Thanks Peter and Pam, you are both saying that as long as the hobby is fun, it will survive and serve us all well. I hope that is exactly what happens.

This is my own personal"ideal scenario" for the future of this hobby:
The hobby grows slowly, steadily and evenly. The casinos don't rush out to grab as much money as they can by manipulating us in our own hobby. They do what they do, without looking at what we do. They put out a steady stream of silver strikes and change them often enough to keep it interesting for us but slowly enough to where we can all get them without creating deliberate frustration for us (driving collectors away). The collecting communitee comfortably grows to 4000 or 40,000 - but it GROWS because we are enjoying each other and trading vigorously and having lots of fun without being gouged for larger and larger sums of money. And this hobby continues to attract genuinely nice people as it has in the past.

Twenty years from now, each one of us can look at our collections and the hobby we had so much fun with and say "it was well worth it". But lets also face the fact that twenty years from now we will look at the tens of thousands of dollars that we have put into having fun and most of us would like to not see that money as a total waste. Therefore, twenty years from now I would like to see a small fraction of each of our collections go up in value to where we can sell off a selection of our very best strikes and it will reimburse us for the money we spent over the years.

I simply don't want to see money go to waste. In twenty years the casinos will have made a lot of money, I think that it is only fitting that in twenty years the collectors should be able to make some of their money back since they supported the casino industry faithfully for twenty years.

Quite honestly, I question whether my perfect scenario can come about because the casino industry does not look at our hobby for longevity, but only for what they can get from us today and I question whether some of their tactics (along with the so called "dealers" tactics) aren't destructive to the long term health of this as a collecting hobby. It appears as if Strikes are artificially higher at the very beginning and then come down in value as many more people are choosing not to chase them - I'm not sure how to extrapolate and interpret this over the long run, but it doesn't bode well for my optimal scenario.

My Own Personal Perspective,
Avram