Numismatic Demographics

Definitely a positive that younger dealers are entering the fold. The article touches on some differences:



I think that echoes some observations people were making earlier this year about coin show attendance and demographics. I would bet that younger collectors and dealers are much more focused on the online communities and selling venues like ebay.

People come to numismatics because they like history. Coins are the easiest old artifacts of symbolic value to collect. Or because they seer financial gain from collecting. Or because they like the art in coins. It can be a mix.

Societies have been focusing more in the present and in commerce. Caring less for history. I was not surprised in what I read there. Writing and reading hobby publications came from the interest in history. I try to do my little part in that. But I can see it is declining. Societies that do not value history and culture create fewer of those collectors.The mix changes to commerce and gain.

But perhaps collecting will encourage some younger people to become interested in history? Work the other way around?

One does have to be careful about relying too heavily on the "buying and selling of coins for profit" subset of numismatists as the future of the hobby. Because the "profitability" part of the hobby ultimately relies on that core collector base who (at least at that particular moment) are wanting to buy and not sell. They are the people that actually generate the underlying "demand" that forms half of the equation that causes coins to be valuable in the first place. If everybody's only looking out for the profits they can make and nobody actually wants to buy and keep the coins, then the result is a market that's primarily feeding on itself and highly prone to volatile bubble-and-burst fluctuations.

Historically, new collectors "caught the spark" by being exposed to a coin that was odd or unusual in some way - a coin in their hand either found in change, or given to them by friend/family. For most American collectors, that coin was an old obsolete coin - perhaps a Buffalo nickel, or a Mercury dime, or a silver dollar, and they would go on to collect old coins just like that one they first saw. For a small minority of American collectors, that coin might have been a foreign coin - and those people would likely go on to become a world coin collector, probably also collecting US coins as well.

However, in this day and age, we have seen the meteoric rise of a third kind of "unusual coin exposure" - indirect exposure, where the person sees a news clip or YouTube video of somebody finding a rare coin in change that sells for an exorbitant price, and they want a piece of that action so they go looking for similar coins so they can sell them. This is why social media groups and the internet coin forums are full of people coming online with their found treasures and asking "I found this, what's it worth". A small percentage of these people will actually get good enough at "finding stuff in change" and actually take an interest in learning about the coins they find that they become collectors, but it's not the traditional "old coins" or "foreign coins" they're into - it's errors, varieties and similar oddities in currently-circulating coins. They're also more likely to be interested in collecting stuff they find "for free" rather than paying other people high prices for rarities. Which isn't "wrong" - it's just "different". So a rise in the number of collectors in this group isn't necessarily good for future prospects of the "more traditional" aspects of the hobby, unless they can be persuaded to eventually evolve into the more traditional classes.