My father instilled that exact sentiment in me when I was a little boy with these totally worthless to the entrinsic seeker but totally collectable to the history coin lover
Of course they're collectible. Any coin is. Just don't expect them to appreciate in value, and if you decided to sell them, don't expect to find a lot of interested buyers.
Circulated ones are just worth face but yes they're collectable. The 1999 P and D are popular as they're by far the best made of the series, nice 81-S are hard to find, the wide rim P, and really high grades of any of them.
There is always a possibility and has been shown in history. Here's one example - In 1931 in Kweichow (Guizhou) Province, China - because of an acute shortage of copper as well as the poor finance of the economy, coins were struck in antimony as it had plenty of such metal. Production was delayed by a couple of years and it came as no surprise that the public did not respond very well to such coins. It didn't look pretty, wore quickly and was not even worth face value when it was issued! It's in the last couple of decades that such coin has appreciated drastically. What might have been worth less than 1 cent back in the day is today worth more than thousands.
That's what I was thinking with the sba,s but as one other person pointed out that will probably never happen in my life time, Hey maybe my kids or grandkids will get lucky ,stranger things have happened,Lol!!!
Do unpopular coins make for valuable or collecta coins Sometimes, but not often. And even when it does, it depends on the circumstances. Ya see, sometimes a coin can become unpopular, based on its design alone, before it's ever released. And if that happens it sometimes results in a very low number of coins that are minted. And or they are minted in large numbers but because nobody likes them very few are ever released so the remainder of the mintage is melted or destroyed - again resulting in a small number that still exist. And then there's the time factor. Sometimes value doesn't increase right away, but years or decades later the scarcity/rarity is noticed, the coin suddenly becomes popular, and value shoots up.
I was referring to another members comment about my spelling error. It happens to all of us I'm afraid. Lol
Do unpopular coins make for valuable or collecta coins[?] It depends on your research on a particular "unpopular" coin or series of coins. Look at world coins. Low listed-values in catalogs for a certain country's world coins was the result of, what I had thought (and most dealers thought), a large supply of uncirculated or BU examples, when in reality it was actually the result of LOW DEMAND. Find (world) coins that are low-ish in current value, but actually somewhat scarce in higher grades, and if you do your research right, you can find yourself with some coins that might grow in value. No guarantees. I found that leveraging a basic knowledge of a non-European language and writing system can help in this regard. Combine that with pursuing coins that people didn't think worth the time. I'm convinced that the majority of coin collectors in the world are in Europe and North America, and that's why learning a non-European language with a non-latin alphabet writing system can help. Most collectors are not "that into" coins to go through the effort to learn that much. Ancient collectors are these types of people, and the occasional world-coin collectors are. See Post #29 above for one single example.
To most people of the world, the English language is considered one of the most difficult to grasp. There are too many words spelled differently that sound the same.
You can also have a coin like this one - There were only about a 150 of these even minted. And yet when I bought it over 20 years after it was minted - and yeah it's slabbed as a PF CAM by NGC - I paid melt value for it. And now, almost another 20 years later, it's still only worth melt value. So in over 40 years this coin which is scarce by any definition has no numismatic value to speak of because it's simply not popular. In another 40 to 60 years who knows what will happen. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. But whatever happens it will be determined by one thing - its popularity. And of course the opposite is true. Coins that exist in huge numbers, several hundred thousand of them, are extremely expensive, even in very low grades, simply because they are popular.
All of these coins are collectible. The trouble is they don't have much of a following which keeps the prices down. That's a good thing if you want to acquire them but not so good when it comes time to sell. With a huge number of coins the mint is issuing these days, there are a lot of coins that have few takers. The first lady series in gold immediately comes to mind.
I have two complete uncirculated sets of SBA's, Sac's, and Ike's, one for each granddaughter. It is my thought that there were no silver SBA's, Sac's, and very few Ike's, therefore a lack of interest. Size and weight are also factors in my opinion. They are still very nice looking coins with great eye appeal and history. I enjoyed your post, thank you.