Topic: Pre-1982 (copper) pennies. (Read 3348 times)

Well, I still have 60 years of lifetime left, at least... I think it's plausible.

In the next five to ten years? The odds are zero, if not infinitesimally small.

I don't think much technology is needed to travel to an asteroid with a propulsion vehicle, attach it, and direct an asteroid to our moon to be mined. The time and money required, however, would be astronomical. (punny)
Time and money that no single corporation upstart could ever get, ever.

I highly doubt that they'll be mining copper from asteroids in our lifetimes.

It's not the copper content, it's the fact that if someone wants to take all my pennies across the border [you can carry 1 million pennies on you legally (~6300 lbs of copper)] and melt them down, they can't melt the CAD pennies. They can melt the American pennies for the copper content, but not the CAD pennies. Same in America, if you have a bunch of copper CAD pennies, you can melt them in America, but not American pennies.


(Text as of 2/19/02) 18 U.S.C. §331:
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled or lightened - shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. (Emphasis added.)


It says bringing coins INTO the United State to be mutilated, not exporting them.
So, you can't bring me a ton of Canadian pennies

Every time I feel the desire to buy some rare earth bullion, I realize that with all the news about mining asteroids, that at some point, we are probably going to do it, and when we do, all metals prices will go down. ESPECIALLY over-inflated precious metals, and not so especially ones with heavy industrial applications.

On a side note, what if everyone decided to cash out their savings into pennies at banks? Would that make copper pennies worth a sizable amount more than they are now, as scrap?

I still can't tell if I'm even contributing to this thread... 

Bluefirecorp, any relation to BlueCorp/ReallBlue?

Dude, check this out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC8ABm2Tz5c&feature=related
Doesn't look like to much effort to mock up with household materials.

None of this metal speculation/value will hold very well when we finally learn how to...

MINE ASTEROIDS.

Im in Canada, and pennies up to '96 are 98% i think. Got boxes of it in my room.

Yes and no. Have to manually feed it..so a bit slow.

Also, it doesn't separate out CAD pennies..which would be illegal to melt down in Canada.

Actually, you could design and build an extremely capable sorter on the cheap. I would recommend a system that you can fill a hopper with coins, and then it spreads them on a slow and wide conveyor belt. Then, use an extremely high resolution camera and some custom image recognition software to sort them; for those that are showing tails, use a robotic arm to flip them over, and another camera to confirm the data from the first one and read the flipped coins. Finally, use a second robotic arm to pick coins and dump them into sorted moneybags.

The problems with this approach are twofold; you must create or buy the image recognition software, which would be extremely difficult, expensive, or both; and you must also be able to create robot arms that are extremely precise without being too expensive. I would estimate that a reputable robot builder such as GE/FANUC would want to charge you between $50k-$100k just to design and build the hardware (cost numbers extracted from my ass).

Another option would be a high-speed serial sorting system; this would mean that you would have to find out a way to feed coins into a slot one at a time very quickly, and again use extremely high speed cameras and image recognition software to read the dates and other properties of the coins. You would need a camera on either side of the slot, and some way of sorting the output. Output sorting could be achieved with a rotating arrangement of receiving funnels that each go to a different moneybag. Use your imagination.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130479399867#ht_2015wt_1270

I wanted one as I have about $250 worth of pennies in my room. A tad expensive though.