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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 3871705, member: 112&quot;]Well in some cases they know who they are, in others they don&#039;t. Take coin shows for example, if a collector walks up to a table and buys a coin, if he pays cash, it&#039;s not likely you&#039;re gonna know who he is. And most pay cash. Same kind of thing applies to coin shops. At auctions, a great many collectors use dealers or another individual as their agents, so while the auctioneer knows who the agent is, they don&#039;t know the buyer.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>And of course there&#039;s a whole lot of collectors who give dealers want lists, so the dealer knows who they are. Many others have long term relationships with dealers, so the dealers know them as well. I used to have dealers call me up or send emails saying they had or had access to such and such and wanting to know if I wanted to look at. This is what smart dealers and smart collectors both do. Because the one is a very effective tool for the other. Dealers see a hundred times as many coins as any collector does. </p><p><br /></p><p>Now that doesn&#039;t really answer your question as to &quot;who&quot; these buyers are, I&#039;m just describing a few situations as to when you might, might not know who the buyer is. But if you stop and think about it for a minute, you and the other people on this forum, and all other forums, know who quite a few of the buyers are, a lot of them even. To know who they are all ya gotta do is read the forum - they post about them every single day !</p><p><br /></p><p>Then ya have &quot;what&quot; these buyers are. A lot of them were like me, they&#039;re people who got fed up with the US coin market. I&#039;d collected US coins all my life, started in 1960. My grandfather, he collected world coins, and he&#039;s the one who got me started back then. But it took me until 2002 when I realized what had decades before that. That there was a hundred times the history in world coins that there was in US coins. That world coins, in the same condition, but several times the rarity, cost only a fraction of what US coins did. And the designs - world coins won hands down. So I sold my entire US collection and switched over to world coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>I first wrote about it here on this and other forums back in 2002. Then I wrote about it in Numismatic News in 2003 and in a few online publications. I was specializing in world gold, particularly Netherlands gold ducats. I set out to do what nobody had ever done, to collect a date set of them. Of course it was like reaching for the moon but nobody ever accomplished anything without first trying. And by post about them all the time, buying every one I could find, even giving them away here on the forum in contests - I became my own worst enemy. Within 2 or 3 years the prices of Netherlands gold ducats tripled, largely because of the popularity in them I had instigated. Before I started writing about them hardly anybody even knew what they were.</p><p><br /></p><p>By then the bull market in US coins had started, and with prices rising a lot of folks saw things the same way I had. A scarce US coin in MS might cost $1 - $10k. But a world coin, of equal or greater scarcity, of equal or greater grade, with a better design, 100 times the history, and often several hundred years older - cost a fraction of that. I mean ya don&#039;t have to be a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall. So a lot of folks gave up on US coins and started collecting world coins. </p><p><br /></p><p>And it wasn&#039;t just the high dollar coins either. There&#039;s lots and lots of low and mid grade world coins out there. With great designs, tons of history, and hundreds of years old. Ya see these 2 coins - </p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1023042[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1023043[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1023044[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1023045[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>- ones a nice VF the other a lower VF. Ya know what I paid for them ? One cost me $25, the other $30. Both fairly scarce, and in decent condition. Both 350 years old. Both issued by arguably the most famous French King there ever was, when he was just a kid. Ya know what a US coin 200 years old, in that condition, of that scarcity, cost ? Well it sure as heck aint $25-$30 ! What&#039;s not to like ? Like I said, ya don&#039;t have to be a rocket scientist.</p><p><br /></p><p>So that&#039;s who these buyers are - those people are.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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