One of the many benefits to be derived from intently pursuing a hobby is that you often learn obscure, interesting, and even weird facts pertaining to your interest. Coin collecting is no different from any other hobby in this regard.
I used to collect coins as a kid. I was able to do so because not all old coins are very expensive. In fact, many very old coins can be bought for their ‘melt’ value, which means you only have to basically pay the going price for the precious metal in them. I’m not sure if this also pertains to gold coins because I never had enough money to indulge in collecting gold coins, so I’m speaking only about silver coins here. Of course old coins that are nearly worn flat or that are all beat up, unless they are exceedingly rare, have little or no numismatic value, so they are hardly worth more than the price of the precious metal they are comprised of. You can even buy decent looking old coins that are in reasonably good shape for melt value, as long as they aren’t almost uncirculated or key dates. These coins are called “junk silver”. Don’t let the name fool you and think, as I originally did when I first heard the term, that that means the coins are all battered and bent, it often just means that they are common, unremarkable coins that are made of silver, and you can literally buy them by the ounce or pound for just a little above the going price of silver. These coins won’t be anything terribly old, mostly quarters, dimes and halves minted before 1964, when they stopped using silver. Real silver dollars usually cost more because they stopped minting those in the 1930s. So, if you were to buy a troy pound of junk silver you’d receive a small pile of Washington quarters, Roosevelt and Mercury dimes, and Franklin and Kennedy half dollars.
Anyway, none of that is the weird fact I wanted to share with you, I saved it for last because once you hear it you’ll be too busy tripping on it to even think about anything else! Ready?…
I, like I imagine many other people, always assumed that coins that were worn down were just kind of pressed flat through years of being handled by countless people, but one of the things you learn early on dealing with junk silver is that worn coins weigh less than newer looking coins, which means that the silver has been wiped away, a little at a time, by everyone who has touched them. Isn’t that weird? All that silver and gold has vanished, rubbed away into nothingness a few molecules at a time over a period of many years by people buying all the things they need to both maintain and enjoy life!
I don’t think there is any way to actually compute how many countless pounds, or, more likely, tons of gold and silver have vanished forever from existence through human commerce over the past four or five thousand years since people first started bartering using precious metals!
Eh, so…ummm, yeah Maybe that isn’t actually as mind blowingly weird as I thought it was. Sorry. It just sounded a lot weirder to me in my own mind, but now that I’ve articulated it, I guess it’s not really as bizarre as it seemed.
Loof Lirpa 