...wasted Hi All, serial lurker here. I have been buying junk silver coins since they were around $14/Troy Ounce. I don't know when that was, but I was also picking up Round 50 cents for $4 and buying silver from eBay for less than its spot price so it must have been a couple of years ago. I have only just found this forum but I have been making stacks of silver on my own for a while now, it is strangely calming. Other than stacking the silver I also like to clean some of the old coins, take the dirt of them, remove the built up grease and make them shine again. Before any numismatists write in, I only do this for junk coins, anything that looks like it may have some numismatic value gets left alone but when you are buying 450+ post 46 sixpences from a dealer you can be pretty sure that none of it has any numismatic value. Once I have sorted through the coins, and cleaned them up and grouped them in their years, and put them in the cardboard shoe box, that's it! All they do from then on is take up space, (and increase in value). They only increase in value as the cost of silver goes up though, being in a coin shape has no bearing on their worth. The only benefit to having them as coin is that they are instantly recognisable and the purity is guaranteed by the Australian Government. But they are no use and they take up space, and if I put them in a bank or buy a safe, they are actually costing me money, If I keep them at home I have the worry of burglary. The shoeboxes are half empty because if I fill them they are too heavy to lift and the sides collapse, the boxes can't be stacked or they collapse under their own weight, the cheap chipboard shelves they are stacked on are about to collapse as well. 26kg of silver coins is a liability, especially as 13kg of that is copper. So I had an idea, silver coins have many wonderful properties, they are metal, have anti bacterial properties, the whitest metal etc.etc. There could be many uses in which they actually become greater than the value of their silver content. For example, if we drill holes in the middle of the smaller coins we could use them as buttons, have them hanging up in the wardrobes instead of in a safe, spread the weight a bit. Forget your wallet? Just pull off a few buttons. I am sick of Kookaburras and American Eagles, they serve no purpose, if I want a picture of a bird I will get a photo of one, I have no need for paying premiums to have one stamped in a useless bit of metal which is only going to be melted down anyway once the spot price hits $50. The solution...Perth Mint Flatware. I know this is not exactly an original idea but a draw full of cutlery is a whole lot more useful than a draw full of old coins, the mint has the metal, they have the mint marks. Having seen how cheaply you can buy a set of cutlery in crazy clarks I am fairly sure that it is cheaper to design a fork than it is to pay an artist/scan a photo into an engraving machine, make a die and then stamp them out. Plus if you have friends around for dinner you can justify going out and buying more silver. The antibacterial properties for silver would come in handy here, apparently the saying "born with a silver spoon in their mouth" comes from the idea that rich babies, being spoonfed from a silver spoon (which killed off harmful bacteria) had less childhood diseases than poorer children, who presumably didn't get fed at all, which probably had more to do with it than the metal in the spoon. I think that "bar" or "round" as the only options is a reflection of the limited imagination of collectors and reflects a lack of demand for more useful items, at the very least they should make the bars 'cube' shaped so they would stack better, have you seen how much space is wasted using round shapes? Maybe making them Lego shaped would be pushing it a bit far but it would make them more fun to stack. I am sure there are many other more useful things that could be made out of silver, if we could make it into shoes I might even be able to convince my wife to buy a few kilos. Cheers
Nice, I believe that some old Byzantine coins were concave so that you could build stacks of them which were more stable than flat disks. I only have the one so I will never know!
