Why I Will Never Collect Silver:

I would argue that the US Mint has melted far more silver coins than the dealers ever had a chance to do. The 1918 Pittman Act alone caused the melting of over 270 million Morgan dollars in addition to the circulating silver that was removed in the 1960s when the switch to clad coinage was made and the melting of silver coins was banned. All of the silver coins that passed through the Treasury were removed while simultaneously being replaced with clad. Simply put, the Treasury had the ability to filter the vast majority of the circulating coinage so they had the ability to melt far more than anyone else through economies of scale. Also, dramatic increase in silver prices in 1979-80 was not caused by dealer driving the price up, that was solely the fault of the Hunt Brothers attempting to illegally corner the silver commodities market

Dealers arent driving the price up,its the silver speculators along with collectors who are competing for the coins....Supply and demand

Also,what was the point you were trying to make with the article?

First off, thank you for posting the article! I enjoyed reading it, because I think it's full of interesting problems and questions.

On the one hand, it sounds a bit like all-too-familiar griping. So the old guys reminisce about how they made a good living melting millions of dollars' worth of silver back in the old days, and yet how bad they feel what they did was for collecting--? Might this not just be another case of the "oh, collecting's not what it used to be," dressed up in an interesting anecdote from numismatic history?

What does the article imply about the worth of CN coins? Are they so worthless to collect as coins, next to silver ones?

Yes many silver coins were melted, fine. If they were still on the market, maybe everything we collect would be cheaper and it'd be easier to get complete date sets.

There are points in the article--though ten years old now--that still seem very timely: how much can we rely on current notions of rarity and scarcity for the types that were massively melted? How can we be sure of the value of any of the silver roosies, for instance, if upwards of 75% of the mintages printed in the catalogs, the graysheets, etc., may have been melted for any given date? Is anyone DOING the kind of research the author of this article calls for, or are today's keys the same ones as before The Great Melt, because no one actually has a clue and getting one is just too complicated, given the alternative of keeping your head down and sticking to what works?

Such questions validate Paul's point in posting the link: perhaps he's not going to collect silver coins, because he questions the validity of the rankings of value underpinning the entire project. I don't know anything about how dealers drove stuff up, I'll let him field that one... ;)

Anyway, interesting to think about, before going back to making dinner--

SCS

Oh-- one last thought--sorry!

If in fact everything is scarcer than the book values say, the ones who've been amassing rolls and bullion stand to gain the most, since what you took as common--and paid for as common--might turn out to be rare. It's the folks who've been amassing slabbed, top-pop keys who might watch their investment value turn on its head.

SCS

And those were subject to reclamation too. When the Flying Eagle cent was first issued, there was a big drive for people to turn in all their large cents for the smaller CuNi coins. Probably a lot of beautiful coins were destroyed--we'll never know.

Not sure about why the problem with the cost of Silver Coins. Obviously the US Mint doesn't make them anymore but China is helping out there. Soon enough you'll be able to get any Silver coin from them for some really cheap prices. I'm waiting for them to start making the 1913 Liberty Head Nickels so I can finish my set.