Silver is beautiful, rare, and useful. It makes some of the best coinage we humans have ever minted.
The 2018 half-troy-ounce 9999 silver $2 polar bear coin, from the Royal Canadian Mint.
This is worth 2 Canadian Dollars.... whatever those are. I'd rather have this half ounce of silver!
Now there is a $2 coin I'll gladly spend. This 'twonie' has little-to-no metal value. Gresham's Law comes to mind.
Go back to 1960, when my parents were young and cool. They were spending coins like this one. 50 cents would have bought a bag of groceries, a lunch, or a shirt.
The queen (curse her and her wicked family) wasn't looking as nasty back then. For that and many other reasons, I sometimes fantasize about going back in time to the '60s. I'm glad to not be 20 years older than I am right now, but I do feel like I missed out on that decade.
The centennial wolf 50c piece. He's probably howling because he's upset Canada took silver out of coinage after that.
That's the image of the queen (a plague upon her house) I remember on my childhood pocket change. Thick copper pennies, dull gray real-nickel nickels, and other coins of nickel or silver. It wasn't until well into the 1980s that most of the silver coins had been pulled out of circulation, and you still found them occasionally in the 90s. It's a rare day to see 'junk silver' now, except in coin collections and PM stacks. In fact, most coinage of all kinds is disappearing from society rapidly at this very moment.
Many of us have paid with metal for the last time.
Back when reeding (serrated edges) mattered. Once the metal in coins became nearly worthless (as with modern steel coins), the incentive to clip/shave edges of coins plunged. Nowadays, they put reeding on coin edges for tradition alone.
Now that's a real dollar if I ever saw one. 1/3 ounce of silver, heavy and thick, demonstrating the value of a dollar. When your dollars were real, it didn't take as many to buy things. That dollar used to buy a week's groceries.
Lately I've picked up a few coins via really good deals on price dips, and a birthday present. I enjoy photographing them and sharing their aesthetic value.
LIBERTY - A word you don't hear much of nowadays, especially from government.
My 2020 monetary reality:
They don't even want physical currency of any kind, anymore. "Not using cash will be better for all of us." Gross... a Canadian fast food chain begging for complete monetary tyranny. They are fully on board the Statism train headed for Fascismville.
Even 2 coins is the beginning of a stack. Precious metals have intrinsic value, which is value contained within them, granted to them by their rarity and usefulness, not decreed by some government or institution. Silver - and gold - present real, sound money with 5000+ years of uninterrupted use, the best known savings and store of value.
Yes, silver is a lot more than great coins, but that's a topic for another time ;)
Keep on stacking,
DRutter
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I have a plastic bank shaped like a Coca-Cola bottle where all my change goes at the end of the day. I'm careful to hold back pre-1982 US pennies for the copper, but realize that my wife and family aren't as careful. So, when the bottle became full two weeks ago, I was counting up the coins and putting them in tubes to take to the bank. I examined each penny's date and found quite a few that then fell victim to Gresham's Law. Imagine my surprise though, when I spotted a quarter that looked different. Sure enough, it was a 1944 US quarter...90% silver! I can't believe they still show up in change.
Nice find!
I kind of wonder if silver dimes and quarters still end up in circulation because somebody accidentally (or maybe out of desperation) spent them. Accidents can happen. Maybe a child grabs some change from their parents' nightstand, not realizing the jar was for silver coins set aside, and spends them on candy. Or maybe somebody like yourself was going through a big collection of old change (like REALLY old), and didn't notice the silver when they rolled them up or spent them. But all in all, silver is indeed very rare in our currency nowadays! Imagine a child getting a silver coin as change, and asking the question "why was our money once made from precious metals?" If there are still curious children in the world, a silver coin might spark an awakening. I know that I'm much wiser for having studied precious metals, the history of money, and so on.
EDIT to say that I remember helping my grandmother clean out some old drawers and cabinets before she died in 2016. We found some old cough drop tins filled with coins. We also found an old piggy bank that had been raided at some point, but wasn't completely barren. We didn't find anything older than the early 70s! Much of the coins were from the 50s and 60s, a few even older. It was pretty much just as somebody had left it, at least a generation ago. She told me to keep it all, so I added it to my collection of copper and nickel. It's heavy when time comes to move house, but I'm happy to have it. In the piggy bank was also a really old $2 bill (we switched to $2 coins in 1996) from the 60s. To her it was nothing, maybe ten bucks in loose change. To me it seemed like a treasure trove, haha! All that history, and lots of copper, nickel, and a bit of silver :)
I’ve thought the same thing. I could see kids stealing change, not realizing it’s silver.
I remember helping my grandmother clean out some old drawers and cabinets before she died in 2016. We found some old cough drop tins filled with coins. We also found an old piggy bank that had been raided at some point, but wasn't completely barren. We didn't find anything older than the early 70s! Much of the coins were from the 50s and 60s, a few even older. It was pretty much just as somebody had left it, at least a generation ago. She told me to keep it all, so I added it to my collection of copper and nickel. It's heavy when time comes to move house, but I'm happy to have it. In the piggy bank was also a really old $2 bill (we switched to $2 coins in 1996) from the 60s. To her it was nothing, maybe ten bucks in loose change. To me it seemed like a treasure trove, haha! All that history, and lots of copper, nickel, and a bit of silver :)
I once heard about a man who bought a can of paint from a yard sale. There were two cans to choose from, one heavier than the other. He bought the heavier can thinking it contained more paint. When he opened the can at home, he found that it was filled with coins. What do you think the lighter can was filled with?
If this is a real story you heard, then my assumption is the man (and you) hasn't heard what is in the can of paint he didn't buy.
But if this is just a joke and not based on real events, then I'm going to guess the other can was filled with either cash or paint. : P
No one knows. I’ve always assumed it was cash though.
The eagle, wolf, and polar bear all make very nice coins! The queen isn't such an attractive animal to put on a coin...especially the one that seems to get more evil with time mwahahah
Flip a coin! Tails: it's an animal. Heads: it's a monster
The process of money becoming currency.
They had to do it over at least a couple generations. Doing so all at once would have triggered the people's righteous wrath. But they dumbed us down, ran heavy propaganda, conducted social engineering, stretched out the con over decades, and got their agenda met one way or another. We're so close to the cashless world they've dreamed of for more than a century they can almost taste it. These creeps (probably the grandkids of the ones who started it all) are about to inherit the entire world economy. Well, that's their plan, anyway. It's not over yet!
It was nice to see the price of gold and silver hold stable today.... when cryptos and the stock market crashed!
Gold hovering just under $2000 without a major pullback is bullish. And silver is going to slingshot higher when gold makes another move up.