Silver Rounds Vs Silver Coins

Agreed the government lost its credibility long time ago, but in a pinch you would be able to unload an ASE faster than any generic round. Also rounds do not have any face value but government issued silver bullion coins do and have the same silver content as rounds.

Except for vintage bars, where premiums can be pretty steep.

Governments only recognize coins as legal tender by their face value. This is both by definition and by law.

Also, who is the round smelter that has more credibility than government coining operations? Who's to say your rounds are 80%, 90%, sterling, or 999 silver? Some guy with a hammer and punch that says 9?

I'm not being obstinate, well not trying to be, just posing some thoughts and questions.

I am a coin collector first, And a stacker second.
I'll take a collectable coin over bullion any day.

The danger of stacking coins is, in my opinion,

Government tends to markup base metal coins (face value > material value); but markdown precious metal coins (face value < material value). What kind of practice is this?

They could recall all the coins by its face value when situation becomes dire.

Isn't coin and currency the property of the govt, unlike guns which are usually privately manufactured.

Governments - all governments everywhere, not just yours - put minimal face values on their bullion coins because they do not want them to be actually used as money. They do not want this because if the price of silver collapses, they would then be forced to buy back the silver they had used, at a loss to them.

Suppose the government issued one-ounce silver coins with a $10 face value. It has to buy the silver at current market rates to make them. If/when the price of silver falls below $10/ounce, what are people who own those coins going to do with them if they need to exchange them for cash? Take them to the silver merchant and get $8 or $9 for them, or take them to the bank and get $10 for them? People will bank them, of course. The bank isn't going to re-issue them, they'd dispose of them the same way they dispose of banked NCLT and obsolete coins: return them to the Treasury - which in effect would be forced to pay $10 each for them, melt them down, and sell off the silver at the then-current silver price. The whole point of governments making coins is to make a profit doing so; those coins would be loss-making.


The situation in America is different to the situation in most other countries. In most countries, the coinage belongs to the government; you can't deface coinage, because it's government property. But in America, if you own money in the form of coinage, it actually belongs to you, and you're allowed to do pretty much anything you want to with it. The government's ownership of coinage ceases as soon as the coins are released into the banking system, or sold from the Mint (your banknotes are a different story; they belong to the Fed).

Which of course prompts me to consider a simple, elegant and perfectly legal solution to the hypothetical "government claiming my legal tender bullion for face value" problem: melt them down. The government can't claim what you've destroyed, and it's perfectly legal for you to destroy them.

Finally, to an important point. There are an awful lot of things that your government could, in theory, do. They could declare war on Australia tomorrow and invade, for example, and there'd be nothing much we could do to stop them. But they've currently got no particularly good reason for doing so, and a lot of very good reasons for not doing so - so even if the "situation becomes dire", I can sleep soundly tonight, confident that they wouldn't be so stupid as to try.

Likewise your government could, in theory, pass a law to attempt to recall bullion coins for face value. But I can't think of a single good reason why they would believe such a law was necessary, or be worth the extreme negative reaction such an act would certainly generate. Your ridiculously-low-face-value bullion coins are safe from confiscation.