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I wish the US Mint would comment . . .
Russell12
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I wish the mint would comment (and be held accountable) for how the July 4th privy coins were really distributed. For 815 of them to be in a single box is crazy and needs to be explained. I know I have more of a chance of finding one than this happening 😝
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Regardless of how they were distributed, somebody would have a problem with it.
What exactly would you like explained, and how should they be "held accountable"? Did the Mint promise a cap on the number of coins that could be found in one box?
They dump a bunch of the privy coins into the big bins of regular quarters, they go through the rolling machine and end up in boxes that get distributed for commercial circulation or that end up in the hands of coin roll hunters.
Sure, in a perfectly fair world there would be dedicated mint employees throwing a couple of coins in at a time for even distribution, but with 250k of them they're shoveling them in by the hundreds or maybe even thousands.
Nothing is as expensive as free money.
One might argue that collectors going to banks in order to get boxes of coins to search would disrupt an effort to put the coins into circulation.
Rhetorical question: What is the effective difference between Brinks employees sorting the coins out and collectors doing the same thing when searching boxes?
I agree. It's disruptive to the general flow of coinage into commerce. There you might point the blame at banks that do not impose a sufficient barrier to entry to discourage the activity, but that's their own business decision. At the end of the day coins end up somewhere. Even at a small business, if an employee that knows about these coins opens a roll and sees them, they're probably going to open and search all of the other rolls too. It's an inherently imperfect process.
Nothing is as expensive as free money.
Yes, it is. And it's not at all surprising that people would imagine ways of altering it so as to increase the odds that they will find the coins themselves.
The more that are found and preserved in MS condition, the lower the rarity, the more likely I can afford to pick up a nice one in a couple years. People finding a thousand of these in a group search will help flood the market and lower prices sooner. It would be nice to search and find a couple, but my banks are more of a hinderance than a help. So I will play the long game and wait for demand and prices to drop. If we can get 200,000 of these into the collector community, I should be able to afford one.
I don't really care, don't want one, not looking and would never buy one.
But even in a totally random distribution anything is possible -- but does anyone think that anyone at the US Mint gave much thought to any kind of random distribution?
In a year or two, it's going to be a $50 to $100 coin. I would not worry about it right now.
Unless one is claiming that the coins are being found where the mint intended them to be found, that is some sort of random. Not that everybody will be satisfied with it, though.
Never going to happen, so just forget it. I just to choose to ignore things like this, since I have no access to obtaining them organically, and have no interest in financially rewarding those who do. As a result, as far as I am concerned, they don't exist.
Since they are Philly only, no one west of the Mississippi realistically ever had any shot at all. And, due to the way circulating coinage is distributed in 2026, the "average" person for whom these are intended would also never have a shot, no matter what. 815 in a box or not, they are almost all going to go to bank insiders, their big favorite customers, Mint employees, Brinks employees, etc. My bank can order me as many boxes as I want, but cannot guarantee new boxes, and reportedly is never able to deliver them to those who try. I just don't have the time to waste, so I'm out.
So, either pay up in order to reward those with access for their access to something you do not have access to, or just ignore them. Enough things to chase in the hobby without having to stress about a single quarter. I hate them selling 2K half ounce silver Liberty Bells for $750. I couldn't care less about 250K circulating quarters I don't have a fair shot to obtain for 25 cents.
I have not visited a mint, but I have visited many other types of production facilities. From what I have seen, the standard practice is to produce one type of product on each production run. As the product comes off the line, it is packaged and readied for shipment (in this case, to a bank). Then, to produce the next type of product, the production equipment is adjusted as needed, and a new production run begins.
If the U.S. Mint operates in this manner, then it would not surprise me that all the July 4th privy coins would be packaged together. The Mint, in essence, is relying on banks to disperse the coins into the economy.
Random has a specific meaning, so no -- if it is as intended it is non-random. It is not possible to generate random numbers, only pseudo-random if you are familiar with programming. But I really do not care how they distributed them as I could care less. If I ran the mint, they would have been included in something that the mint was selling at a less than 1:1 basis to enhance sales.
I don't think they have an easy way to distribute them the way we all imagine they should be distributed.
The Mint cannot and will not comment, because "the Mint" does not know. The Mint does not put coins into "boxes", it puts coins into "bags". As far as the Mint is concerned, the process by which their bagged coins end up in boxes can be classified as "magic".
Shipping coins around the country is not the Mint's job. Once a batch of quarters have been struck, passed QC, officially "issued" and bagged up in 4000-coin storage bags, it is the Federal Reserve's job to then ship them from where they are made to where they are needed. The Federal Reserve, in turn, outsources this logistics operation to the armoured car companies, which incorporate the Mints as just one possible source of surplus coins. The banks and their larger retail customers are the places where coins are ultimately shipped to. It is the car companies' shipment algorithms that ultimately determine where freshly minted coins will get shipped to.
As maximizing profits is the goal of the armoured car companies, they will attempt to always minimize the distances that coins are shipped, because shipping a truckload of coins anywhere is expensive, but shipping it further away is even more expensive. This is why Denver-minted coins are (almost) never shipped to Maine and Philly-minted coins are (almost) never shipped to Los Angeles; there are (almost) always a closer source of surplus coins for those places.
