Letting All My Special Mc And VIP Memberships Lapse

Northerncoins, you've expressed your thoughts very well. That's exactly my point too. Just because something is the way it is now, don't assume it won't change in the future! Many XforX collectors bought them as collector coin and for the right reasons, but for others who might be saving towards their children's education or another longterm reason, nowhere has RCM ever given the guarantee they're redeemable at face value forever.

Furthermore it really ticks me off that RCM uses marketing tactics such as they do - not unethical but it's easy for new collectors to jump to incorrect conclusions....and they do a very poor job of offering any educational component. Instead the focus is on buy, buy, buy! For example they advertise a $20 for $20 is 99.9999% silver which may lead some people to conclude the coin is made from $20 worth of silver. Instead, after one does the math, they'd discover it contains only 1/4oz worth of silver, less than $5 worth at today's spot price. A very poor option in terms of a silver investment as well, at a price of x4.

How so?

Adding: From a business perspective, we don't have any information to consider since RCMs financial statements do not specially reveal the volume of XforX it redeems and no mention of counterfeiting ever.

But RCMs redemption of $5 worth of silver at a cost of $20, adding in melt and production costs in order to remint the bullion into some current edition of NCLT certainly erases any profit it originally incurred on the sale of that $20.

So it's possible it will come a time when XforX's become unprofitable and we likely will not know if or when it's "destroying their business". But it's quite possible that time already occurred in the UK and that's partly the reason the legislation to define "legal tender" was amended.

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain (guaranteed), except death and taxes."
- Benjamin Franklin

I think any coins released to date have to be honoured at face value. If they decided to no longer honour $1000 bills, there would be an outrage from collectors that stored a few away when they stopped being made.

Take a brief look at the other forum pages - people started to deposit these coins in thousands of $$$, there is no demand on the secondary market, so no one want to stuck with the coins and rushing to bring them to the bank.

Or Canada Post for that matter, who have consistently sold the $20/4/$20 coins for $25, while the mint was $20 with free shipping.

Here, unlike my previous response, I would say, that couple of years ago (till the 10-th coin), I used to order from RCM and in addition to get some of them from dealer or CP for CAD 25. The reason - bought them for the gift, and unlike the RCM, dealers and CP had them in the sealed external clear sleeve, that was very giftable (and I gave them as small gifts - we had many foreign business travelers)