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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 22456, member: 68&quot;]Silver coins are long gone from circulation.&nbsp; The average quarter is in a transaction about every twenty day and more than 5% of the population would remove a silver coin.&nbsp; This means the statistical life of a silver quarter in circultion is only a little more than a year.&nbsp; Coins occassionally will get hung up somewhere like in a retail store&#039;s safe or in storage at the fed, but it&#039;s highly unusual for a coin to not make a transaction for more than three years.&nbsp; Even coins that dropped behind a machine at the laundromat in 1964 was found and spent many years ago when the machines wore out and were replaced.&nbsp; It&#039;s very uncommon to see any coin operated machine more than fifteen years old.&nbsp; While it&#039;s not impossible for a silver coin to have passed from one piggy bank to another since 1964 the odds of there being even a single such coin are staggeringly small.&nbsp; It can not account for the large numbers of silver coin in circulation (dimes ~1: 1,000, quarters ~1: 1,800).&nbsp; These are coins being intentionally spent by collectors and by those who know it&#039;s silver but don&#039;t want to bother with selling it.&nbsp; These should be thought of as coins mixed in with the circulating coins because they simply don&#039;t circulate.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It is true that they don&#039;t work in modern vending machines.&nbsp; The clad composition was chosen largely because it mimics silver so closely.&nbsp; In fact a vending machine operator was asked what the biggest threat to his company was and he for the first time described a cu/ ni clad copper coin.&nbsp; Over the years the discriminators on vending machines have been fine tuned to reject anything except one of the current coins.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Most counting machines work primarily by separating the items by size before counting and do not reject based on weight, electro magnetic signature, metallic composition or anything else.&nbsp; I believe some of the major counting houses run their coins through some sort of discriminator because it&#039;s so unusual to find &quot;bad coins&quot; in their rolls.&nbsp; Most banks will look at the coin they run through the counter and the employee will pull out non standard coin for rejection.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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