I wonder as I got some 'junk' tonight and wanted to look through them for DDO's. I found 1 out of 10, not strong but there. So this got me to thinking, with darn near 425 million of the circulated and 4 million proofs, how many do you think are left and un-melted etc?
< 75% because these may have had some international appeal, therefor they are in collections world wide. This year more so than other U.S. coins.
The great melts....the biggest being 1980 ish...and to some degree in 2011...there was guesstimated to be over 50% of the 90% silver melted during the 1980 one. There are some web articles about it... They were melting Morgans, Peace, you name it, if it was 90% it got melted. Dealers had no time to check for dates etc. Still the 64 was common...and saw it fair share of melts..... http://www.pcgs.com/News/After-The-Melts-Whats-Left-In-Silver-Coins http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v09n18a15.html http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abu/y210/m08/abu0269/s06 SO if Frankies bit the dust...how many of the 64's? Now the 40% ers I think are mostly still here, refiners did not like them when they had 90%. In 2011 we saw the same thing....therefore...I am thinking that somewhere north of 50% (counting in foreign hands) but far less than 75% of the 64 P & D's are left. Proofs? Well, I have not heard much nor seen much but being that 4 million were made, they were not rare and surely some of them found the way into the melting pots...Best guess is 65% of those remain.
Here is one more article if your interested http://numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=18381
Here is a thread on Cointalk about it... https://www.cointalk.com/threads/data-on-1980-silver-melt.113706/
Are you kidding. With so much being produced during early years. Who is going to collect them. Very very few. You have 2014 kennedy half sold so far a little over 130,000.set. And yet very few people out of 320 millions american buy them. You got every kid playing computer games. Etc. average age for this hobby is quite old. By looking at the U S mint sales figures. Every year the sales number came down. I myself is near 70.
My guess is around 50%. Because they're so common and 90% silver I think a lot have been melted but there will always be more than demand.
since the mint released 90% silver coin production before and stated how many were melted. and since it also mentioned 40% silver coin. i would add a 35% silver content five cents nickel to it. total produced 869,923,700 pc.
