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