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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Suarez, post: 3720637, member: 99239&quot;]I think maybe you guys misunderstood my feelings about the internet and so on. I&#039;m about as hooked-in to the digital age as any millennial and see the Information Age as humanity&#039;s literally most important leap forward. My argument is simply that as opposed to the 1950&#039;s (or 1850&#039;s) collectibles as a hobby is on a steep decline precisely because there&#039;s so many other alternatives that are appealing as entertainment and without this new generation replacing the ageing, established one it&#039;s a foregone conclusion where we&#039;re headed.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I was in grade school every other kid had a stamp or coin collection. Maybe not every other kid but certainly a significant percentage. I&#039;ve spent a lot of time with my kids&#039; friends over the years and not one single one of them, somewhere between a dozen or two, has collected anything at all that I can tell. I&#039;ve shown many of them some coins and they unanimously they think it&#039;s cool and.... that&#039;s about as far as it goes. It&#039;s equivalent to me and Greek coins. I look at them and think wow, they&#039;re really cool looking. I appreciate their &quot;oldness&quot; and the incredible artistry and so on. But I don&#039;t feel the need to <i><b>possess </b></i>them. Without that spark the whole process of taking the next step never materializes. They might as well be items in a museum, to me no more worthy of lingering attention than a well-crafted vase or a medieval oil painting.</p><p><br /></p><p>I wonder if the ACE coin cleaning program of a few years back, which supposedly reached many schools, made so much as a single kid take up the hobby. Have you ever seen a post where someone credits this having kickstarted their collection? In fact, my own company Dirty Old Coins sold thousands of coin kits between 2005-2010 and I can probably count on one hand the number of those customers who credit that as a starting point into their own ongoing interest in numismatics.</p><p><br /></p><p>And it&#039;s, again, not just coin collecting. It&#039;s pretty much every other offline passtime. How many kids do you see nowadays raving about their ant farm, train sets or even board games like Dungeons and Dragons? If you have to think hard to come up with an isolated example you&#039;ve proven my point.</p><p><br /></p><p>Honestly, if I had had access to something like the internet and cell phones and video games as a kid back in the 70&#039;s I seriously doubt I ever would have picked up coin collecting. It&#039;s possible I would have later on in life, sure, but if you&#039;re not exposed to it in your formative years I think the appeal is much weaker. As a rhetorical exercise, in your most objective, detached assessment ask yourself if this might not be the case for you as well.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rasiel[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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