Revenant

Currently there's four categories in the Venezuela Registry. The Banco Central de Venezuela, 2000-Date, P-84-Date is the closest one to what I'd like to see but it includes P-84 through P-87, which are part of an earlier run of notes and I think they're still Bolivars (Bs, ISO Code VEB). The rest of the set (P-88 to P-100) are the Bolivar Fuertes series (BsF, ISO Code VEF) Would it be possible to remove the four slots for P-84 to P-87 from this set so it's just Bolivar Fuertes notes? Also, would it be possible to get a new, separate category for the Bolvar Soberano Series (BsS, ISO Code VES) - P-101 to P-111 (I think).

I just realized that this old thread was updated for the 2020 awards... When did this happen? I've been waiting for and looking for the big announcement. Did i miss something or did PMG go super low-key this year? Anyway... Glad to see it continue!

I hear ya. I do. My 4 year old had trouble understanding recently that my laptop - which was bought 3 months after his birth - did not have a touchscreen like his tablet and you have to use the keyboard and mouse. I am soon to be 34 years old and I have received my paycheck as a physical check precisely 1 time in the ~16 years of my working life. When I was on unemployment they mailed me a pre-paid debit card and they just loaded my benefits onto the card every 2 weeks.

I'm not sure what the situation is in the rest of the world , but the paper money at least isn't going away until they find a way to resolve the issue of the "unbanked." There's still a good chunk of the population that doesn't have a checking account or a credit card and they don't have easy access to a bank. The situation is or is going to get worse for some people because banks are increasingly going online and encouraging people to bank exclusively online - even cashing checks, when you actually get one, with an app on your phone. If you switch to requiring people to have electronic money which they are going to be required to monitor and access electronically you're then going to have to deal with the idea how internet connectivity / smart phones / data plans as a basic right or something people absolutely have to have in order to function within the society. We're not going paperless or cashless yet.

The P-2e is an interesting note (one of a few 1994 issues, along with the P-1d). It is a somewhat rarer variety than the P-2d, but when you look at the two, on the surface, they look pretty much the same. The difference between the P-2d and the P-2e (and the difference between the P-1c and the P-1d) is that the earlier issue uses the first version of the Zimbabwe bird watermark while the later issue uses the newer, second version of the Zimbabwe bird watermark that was used in later issues, including the Series 2 notes. Zimbabwe started rolling out the Series 2 notes in 1994 and 1995 (and retired the $2 denomination, replacing the P-1 note with a $2 coin). So, between their replacement mid-year of the prior issues with the old watermark and their subsequent replacement with completely new designs, these notes were not in print long. Pictured below for comparison is my P-2c, from 1983. I don't have a 1994 dated P-2d at this point. We'll see what the future holds there. The P-1c is fairly common and cheap, seemingly almost as common and inexpensive as the P-1b, and it’s just a watermark that separates it from the P-1d – which is one of the rarest and most desirable notes in any Zimbabwe note collection. I can say that with the P-1c and P-1d because I have seen P-1c notes come up for sale in 67 EPQ and sell for less than $30 in most cases 3 or 4 times now. I have hardly ever seen P-1d notes and they tend to go for more in the $120+ range. It’s harder to make this argument, for me, from what I’ve seen, with the P-2d and the P-2e because I’ve now seen two P-2e notes sell for $51 or less, but I have not yet seen a P-2d come up for sale. This makes it difficult in most cases to try to shop for a P-1d or a P-2e on the internet, in raw, ungraded condition, because sellers typically don’t include pictures where they’re holding the note up to a light to show off the watermark and it’s the watermark that makes literally all the difference - the dates and signatures are the same. From a registry perspective, these notes are interesting in that they are competition drivers that play an outsized role in making sets competitive (or not) in the 1st dollar category. And they seem to be more scarce on the market but their prices aren’t much higher in practice - I’m sure because there aren’t many 1st dollar collectors compared to 3rd dollar collectors and there aren’t all that many 1st dollar collectors that are crazy enough to build full variety sets or to try to hunt down the rare varieties instead of settling for the more common ones - most people probably would not care to pay extra for a P-1d and would rather just get a P-1b. The notes are nearly identical. A P-2c in 66 EPQ gets 45 points but a P-2e in the same grade gets you 357. I paid about $30 for the P-2c and paid about $51 for the P-2e. More, but not 7 times more. A P-1b gets 37 points in 66 EPQ but a P-1d gets 584 - which can make it hard to compete in the category if someone else has a P-1d and you don’t. The point values on these notes seems to be more reflective of their relative rarity and not necessarily their price - and we all know, per NGC/PMG that the scores are not based exclusively on price. But you also can’t draw many conclusions about relative scarceness or desirability because these things are rarely graded in general and the more common varieties are generally not worth enough after grading to justify the grading fees - so their relative numbers in the pop reports are not at all indicative of their relative commonness overall. This dynamic has made me keen to try to go for some of these rarer varieties when one comes up for sale and the seller is asking something close to a reasonable price. But the problem sometimes becomes that the seller is asking what I do not particularly feel is a reasonable price. And, when the thing sits unsold for months, it suggests to me that the others out there that buy these things also don’t feel like it’s all that good of an ask. But, when you’re dealing with something that only comes up for sale very infrequently - especially already graded in a very hard grade - it can be extremely hard to argue this point with the dealer or get them to come down off those asks. And then the things just sit in inventory for a year or two or three.

