Industrial Gold, Silver

[Number1gun]

Ok Gold and Silver experts. Explain please. Having nothing to do with buying or not. I see a lot of " not intended for investing " attached to industrial Gold and Silver. I understand the reasoning behind having assayed bars or known coins due to counterfeiting.
Is not..Gold, Gold and Silver, Silver. If the goal is to have some of ..? On hand that collects dust until SHTF. Would not beads, flakes or shot be better as it is easier to portion out. I also see no reason to pay a premium just to have a coin with no numismatic value what so ever. Thanks for the imput.

 

[dewey]

I agree, I've never paid a premium for a coin that wasn't graded 66/67 or better.

I was going to add a guess at the "not intended for investing".
Perhaps as they have a fair amount of other metals of enough content to make it difficult to place a percentage of gold or silver, thus a firm market value. W.A. Guess !

 

[jlrhiner]

Purely a lay mans perspective, but if I'm going to invest in precious metals, theyre going to be registered, authenticated, proofed, serialized, blessed....you get the picture. A sack of gold electrical connectors probably still has a way to go to be at top value. Alloy wise, and credibility wise.

 

[Number1gun]

Although I would be investing money in it. I am not looking at it as an Investment. I do not think if SHTF in a big way Gold or Sliver will have any value anyway. Food, water, arms, ammo and land will be worth much more. I only believe Gold or Silver will be super valuable in the transition stages. Just a small hedge to maybe give you an option. No crystal ball here.

 

[rburg]

My views are distorted by my mental incompetence, alcohol damage, and just general disagreeable personality. It comes back to "who do you trust" or "who can you trust". At the December Louisville gun show I was shown a pair of silver dollars. Very nice condition but with some minor oxidation, and it was the proper black color. I handled them for a minute and kind of thought they were a little light, but then I don't handle silver dollars every day. The owner of them then picked them up off the table with a magnet. Either nicely done fakes or he's invented a silver magnet.

We don't even know what we think we know. In my family and probably illegally hoarded were some gold coins. Of course my brother got the double eagle. I was relegated to last place with a couple of very nice $1 gold dollars. Barely flakes of gold, but they'd been in my family since the 1920s and I'm firmly convinced they're the real McCoy.

But the gold "experts" have suggested that they're fakes because China has mastered the art of making copies. And the way they tell copies has to do with the printing and spacing on the coins. OK, mine are fakes from the 1920s then.

And a Politician friend has told me not to trust the "sterling" stamped on silverware and other dinner pieces. He says those are being faked, too. And I may or may not be able to tell. But I do know the Brits would hang people regularly for attempting to counterfeit objects by stamping "sterling" on them.

Industrial silver or gold needs to be assayed to determine the purity. Buying an item someone you don't know tells you its pure or some other measure is pretty foolish. I watched a guy take a bunch of electrical contactors apart for the silver inside. A fair amount of work for some small pieces of silver. He was proud of himself both because of his knowledge and his ability to find scrap inside junk. My feeling at the time was amusement because with his ability, he could probably find an honest job and just buy silver.

I have a friend who is a retired jeweler. He likes to buy scrap jewelry and either resell it or dump it off to others as scrap. Buy low, sell higher. You mostly can tell gold by the weight or specific gravity. If it comes up high, you can pretty much be assured its gold, platinum, or the poor cousin, tungsten.

Buying silver you can do pretty well purchasing sterling flatware. That's the stuff your wife wanted so badly 45 years ago. With any experience you can pretty much tell the real thing because of the quality of manufacture. After a while you can even identify the maker and pattern. With luck you can buy it low, like the gold and silver buying retail stores. Sterling is 92.5% silver or better. Some is higher, like 950 or lower, like 800 marked European pieces. Take along a calculator and a small scale. And a smart phone to access kitco.com for the most current spot prices.

 

[Mike7.62]

Number1gun,
Industrial forms of precious metals are just that, intended for industrial use. You might get someone to accept it in trade after an assay and weighing, but that takes time, knowledge, and money to accomplish correctly, and decreases the liquidity of the item. The reason that assayed bars, officially minted coins, or commercially minted rounds are more accepted is because of their known quantity and quality, thus providing easily traded real money when the paper Federal Reserve Notes that we euphemistically call money become increasingly worthless.

As to the utility of PM's during a SHTF situation, the reason that one has them is to facilitate trade when barter is impractical. That is the whole reason that humans came up with the concept of money, in order to facilitate trade. Having a store of pre 1965 silver dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars will be the best form for everyday trade, with gold being more for large purchases and wealth preservation. This is not to say that one should not have other supplies mentioned in other posts such as food, ammunition etc. available for use and trade via barter, but unless you and the person with whom you're trading need what the other has for trade, you can't make a deal. That's where PM's shine-no pun intended, by being something that both parties recognize as having value, and that can be also recognized by other parties as having value to facilitate future trades.

In the current day the banks have degraded the concept of money to be debt and credit piled on more debt and credit, and easily debased and manipulated to the detriment of the public. Commodity money in the form of gold and silver are the real deal, and will take the place of the paper paradigm in the very near future. The last days of the paper system are upon us, and having metals will be essential to preserving purchasing power. 6000 years of history is very hard to ignore, and one does so at his peril.