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$ coins

2021-12-20

As a kid I was pretty obsessed with dollar and half-dollar coins. I don't really know why, maybe just because no one uses them and they were usually gold-colored so they were rare and fancy. The “tooth fairy” gave me a few fancy actual silver coins, and the only other place I knew of to get them was at light rail ticket kiosks, so any time I would take the train to downtown or something I'd feed in like 3x the ticket price just so I'd get the change back in dollar coins. Yes, I know you could just do that at a bank but whatever I was like 11.

At any rate, I just rediscovered my stash of them and after making use of Wikipedia to determine what types they were, here's what I have:

1 silver Eisenhower dollar
2 nickel Eisenhower dollars
9 Sacagawea dollars
18 presidential dollars
5 Susan B. Anthony dollars
3 silver Kennedy half-dollars
1 nickel Kennedy half-dollar

(worth $39 total at face value)

Here's a shitty picture of the stash:

From left-to-right top-to-bottom: Eisenhower silver dollar, nickel Eisenhower dollars, silver Kennedy half-dollars, nickel Kennedy half-dollar, Sacagawea dollars, various presidential dollars from George Washington–James Monroe, Susan B. Anthony dollars, various presidential dollars from John Q. Adams–James Garfield

The silver coins are particularly interesting to me so I went and computed how much silver they had.

Eisenhower silver dollars:

380 gr × 0.40 silver composition = 152 gr ≈ 9.85 g of silver

The silver composition is the aggregate throughout the whole coin, but in reality the plating and core compositions are different. And also yes they used “grains” as the weight of the coins because of course they did, it's the U.S. we ain't using no shitty grams.

Kennedy half-dollars:

12.50 g × 0.90 silver composition = 11.25 g of silver

So I have in total:

(1 × 152 gr) + (3 × 11.25 g) ≈ 43.60 g of silver

With silver being worth $0.72/g as of this writing, that means I have ~$31.39 worth of silver in coins that have a $2.50 face value. If I used them directly I'd have a few candy bars and if I melted them down I'd get a good lunch in downtown Denver 🤔. Also apparently an uncirculated Eisenhower silver dollar like I have is actually worth $20–$30 and a circulated Kennedy silver half-dollar is worth ~$10 so it'd be even better if I just sold them.

I think I'm just gonna keep them though. Sure they're worth money, but it's not a massive amount of money. The brass coins are just neat and unique amongst American coins and it's more fun to have real silver coins then to have a few $10 bills. Plus the Eisenhower dollars have the dope-ass Apollo 11 insignia on the back which is great. (also isn't it weird that it's the Eisenhower coins and not the Kennedy coins that have the moon landing imagery on them?)

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