Where did all of the coins ever minted go?

relayer

So where are all of the coins minted that no longer circulate?

1) In the hands of collectors
2) Melted for their metal content
3) Made into jewerly
4) In coffee cans across America

Where else?

nolimitz

taken out of circ by the fed and destroyed?

Cladiator

dropped by their owners and now residing underground waiting for metal detectors to dig them up.

MrSpud

Ummm... In the bottom of wishing wells?

fivecents

I'll say 1 and 4 followed by 2.

stujoe

<< <i>dropped by their owners and now residing underground waiting for metal detectors to dig them up. >>



Or sitting at the bottom of the sea or other body of water.

TUMUSS

Under people's car seats.

Weiss

Ever swung a metal detector? Coins litter the ground you walk. Along every sidewalk, in every yard. An average park will have hundreds if not thousands. It's not uncommon for a weekend and holiday detectorist to find a thousand coins in a year. A dedicated detectorist can find five or ten thousand in a year.

MrEureka

Laura has them, of course.

GAT

There must be billions of Dollars at the bottom of the sea.

AJ2525

Quite a few get thrown away!

Case in point, years ago when recycling was a news item I remember a thing about a recycler in the New York city area who commented that adding a coin screen in their separator paid for itself because they were getting $30 worth of coins per day. That's coins that were mixed in with recyclables.

I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could guesstimate percentages of coins that the fed pulls from circulation and destroys. I bet a lot of the zinc coated cents can't take too much abuse before the fed pulls them out.

I've heard the expected lifespan of a coin is anywhere from 22 to 30 years. If that is the average, then does that mean that half of a certain mintage are "gone" by the 30 year point?

Any thoughts?

dorancoins

Do you really want to know...............

junk boxes at coin shows
landfills
buried in the ground (not on purpose)

You've already answered the rest!

Darkhorse

Simpletons, where do you think Santa Claus gets the money to pay for his polar operations? Think of the logistics of reindeer upkeep, elf wages, the damned heating bill must be astronomical.

TheRock

No not Santa Claus, the Tooth fairy.

ms70

It truly is amazing how many coins are just "out there". Laying in parking lots, lawns, etc. I must've found about $3 in mixed change around
my house with the metal detector. The house was built in the 50's.

Now think about all the existing homes built just in the '50's and figure each one probably has SOME change under the grass. That has to
be a huge sum of money!!

magikbilly

I think dealers have them . The exchange rate is terrible - I go in even with paper money - surely the equivalent of thousands of coins, and I leave with just 1 or 2 coins! some racket!

Billy

richbeat

All of the above!

CUEBALL

In couches!

Jdurg

Many have died in chemistry labs across the country. I remember dipping pennies in mercury, then having to dispose of them as 'toxic waste'. We'd also file off some of the copper plating of a penny and dissolve the zinc in acid, or we'd plate a penny with zinc and heat it until it became brass. In college I took about a dozen nickels and analyzed them for their metal content. (Prior to the lab, I didn't know the exact composition of the nickel). I was able to figure it out and had an accuracy of 99.95% according to the U.S. Mint, so that felt pretty neat.

Conder101

They are simply in change stashes all around the country. You would be surprised how easy it is to make the entire mintage that the US puts out each year disappear into these hoards. If each person loses or puts away in a change hoard an average of ONE coin per week, that totals 15.6 BILLION coins per year. So stash away a roll of lincoln cents on Jan 1st and you have consumed your entire allottment of coins for the year. Keep one roll of each of the state quarters and you have used up all the coins for eight people

If your typical person come home and tosses say on average five cents into a jar because he doesn't like to carry "pennies", in ten days he has stashed his share for the year. If he keeps it up all year he will have put away, in one year, his entire share of mint production for 36 YEARS! Obviously it such coin hoards are soaking up a TREMENDOUS quantity of coins. What I always wonder about is why we don't have a constant coin SHORTAGE.

itsnotjustme

In addition to all of the above, there are also some more destroyed, intentionally (torrch to a penny in the basement, hacksaw, acid) and unintentionally (fire).

Condor has an excellent point. Other than economic swings and slow population growth, the number of coins in circulation does not vary too much. The annual production will roughly equeal those that are disappearing from circulation in all these ways.

One note from Europe. When they changed to the Euro, boom all the coinage from 12 nations became obsolete. I read a news story about China heavily buying the demonetized coins for the metal content.

