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Update: a coin dealer in Toledo told me 90% silver halves are the most melted-down US coin, and now I see the take everywhere
I collect junk silver and a dealer on Monroe Street mentioned that about 90% of the pre-1965 half dollars ever minted have been melted. I looked it up after and found melt estimates in that same range, which surprised me since you still see them at every coin show. Now I keep running into takes online where people swear the supply is huge and prices will crash. One side says melting keeps the supply low so the coins hold value. The other side says the mintage numbers are so big that melting barely matters. Which one is the real bad take here? I want to know what the actual melt data looks like, not just what a guy behind a counter tells me.
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murray.robert10d ago
The melt numbers get thrown around like they answer the question, but they don't, because melting is not fixed and it moves with the price of silver. Look at what happened in 1980 when the Hunt brothers ran silver up near $50. People pulled jars out of closets and sent them to the smelter by the truckload, and the halves that survived that run are the ones sitting in dealer cases today. So the "90% melted" figure is really a snapshot of past price spikes, not a permanent floor. If silver doubles again, another chunk disappears, and if it sits flat for twenty years, almost nothing gets melted. The real bad take is treating melt data like a fixed supply number when it is really a price signal. That is why both camps can point at the same data and feel right.
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