Smelting Figures To Mint?

No. Smelting coin of the realm is still technically illegal in Canada. It's a law that's apparently widely flaunted, but anyone that phoned the Mint up and told them they were melting Canadian coins in bulk for profit would probably be in line for a friendly visit by the RCMP.

The Mint itself is probably still the biggest coin smelter, certainly in terms of length of time in operation and quantity of coins destroyed - even before silver was withdrawn from the coinage, they were responsible for melting down old worn-out coins to make new ones. And the Mint has never kept track of which specific dates are being melted. All they need to keep track of is the face value and the weight of metal recovered.


You can't. Precise, accurate numbers of the number of surviving specimens of any coin are impossible to obtain, except perhaps for the super-high-end rarities where every surviving specimen has a well-known established provenance. However, for everything except the super-high-end rarities, it doesn't really make too much difference.

What's most important for determining value is the relative rarity, not the absolute rarity. And one can assume that, unless one knows otherwise, the Mint has melted down the same proportion of each date and variety. A coin with 6 million mintage is still going to be roughly 10 times rarer than a coin of the same time period with 60 million mintage, even if roughly 9/10 of them have been melted by now.

Where the imbalance is occurring is in recent private smelting. Because, in most instances, the coins going to the private smelters are being filtered by their suppliers (such as coin dealers) for "rare" dates and varieties prior to going into the pot. If private melting is prolific, the net result is that "common" dates gradually get rarer and rarer, until eventually people start to notice that the coins previously considered "common" aren't so common anymore.


If you think your post was long, you obviously haven't read many of my posts.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing the other day. It seems to me that the real populations for "regular" circulation coins is hard enough to figure out, much less the populations of the more difficult to obtain "rare" coins. I believe there's a whole lot of melting going on with the price of silver being what it is at the moment.