As someone who has dealt in raw metal, let me tell you what a pain in the ass it is to deal with.
But when you are dealing with governemt issued ingots of copper( such as pre 1982 pennies ) or government minted silver ingots( such as pre 1964 quarters ) its not an issue- they are accepted for what they are, as is.
Check eBay, where you will find a lively market in such items.
Curious question. What metals were you dealing in? The boring ones (gold, silver), or the more interesting stuff (gallium, rhodiumâŚ)? Just for money, or for technology purposes?
âŚummm, wouldnât be the proper term âbullion coinsâ instead of âingotsâ? Just wondering, metals market being out of my depth.
We donât have to mint any pennies at all. Almost everyone hates them and theyâre more of a wasteful nuisance than a useful form of currency. We phased out the half-cent coin in 1857 when it still had 14 times the buying power a penny did in 2014.
Aside from some some spirited lobbying from the zinc industry (yes, Big Zinc is really a thing) I honestly donât see who is fighting to keep these damn things around. When was the last time you wanted to buy something worth less than a nickel?
I was dealing in raw gold ingots. Naturally people want an assay, but unless you are dealing in scale the cost of an assay is an âalligator propositionâ ( i.e. it eats all of your profit )
Hmmmm. in the interest of clarity let me get an academic definition of âbullionâ
âŚ
From Le Wiki: Bullion traditionally stands for gold bars, silver bars, other precious metals bars or ingots.. So yea, bullion coins sounds fine to me.
Pre 1964 quarters are not pure silver but the silver content is well known and consistent. This makes them ( mostly ) fungible as trade items- market prices are consistent with the value of their content.
Thereâs a good chance that some of those pennies are rare, valuable ones. It would be an awful pain to locate them, though!
Two webcams (one for each side), OpenCV, and some lego contraption. Thatâs the direction Iâd suggest going. With 81,600 coins it may take shorter time to build the sorting device, write the software, and run it than to do it manually.
Nice. I am thinking about getting myself a gram or two, as investment gold is untaxed (and therefore cheaper) and does not differ from any other kind of gold in its ability to get dissolved and used for gold plating.
How is the assay done typically? X-ray fluorescence spectrum (gets only the surface, though)? Or a deep drill into the barâs core (which can find the tungsten-stuffed ones)? Or a combination of XRF (for surface) and ultrasound (for finding the presence of absence of the gold-tungsten boundary or detecting other nonhomogenities)?
He and some friends with a cool vw van sold a crazy Doctor in CA some uranium.
That long ago? The UK didnât get rid of 1/2p coins until 1984. Mind, we didnât even decimalize our money until 1971âŚ
I heard it was Plutonium, and it was actually more of a barter than a cash sale. Something involving a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts.
âSomeâ uranium is a rather wide designation. Natural, depleted, enriched (and to which degree), or something special (uranium-233 for example)? How pure metal, what impurities?
âSomeâ uranium. âSomeâ uranium! People and their usual accuracy!
[ducks and covers]
âŚof course the same applies to plutonium as well. And to other metals too, though there it is usually sans the isotopic composition. But not always, see e.g. depleted boron or depleted zincâŚ
Pedant.
The fainting couch is to the left, just past the vomitorium
But he turned them in
it would explain the aborted trip to baja in a VW vanâŚ
Hey, I just work here. People asked for certificates and rather than go thru the pain I sold at a discount.
You people crack me up. 
Itâs turtles all the way down, man!
âŚfor me, I think my wince with the article isnât that its ânewsworthy,â itâs the tone of âyour fatherly advice to always save your pennies pays off, just listen to your elders!â when in fact it is horrible advice to follow and youâll need a whole lot more than fatherly wisdom here. But then, thatâs probably giving a puffy human interest piece more credit for villainy than it probably warrants. Some editor somewhere was just like, âcute,â so bam, here it is.
Boing Boing reader Scratchee considers carrying on the joke but decides not to.
I spent some time on a U.S. military base in Asia, and they didnât use pennies in any of the base stores or facilities. Apparently nobody spends them in the store, they only take them away as change, so they had to fly in a continuous supply of pennies. At some point they just started rounding to the nearest nickel, and everyone was happy.
Right, thatâs also the way most countries do it when inflation gets to the point where the lowest denomination is no longer worthwhile. Thereâs just something so satisfying about getting a handful of change after a transaction and knowing that each and every one of those coins could be used in a parking meter or vending machine.
Iâm not an expert and itâs late, but I believe taxes on gold are the same as any other investment. If you sell for a profit, you pay tax on the profit. As a friend of mine once explained, you could sell an ordinary $10 bill for $12, and you still have to pay taxes on the two dollars.
I do think the tax code differentiates between bullion and a collectible item like a coin or piece of antique jewelry, and that may lead to a misperception that gold gets special treatment in taxes.
Disclaimer: Iâm wrong about 40% of the time in real life and about 75% of the time on the internets, so a person would be a damn fool to act on my say-so.
UPDATE: After a bit of research, it appears that gold is taxed at a capital gains rate equal to the taxpayerâs income rate, up to a maximum of 28% (normal capital gains are capped at 15%, but they kindly raised the cap to 28% for gold and similar).
Yes, but the issue here is the VAT (aka Value Added Tax, aka maybe sales tax, aka various other names). Profit tax does not exactly apply when the investment-grade material is turned into engineering-grade material that would be VAT-covered.
(Insert here a grumble about cyanide not being off-the-shelf material, and longing for the days when it was, because the organic chelating agents for metal-plating are crap.)
