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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1299018, member: 19463&quot;]A question for the &#039;club&#039; and anyone else who has an opinion:&nbsp; What happened to the busk of the silver alloy containing metal stock when it was determined that coins no longer had to be silver bearing and silver washed?&nbsp; I always assumed that the old coins were melted and the silver extracted but Chris says that could not be done (I don&#039;t know).&nbsp; For most of the period, I assume also that most of the coins were melted and reissued at new weights.&nbsp; Again I assume that they had the technology to tell the difference between 4.77% silver (XXI stuff) and lesser grade material.&nbsp; I have no idea how they did it but I always suspected the average later silver coin (siliqua, etc) contained some silver derived from materials previously used in the many millions of silver washed coins that were in circulation when the last ones were made.&nbsp; I never understood how the process worked.&nbsp; Lets say the emperor declared that old coins were no longer good and you had one million of them buried out in the fields.&nbsp; If you could not get the silver out of them and you could not spend them on the open market, just what could you do with them?&nbsp; Today we could treat them as ore and extract the silver.&nbsp; Then?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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