Collecting Coins Vs. Collecting Bullion.

The price of bullion reflects many concurrent variables - it should be acquired and sold during appropriate circumstances, not simply bought today and sold automatically in 10 years. This leaves everything to chance or luck - not skill.

So the answer to your question must be to invest (with knowledge) in individual coins so that the skill factor indeed comes into play, like with all sound investing.

I'd like to turn this into a game like fantasy football.

Fantasy coin buyer, because who doesn't like spending someone else's money, even if it is imaginary.

Either work with an advertisement of a paid sponsor (sponsors) or just eBay to get coin prices. We'd need some standardized parts and ideally parts with some price volatility to make it interesting.

Let users buy / sell coins and bullion in a fantasy market.

Something like that.

Might be a good way to get users to look at the advertisers that support this place even.

Maybe even get a sponsor to give away some prizes.

Classic silver commemoratives in MS-66 or 67 depending on nearest top pop.

I think that you are trying to paint 2 different pictures with one can of paint.

to make money in bullion or in numismatics, you need to buy low and sell high (duh) however bullion is a known commodity sold anywhere world wide for centuries. Numismatics (might be traced back to ceasar) but as investments is relatively new.

What people collect today, was unheard of 5 or 10 years ago. (graded proofs, or even graded bullion)

If you are thinking of buying these and sticking them in a time capsule and waiting any specific time frame you are only going to loose.

as mentioned buy low, sell high. Meaning you need to CONSTANTLY looking at the trends and searching for deals to buy, and places to sell. To make significant money you will most likely need to buy and sell multiple items over that 10 year span.

Invest in anything like an investor, not a collector.

Key dates and extremely high grade coins are big investment, low risk items. They may keep pace with inflation, but mostly will store value and nothing more. There are of course fluctuations in demand (like in the 50s and 60s) that can impact prices, but it's safe to say that the 1909-S VDB market isn't going anywhere.

The real money to be made is in being at the forefront of a fad, or stocking up before one takes off. Some are predictable--the guys who snatched up the 2015 March of Dimes sets for $65, graded them for another $50, and flipped them on eBay for $500+ knew what they were doing. Some are less predictable, like the surge in prices for all things Marcus Aurelius and Commodus once Gladiator was released. Greater payoff sometimes means higher risk.

Investing in bullion just comes down to doing your homework. Stay on top of world events well enough, and you can generally predict about when precious metals (or industrial metals for that matter) will soar or take a dive. Time has very little to do with it, compared to timing.

The great disadvantage of such a game is that there are too many factors involved which are outside the control of the participants. First and foremost, the precious metal value, which differs per day and seems hugely impacted by 'worldly' occasions like politics, the economy, wars, incidents, accidents and even the weather. Also, interest in bullion collecting as saving and coin collecting as hobby seem to be impacted by these factors: huge uncertainty leads to more interest in collecting PM where coin collecting flourishes with stability and a booming economy. So if I bought silver around 1980 and had to sell it 10 years later... I would have lost almost all I invested.

If I had to buy my stock today, I'd probably invest in key date coins, as PM is relatively extremely expensive, especially gold, to buy right now for the mid term. I expect prices to drop as soon as there's a new president in the US and Brexit has been concluded, and if Putin and Erdohan didn't start a war.

Ask me the same question next year and I might invest in something else.