Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="littlehugger, post: 2135354, member: 58633"]Sorry, I confused melt value with cost to produce.Silver became too valuable to continue to use....long ago. But then, the metal value was about 90% of the coins worth, with the mint making a tidy profit off the difference. Nowadays, the coins are still well below face value in melt value. For instance, the nickel, at 3.9 cents. Roughly a 20% difference between melt value and face value, but now the mint loses money. Its not just that useful commodities go up, but money loses value when you mint it by the trillions. Our present day ASE is larger and purer than the old silver dollars, but the old ones sell for much more than they are worth in silver. Collector value. Not every coin is an 1804 dollar, but people still pay many times face value for common date coins for their sets. I was a kid when silver was removed. A dollar was a lot. Ten or more enormous. I might have been able to put away $5 or so. But now? I could put away hundreds of dollars worth of nickels and cents without financial pain. Relatively, its a steal. Its an opportunity to put away significant quantities at small cost, and watch history repeat itself, on a smaller scale.[/QUOTE]