What's Left To Collect From Circulation?

PCGS - If you've been in the hobby long enough, you may have seen a marked shift in the types of coins you can find in pocket change. At one time just a few decades ago, say the 1970s or even 1980s, the typical coin collector could expect to find random Lincoln Wheat Cents in circulation from time to time, maybe even the occasional silver coin. Go back a couple decades earlier, and early 20th-century types such as Barbers and Standing Liberties were periodically comingling in handfuls of change that regularly included Mercury and Roosevelt dimes, Washington quarters, and Walking Liberty and Franklin half dollars.


Lincoln Cent (Wheat Reverse), 1941 1C, BN, PCGS MS66BN

Where Did All the Old Coins Go?
So, what happened? Have all those old coins just vanished into oblivion? And perhaps more importantly, what's left to collect in circulation today?

It can seem to many collectors that all the coins we now regard as "vintage" all but vanished from circulation a generation or two ago. As the United States Mint produces new coins, they replace older ones that age out of circulation through obliterating wear, collector intervention (I.E., they're intentionally plucked from the wild by astute numismatists), or other forms of attrition. Many are sadly lost to the hands of time - they're buried, stolen, or destroyed by fire or other natural disasters. The latter particularly exemplifies why collectors shouldn't get too fixated on mintage numbers when determining how "rare" a coin is; reading population reports, such as the ones found on PCGS CoinFacts, is a far better way to gauge the real scarcity of a coin.

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