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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 4022537, member: 27832&quot;]The comparison with astronomy and department-store telescopes is interesting, but I don&#039;t want to sidetrack this discussion. (Bottom line: I&#039;ll need to look for your essays on the topic, because I&#039;ll bet we&#039;re on the same page.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I did have to go off and read the Rand essay on stamp collecting. It was... Randian. Utopian and dystopian in turns, but with some interesting ideas.</p><p><br /></p><p>I came into the hobby through grandparents&#039; collections and change-searching, with a predisposition to obsess, er, study. From that perspective, registry sets mean nothing, the spray of new novelties from the Mint means nothing (except when they&#039;re released <i>through circulation</i> -- cool!). YouTube is a threat, but I like to think it wouldn&#039;t have taken me long to see through the garbage posts.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think the big dinosaur-killer heading our hobby&#039;s way is <b>the death of circulating change</b>, coming in two blows:</p><p><br /></p><p>1) We stubbornly cling to denominations that inflation has left far behind. We abolished the half-cent in 1857 because its value was too trivial. A dime today is worth less than a half-cent then -- but we stubbornly insist on counting out pennies and nickels as change. And then we dump them into jars, or occasionally pour them into CoinStars for a quick 11% haircut.</p><p><br /></p><p>2) Nearly everything is moving toward electronic transfer. Fewer and fewer people want to deal with coins and even paper money when they can just carry a card, or use the phone they already have with them.</p><p><br /></p><p>If a child never sees coins in daily life, or sees them only as something to be carried around until you can dump them, why on Earth would they seem like something to <i>collect</i>?</p><p><br /></p><p>Some still will collect them, just as some collect rocks, or insects, or thimbles. But the hobby will be a lot <i>smaller</i>.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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