In the world of "Hobby Kings" .. Aluminum is more expensive than gold

Abdel Rahman Ahmed-Cairo

If you had the choice of having a “golden pound” or an old “five millimeters” of aluminum, what would you choose? It may sound like a strange question, and you think its answer is definitely decided by choosing the gold piece, but slow down a bit, it would be quite different if the owner of the option "collector of currencies".

The currency hobby community in Egypt has witnessed considerable controversy in the last few days after the announcement of the purchase of Egyptian amateur coin "five millimeters" of aluminum in 1973, for up to fifty thousand Egyptian pounds (equivalent to three thousand dollars), or about ten Times the price of the gold pound.

While the new amateurs, and many followers of the pages and collections of hobby collecting coins on Facebook, were surprised to pay this amount in a piece of aluminum weighs only two grams, many experts and senior amateurs to clarify the importance of this piece, which is one of the rare mistakes in modern Egyptian currencies and made some clips Illustrated explain its value.

In his famous Encyclopedia of Egyptian Coins (the most important amateur reference for Egyptian coins), the Egyptian engineer Magdy Hanafy classifies this coin as a rarity (R3 +), which means that it is “extremely rare” and is considered a “Mule” coining error. A coin that combines the face and back of two different currencies.

This coin bears the face of the normal version of the five millimes issued in 1972, the image of the falcon, and the back of a commemorative coin, also aluminum, in 1973.

An unknown quantity has been minted with the wrong date, before the minters took care of it, but some pieces have already leaked into circulation to become a rare mistake, only recently documented, for amateurs in search of him to complete their collections.

After many discussions of amateur groups and their Facebook pages and hundreds of offers of various currencies near the rare coin, only five pieces of information were counted among the top amateurs, and estimated the price of this error between twenty thousand pounds for good cases, and fifty thousand pounds for non-current cases.

The discussions coincided with warnings for amateurs not to rush to buy any new piece that appears before verifying its authenticity, amid fears of counterfeiters tend to make replicas of the rare piece, especially with the licenses of metal made from it.

Low price
Although the amount sold by the previous piece may seem large, there are many Egyptian currencies achieved prices that are tens of times the figure, led by a 20-piastre piece of silver coined in 1920 during the reign of the Sultan of Egypt, "Fuad I" (before becoming king) Later), the rarest Egyptian coin since the beginning of the twentieth century, showing only two pieces.

It was sold at an auction set up by an auction house in New York on January 14, 2018 for $ 144,000.

In April, the first version of the Egyptian pound, known as the "Gable Pound" (issued in 1899), earned more than $ 37,000 at an auction at Heritage House.

Special laws
The hobby of collecting coins famous as "hobby of kings" its own world and its laws and rules governing them, and determine the prices of important pieces, and comes topped by scarcity, status and demand, not its history or presented as some people believe, but the important rule of the hobby world that "not all old precious And not all talk is cheap. "

The Egyptian amateur Hatem al-Jundi that the information is more important than the currency, the difference of a letter, date, metal or place of minting a currency may raise the price of tens of times the ordinary pieces.

The soldier created a special Facebook page titled "Egyptian Coins Guide," which will be a database of Egyptian coins and their guided prices in US dollars for each grade based on the data available from the two largest coin-valuing companies in the world, NGC and PCGS.

Because of the importance of information and knowledge in the world of collecting hobbies, Egyptian amateurs established a free electronic magazine for collecting hobbies, called "Arab collectors", supervised and edited by a group of Egyptian and Arab amateurs.

The magazine aims to create a suitable scientific environment for amateurs from all over the Arab world, and to enrich the Arab cultural content of the hobby, and through eight issues published so far presented the magazine various topics about hobbies collecting coins, stamps and medals.

One of the most important topics was a file on the sale of the collection of rare coins owned by the former King of Egypt, "Farouk I", one of the most important and famous hobbyists around the world, which was sold by the leadership of the "July Revolution" cheaply at an auction held in the Palace of the dome in 1954.

The file revealed the seizure of one of the "Free Officers" on a large collection of auction items amounted to (2375 pieces) of the most important and rare Egyptian and international coins and coins, and even one of them (the category of twenty gold dollars for 1933 famous double eagle) was sold in a special auction in 2002 It was the most expensive currency in the world at that time.