I personally think the golden age for premiums on physical bitcoins is over.
Holders will keep their ask prices steady because they don't want to write up a loss, but you're fucking bananas if you think, e.g., that anyone is going to pay 16 btc for a 10 these days. Seriously, a $24,000 premium for a privately minted round? Get outta here. The only people with that amount of coin to burn are old hodlers, and they've already finished their collecting.
At least the folks who bought 0.5s/1.0s/25s paid a smallish premium. Even the 5s weren't *too* bad, although you'd be looking at a loss of at least 1 or 2 btc selling them today. Can't imagine being stuck with a bunch of 10s.
There's two schools of thought I see around here when it comes to premiums. Please correct me if you disagree. We have the collectors who spend $ on
BTC to support their collecting habits and we have the 1btc = 1btc crowd. There's some crossover but these are our two main groups.
How this affects premiums is that you have what I call $ thinkers and then
BTC thinkers and they think about premiums in this sense. I am a $ thinker because a lot of what I purchased, I purchased with $ and immediately sent the
BTC to the seller. When I look at premiums today, I see the same premiums but lower
BTC. In some cases the premium is higher and others it is lower. A good example is an MS70 .1 Casascius I purchased for 3
BTC. I think I spent less than $1k on the bitcoin to buy it. Would I have more money now if I kept the bitcoin? Sure, but I wouldn't have my collection and I did buy and hold bitcoin too. I'm sure I will get more fiat value when I sell it and in the mean time I've got the shiny.