Don't Melt Your Coins, Dang It!

As much as I hate to see old coins melted, both of the last two posters have good points.

As to the question of melting or not melting... I can go either way on it. Anything that is for sale is for sale and is not conditionally for sale. Once sold, the new owner can do what they want with it.

As to numismatic value... the disappearance of some of the old coins, while sad to collectors, only makes the survivors more valuable.

I never actually saw a coin melted. I think a lot of coins stay around as bulk bags of bullion in face value amounts and never get melted. I suppose some do get melted. It is interesting. I wonder what effect this has on surviving common date XF mercury and Roosevelt dimes, Washington quarters, Walkers Franklin's and Kennedy halves. Jeeze, someday you would think that the 1960's Franklin's could be as scarce as pre 1940 Walking Liberty halves. Common could become semi key dates if they really did melt all the coins that were sold with a refining fee attached.

The melters aint gettin' mine.

I have heard many stories from some silver dealers and the smelters where they used to dump $1000.00 bags full of BU Morgans in the fire (so to speak) one right after another. And I am not talking about20-30 bags full I am talking about thousands of bags full of them, so they are definitely melted down. All of them may not be but I am willing to bet when silver hits highs like it has not more than you would ever think have been shipped to the smelters than the dealers just have hanging around their shop collecting dust. I have talked to a few dealers that had a shop in the early 80's and that was their whole business model, they would buy and sell bags full of silver coins, that was it. And they made quite a big hunk of money doing it also

The gubmint melted hundreds of millions of Morgans early last century. They still were available BU by the tens of millions 50 years later, at face.

If dealers dumped a thousand bags into the smelter, that's still only one million.

One dealer had a fleet of armored Ford vans that did nothing but take silver coins from IN to NY, much of it bound to Comex. One of the half-dozen Comex approved brokers bought and sold 1000 bags in one day.

A friend of mine melted 6000 Columbian Expo halves in 1980. Has anyone noticed any particular scarcity of them?

What we are likely seeing is a shortage of the easily obtained silver on Earth. We need to consider that 3/4 of the Earth is covered by water and likely contains 3x as much silver as the dry land portion. It's just not as easy to get at as the land-based silver deposits. Also, silver is a dense material, so it is likely to be found in increasing concentration with depth in the Earth. 100 miles down in the Earth is likely to be MUCH richer in the silver, gold, and platinum type metals than the surface of the Earth. All we need is the incentive to develop the technology for getting it.