Brief Historical Review Of The Origin Of Coin Collecting and Coin Collecting Value. - By: Theo Steward

Experts can't agree when exactly coin collecting started. Evidence suggests that the first proof of coin exchange that can be proven, dates back as far as 1100 B.C. Human communities never failed to exchange necessities, driving commerce between countries through the ages.

As commerce became more generalized and wares started coming from further away, a mutual transaction benchmark had to be found for the payment of bills. Soon exchanges happened with painstakingly measured precious metals like gold or silver. A couple of enormous benefits soon appeared: thanks to benchmarking, crooks could not operate any longer and commerce was facilitated because of this.

Numismatics could be described as the ongoing honing of the ability of evaluating the real market value of coins. Julius Ceasar was known to pay more for no longer in circulation coins than what was considered their actual accepted face value. So, Numismatics refers to the true worth of a coin that was minted for use as official money, whereas coin collecting refers to the hobby.

A good numismatics example concerns the run in the seventies in the Swiss Alps on all mint produced before 1968. Swiss coins circulated before this time contained such a large amount of high grade silver, that by the time world market price for this precious metal attained peak heights, it was more intelligent to melt the coins for their precious metal content, turning a pretty interesting margin in the process, than to keep them or continue paying with them. Melting official currency was against the law, naturally, yet it happened nonetheless, alas, vast amounts of ancient Swiss coins vanished this way.

This historic fact had two consequences pertinent to coin collectors the world over: The Swiss government quickly decided to halt the production high precious metal grade coins and all coins minted before 1968 suddenly were scarse, which put more worth to those that had survived.

What it boils down to, having knowledge of the history of coins has a direct relation to coin collecting value and the numismatist's fine tuned sense of the market worth, or true market price of a coin. Not knowing this history will decrease his ability to identify true opportunities.

Experts can't agree when exactly coin collecting started. Evidence suggests that the first proof of coin exchange that can be proven, dates back as far as 1100 B.C.. Human communities never failed to exchange necessities, driving commerce between countries through the ages.

Theo Steward is a numismatics expert. For more great articles on coin collection values be sure to visit I Love Numis.