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Originally Posted by tradernick I don't think there's anything in circulation today that will dramatically increase in value in years to come. Possible some of the proof/mint set issues will be valuable. As always, my stance is that key date coins, genuinely scarce pieces, will always be in demand, while common coins will always be common.
Nick |
How many 1977 (type "d" reverse) quarters do you have? Not one coin collector in a thousand has this coin but you can't just go down to the corner coin shop and buy it either. In fact if you want a nice choice gem of this coin you may as well forget about it since it doesn't exist in unc in all probability. Almost the only place you can get it is out of circulation. While the mintage was very small, many of these have already been lost and fewer than 1% of these will even exceed a nice Fine condition. Essentially if you say that circulating coins will never have a premium ir is the same as saying they'll never be collected. While this argument can be made it still fails to explain the '83-P quarter. It fails to explain many of the very rare and valuable coins that have come out of circulation in the past thirty years And it presupposes that all such coins have been found and no more will ever be made.
It's not only varieties, errors, and non-standard issues which circulate which may be rare. How about a choice AU '82-P dime. This is a regular issue that is very tough in unc. If you find an unc example it will almost invariably be very poorly struck from less than perfect dies. Yet it's possible to find a choice AU with far more detail and far more attractive than most of the uncs. While this coin may be a tough sell today at more than a quarter, it seems likely that the 5,000th nicest '82 dime just might have some premium in the future.
These coins have been widely ignored for two generations. It might be short sighted to merely assume that this will continue indefinitely.
There are actually large numbers of people who are having fun collecting circulating coinage. As this gets more common it's probable that you will see markets develope for circulated moderns. Since some of these are pretty scarce there is a potential for some of these values to be pretty significant.
