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It is a federal offense to melt any United States currency
No, you are absolutely, definitely not correct. As stated above, the only federal laws against melting coins are in place for 1 cent and 5 cent coins. The US government reserves the right to pass laws banning the melting of coins at any time, but at this time it has not done so for any coins except 1 cent and 5 cent pieces.
It is illegal to burn or otherwise destroy US paper money, as per
18 USC 333, but coins are fair game.
For coins, the relevant law in question is
18 USC 331:
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Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
The key word in that law is "fraudulently". The adverb "fraudulently" applies to all the following verbs (defaces, mutilates, alters, etc). This means that according to this law, you can't mutilate or alter a coin in such a way as to commit fraud - by, for example, trying to clip a half dollar down to the size of a dollar coin and passing it off as a dollar, or by painting a penny silver to make it look like a dime, or by altering the date or mintmark of a common coin to make it look like a rare date/mintmark and then selling that altered coin to a collector without disclosing the alteration.
This in turn means that it's perfectly legal to do all those things to coins, so long as no fraud is being attempted. So it is legal to destroy coins completely by melting them down, dissolving them in acid or by putting them in one of those little souvenir-making machines that squashes a penny flat and stamps a new design on it.
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I believe the US nickel actually cost so much more to mint than almost any other coin I believe I forget the specific dates the quarter is only worth I think less than one cent
I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but this too is not entirely accurate.
Yes, at current metal prices, of the four commonly circulating
US coins (penny, nickel, dime, quarter), the nickel has the highest metal cost, but only barely - the nickel's raw material costs about 5.3 cents, the quarter about 5.0 cents. However, this doesn't include the cost needed to create the cladding for the quarter, which probably adds an extra cent or two each to the cost of making clad coins.
Speaking of "melt values" of base-metal coins is also rather moot, since the recycling value of a base metal is not determined so much by the sum of its components, but rather on how difficult it is to refine and re-purify the metal. The cupronickel alloy of a nickel, for example: nobody wants or needs an alloy of 75% copper, 25% nickel, except for the Mint - so anybody buying melted nickels would need to find some way of getting rid of the unwanted nickel impurity, so they can make something useful out of the pure copper. The nickel, in this case, would have a negative value, since you'd need to pay money to refine it to get rid of it. We don't have the technology to magically separate for zero cost a piece of cupronickel back into the pieces of copper and nickel from whence it came.
Example: current price of bulk pure copper is about US$8000/ton. Current price of bulk cupronickel is about US$2000/ton.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 10/02/2023 11:05 am
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