In a distant future without money: will numismatic hobby decline?

Numismatics can be expensive but it does not have to be. Most collectors and those most passionate about our hobby, started as kids filling in the holes of their binders and it all came from common pocket change.
All shows are scheduled during the weekends in attempt to attract every collecting age, but the attendance is dwindling. If their target market was the retired wealthy, why pay the higher wkend facility fees? Can you imagine coin shows only taking place on tuesdays! With their limited physical mobility, older collectors may be using ebay etc. a lot more than you think. This is where they can finally enroll the participation of their grandkids who can teach and guide them to navigate the internet.

 

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Like Babe Ruth said about baseball, you have to grow up with it and get it into your blood. Our collective challenge is to do the same with numismatics.

 

New Zealand abolished its 5 cent coin about 10 years ago and Australia is condidering doing the same .Sad. PS ,I love your pennies (cents really,we had the pennies!) and hope they last for a long time yet.

 

Yikes you make a good point...'til I read your input I thought "oh it might ebb 'n' flow just as it has throughout the years" but I'd venture to guess you may quite well be unfortunately VERY right...based on what I see on TV these days this atomic copying (sp) may be right around the corner...look at the new gold atomic polymer sheets Mike Mesack (sp) sells atoms of gold?????

 

Is there a public link to see the sites demographics?

 

Okie doke. Can I get a teaser at least? Average age?

 

I see

 

I can't speak for this place, but I'd guess my experience at another similar forum is equivalent - a quarter of their active membership is under 25 and the large majority of them not old enough to drink yet. I'm not worried about the future of numismatics, just the stuff that needs to get done to get numismatics into that future.

 

Omegaraptor said:
In 2100 the key date market probably won't exist. People will be able to make perfect copies of a certain issue down to the atomic level, thus being undetectable by grading services.

But one additional point...isn't Treasury the only Dept. that earns $$ for the Govt.? So I suspect if the Fed does decide to eliminate cash & currency that's a valuable source of income which needs to be replaced.

goodbye need for tellers, minimizing need for banks on every corner...I don't know it may very well happen but I'd guess quite a way down the road...our economy just isn't good enough right now (and I'd guess for quite some time in the distant future) for the Fed to let go of the Goose.

 

A century ago, medal collecting was a bigger hobby than collecting legal tender coins was.

 

No, it isn't. Curbside recycling is not even offered where I live, nor is cable TV, for that matter. We also have no police, no municipal trash removal (most burn), and it sometimes takes 24 hours to get out after a big snowstorm. All that, and I'm an hour from the Liberty Bell, and 2-1/2 hours from Times Square, WITH traffic.

 

This is a result of our nation's Gross National Stupidity, and nothing more. Canada lives without a cent. The Swiss discontinued theirs long ago. Many Euro countries don't use it. Heck, in Switzerland even the 5 rappen (equivalent value about 5.5 U.S. cents) is almost never seen in circulation. The smallest coin they routinely use is worth about 11 U.S. cents. We CAN do it, we SHOULD do it, but our Idiocracy will prevent eliminating the cent.

Then again, the largest regularly circulating Swiss coin is worth about $5.50 US.

 

But what is undeniable, Doug, is that there are giHUGEous portions of the coin community that have never used a computer and won't. I will see a slew of them tonight at Red Rose Coin Club. They want NOTHING to do with email, websites, forums, or online ANYTHING. Dozens and dozens of them will be there. So yes, CT may have a younger demo, but it does NOT reflect the hobby writ large. CT is HUGE with newbies.

 

I never knew that. I still get Canadian cents as change.
Maybe I should keep them all.

 

Where were you? They killed that puppy off a few years ago. I must say, though, a mint set without a red coin in it does look a little, umm, incomplete.

 

And we need to face the fact that younger collectors are going to experience the hobby online, like they experience everything else, whether we like it or not. I'm not so pessimistic as to see a future where people sit at the keyboard like passive drones without ever seeing the outdoors, or where coin shows disappear, but numismatics needs to move online in a big way in order to keep the hobby thriving into the future.

Numismatic treeware needs to die as a sole information source. There will always be a market for books because books are something you can "collect," too, but the information they contain needs to be found online as well. That is what younger collectors will expect - the easy availability of information online, just like everything else they want to know about.

Numismatic sales need to move online to a far greater extent than exists now. Dealer websites - where they exist at all, and that's only a fraction of dealers - generally reflect very little knowledge of effective e-commerce.

Numismatic interaction, as personified by forums like this one, is where it's going. Social media's success is proof that newer generations wish to interact online, and it is imperative that the numismatic hobby build strong online communities as destinations for younger collectors. This serves their desires, and greatly expands the efficacy of information dissemination. In the future - and the future needs to be pretty darn close to right now - it will be easy to learn online about any numismatic topic, and to pick the brain of experts in any aspect of the hobby.

The bigger picture is plain, and the sooner we embrace it, the more easily we can guarantee a thriving hobby into the future. That, in a nutshell, is why I'm here and what I do.