Brendan Greeley

The brassage on small coins is higher.

What that means is to make a coin is an industrial process.

You've got to put one die on a stump, and then the metal goes in the middle, and then another die on top of it, and then whack the whole thing with a hammer.

I've seen it done.

It's very loud.

It's an industrial process.

It takes one whack of the hammer to make every coin, whether it's a big coin or a little coin, which means that per unit of value, the labor costs, the brisage, the production costs are much higher for little coins.

So this is...

a consistent problem throughout the history of coinage.

Constant complaints that mints, which are actually private companies, prefer to make the big coins because the profit is high.

The margins are better on the big coins.

They're smaller on the small coins.

Yes, absolutely.

What you have then in this Bohemian Valley is Saxon investors coming south, Saxon miners coming south, Bohemian count who doesn't really have title.

And what they do is they start getting silver out of the ground.

All of the silver goes into a single form, which is what the Saxon investors would have expected to get a large silver dividend coin.

This was not local money.

This was not money for a valley in Bohemia.

This was paying back silver investors.

It went straight.