NGC and PMG tend to show a reluctance to encapsulate things not issued by a government agency. I think that's one of the reasons they have expressed a reluctance to encapsulate some bank-issued Zimbabwe checks that have been given / assigned pick numbers in the catalogue even though they didn't come from the RBZ. There are exceptions though like the Civil War tokens - which NGC will encapsulate. An aside, even though I know you were 100% joking.

I found myself in a very similar place around the same time, not just because gold spiked, but because premiums for anything physical went insane. Like you, I've hit the notes hard. I was really thinking about branching out into Venezuelan Bolivars but when these 1st dollar notes started coming up I had to go for those instead. The first series is a great choice in that it isn't a 27-32 note series (unless you start getting into varieties) and they just have more character and history than the 2nd and 3rd dollars. Every new attempt to relaunch the currency tries to make callbacks in the designs to the 1st dollar series because they desperately want the populace to associate the new currencies with that brief period of glory. If you've been watching the recent eBay auctions on 1st dollar notes you've probably seen a lot of me slugging it out with one other bidder that has come onto the market for 1st dollar notes in a big way recently. Based on the fact that their feedback is over 3600 I suspect that they're a dealer or associated with one - they might be trying to pick these things up for resale, which would explain why they consistently give up once the price starts going past about $40-50. I also saw a 68 EPQ P-6 note get sold recently and then pop up later with another dealer that has a large stock of Zimbabwe notes - a dealer that I honestly hate just a little because he slaps insane prices on things, makes false or misleading statements about the pop reports in his listings and generally tries to over-hype and over-pump these notes because he wants people to pay $140 for a $35 note. I'm so excited to finally see the new designs released. But I am increasingly worried that the new series is going to spiral out of control and we're going to see another long series with a power climb of zeros. I suspect that the only thing that might stop or prevent that is the fact that the population has seen this movie already and they're likely to abandon the new ZWD the second it even looks like that's happening. The RBZ had better be on their best behavior. I think if you wait another month or so you'll probably start seeing PMG graded examples of the new $10 and $20 notes pop up with a couple of dealers. I'm waiting to see if the new notes / new series is going to cause a renewed wave of interest in the older stuff that I hope isn't going to drive prices back up. Thank you both! Reading that really is the best feeling.

I did a bit of reading last night and found out that the new $20 notes were announced at the same time as the $10 notes, but, where the $10 notes went into circulation in late May, the $20 notes weren't supposed to go into circulation until June. This time delay is probably why the $10 notes are starting to hit eBay but the $20s aren't - yet. I figure, assuming they aren't delayed, we'll see the $20s for sale to US collectors by early July. I said in my post about the new $10 notes that there seemed to be some clear attempts to call back to the original $10 notes from 1980 but it's even more clear with these new 20s While the design is clearly different, the color choices are very similar with greens, blues, and teals / aqua. Then you get to the art on the back. Both notes have an elephant - or the front half of an elephant - and Victoria Falls. Yes, they've clearly updated the art, but the inspiration drawn from the older note is very clear.

