Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tom Maringer, post: 199810, member: 7033&quot;]Laws vary from nation to nation. Apparently it&#039;s illegal in the British Commonwealth to deface the portrait of the queen. (does that mean that as long as you work around the image it&#039;s okay??)&nbsp; In the US the standard seems to be any attempt to defraud. So... changing the date or mintmark of a coin to create a rarity would be attempting fraud and therefore illegal. Putting a personal, corporate, or political message on a coin is merely the creation of a &#039;coin novelty&#039;. The recent ban on melting coins is apparently in response to a couple large operators who were mining out the copper and zinc from the penny supply and smelting it. The ban is likely to be temporary because the situation which makes it necessary cannot last. But you don&#039;t need to melt coins to appreciate or capitalize on their bullion value! In fact, I feel it would be foolish to melt pennies because they have already been processed into a &quot;higher&quot; form than ingot. It would be a waste of energy to melt them into a lower form. </p><p><br /></p><p>There is already a market developing for sorted pre-1982 copper pennies that acknowledges their bullion value. (currently about 2 cents each)&nbsp; What&#039;s REALLY interesting is that people over at the hoarding pennies forum (already referenced in the first post on this thread) have been sorting and reporting copper percentages from bulk coins in different areas of the country, and the percentages vary rather widely, but seem to average about 20%. The unanswered question is whether (a) the Fed is gleaning the copper out of the money supply, or (b) whether they&#039;ve really made four times as many pennies between 1982 and today as between 1959 and 1982, or (c) whether the dwindling supply is due to people like us squirreling them away. I guess we could answer (b) by adding up mintages from the red book. But all that copper is going SOMEwhere![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in