I have been here at steemit for a little more than a month and I know how difficult it is for beginners to understand the lingo of the community. I am not talking about names like bandwidth, Stax, witnesses, etc. I talk about rounds, bars, preppers, stackers, etc. Simple things for most of us but a little difficult to begginers in the art of loving precious metals.
Let's start with preppers. As the name indicate, we are people who are prepared to an incoming financial catastrophe. We don't believe in fiat money (dollars, euros, pounds, etc) and when things go south, we will have several packages in several places with all that we will need in a future society. Money, medicines, guns, ammo, oil, food, water, etc.
We will use junk money, also known as Constitutional Silver. These are coins minted by governments in the past with a high content of copper/silver/gold. As these coins are already known to the population, it will be easy to use them to buy what we will need.
You will recognize now what is junk or constitutional silver.
Now the name is stacker. We stackers don't believe in fiat money also, but we have our stacks of copper/silver/gold just as a security if something happens. Copper/silver/gold won't make us rich but they will prevent us to be poor. We usually stack bars or rounds of metal. Bars and rounds are minted by private mints and have a very little premium. Premium is the difference in price from what they are charging you and the spot price of the metal.
As I have no bars, I will show you some beautiful rounds. Remember that beauty is not important to a stacker. Copper/silver/gold are.
There is another category called semi-numismatic coins. To compete with the private mints some governments issue bullion coins. Some are very beautiful, some change the look every year, some are minted as a series, etc. People started to collect these bullion coins and created a kind of numismatic value for them. The premium of these coins is generally higher than the premium of the rounds.
I will show you three series from three different countries. The first is the Australian Koala series, the second is the Rwanda Nautical series and the third is the Chinese Panda series.
Finally, the numismatic coins. These coins were minted originally to circulate. Their premium can be thousands of times their bullion value. It depends on the number of similar coins that reached our time, on the level of conservation of this particular coin and on the number of persons that are interested in collecting this coin. Numismatics is a too large subject to be explained in a paragraph...
I will show you three representatives of my collections. The commemorative $.50 Oregon Trail is one of the most beautiful American coins (1936). The Greek stater from Corinth showing a helmeted head of Athena and Pegasus flying (350 BC) and the famous Morgan dollar minted in Carson City (1882).
Did you noticed how imprecise are the borders of the four categories ?
I belong to all of them...And you ?
I hope you have enjoyed this article. You have noticed that I love commemorative coins. Tomorrow we will talk about Euro commemoratives.
Thank you for reading and please comment, upvote, resteem and advise me.
