I went to rather large coin shop today, and asked if they have junk silver for sale. They told me that they dont sell junk, everything gets melted. So my question to the forum is, as common silver coins keep getting melted and the semi key and key dates remain, will there eventully be a shift in rarity rankings among series? Taking Ebay for example, there are more listings for coins such as 1932-d quarter, 1927-s quarter, and 1914-d cent then other coins in the same series. Sometimes 4 to 1.
That's because the value of those common coins isn't worth listing, the keys will always be keys, there is no way to know how many of any coin remain still in existence, but that's my opinion, I'm sure there will be others
Don't know why but 'another brick in the wall' seems evident in my mind tonite. Can't say why..... But I do know this. With dealers sending so called 'junk' to the melting pot, otherwise common issues will become rare.
Yes, there will be. But it make take your entire lifetime, or longer, before it happens. The reason for this is twofold but rather straightforward. For one thing nobody keeps track of what date/mint mark combinations get melted. The other is that as a result of this there is no way to determine how many examples of any date/mint still exist except by observing the market. Most people don't realize it, others don't even believe it, but the coin market is a self regulating thing. What I mean by that is that prices are established and eventually changed by how hard it is to find a given date/mint combination for sale. And that can take many generations. And again there are a couple of reasons for that. One would be that once a particular date/mint combination is established as being excessively common, the lack or scarcity of that combination in the market is assumed to be because the coins are just sitting idle in collections, or, that the known commonality is what keeps out of the marketplace. And it takes a long, long time to get people to change their mind about what they believe to be true. Evidence of this is out there already, people just refuse to see it, to believe it, or to recognize it. Take any of the most expensive date/mint combinations, in any denomination (the keys), and in just about every case among truly knowledgeable collectors and dealers there is another combination that is known to be much harder to find (more scarce or rare), but yet less expensive than the keys. In some cases this has been known for 50-100 years - but yet it still doesn't change. People in general are a weird bunch. For once they believe something to be true, you cannot convince them that it is not true regardless of how much evidence you give them or how many facts you present to them that their belief is wrong. They just quite simply refuse to believe it. That is because if you are trying to sell something, you have to offer people what they want to buy. But it also proves what I was talking about above and have long said. Most of the so called keys are not even close to rare, they are not even scarce, and some are downright common. They are merely expensive because people refuse to believe the truth.
The same with my LCS. It amazes me that they're selling all their low grade common silver for melt (or probably lower) when they could sell it for slightly above melt. I've seen people come in with bags of junk silver and are only paid 15X face or less. I assume the store owner just wants to move silver in volume for cash flow, while still making a slight profit.
I remember when I was putting together a vf-xf set of indian cents together there were a couple common dates that were harder to find then the so called keys
