Is Our Coin-Hobby Becoming More, Or Less Popular?

As more people are born into the world and communication increases, more people will become interested in different things, one of them being coins. That's why so many different people are specialized in certain things that awhile back no one had interest or time for. So out of the millions of people born this year, a few of them must be interested in coins.

I feel we may see an upsurge in coin collecting. The reason I believe this is because stocks/bonds/retirement funds/pensions are no longer the main stay of future securities for people's retirement.
I believe that people are going to look at hard assets such as gold and silver bullion for security.
This being said, much of gold and silver bullion is found in coins and not only bricks/1 oz blocks. Therefore, I feel people may enhance their inventory with rare collector coins once they see that there is little or no drop in their value in long term holdings!
Perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my behalf, but you never know?

Glenn

Well I am a plus 1 if that helps. This is my new addiction. I feel like a kid again a little. I collected baseball cards as a youngster. It taught me a lot about the value of a dollar and even though the baseball card market crashed it taught me skills in economics as a youth that is invaluable. I currently have been buying silver. I like Morgans, Peace dollars and medium premium bullion. I like getting different things and don't mind paying a small premium for kooks, lunars, brittannia and the old silver dollars are awesome. Why just pay for spot price when you can get a really cool coin for 2 dollars more. Thats just me but to each his own. You will get it back in the end. Keep stacking and have fun while making money.

I'm another plus one and I am dragging my husband along with me. He has some interest but not a lot of time.

I have been collecting since I was a teen (more than 40 years ago). But I was never very serious about it. I never bought a coin until this year. I would just set aside any silver dollars and buffalos, etc. that I came across.

I just got interested again this past year. My father-in-law passed away a few years ago and we found the coins he had set aside while we were cleaning out his house. My husband dragged out his old coins and it all started to look like a collection.

I still don't quite know what to pursue -- but I am having a great time learning about coins.

It's really hard to say whether the hobby is growing, shrinking, or staying the same, because there's never been a good way of figuring out how many people really collect, and how serious they are.

Anecdotally, the State Quarters brought a lot of new people into the hobby, but prior to that, my feeling is that the number of collectors was dwindling somewhat, but the seriousness of those who collect increasing.

That's just a personal guess/belief, but back in the day, there were plenty of coin shops around, definitely more than today, which implied enough business to keep them all open, but I never really knew anyone who was hard-core (growing up in a fairly poor community might have skewed my experience in that regard, I grant).

Now, information is more accessible, and we have access to far more dealers than we did back in the day. We also have more disposable income to devote to hobbies, all of which allow collectors to be more serious about collecting.

Anyway, why would the end of coins as circulating money mean the end of coin collecting? I can envision, hundreds of years in the future, people still collecting coins saying "wow, people actually used to think these things were money?" I guess my point here is that coins will always be collected because, even long after people have ceased to use coins, they're still a part of our history, and what is a more integral part of history than money? The form might change, but that understanding I suspect won't.

I have a credit card through my credit union which gets paid in full every two weeks so, balance: $0
That's another story or thread.

More popular. I see many more people at coin shows I attend than ever before and, new members joining the CCF in numbers I have not seen since I have joined in 2008. Bullion, up...new interest in that. It all adds up.

I think that the number of people interested in coins is going up but the number of collectors strictly interested in the numismatic aspects is waning a bit. A lot of those people you see are into bullion, not collecting in my opinion.

The guys at the coin store last time I went in said "thank god, someone here to look at COINS! - all we get now is people wanting to sell gold".