do you guys think the collecting coins here in 20 years will be more popular or less??? i dont see very many younger kids like me collecting coins. most kids now days dont care they just want to be cool and have a cell phone. what do you guys think?? to me its rare to talk to a collecter that was born after 1978. could this be good news for the new stray collecters as demand will go down?

dustin

Uggh, I don't know. The SQs were a boost but by now the themed-coin fad has passed. I think I also see a dip in numismatics' popularity in the future... especially with all these iPhones and XBox 360's and junk. Coins are low tech.

When I was young I knew no other young person who collected much of anything that would increase in value.
I started out by 'saving' my steel pennies and all the Canadian coins I could get my hands on. Eventually, when I got to be a teenager, I turned in my steel pennies for dollars, and the Canadian coins for their extra value.
At the time it might have been considered collecting, but as the need approached I still cashed out what I had.

I also took a small interest in stamps. They were so cheap to order from the comic book ads and I had quite a few stamps from all over the world. I don't know what happened to the stamp collection, but I sure wish I still had those special comic books that I was able to get with my meager earnings working on our little farm.

Nowadays most kids are of the 'instant gratification' generation. With telephones at their disposal and meals in the blink of a microwave, I think they just haven't learned the value of what they have. My own 9 year old grand daughter has very little knowledge of how long it can take to actually cook a meal. The 'is it done, yet?' that took about fifteen minutes from start to finish is now a 30-60 second job. You should have seen this child when she came to visit one day and brought along a boxed pumpkin bread mix and realized it actually took time to measure and mix the three ingredients, then have to wait for the oven to heat up, and then wait another hour for the finished product... she just couldn't believe it.

Of course, I cannot work my cell phone nearly as good as this nine year old, and I do use the microwave on occasion, and sure, I like instant gratification as much as the next kid, but I know the importance of patience and earning the funds to get I want or need.

However, I have gotten this same nine year old a little bit excited about the coins I find, and I take her to the coin store with me when I have the chance. She likes looking at the coins and searching the buckets for fun foreign coins. Maybe, maybe, there is a little bit of a spark there. Sometimes it takes someone older to get a youngster interested in a hobby like coin collecting.

Maybe our motto should be 'take a child a coin shop'.

For what it's worth...
Corky

eh myself i dont own a cell phone and just about the closest thing i use to a cell phone is my computer. in my mind i do not trust it will come and it will go and we will be back to rubbing two sticks together. but i hope to influence many young collecters ivealready turned my lile bro ostin ( pronounced austin) and the lil one awbre likes the shiney ones!!

Coin collecting has made a bunch of small cycles since I started. When other collecting hobbies faded this one continued. Coins and stamps will be around for a long time.

Beanie babies, cabbage patch dolls, pet rocks, Pong, etc. have all gone by the wayside. Cellphones, PC games all become obsolete. Coins have been collected since antiquity and will continue to be, there will be times when they fall out of favour, etc. but there will always be a core group of people interested in them.

I think coin collecting has cycles,like those tv ads that come on one season every 4 years.I was born in 1995,and other collecters my age are hard to (next to imposibal) to find.

Scottishmoney said it well.

I agree with Scottishmoney it was said well

I think the inability of modern teachers to interest pupils in history has a lot to do with it. At school, the wonderful descriptive stories told by my history teacher has had a lasting impression on me and probably started my curiosity about the coinage of older times. The thought that someone in medieval times actually bought something with my hammered pennies is an adventure that outstrips any adventure story - although the possibility of the coins being in a soldiers pouch during some great battle always lurks in the background!!

less collectors the better, more collectors means more people outbidding me

At least in Europe the coin collectors number arise constantly. One of the best things happened in past years was the euro. You will be amazed how many kids constantly check the parent's change to fill another hole in their euro albums... In change you can find coins from every EU state, so this is a good start for the youngs.

Don't know whether the number of collectors is actually going up in Euroland. A few years ago, when the € cash was all new, that was definitely true: There was a collecting boom, and some kids who got "infected" still collect coins. For quite a few others, however, it was fashionable back then, but collecting is not so cool any more ...

From what I have read, in 2007 the new reverse designs and the new pieces from Slovenia made some people start a collection. Some found this year's Treaty of Rome series interesting enough to begin. Well, in a few weeks Cyprus and Malta will change over, and (regarding €2 commems with a common theme/design) the Ecofin Council just opted for a 2009 series celebrating the 10th anniversary of the euro. Now whether such issues will in the long run increase or at least stabilize the number of collectors - we will see.

And then there is the question of how many of those circulation coin grabbers become, errm, serious collectors. I for one am still somewhere in between, hehe.

Christian