The Eventual 'Cost' Of Rising Silver Prices

You pose an interesting question, which to properly answer, requires many pages of graphs and analysis. I'll be terse. Numismatically, your coins will only be worth what the market will bear based on their grade. (I. E. if your junk silver has readable dates and can be graded, you can sell them at that grade.) Intrinsically, the price of silver will always vary as a commodity based on a lot of factors. While Industrial silver usage is slightly up, the overall use is down. Like any other commodity, I believe silver is cyclical. Like in the 80s silver is now in high demand due to the economy; everyone wants a hedge on inflation and the possibility of a declining dollar. As many have indicated, we are slowly coming out of this recession and when we do, silver prices will fall. It may fall to the point that the Numismatic price of the coin is higher than the intrinsic value of the silver. It's happened before and I believe it'll happen again. Someone will get stuck holding a lot of expensive silver. If you have the Complete Catalogue and Encyclopedia of Morgan and Peace dollars, check out the graphs they offer in the first part of the book on Silver Dollar and Bullion prices. It's interesting reading. Not to mention, Google Industrial Silver Usage. They are all good reads.

Most of the "roll hunters" you see on the forum are in America. The United States is rather unusual in that it does not currently have any laws on the books preventing defacing or destruction of currency. There are laws against sticking advertisements on coins, and regulations specifically banning copper 1 cent and nickel 5 cent coins in place, but this latter one is seen as merely temporary, intended to prevent hoarding up of coin that the government would then have to pay to replace with new coins. There was a similar ban on melting silver coins back in the sixties when silver was formally withdrawn from the coinage, but this was only in effect for a few years.

America is also one of the few countries where it is even technically possible to find large quantities of silver coins in circulation / rolls / whatever; most other countries have reformed their currencies since silver was withdrawn from the coinage, and modern coins no longer resemble their silver equivalents from the sixties. Canada and Switzerland are the only other countries where "roll hunting" for silver is even theoretically possible, and I believe that in both of those countries there has been a concerted effort by the national mint in cooperation with the banks to withdraw and melt down old silver coins. In allowing the public the opportunity to profit from their lack of willingness to be proactive in withdrawing old coins, America is similarly unusual.

oblakavshtanax,
US laws against defacing currency only apply to fraudulent alterations. If it was illegal to deface US coins, there would be no such thing as elongated cents. It is also perfectly legal to melt any US coin other than 1 cent and five cent coins. However, the majority of bullion grade silver coins are not melted. They are traded in face value bags as a convenient form of bullion in a known purity.


In actuality, the US Mint has destroyed more coins through melting than the general public ever could. The Pittman Act alone was responsible for the destruction of 270 million silver dollars While it has had some effect on value, you can still purchase beautiful MS Morgan silver dollars all day long for less than $50.

When I find silver while roll hunting I always keep the nice coins that would go high AU or MS. The ones that are beat up, scratched, dinged drilled, ect.... get sold for melt. If they are pre 64 US coinage of foreign they go into my collection even if they are ugly.

No I wouldn't. But one of the points I was trying to make is that if you melt all your silver coins, where are tomorrow's collectors going to get theirs? And at what price?

As carmykle stated:
Like the stock market, you don't loose until you actually sell the stock. The cost of silver coins may be artificially high for years.

Silver gets sold all the time for less then what people payed for it.
Grandpa or dad dies, kids take the coins to the closest dealer and take what cash they can.

Lil kids ( elementry school age )find dads coins and swipe um and spend um on candy or take them to school and loose um or spend um.

Some one inherets coins , they often dont relieze the washingtons and roosies are silver becuase they look the same as the ones they see everday in pocket change often they just get spent

I dont see why taking them from roll seraching is any different then taking them out of pocket change.

Ask any one age 8-18 right now if they had $5000 given to them what would they spend it on ..
Coins prob wont be a anwser from 99% of the kids ,

As far as it goes coins collecting is prob on the diminish as we speak. Over they next 20 years as the baby boomers die off and their coins hitthe market I think we might even see prices level off or go down in some cases.


I'm 35 still young enough to know whats hips and mature enough to cross over to the older crowds
and I can def say coin collecting in the younger generations if dying

One thing that has happened from my roll searching all the time is that my daughter and her boyfriend are getting interested...I keep getting questions about value/rarity and my daughter even called from her job one day because she thought she had a Wide AM...it was, but the date was 1992.It's up to everyone to pass the knowledge and intereset down to the next generation.

Yes it is. I spend a good bit of time at my local shop and I've seen a lot of silver bought and resold directly to the melters by the shop. One day I walked in and they had at least $10,000 in face laying around in bags they had just bought. It was a sight to behold! He said they were going to melt all of it.

Silver comes into this shop daily. Almost all if it get melted as junk, even though I've picked through some it and found some keepers. They simply do not have the time to cherry pick it all so they just melt it. This is but ONE shop. If think about the thousands more out there, there's a LOT of silver coins being melted.....especially at today's prices.