Just think, if everyone gathered all their coins (non-collector) from all around their house and returned them to circulation, stores would stop ordering rolls from banks, banks would stop ordering from the Federal Reserve (if not strat returning cents!), the Fed would stop ordering from the mint, the mint would slow production significantly, and we would get some modern rarities!

coynclecter

Most cents are in coffee cans etc across America.

Most pre64 silver coins were melted in the great silver melt of 1980

Most other coins were melted over time to make newer coins or jewelry etc.

A lot sits at the bottom of the oceans.


The rest are on Ebay

Dockwalliper

Sitting in CoinStar bins.

I've heard that Americans loose 1 million coins a day.

Some zinc cents rot away where the fall.

eyoung429

I went through about $19 in silver just driving from TN to CA. I was driving one of my 'Stangs and had a problem with the radiator......a pair of jumper cables and a stop every 200 miles or so and 4 coins....I was on my way......

Dang that was a fun roadtrip.......I miss the single life sometimes.

northcoin

Where else do you think the aliens get the metal for their spacecraft? Next time you check your pockets and wonder where the coins went just try and see if you can account for all 24 hours of the day. (This also explains the attacks on our bovine friends as the extraterrestials continue searching for the "cash cows" they have heard so much about on our airwaves. And crop circles are nothing more than oversized coin diagrams marking territory.)

1956Half

Russ' basement.

cladking

More than half a trillion coins have been made over the centuries. To get an idea of where
they all are it's best to think in terms of attrition. This wasting away of populations is dependent
upon the series, era, place of issue etc and can vary considerably. Some series will have very low
attrition due to high value and limited usage like the Morgan dollar and other series will be nearly
totally destroyed due to many years of use followed by melting or lack of collector interest.

Attritions primary tool of destruction is fire. Each year about 1% of buildings are destroyed by fire
and natural calamities and war will raise this number much higher. Flooding also has an insidious
effect on coin populations because it often displaces people and moves the coins to places where
they are irretrievable. Another huge factor in attrition is loss; coins simply are dropped or thrown
away. They are tossed in wishing wells and ponds for good luck. When Niagra Falls was shut down
years ago for repairs several truck loads of coins were removed. Loss would also include both inten-
tional and unintentional destruction of coins. Many of these do end up in the garbage stream when
fall off tables into waste cans or when they are taken up by a vacuum cleaner. Cars which go in for
recycling average more than ten coins each in them. When you consider that 10,000,000 cars are
produced annually you'll see this is not inconsequential.

Governments actually have destroyed relatively few precious metal coins over the years. The most
common exception is when coin in circulation has been worn so severely that it is recalled and re-
coined. There are numerous government melts of gold and silver coins but these account for a tiny
percentage of the billions of coins that have been destroyed. Most melts which dramatically affect
populations of specific coins have been only in recent years and affect only base metal coinage. The
fed separated out more than a hundred million steel cents and destroyed them. Many series of coins
from around the world that circulated since 1950 have been removed from circulation and destroyed.
The European coins from before the introduction of the Euro have been destroyed to make Chinese
refrigerators and Indian surgical instruments. Pallets of coin are added to heats of metal in furnaces
world wide to achieve the proper alloy.

There is also private melting and destruction. When the value of a coin's metal goes higher than its
face value it will very quickly begin being melted. At first it's just the easy pickings but as the differ-
ence increases the melting does also. By the same token the coins are used as makeshift "fuses" or
as a ready supply of metal for chemistry experiments. Many coins have been used as is for spacers
washers or for other similar uses in construction. They are sometimes modified for such uses.

All things disappear in time. It doesn't matter how ubiquitous or how they abound. As time moves
forward attrition will destroy them.

Prethen

I have over $300 in change sitting in a "piggy bank" in my house. Eventually, I feel it's worthwhile to get to the bank with it all. It weighs a "ton".

itsnotjustme

One more surprise location. Remove the front of your dryer then look into the compartment below the lint trap. I found several dollars upon opening one dryer!

carl

When the major road, Waacker Drive, in Chicago was recently reconstructed, one of the construction workers showed me a bag of coins he has found in the ground being dug up. Most of this was built in the 1920's so the coins he was finding were all prior to that. Possilbly many were dropped in what may have been the construction in the 20's or even left over from the big fire. 2 of them were gold, lots were Indian pennies, all were pretty poor condition being in the ground for all thoes years. They were also finding bottles, old wood, mysterious concrete blocks and lots of other items no one would show others. Just hid away til after quitting time. when we were kids we used to throw pennies into the Chicaago River. Hope none were valuable.