Goldback Mintage Dataset: Data Dictionary and Licence

Field-by-field documentation for the downloadable Goldback mintage dataset. Written to be read on its own: you should not need the article to use the file correctly.

Download the dataset

goldback-mintage-issuer-subset-192-2026-10-13.csv

CSV · 192 records · 18 fields · issuer sources read 2026-10-13, dealer sources read 2026-10-12

What this file is, and what it is not

A row is a tracked record, not a published mintage figure. A record is one combination of series, year, denomination and edition. Of the 192 rows, 28 carry no published figure at all: they exist to record that absence explicitly, because an absent row would be indistinguishable from an oversight.

This is a 192-record subset, not the complete dataset. The mintage reference page carries 210 records. The 18 records excluded from this file are those resting on a dealer compilation alone, with no issuer figure located. They remain visible and fully attributed on the reference page; they are held out of the download while the rights position for redistributing a third party’s compiled figures is resolved. A later edition may include them.

An issuer-published figure does not mean the year and edition are confirmed. The issuer commonly publishes a figure at a denomination without naming an edition, and often without naming a year. Those two facts are tracked separately, as independent fields, because a record can lack both.

“No published figure located” is a research observation, not proof of absence. It means no figure was found on the issuer’s pages or the named dealer’s chart on the observation dates. It does not establish that no figure exists anywhere, that none was ever published, or that the note does not exist. Where the issuer archive reads “mintage information coming soon”, that is recorded here as not published.

Verification tiers

Year and edition confirmation are independent dimensions, not a ranked scale. Do not treat these six values as an ordered quality score without deciding which dimension matters for your purpose.

The six verification tiers
Tier	In this file	Meaning
`issuer_full`	89	Goldback Inc. publishes the figure, its card states the year, and only one edition exists at that denomination and year, so the figure is unambiguous.
`issuer_year_only`	8	The card states the year but names no edition while two editions exist, so the edition attribution is the dealer’s.
`issuer_edition_only`	34	Only one edition competes for the figure, but the card states no mintage year, so the year is the dealer’s attribution.
`issuer_figure_only`	33	The issuer publishes the figure but confirms neither its year nor its edition. Both are the dealer’s attribution.
`dealer`	0 (excluded)	No issuer figure located; rests on a named dealer’s chart alone. The 18 records in this tier are on the reference page, not in this file.
`not_published`	28	No published figure located anywhere on the observation dates. A recorded absence, not a zero.

Issuer figures versus dealer-dependent attributes

This is the distinction most likely to be misread, so it is worth stating on its own. A record carrying an issuer-published figure does not mean every field on that record came from the issuer.

Of the 164 records in this file that carry a figure published by Goldback Inc., only 89 have both their year and their edition confirmed by the issuer as well. For the remaining 75, the figure is the issuer’s and one or both of those attributes is the dealer’s attribution:

8 records — the issuer states the year, but names no edition while two exist, so the Alpha-versus-standard assignment is the dealer’s.
34 records — only one edition competes, but the issuer’s card states no mintage year, so the year is the dealer’s.
33 records — the issuer publishes the figure and confirms neither the year nor the edition. Both are the dealer’s.

Read year_stated_by_issuer and edition_confirmed_by_issuer on any row you intend to cite. A “no” in either field means that attribute rests on dealer reporting even though the number beside it does not.

Field reference

All 18 fields
Field	Type and accepted values	Definition
`series`	string, 10 values	State series the record belongs to. Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming. Never blank.
`year`	year string, 2019–2026	Mintage year attributed to the record. Never blank. Not always the issuer’s: where year_stated_by_issuer is "no", the issuer published the figure without stating a year and this value is the dealer’s attribution.
`year_stated_by_issuer`	enum: yes / no / n/a	Whether the issuer’s own card states the mintage year. "n/a" means not applicable rather than false: there is no issuer figure for that record, so the question does not arise.
`denomination`	string, not numeric	¼, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100. Two values are fraction glyphs, so sort by mapping ¼ to 0.25 and ½ to 0.5 or they sort after 100. The 3 denomination exists only as a Limited Early Release.
`edition`	enum: standard / Alpha / LER	Which edition of the note the record describes. LER is a Limited Early Release, a collector release rather than standard production.
`edition_confirmed_by_issuer`	enum: yes / no / n/a	Whether the issuer’s figure can be attributed to this specific edition. "no" means two editions exist and the issuer’s card names neither, so the Alpha-versus-standard split is the dealer’s attribution.
`reported_mintage`	string with comma separators	The production figure as published, or the literal "Not published". Parse by stripping commas. Quoted in the CSV because of the separators.
`gold_content_troy_oz`	fraction string	Gold content of one note of that denomination as a fraction of a troy ounce. A fixed manufacturing specification that does not vary by series or year, and not a measurement of ours.
`verification_tier`	enum, 6 values	Machine-readable provenance and confirmation level. The most important field in the file; defined in full in the table below.
`verification_meaning`	string	Human-readable restatement of verification_tier, so the file is legible without this page.
`issuer_source`	string or blank	"Goldback Inc." where an issuer figure was located, blank otherwise. Blank means none was located, not that the issuer was not checked.
`issuer_source_url`	URL or blank	The issuer page carrying the figure. Two distinct URLs appear: the card archive, and the Idaho Limited Early Release programme page for the one figure published outside it.
`issuer_card_wording`	string or blank	The issuer’s own sentence, verbatim, so a figure can be checked against the publisher’s exact words rather than our transcription.
`issuer_observed`	ISO date or blank	Date the issuer source was read: 2026-10-13.
`dealer_source`	string or blank	Named dealer whose chart reported the figure. A record can carry both an issuer and a dealer source: where the issuer corroborates a figure, the dealer that originally reported it is retained rather than overwritten.
`dealer_source_url`	URL or blank	The dealer chart carrying the figure.
`dealer_observed`	ISO date or blank	Date the dealer chart was read: 2026-10-12.
`qualification`	string	Free-text caveats that must travel with the row: why a figure is unpublished, edition ambiguity, malformed issuer notation, a dealer disagreement settled by the issuer, or the identical consecutive-year figures. Never blank. Read it before quoting any single row.

