Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 1260226, member: 68&quot;]I might be getting a little off topic here but it&#039;s something most people aren&#039;t aware of and is at least tangentally relevant. </p><p><br /></p><p>I got interested in world base metal coins from looking through junk boxes in the &#039;70&#039;s for silver coins. I memorized all the silver coins so I could pull them out but over the years I started noticing that a lot of the world coins that were supposed to be common either weren&#039;t seen at all or were never seen in nice condition.&nbsp; The first such coin I spotted was a &#039;57 Greek 1 D.&nbsp; I looked everywhere and just couldn&#039;t locate the coin.&nbsp; By the mid-&#039;80&#039;s I had long lists of things that I searched for.&nbsp; All the soviet coins were included but especially the Soviet moderns which started in 1962.&nbsp; I corresponded with some Moscow coin club members.&nbsp; Coin collecting was discouraged in the Soviet Union because it was considered a waste of time so this club was pretty small.&nbsp; Coin collecting was not very big.&nbsp; But none of these people collected Soviet moderns and very very few had any interest in the Soviet coins as they were collecting the old silver czarist coinage.&nbsp; A little of the early Soviet coinage was silver and most coins from that era had a little interest but I just couldn&#039;t get any of the moderns despite offerring very favorable trades.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>This was true in other countries as well;&nbsp; you couldn&#039;t even get the coins back in the days they were current.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Most of the Russian mint sets were shipped to Europe and the US and dealers couldn&#039;t give them away.&nbsp; Just like all moderns US collectors considered them common and they too were seeking the old silver coins.&nbsp; Dealers would cut up the foreign mint sets and drop the coins in junk boxes.&nbsp; Sometimes I&#039;d find them soon enough that they were still nice.&nbsp; Most of the time these coins would eventually end up in poundage which has a staggeringly high attrition.&nbsp; The coins sold by the pound tend to get used up as play money or as a curiousity or eventually left in the reject bin of an automatic counting machine and then tossed in the garbage.&nbsp; I&#039;ve heard stories of barrels of low denomination world coins left out for the trash man.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Old collectible coins exist because someone took the effort to set them aside.&nbsp; If they hadn&#039;t been then all the old coins would be degraded or long gone.&nbsp; In fact with old coins lots of them were saved &quot;accidently&quot;.&nbsp; They were used to back paper money or lost and refound.&nbsp; This won&#039;t happen with moderns.&nbsp; Many of the moderns have already been destroyed because the issuer changed currencies and recalled the old coins for destruction.&nbsp; This will impact very high percentanges of the high denomination coins.&nbsp; People simply don&#039;t save coins worth a few dollars when they are being demonetized.&nbsp; This means that many moderns weren&#039;t saved out in high grade or low grade and they&#039;re gone now.&nbsp; There aren&#039;t any &quot;accidental&quot; hoards because these have no &quot;intrinsic&quot; value.&nbsp; Any base metal coin that gets lost will probably be highly corroded if it is ever found. Nobody collected them so there aren&#039;t any collections of them.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>People see piles of lightly worn French coins or see hoards of millions of low denomination Hungarian coins and deduce that all moderns are common.&nbsp; It just doesn&#039;t work that way.&nbsp; There might be millions of 1972 Finnish 1p coins and almost no 1971 coins.&nbsp; Greek 1959 10l coins might be &quot;common&quot; in unc but the 2D is scarce.&nbsp; Old Fijian silver can be found all day long but the modern cu/ ni can be impossible in any grade.&nbsp; The silver Japanese 100Y coins from the mid-&#039;60&#039;s is common but the cu/ ni from the late-60&#039;s is almost impossible.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Each year that goes by collectors and the market become a little more sophisticated and it is starting to sort out the wheat from the chaffe.&nbsp; What we&#039;ll come to find is the vast majority of moderns will be scarcer than the older coins and that&#039;s just as true or truer for US moderns and especially clad.[/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