I'm wondering if there's a clear preference here with regard to bank note images in the registry. On the NGC side, the images almost always focus on the coins and it seems a lot less common to see pictures that show the whole holder / slab - but NGC's provided images do show the whole slab, I think in part because those images are provided to verify the authenticity of the coin and slab so showing the slab is relevant to their purpose. Over here, the overwhelming majority of the images I see include the full holder / sleeve with the label. I'm more on the coin side and came to the notes side because of my love of these hyperinflation notes but this has left me wondering if there's a standard or norm on this side of things that I missed out on. I'm in a "Graded Paper Money" Facebook group too and over there they almost always show the whole label too. But I don't know if that's just to show that the note is, in fact, graded, because the group focuses specifically on graded notes.

"Money" is awfully broad. Are you talking about "Money" as in currencies, like Dollar vs Euro vs Yen? Are you talking about "Money" as in the concept of mediums of exchange and things like Gold vs Sea Shells vs Fiat? Do you mean "Money" as in the actual currency, like the bills? Obviously, multiple books / volumes have been written about a lot of this stuff and there are TONS of topics out there that could easily support a research topic. Hyperinflation is one of my favorite bits of monetary history to talk about, which I currently explore in the context of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation of 2005-2009 with my note set here in the registry. You could easily talk about the abandonment of the gold standards in the wake of WWI/WWII and the closing of the gold window in the 1970s - severing the last ties that any currency had to gold / hard assets at that point. You could write a paper about the introduction of paper currencies and / or the first "greenbacks" introduced in the Civil War. You could write about the introduction of rebel / non-governmental "money" like what NORFED was doing right up until the feds siezed all their bullion and brought them up on charges. You could write about the introduction of the hard times tokens and the Civil War tokens / store cards in response to currency shortages and the US government's subsequent banning of such tokens with the Coinage act of 1865 (I think that was the law anyway...) ... or

Yeah. That would have been funny. I wonder if #1,000 is even aware that they were #1,000.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but, sometime just this week I think, the PMG Registry just got up to having 1,000 Ranked Users. There's 1,002 now.

Over the weekend I just started seeing these pop up for sale in eBay auctions and new sales / offerings popping up that offer these as part of a 3 note set with the 2 2019 issues, so I'm guessing these are freshly released and they're just now making it out to the dealers. So I guess I might get to see all the designs that were supposed to be released as part of the bond note series afterall. I was really expecting them to tack an extra 0 onto these if they released them and have $100 and $200 notes instead of $10 (and maybe, later, $20) notes. Even with the official exchange rate the government is trying to peg these at (25:1 with the US dollar) these new notes are worth less than half a US dollar - not much. If you use some of the exchange rates people have been using, these are worth less than a US nickel. They are pretty though, and in some ways this feels like another attempt to make a call back to the 1st dollar series. The Original $10 notes, the P-3, issued starting in 1980, was primarily red, like these notes. On another note, I got a P-99 $2 bond note - an actual 2016 Bond note and not a new 2019 banknote - last week. Last night I won an auction for a P-100 $5 bond note, so, once that comes in I'll have both the bond notes for real this time, and both the 2019 issues, and I'll just need to get this new 2020 note (and anything else they come up with this year, like a $20 note if they release it) to stay current on the new issues. Other than trying to keep up with the new issues and the new developments I'm still emphasizing going back and building up my 1st dollar set with new varieties as I can get them.

I've been looking into storage options for my PMG notes and wanting to get something like this. I'd much rather have something like this than the bags currently offered by PMG but it'd be cool to have something like this available directly from PMG.

The funny thing with Zimbabwe is, while it's tempting (and the way I went, and the pick numbering is continuous) to treat the whole thing as a single continuum, the Zimbabwe sets span 4 currencies, each with its own currency code. So, thought of that way, I could see it being totally justified to refuse to do a set from 1980 to date, because, technically, legally, it's not all the same currency / monetary unit. You'd have a similar situation in Germany with the different Marks (gold mark, Papiermark, Rentenmark, Reichsmark, Saar Mark, Deutsche Mark) , or Venezuela now with the 3 or 4 different bolivars they've had now (Bolivar, Bolivar fuerte / "Strong Bolivar", Bolivar Soberano / "Sovereign Bolivar").