How Common Are Bicentennial Quarters?
US mint records tell us that by 2010, 74 billion quarters have been released into general circulation since 1965 and that number is increasing at the rate of 2 billion per year. (Silver was used prior to that year and virtually all of those coins have been removed from circulation.) We also know 1.7 billion bicentennial quarters were released. That should mean that 1.7/72 = 2.3-percent of the quarters in circulation are bicentennial quarters. The problem is that there is no way of knowing how many quarters have been collected, lost, destroyed or removed from circulation because of wear. To answer this question I keep a count of all the quarters we get over the year and the percentage of them that are bicentennial quarters. These we give to our son who collects them. The result from this tabulation is the following: 2007: Fifteen of the 1680 quarters we collected were bicentennials. This equates to only one out of every 115 quarters. However, the distribution is far from uniform. We’d g
US mint records tell us that by 2010, 74 billion quarters have been released into general circulation since 1965 and that number is increasing at the rate of 2 billion per year. (Silver was used prior to that year and virtually all of those coins have been removed from circulation.) We also know 1.7 billion bicentennial quarters were released. That should mean that 1.7/72 = 2.3-percent of the quarters in circulation are bicentennial quarters. The problem is that there is no way of knowing how many quarters have been collected, lost, destroyed or removed from circulation because of wear. To answer this question I keep a count of all the quarters we get over the year and the percentage of them that are bicentennial quarters. These we give to our son who collects them. The result from this tabulation is the following: 2007: Fifteen of the 1680 quarters we collected were bicentennials. This equates to only one out of every 115 quarters. However, the distribution is far from uniform. We’d g
