1776 8 Reales. Good Fake Or Real Deal?

Appears genuine. Where did you find it? Cost?

Looks real to me - from Chile

Thanks for the warm welcome to the coin community and for the thoughts on this coin! Believe it or not, I found it in a dumpster at a for-profit thrift shop in my area. I discovered this dumpster (22ft long,8ft tall 8ft wide...huge!) last September and go thru it once or twice a week, have found 2 WW2 medals, several Roman coins I've identified and lots more cool stuff #128526; would be in the landfill had I not discovered it!

That's a heck of a dumpster find congrats.

Surely puts a new twist on dumpster diving...unreal score. No pun intended.

I just had a coin shop tell me this coin is worth approximately 40$..... That can't be correct can it?


Honestly if you have any for-profit thrift shops near you, go check out their dumpsters.
Those are only the significant items, in the 10 ish months since discovering this place I also have found 10,450$ (paid to me by a pawn shop@ 70% scrap market value at time of sales spread out thru the year) in gold and silver jewelry that was thrown out either by mistake or for lack of knowledge on what's real or not by the employees.
I'll upload some pictures of the crazy finds after work!

Hello and

The coin has been misidentified. It is not from Chile, it is from Potosi, Bolivia. Silver coins of Chile are far pricier than Potosi where silver was the primary products of the mine.

From appearances, it looks like it could be genuine. But as is normal a few tests will be able to eliminate the most common fakes.

Fake coins are of two types. The first are Contemporaneously Circulating Counterfeits (CCC) made to deceive merchants, bankers and ordinary people in day-to-day business. These can be valuable. The second are Numismatic Forgeries (NF) made to deceive coin collectors. This type are nearly worthless. I usually pay at most $15 over melt value.

I see a couple things that cause me to be concerned about the coin being a fake of some type. First there appears to be a line on the reverse side at the end of the dentils between the letters H and P of HISPAN. The die of any original 8 Reales of this type should have dentils that run to the absolute edge of the coin. The dentils should NEVER terminate before the edge of the coin. Hard to tell from a picture however, but please check to see if the dentils stop before the edge.

My second concern is the broken castle punch used to manufacture the die that made the coin. In my book "Counterfeit Portrait Eight-Reales" (2014), I note on pages 150 and 151, a series of coins from the Potosi mint bearing dates from 1774 to 1784 and a bowl bottom from 1789. In actual use in a high-volume mint like Potosi an individual punch would last a very brief time. A period of 15 years in service is unheard of. In my own collection, I have several examples in off metals which are recently made.

Some collectors insist that they own examples that are genuine and use good silver. I will take them at their word, but would still like to see weight and density records as well as an XRF test including Arsenic and Gold as trace contaminants. Then provided the weight is about 26.8 grams, the density is 10.3 and the proper amounts of both Arsenic and Gold are in the metal, I would cautiously view the coin as possibly genuine.

Numister

It is well known that most counterfeiters producing coins to circulate as face value, "age" their works before they enter circulation, that was done so that the coins would not be reviewed too closely when being passed. The goal was one quick pass, and the profit was made.

Makers of Numismatic Forgeries have the same goal as counterfeiters because they too do not want their work examined too closely. So, they do wear their coins. How they do this I am not certain about. But I do know that they do it. Between 2010 and 2013 I detected many identical but worn Charles IIII 8 Reales from the Mexico City mint that came from China. I ended up buying 6 examples. They are identical except for the level of wear present.

I believe I see the same type of a wear pattern here.