Is Coin Collecting Dead Or Dumb.

Hey -- if you think collecting modern coinage (minted in the tens or hundreds of millions, almost all still available cheaply in MS70 condition) is dumb, you're probably not alone. Some people enjoy it, some don't. But that doesn't really speak to coin collecting as a whole. You might find classic American coins more to your liking. Or European coins. Or ancients. There are lots of coins to collect that are still worth a lot even after you buy them from a dealer, even if modern mint sets and Presidential dollars aren't.

Seriously, don't give up on the hobby -- just change your focus to something you personally find more rewarding!

How much would YOU offer for president dollar proof sets when you are offered 10 setsor more for every one you can manage to sell? The dealer is in business and needs to make a profit. The easiest way for him to make a profit on these sets is to buy them for $3.50 and spend them himself. Makes 50 cents a set and gets his money back immediately. If I was still working in a shop that's what I would be doing. I remember back when I was we would often buy 1971 and 72 mint sets for less than face value.

Prrof sets have been dead items for a LONG time simply because they sold so many of them. That's why almost 50 years later most of the early S mint proof sets are still selling at issue price or less. The 68 and 69 sets have silver in them and after 48 years they are still issue price. Proofs set for the most part are something a dealer rarely wants to have a lot of because they are NOT going to move and they are going to tie up capital.

Likely because there are people out there accepting them.

Of course coin dealers will try to rip you off. Their (admittedly, intelligent in a way) attempts at making money off of the usually-saturated market of modern US coins are just that, attempts to make money.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if all you have is a smelter, then someone's MS-60 1879-CC Morgan dollar looks like $17 worth of silver, and will be melted down as such.

I know right... I can't believe this thread has reached three pages... Believe me, if I had admin rights, this thread would have been locked a while back....

Too much cynicism in this thread.

This thread of four whole pages.

I'm no expert, but I've been doing this for almost six decades and the one thing I feel qualified to say is that the popularity of coins both as a hobby and an investment is very much subject to trends up and down. If I were an investor and not a hobbyist, there is one thing that would worry me, and that is that "young people these days" (pardon the cliche) are what I have come to describe as "non-archival." Those of us who are baby boomers have always been collectors of all sorts of ephemera--how many of you have in your basement a newspaper from the day we landed on the Moon or the day WWII ended? I find that young people do not have much interest in such things. I know at least one young collector spoke up in this thread, and I'm sure there are thousands of young collectors in this forum, but I hold to this observation as a cultural watershed. My theory is that it relates to the digitalization of things. Young people have all their music, photographs, books, etc., in what is actually called a "cloud." They don't have solid things that they carry around with them the way we did. I suppose, following the notion that trends come and go, we can hope that coin collecting might someday have a charm for young people, perhaps comparable to the trend toward vinyl records, but if my theory is correct that there is a true cultural change based on the use of digital storage of everything, the upward trend may be less frequent and less strong.

I've heard some things in this thread that were not very well thought out. "not worth it I'm not turning a profit in coins I bought 2-3 years ago". Very few investments make short term profits and almost no collectables do.
But then on the other side, I hear "none of the modern coins will ever show a profit". I buy unopened satin finish mint sets when ever I can. I also love the rolled Kennedy Haves during the same period because there are no other Kennedy's like them. Hard to get mint figures but I bet they are very low.
One of my favorites are also those cheep little dollars. The mintage on some years are very low but what I think could make them increase in value is it's very hard to keep them. Their one of the fastest tarnishing coins I've ever seen.
This by no means means I like the modern coins so much because I don't. But all old coins were once new coins, and although millions are made, very few will make it very long.

Darn and I wanted to talk about the history and coins. My reason for collecting.