Most Worthless Coin

Because of the rising price of nickel and copper that began in 2005, the United States passed a law that made it illegal to melt pennies and nickels for their metal content. ... Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers.

 

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OK, makes sense

 

It isan attempt to slow the recycling of cents for private profit. Same thing happened in 1965 with silver. Once the feds have withdrawn enough copper coins for the strategic reserves and industry they may permit the wholesale melting. That precaution has created an opportunity for
our northern and southern neighbors to "mine" our coins for their profit. Whether our public servants were bribed in order to create that opportunity for them I have no proof one way or the other. The great American sci-fi author Robert Heinlein is credited with being the first to opine "Never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity." That is a paraphrase. I do not recall the exact wording.

 

In THEORY they are worth close to two cents each, if you could get full spot price for the metal. You won't, as an alloy the copper is worth about 1/4 of spot so that makes them about 1/2 cent apiece.

Absolutely nothing. Of course you unmarked alloy bars will now have to be assayed as well, so the buy price just went down, now equal to 1/3 cent apiece.

Because that is what the law says. Laws don't have to make sense, they just are.

Collectingnut explained why it was passed. Back then copper was approaching $5 a pound and it looked like it might continue rising to the point where at even 25% of spot they would still have been profitable to melt. The government was afraid everyone would start hoarding them and there wouldn't be enough for commerce and that the Mint would have to replace all those hoarded cents at a cost of over 2 cents apiece. So instead they made melting them down illegal.

Yep, during the late 60's they made it illegal to melt down silver US coins, and while they kept spouting the line that the silver and clad coins would co-circulate for many years to come, they had machines at the Federal Reserve processing all the coins that came in from the banks separating out the silver from the clad. They kept the silver and sent the clad back to the banks. Finally around 1970 the amount recovered had dropped to a trickle so they shut the machines down and made melting silver coins legal again.

 

I'm surprised no one checked the math in the linked to PCGS article. From the article "the tiyin is worth about 0.0000010 United States dollars. In other words, it would take about 1,000 tiyin to equal one cent from the United States."

The correct answer would be about 10,000 tiyin to equal one U.S. cent.