cladking

Greysheet lists this coin for 15c and even this is a little optimistic if it's really only MS-61. Buyers willing to pay 15c want mostly MS-63 and better. There is certainly room for price increases if any demand ever materializes.

I'm sometimes little more optimistic than you are. I can grow extremely cynical watching the evil prosper while the good and competent fall by the wayside. But then I look at the children and remember most of them will try to do what is right and our job is to merely teach them right from wrong. They remind me that where there's life there is hope and there's nothing like a human or entire generation of humans working together to get any job done. I believe that right up to the time we manage to make human life impossible there is a virtual certainty that moderns will be hot. Collectors collect and so long as there are collectors someone is going to want every coin; even if it is nothing but "clad".

Last year I made the monumental mistake of buying a computer with cash. I expected it to cost under $400 but the HP I bought that doesn't even have a disc drive, monitor, or anything else was well over $500 by the time they added everything up! I thought it was a good time to get rid of a few bills but I sure was wrong. They acted like they had never seen cash before and managers were crawling out of the woodwork to OK it and pass on it. You'd think I was trying to cash a third party check on a foreign bank with all the commotion. Believe me I've actually done this before and it took less time. Maybe they thought I was planning to come back after closing time and steal the bank deposit. When I set aside a Gem 1980 quarter I knew full well that I was taking a large risk on inflation and opportunity costs. Never did I realize the loaf of bread I didn't buy with that quarter might someday require a handful of quarters in the form of a credit card. Every day the world gets screwier but people don't seem to notice. We have the worst products in history yet their producers of it get all the money. If I sell the Gem 1980 quarter the middlemen, ebay, and paypal get the lion's share.

It's not just collectors who hate moderns; https://goldseek.com/article/americans-throw-away-millions-us-coins-because-american-money-junk The American public probably "throws away" a lot more than 68 million dollars worth each year if you add in what ends up on the ground, recycled with cars, and in public incinerators. A lot of coins are discarded accidently or are dropped but not worth the effort of retrieving. Most countries have some coins of real value and their vending industry flourishes but here coins have no value as the government wants it that way. The paper currency no longer has ,much value either inasmuch as no significant purchases can be made with it. Every year inflation chips away more at the value of coins and more coins are discarded and lost. Every year all those old quarters are further degraded and another ~4% are lost forever. Older coins have a higher attrition because they are thinner and lighter. Soon enough they'll just be a memory. When the government demonetizes and recalls them there will be only a few left to turn into refrigerators and other appliances that won't last. But at least we'll have gotten our money's worth out of the clads; the last vestiges of quality in a throw away society.

Even though debased coinage is USUALLY scarcer and often much scarcer than the coins they replace they usually sell for a small fraction of the price. Why would you think this is?

Repeating things that aren't true has no effect on anything. You can find fistfuls of Unc and gemmy British silver for every 500 fine coin you can find yet the sterling sells for more. Then you can find a lot more of the 500 fine than cu can the cu/ ni yet the 500 sells for more. Mintage and sales are irrelevant. The only things that count are how many survive and how many want one. I'm selling. Not because I have as much profit as possible but because of my age.

I had a chance to buy a few hundred of the scarce 1959 Scottish 1S back in 1995 but would have to take them all at ~40c each. I passed. They were almost all XF and AU with a few VF's and sliders. I doubt many of the cu/ ni coins are tough in XF except maybe the early ones. I see a lot in poundage and they tend to be F. Moderns are funny. It seems most are either more common or less common than one would expect.

Imagine how hard these would be to find if there were lots of collectors and lots of collections! 20 years ago most of them were just a dollar or two each and I always picked them up but rarely saw them. Now they are five or ten dollars and you still don't see them. These come nice but Gems are not easy. A lot of them are tarnished and these don't clean up as readily as clad. There are lots of sliders and AU's also.

No. what I am describing is collectors refusing to pay much less for scarcer coins because they are base metal. There's a simple reason they won't pay a lower prices for scarcer coins: They don't collect them because they are believed to be common debased junk. Part of the reason they are considered such is that mintages are higher and quality is lower on average. I can find handfuls of nice chBU, XF, and VF British sterling for every "common" mid-'20's .500 fine debased junk. Then I can find handfuls of high grade .500 fine for the '50's era cu/ ni coins in BU. It's this way in "every" country.

In almost all countries (at least major countries) between the Bretton Woods agreement and 1968 silver was discontinued and the coins were replaced by base metals, usually cu/ni. Referring to the debased coinage as "modern" makes sense because its introduction in every case marked the beginning of the cessation of collecting new coinage. In a few case copper coins that were unaffected by the debasement continued to be collected but in most (such as the US) all coin collecting of new coin ceased. This happened in this country in 1965 but in most countries it was earlier and in a few it was later. The definition of "modern" hence is "new debased coinage that was not collected and usually still isn't". Whether or not this ball was set in motion in Bretton Woods is a question that won't be answered for years yet. I strongly suspect it was. Mebbe the bankers wanted all the precious metals so they could sell the same bar to numerous individuals.

I wasn't aware of this. When I was young back in the late-'50's/ early '60's most of my friends were collectors though most rarely bought coins or supplies. I suppose it's possible that it's more widespread today than I believed. I've been trying to get the numbers for coin folders that are printed each year but haven't succeeded. I'm sure it's very substantial because I see these everywhere except filled and walking into coin shops. Obviously there are a lot of state quarter collectors.

If you define "collector" as anyone with a collection of coins that they are studying and increasing or simply has an advanced collection then there are probably at the very least 10,000,000 collectors. About 1,000,000 of them buy supplies, services, or coins on a continuing basis. The number is still lower than in 1964 but is approaching it.

Charles Morgan and Hubert Walker make an important observation in this article; https://coinweek.com/1983-p-kennedy-half-dollar-a-collectors-guide/ Only two '83-P half dollars trade per day. This pales in comparison to the number of something like an '09-S VDB that trade. Tens of thousands of people have wheat cent collections and as the population of this group evolves coins must trade in the market; you can't take it with you and you can't have a complete set without the VDB. How many people are collecting half dollars for so few to trade hands? There are no old collections, no BU rolls and WYSIWYG applies.

If it weren't so well struck I wouldn't give it a second look.

Here's a really nice coin from Herndon's site; https://www.collectorscorner.com/Products/Item.aspx?id=65660796 Believe it or not it's the best strike I've ever seen for the date! As a buyer I'd be a little concerned about the hazing on the reverse but many collectors are not. It's a very remarkable coin though they also come cleaner than this. It's one of the few high grade coins I've seen of the date that's not blatantly overgraded and is positively among the finest. It looks a lot like a mint set coins but it can not be, of course.