Archie, well said. What other hobby other than coin collecting can you collect with the possiblity of the strike going over what you paid for it. Say silver hits 25.00 an ounce in the next few years which is entirely possible with the trillions being spent by our government, you would have a collectible that would be in the 15.00 range. Having been a coin collector for longer than I can remember and having a shop here in Green Bay (which I sold) I have met many great coin dealers over the years. Some try and sell the strikes when they come into the store but some just send them off for melting. Now if 700 strikes come into a dealer and they pay $7.50 for them the dealer has a choice. He can try and sell them for 10.00 or he can melt them for say 9.25. Any way he comes out of the deal making about 1.75 or 875.00. So he decides to melt them. If this is happening all over the country then what happens to the value of common strikes. My opinion is you will have to pay more because they will be harder and harder to find. Also the rare ones will get melted also. When that happens the rarer strikes should go up in value if the collector base stays the same or even more collectors decide that this is a great way to collect something that actually has precious metal value. Take the $7.00 strikes. What a great collectible. With silver at 16.00 the silver value is about $10.40. These are going to get harder and harder to find because I think a lot of them are going to be melted by dealers. I try to buy all of these that I can from my dealer friends but I just can't seem to get more than 4 or 5 at a time and I pay silver value rather than have them sent to the smelter.

Please remember that my wife Sharon is a collector and also a seller of the ones she does not want. Lovemysasha on Ebay. We have a lot of fun doing this and hope over the years we have helped other collectors build their collections. She keeps me busy scanning the strikes and now chips. It has been a great hobby for her and she continues to love these silver strikes. For me I love all coins and trains and the Packers and Brett Favre. Ted and Sharon Pamperin SS171