It doesn’t really matter, but I had a discussion recently with a friend who does YouTube videos. He collects coins primarily, although he also collects some stamps and we were talking about our individual interests. I knew it would cause consternation, but I said it anyhow.

I’m really not impressed with the way a lot of people collect coins.

Now it wasn’t meant to cause problems, I had a very specific point in mind and I wanted to take a minute to explain. I have collected coins in the past and I admit I fell into this because I didn’t have a very good handle on why I was collecting. For stamps, I know. The stamps I collect are intended to move the mails, or, for revenues and the like, to pay fees. Regardless, there is a reason for them to exist beyond “stick it in an album”.

For coins, that’s not necessarily the case. Even if the coins are technically legal tender, a lot of coins that come out of the mints, worldwide, they’re all “not intended for circulation”. In other words, they exist solely to feed the coin collector’s desire for coins. I don’t buy into that.

See, at least in the U.S., the post office only releases stamps that are intended to be stuck on enevelopes and sent through the mail. They don’t have “collector stamps”. They don’t make things that you can’t buy at the post office. They could issue special packaging for publicly-accessible stamps, but they don’t make “not intended for circulation” stamps.

Mints do. In fact, in some countries, there are more NIFC coins minted, by a fair margin, than actually released into the wild. They don’t serve any legitimate monetary purpose. The closest philatelic equivalent would be wallpaper stamps or “Dunes”, which were not legally released by governments for the purpose of moving the mails, they were made specifically to make money off of collectors. In stamp collecting, such things are frowned upon. It’s too bad that the same isn’t true in numismatic circles.

There’s one coin YouTube channel that I watch on occasion, just because it’s kind of cathartic to see them flipping through coins, but it’s based in England and he spends his entire time talking about all of the coins that were never issued into public use. They exist only so that fanatical collectors can pay vastly inflated prices for what essentially amounts to random pictures on discs of metal. Sure, in theory, you can break them out and use them, but considering you probably paid 20x face value for the privilege, you’d be an idiot to do so. It reminds me a lot of the old gold-foil stamp replicas that came out in the 80s. They sold for a bunch of money and are now effectively worthless, especially if you had your name and address printed on them. The gold used was a few atoms thick and basically insignificant and now, people struggle to move them at 10% of their original cost. What’s the point?

Granted, people can collect whatever they want, however they want, but for me at least, there has to be a reason for it all. Are you collecting colorful stickers or slabs of metal, or do you have a purpose in mind? How do you get from your purpose to what you’re actively pursing? It’s why I don’t collect cancelled-to-order crap, except where it fits in with a topical collection and I wouldn’t collect coins that had no immediate monetary intent, if I did at all.

I was going through our coins a couple of weeks ago, putting them into Numista, just to see what we had and there’s a lot of it that’s just NIFC crap. It’s worth spot value, whatever gold or silver they minted it out of, but monetarily, it’s completely empty.  I’ve got a couple of thousand dollars worth of gold and silver, but numismatically, it’s worthless. It’s not a collection, it’s an investment and I’m a collector, not an investor. That’s why I’d never do that again. If I ever got into coins again, which I don’t have any interest in, it would only be coins that were issued to be used as money. I might get brilliant uncirculated versions, I tend to like things that are mint-fresh, but I’d never touch anything that was just made to make a buck off of collectors.

You can do what you like, of course, more power to you, but for me, I can’t imagine ever wanting to do that. No one yet has been able to justify it to me at all.