Is it "random"? No. Is it "predictable"? Also no - it is, in effect, chaotic: theoretically predictable but there are so many variables in play that it's impossible for an outsider or even an insider to track them all and tiny changes in variables can make big changes in outcomes.
What the Mint could in theory tell you is how many presses were used to strike the privy quarters, compared to non-privy quarters, since making them simultaneously is the only practical way that the Mint has in its toolbox for "randomly" mixing two different coin types together, without completely overturning their usual modus operandi. This statistic would give you a typical proportion of privy quarters in each bag on the days that privy quarters were being made. A single standard coin press in Philly produces 750 coins per minute; that single press could do the entire mintage of 250,000 privies in just over five and a half hours of operation; even with down-time for replacing worn-out dies, I'd expect these could all be knocked out in a single day. I would assume that the answer on the day of production of these quarters would be something like "1 press for privy quarters and 7 presses for non-privy quarters", which would give a theoretical 1-to-7 ratio in a final mixed-together bag. But that bag-mixing wouldn't be truly "random", and a ratio of something like 1600/4000 in a bag could easily be obtained through this process, which would then get passed through to that ratio in the boxes put together by the armoured car companies.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
It's not fair that mint staff had a chance to snag a 1933 double eagle and we didn't.
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero. Voltaire. Ebay coinbowlllc
That wouldn’t be fair. But that wasn’t the case, as Mint personnel had no better chance to obtain the coins legally than the public did.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
The YouTube guy who found 800+ in one box is in Plano, Texas. Pains were taken to ensure that these were distributed around the country. They were allegedly intentionally not distributed near the Philadelphia mint, with the exception of the gifts to employees and the ones given out at the gift shop in change. Per a mint employee I spoke with, you shouldn't be able to find any within 150 miles of the Philly mint unless they filter into that area via means of regular commerce. Though I suppose that's really down to how the armored carriers distribution districts work.
For whatever it's worth, my basic testing seems to hold out that being true. 83 banks visited in the past week and change, and I haven't found a single roll of the liberty bell quarters, let alone a privy.
"It's like God, Family, Country, except Sticker, Plastic, Coin."
I totally agree its frustrating. We cant even get that quarter at the bank, let alone get one with a privy mark. If the mint wants to sell them for a huge premium, they could just announce it and sell them to the highest bidder one coin at a time!
That's NOT what they wanted to do
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
Curious, how many boxes have you searched so far?
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you" Matthew 6:33. Young fellow suffering from Bust Half fever.
BHNC #AN-10
JRCS #1606
This is a silly post. It’s not like somebody was sitting there throwing a single privy in each box of quarters. Nor did they throw all the regular quarters and privy quarters in a cement mixer to get a more even distribution. It seems very reasonable that there were 800+ in a single box. Not everything is a conspiracy.
The impatient pay more. I may buy one for my 21st century type set when the price settles down below $100, slabbed 66 or 67. I may sell that set anyway. Lots of emphasis on marketing these days rather than the business of producing coins for commercial use.
For those of you lucky enough to live in or be close enough to drive to banks located in one of these cities good luck!!!
Look at where the sellers on Ebay are located and you will find a very strong correlation!
Here are all of the cities where the privy quarters should be appearing:
The Federal Reserve System has 12 main regional banks and 25 branch offices.
The complete directory of the branch sub-locations across the U.S. is organized by their parent Federal Reserve Bank
Boston (District 1): No branches.
New York (District 2): Buffalo Branch, NY.
Philadelphia (District 3): No branches.
Cleveland (District 4): Cincinnati, OH; Pittsburgh, PA.
Richmond (District 5): Baltimore, MD; Charlotte, NC.
Atlanta (District 6): Birmingham, AL; Jacksonville, FL; Miami, FL; Nashville, TN; New Orleans, LA.
Chicago (District 7): Detroit, MI.
St. Louis (District 8): Little Rock, AR; Louisville, KY; Memphis, TN.
Minneapolis (District 9): Helena, MT.
Kansas City (District 10): Denver, CO; Oklahoma City, OK; Omaha, NE.
Dallas (District 11): El Paso, TX; Houston, TX; San Antonio, TX.
San Francisco (District 12): Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA.
It looks like some people are unhappy because the coins are not being dispersed very well into circulation while others explore ways to intercept the coins before they're dispersed.
While this was mean to be sarcasm, I'll say that mint personnel who worked there had an advantage. They got to go inside the mint where the coins were made, the public didn't.
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero. Voltaire. Ebay coinbowlllc
I also think people need to be patient. I could be wrong, but there seems to be an assumption that all 250k have been introduced to circulation. But I surmise a large percentage are still sitting in vaults and will enter circulation over the rest of the year and into next year. There's probably still plenty of time to get and find brand new ones.
Yes. But they have security to prevent them taking anything out - unless you put it in a crankcase
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
Perfect
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero. Voltaire. Ebay coinbowlllc
Many mint employees were gifted a pair of them along with a 2026 Proof Set for their work at the mint, for whatever it is worth.
"It's like God, Family, Country, except Sticker, Plastic, Coin."