Hello! I have recently joined the Young Numismatist discord, and it’s been a blast. We had our first meeting last week, which was awesome. Today, I am going to write about the 20c coin. Unfortunately, I do not have one. But it is still an awesome coin. The American twenty-cent piece is a coin struck from 1 8 7 5 to 1 8 7 8, but only for collectors in the final two years. Proposed by Nevada Senator John P. Jones, it proved a failure due to confusion with the quarter, to which it was close in both size and value.

In 1 8 7 4 senator Jones began pressing for a twenty-cent piece, which he said would remove the shortage of small change in the West. The bill passed Congress, and Mint Director Henry Linderman ordered pattern coins to be struck. Linderman eventually decided on an obverse and reverse similar to that of other silver coins. 

Although the coins have a smooth edge, rather than reeded as with other silver coins, the new piece was close to the size of, and immediately confused with, the quarter. The obverse sides of both coins were almost identical. This was made out of 90 % silver and 10 % copper like most coins.  After the first year, in which over a million were minted, there was little demand, and the denomination was abolished in 1 8 7 8. At least a third of the total mintage was later melted by the government. Numismatist Mark Benvenuto called the twenty-cent piece "a chapter of U.S. coinage history that closed almost before it began". 

A twenty-cent piece had been proposed as early as 1 7 9 1, and again in 1 8 0 6, but had been rejected. The 1 8 0 6 bill, introduced by Connecticut Senator Uriah Tracy, sought both a two-cent piece and a "double dime". It was opposed by mint director Robert Patterson, though his opposition was more to the two-cent piece, which Tracy proposed be struck in billon, low-grade silver that would be difficult to recover when melting the coins. The bill passed the Senate twice, in 1 8 0 6 and 1 8 0 7, but did not pass the House of Representatives. No twenty-cent piece was issued prior to the 1 8 7 0 s, but Americans were familiar with the denomination as the two reales piece struck in Spain, known as a "pistareen" in the United States, passed for twenty cents (its Spanish colonial equivalent passed for a quarter).

Thank you for reading this blog, I hope you enjoyed it. It's been two weeks since I wrote a blog. I have a blog on my YN auction wins coming this weekend.