The men crept into a room replete with coins and medals, where a strange curio dominated the display. The Big Maple Leaf, on loan from a wealthy Düsseldorf collector, was a 220-pound solid-gold coin minted in Canada in 2007 and stamped with the image of Queen Elizabeth II. The thieves broke through the thick glass case using a carbon-fiber-reinforced ax, placed the enormous coin—the size of a car tire—on a trolley, wheeled it back to the window, and lowered it by rope to the train tracks. Then they pushed the coin in a wheelbarrow 200 yards along the track bed to a railroad bridge over a street and again used the rope to lower the roughly $4 million trophy 20 feet to a getaway car.

So apparently 6 of these were minted, but Wikipedia fails to explain why they were minted. Amazing as that story is; what's the use of a 100 kg coin? Or were the empoyees at the mint just bored and had 600 kg of gold bars lying around?

Riveting read! It's terrible to think about one of a kind works of art being chopped up and melted down and parted out for small fractions of what they're worth. Such a waste.

Wow. Fascinating and swift 34 minutes.