Coin Collectors and Keys

I just saw an estimate that there are 10,000,000 coin collectors in the USA. Considering the mintage on the 1950 D nickel is just 2.63 million, should I feel guilty if I have two of them?

 

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Hell yes.

 

No because there are almost certainly less than 2.63 million people looking for one and they are always available for sale at a fairly inexpensive price (even in relatively high UNC grades).

But if you do, you should give one away.

 

Remember, you are not counting the 8.5 million made in China.

 

That's funny.....

 

How many collectors do you think there are in the USA?

 

Didn't you just say above that there were 10,000,000?

 

Yeah, but I don't necessarily believe me... The number does seem high (from an NGC thread) just wanted to see what others said.

 

Funny post. I never would have thought of that.

This is the perfect interview-style question where an employer would want to see the path of logic you follow, even if it wasn't possible to know the actual answer.

There are about 328.2 million people in the USA. I am going to go on a limb here, and say that 3/4ths (75%) of the population heard about the 50 State Quarters Program on the news or were aware of it in someway. I assume that the announcement of the 50 State Quarters Program was probably the biggest coin-related news the public had seen, and will see in a long time, but let's just say that 75% of the population has heard some coin-related news in the paper or on TV, be it 1943 copper cents being found or new quarter designs. This is probably the biggest factor in pulling in new collectors.

So, 75% of the population has heard coin-related news. I will assume that about 30% of the population actually cared about that news (a few percent were probably already collecting, such as if their parents had gotten them interested). Out of that 30% group, I would say that 10% of that 30% would not have found anything interesting, or got frustrated, and gave up. That leaves about 20% of the population of the USA that began collecting after hearing the news. We will count them as collectors.

Now to plug in the numbers:
Total population of the USA- 328.2 million.

0.75 * 328.2 million = 246.15 million.
Number of people who've heard about coins on the news- 246.15 million.

0.30 * 328.2 million = 98.46 million.
Number of people who really cared about the coin-related news- 98.6 million.

0.2 * 328.2 million = 65.64 million.
Number of people who found something or remained interested and became collectors- 65.64 million.

I would bet that around 75% of the people who became collectors became somewhat serious collectors (more than just a few coins).

0.15 * 328.2 million = 49.23 million.
Number of people who grew to become moderately serious collectors- 49.23 million.

With that I estimate about 40-50 million people collect coins in the United States. This does not surprise me; people are fascinated with money, it's really interesting.

Now this, as you can see (if you've actually read this far), is a lot of speculation, but it does follow some logic.

Boy that really took me a long time lol. I was very invested in it

 

I would guess that the number of ACTIVE coin collectors is under 250k.

 

Can you please help me identify what variety this coin has

 

How do you upload pictures

 

Can you please help me identify what variety this coin has

 

Please start a new thread and read this:
https://www.cointalk.com/threads/ho...ck on the photo or,the upload a file sequence.

 

I doubt that it’s that high, but not a bad thought process. I’ll try to come up with a lower bound...

Recently the Mint has been selling ~500,000 proof ASEs and proof sets per year. A lot of these sets were bought by collectors as duplicates or bought in bulk by dealers, but on the other hand, a lot of collectors (like me) don’t buy proof ASEs or proof sets annually (i.e., these offset to an extent). So, I’d be willing to wager that each sale of a proof ASE or proof set represents one collector (on average). So that would be at least ~500,000 coin collectors in the US.

To go a little further, PCGS estimates that there are nearly 1,000,000 1884-CC Morgan dollars still in existence. The vast majority of these coins were released in the GSA sales, so I feel reasonably confident in PCGS’s survival estimate. These coins trade at a premium to melt, so I’m guessing that there are more coin collectors than there are 1884-CC Morgan dollars. Granted, some Morgan collectors have multiples of this date, but if there were only 100,000 coin collectors, they probably wouldn’t be worth a whole lot more than melt value because there wouldn’t be enough collector demand to support the prices. So based on this, I’m reasonably confident that there are more than 1,000,000 coin collectors in the US.

I don’t know how much further this could be taken, but it certainly is interesting to ponder.

 

Curiously, how many members does ANA have? Would that number even be 10% of the total number of collectors?

 

How many Nickel collectors are there? By your numbers over 25% of all collectors are Nickel collectors. The other way to look at it is simple, the price. Pricing is controlled by supply and demand. A 1950-D Nickel is selling for how much? So where's the demand? No you shouldn't feel bad for having two of them but if it will make you feel better PM me and I'll tell you where to send it.

 

At this point probably not. There are countless collectors that couldn't care less about them or operate just on the internet. If you collect moderns or world coins they're basically worthless to you anyways.

The one thing for sure the older someone is the more likely to be a member, which isn't a knock on age but that is how it was always done. For several years now middle to younger aged people have seen little to no value in paying for magazines

 

I would guess a little higher, between 500k to 1-mil. But not more than 1-mil.

When figuring how many people there are in the USA, remember that a lot of them are kids, and the current crops of kids (ages 1-29) are typically not into coin collecting. This is what I call the "internet cellphone generation". They have no memory of a time without cellphones or internet.