I just read an interesting article in CoinWorld about a venture the Canadian Gov't has going with CoinStar. They are taking the coins from the coinstars and selecting out the old alloys and melting them. It appears that they're making a decent profit on this activity. I think that in 100 years there will be big holes for the beginning collectors because of this. Similar to what happened in the US with large cents being turned in in the mid 1800s and melted for the copper. It has drastically reduced the availability of what should be rather common dates.

This also leads me to wonder about a few other things:

1) How many US coins are being caught in this process?
2) Is the Canadian Gov't actually going after US coins to melt? Most of the coinage, even current stuff matches the melt criteria they have established.
3) Will the US Gov't take up a similar campaign once the alloys in all of the modern coinage are changed?

This looks like the bottomless pit of coin destruction. (The are melting copper/nickel coins as well as copper and nickel and silver)

Actually older Canadian coinage is worth more than USA coins, because it has more nickel than copper. For instance the older pre 1982 5¢ coins are worth 14¢ in melt value now. This is what they are after. The US 5¢ coin is worth only 10¢.

I still find 20-25% of the nickels I get are the pre-1982 nickels. The ones that I find hard to get are pre-1960.

Interesting. Haven't heard anything besides this myself, so I can't really comment. Not too suprised, though it is unusual.