2 Reales - Philip V

Philip V inherited the Spanish throne in 1700 as the first Bourbon king, triggering the War of the Spanish Succession and nearly two decades of financial strain that made the colonial mints in the Americas more critical than ever to the Crown's solvency. Potosí's output during this period underwrote the war effort almost directly. The cob-style planchets struck here were notoriously irregular — a deliberate consequence of assay requirements prioritizing weight and fineness over shape, meaning no two pieces are geometrically alike.

KM#29 spans a stretch when Potosí was under chronic pressure to produce volume, and assayer fraud was a documented problem: the 1705 scandal involving assayer Ramos implicated multiple mint officials and led to executions.