor" coins were originally made of precious metal as well and even when they went to copper they still contained almost the full face values worth of metal in the coin. Fiat or token coinage issues where the value of the coin is based solely or almost solely on the faith in the issuing authority is only about a hundred years old, and complete fiat coinage systems only forty to seventy years old. Five hundred years of dating coins, plus government buracracy produces one heck of a lot of tradition inertia. (We stopped striking coins with silver in 1964 but we kept the assay commission coming in every year to assay the fiat coinage for 13 more years. Britian went to fiat coinage in 1947 and they still have the annual trial of the pyx to assay their coinage. Traditions can take a long time to die out. What do people commonly call our smallest denomination today? A penny. It is traditional, even though no half pennies have been struck for use in this country in 217 years.)