Source attribution rules

Issuer and dealer provenance are separate fields and both are kept. A record corroborated by the issuer retains the dealer that first reported it, so neither source is misattributed.
A blank source means “none located”, never “unknown” or “not checked”. Both source types were checked for every record.
Issuer-published is a statement about provenance, not accuracy. It means the figure appears on a page Goldback Inc. controls. No independent audit of Goldback production figures was located.
One issuer figure confirms at most one record. An edition-unspecified figure is never counted as independent confirmation of both an Alpha and a standard record.
A dealer crediting the issuer does not make a figure issuer-published. Only a figure located on an issuer page counts. We checked whether the excluded records could be traced to issuer statements and they could not.
Missing years and editions are never inferred. The dealer’s attribution is retained and flagged rather than promoted or dropped.

Known limitations

Dealer listings agree, but that is not independent corroboration. The dealer figures in this project appear on two published charts, which match on 134 of 134 comparable standard records with no variance, and neither names a source. That is consistent with a common upstream origin rather than separate compilation, so the relationship between them is unverified and the dealer tier should be treated as one effective source. A third chart was unreachable on the observation date (HTTP 429), so its figures are unverified rather than contradicted.
The issuer’s New Hampshire archive carries a denomination labelling inconsistency. Eight separate cards in that series read “One Goldbacks” while carrying eight different figures, and other cards in the same series name “Five” and “Ten” correctly. We record the wording and the figures as published and draw no conclusion about which denomination was intended.
One issuer figure is published in a malformed form, with a decimal point where a thousands separator belongs. It is preserved verbatim in issuer_card_wording and flagged in qualification rather than silently corrected.
No independent audit exists, for issuer or dealer figures.
Not a complete production history. An absent series-year-denomination combination is not asserted never to have existed, and a cumulative “to date” figure the issuer publishes for one denomination is excluded because its period and coverage cannot be established.
The 2026 series are substantially unpublished, and those records will change as the issuer adds figures.
A print run is not a surviving population, a scarcity ranking, a resale value or an investment return. Nothing in this file supports a claim about any of those. It records how many notes were reported as produced, nothing more.
Two observation dates. Use the per-row date rather than a single dataset date.
Goldbacks are privately issued and are not legal tender under 31 U.S.C. § 5103.

Licence

The Goldback Guide’s original selection, arrangement, verification classifications, annotations and accompanying original documentation for this dataset are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), to the extent those elements are protected by rights held by The Goldback Guide.

Underlying mintage figures are factual information attributed to their identified sources. The Goldback Guide does not claim ownership of those underlying facts or grant rights over third-party copyrighted material, trademarks or other third-party protected content.

Users should consult the identified original sources where additional rights or permissions may be relevant. Every record names its sources and carries their URLs for that purpose.

This exception is recorded in our Terms of Use. It permits commercial and non-commercial reuse of the covered material, and the site’s general non-commercial restriction does not override it.

Recommended citation

CC BY 4.0 requires attribution, a licence link and an indication of changes, and is flexible about the exact form. This is a recommended format rather than an additional condition:

The Goldback Guide, Goldback Mintage Reference, dataset version 13 October 2026 (192-record issuer subset). thegoldbackguide.com/goldback-mintage-reference/. Original compilation, verification classifications and annotations licensed under CC BY 4.0 to the extent The Goldback Guide holds the applicable rights. Underlying mintage figures are attributed to their identified sources.

If you modify the data, say so and describe what you changed. When quoting a single figure, cite the publisher named in its row and that publisher’s observation date rather than this dataset alone, and say whether the figure is issuer-published and whether its year and edition are confirmed.

Versioning

The observation date is in the filename. A later revision is published under its own dated filename rather than replacing this file, so a citation of this version stays resolvable after the data changes. Superseded editions remain available.

Full methodology, the correction history and all 210 records including the 18 excluded from this file are on the Goldback Mintage Reference.

Educational content only, not financial advice. Mintage figures are published by Goldback Inc. and named dealers and are not independently audited. Merchant acceptance of Goldbacks is voluntary everywhere. Past performance does not guarantee future results.