If You Had A Time Machine?

You guys know that if you bring back a whole bunch of BU examples of a rare coin, you would deflate the price as there would be a large influx of these BU coins entering the market. Thus this would be counter-intuitive, unless you want more people to be able to afford these previously-unattainable pieces.

Now that being said, I would probably buy 100,000 circulated silver certificates, trade them for common-date circulated silver dollars in the 1950's, and melt them down in present day into crude silver bars. Then I would go to the US mints (and the private ones) every single year from 1776 until 1940 and use all the silver to buy carefully-struck proof-like and proof coins from every year. Then my collection would be better than Eliasberg's. Now the tricky part is introducing the collection into the world without anyone getting suspicious. What I would probably do is to rent a safe deposit box under my Great-Great-Grandfather's name in Denver, Colorado in 1940, and then "discover" the " inherited" key and open the box in present day. The magic of that is that all the coins would have beautiful rainbow toning due to the higher sulfur concentration in the air there. Yes, I have thought about this before.

I would also make a pit stop at an auction in 1921 and buy the Rittenhouse 1792 Half Disme for the measly amount of $30.

I would look up the biggest gold strikes and the years they occurred and go back a bit before and buy up the land. Also note exactly where huge shipwrecks were and get to them before anyone else ...

I would also transport a storage container with me full of modern waepons and uber ammo.... As well as some other major "advancements" for the day. And maybe beat (or "outgun") some of the old time outlaws in some major heists. Would copy patents of major tecnoligical items (phone, plane etc) and invent them ALL myself .....

And would research and go buy into some insanely valuable stocks when they were first starting out

If you look into the theory of the multi-verse it basically says that for every choice we make a new reality is created. So if someone did go back and change things in a major way they would be in their own universe that had nothing to do with you, assuming you were not connected with the time traveler.

...or just go back to 1792 and pick it up at face value.

"...or just go back to 1792 and pick it up at face value."

Then it wouldn't have the Rittenhouse Pedigree or the letter signed by George Washington and John Adams putting him in charge of the first US Mint.

By the way, how do you put a quote of someone else's post in a quote box?

Ah, so buying all of the mintage and melting them all except a few will increase the coin's rarity!

As jbuck said earlier, this is not a new or novel question being raised. Do a forum search for the exact phrase "time travel" and you'll find several pages of threads on the subject. You can say "Hi" to Sap-from-2008 in this old thread, for instance.

There are other issues that are raised with time travel for numismatic purposes.

For example, in the OP, Mr Click says he will "buy all 1909 s vdb's". But what will you buy them with? You can't take modern money from your native time period with you, and if you take "old" money with you there might be odd puzzlings about why they look so old and worn. You'd have to buy lots of gold coins or other mint-condition contemporary coins and notes to use as spending money, which could seriously impact the profitability of the trip. The issue is discussed in this old thread.

Second, transporting artefacts carries its own problems with believability when you get back (assuming, of course, that you're going to be trying to keep the existence of your time machine a secret). For example, if you literally did "buy ALL of the 1909 S VDBs", then there would be no evidence for the existence of 1909-S-VDBs and therefore no collector demand for them today. So if you suddenly turn up with hundreds of thousands of mint-condition 1909-S-VDB cents, you wouldn't become super-rich - everyone would assume they were fake, freshly minted in China or something.

Finally, of course, there are temporal anomalies and paradoxes, which may or may not be resolvable, depending on the as-yet-unknown physical properties of the universe we live in. For example, if you go back in time and try to "rescue" all the stockpiled 1933 gold double eagles before they get melted... what if you accidentally steal the ones that were, in our timeline, already rescued? What happens to them? Does the King Farouk coin suddenly disappear from our history?

This probably won't be the last time this topic comes up, either. So once again I'll say a big "Hi! How are you going?" to all those folks from the future who will almost certainly stumble upon this thread when Sap-from-the-future links to it.

Yeah, lots of risks with time travel. You could mess up all of history! And then you wouldn't know the future as you do today. Then, if things are really messed up, you might go back in time to stop yourself from going back in time in the first place.

Now, if I accidentally did go to the past, say in the 1930s America...

I'd be a hobo. Create some hobo nickles. Sign them in a different name. I'd memorize a future map. Barry a couple of my nickles in a safe place. And go back to the future!

Hopefully, I'd because a famous hobo nickel creator. No one should recognize me until whenever hobo nickles started becoming popular. So the future from the 30s, but the past from today, but not as far back as the 30s.

Yeah, that's what I'd do