Is It Worthwhile To Hoard Copper Pennies?

I've dumped gallons of them over the past couple of years. Folks on the forum have convinced me it wouldn't be worthwhile to take up the space. It's a personal decision, of course.

I only hoard them to prevent them from being melted.

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Insane waste of time. Do the math.



to the CCF!

This is my main motivation. I don't go through boxes but if I come across them in change, they get rolled up and stored with their friends in the basement.

Japan is the only one I can think of. The 10 yen coin is solid bronze, and hasn't changed size or composition since 1951. There's still only about 3 cents worth of bronze in the 10 yen coin (face value equivalent of about 8 US cents), so there's minimal pressure to change it yet.


There has never really been a "copper standard" for coinage. Even in ancient times, copper coins were somewhat of a token coinage, with people not really expecting them to contain "full metal value". It's true that people generally did find bigger, heavier copper coins to be "more trustworthy", all other things being equal, but there was little pressure to conform to any kind of "international copper standard". Copper coins simply didn't travel as much as silver and gold did, the copper coinages tended to be locally produced and locally used. And copper didn't travel for much the same reason that it's foolish to try to use copper as a store of wealth today: it's simply too bulky.


The difference is, the Canadian government actively withdrew and destroyed them, generating profit for itself from the sale of the scrap metal. Most other countries do likewise. But in recent years the American government has proven itself to be curiously reluctant to destroy its own obsolete coinage for profit.

In terms of income generated from bronze coins found during coin roll hunting, you're probably much better off selling them straight away to some other fool who's hoarding copper coins, and using the money to buy other things.

If you want a metal that will be truly valuable when the New Dark Age arrives, can I suggest hoarding aluminium instead? Aluminium ore is cheap and abundant, but you can't simply refine it like gold, silver or copper; to turn it into metal you need electricity, and a source of cryolite. And we've already mined all of the naturally occurring cryolite from the planet, back in the 1960s. If you already have a large quantity of aluminium metal you can use it to make synthetic cryolite, but if we ever run out of both aluminium and cryolite, we're sunk. So in the New Dark Age, any surviving pieces of aluminium will become a precious resource, because nobody will be able to make it, and by the time civilization climbs back up to the electricity age again, there won't be any cryolite around to make more aluminium, and most of the aluminium which our civilization just leaves lying around in the open air will have corroded and dissolved in the rain.

i keep them. its a super safe long term speculation.

everyone talks about meting them. nobody talks about melting 90% silver coins. or pre 33 gold. I believe they will be worth more than metal content as coins just like every us minted gold and silver coin.

they wont be worth less than a penny as long as they can be spent. after the inevitable melt rush the decrease in supply will cause the coins themselves to pop up to 5 or 10 or maybe even 25c. on that day ill get to buy a fancy dinner or something. or maybe ill be dead before it happens. thats ok too. then someone else can lug that giant bag of change to the bank.