Website purchased by Collectors Universe

One of my favorite websites has been sold.

Coinflation.com was purchased by Collectors Universe, Inc., the parent of the Professional Coin Grading Service.

No purchase price was disclosed.

The creator of the site, Alec Nevalainen, goes with the deal.

That’s good news, because what attracts me to the site is the list of metallic values of U.S. coins at current prices.

Who would have thought that such a list would be the basis for a commercially viable website?

Of course, it lists widely traded U.S. silver coins, but I am personally less interested in those than the prices of lesser issues.

It is an easy calculation for me to make to figure out what the silver value of a pre-1965 quarter is at current silver prices.

However, it is another story for pre-1983 copper cents or the value of the current copper-coated zinc cents. I don’t particularly care to do the math.

It is far easier to go to www.Coinflation.com and see that the metallic value of the old 95-percent copper cent is currently 2.61 cents apiece and the value of the current copper-coated zinc cent is slightly more than half a cent at 0.584 cent.

The values listed even include the copper-nickel clad dimes, quarters and half dollars.

Even with the increases in metal prices in recent years, it is easy to discover that there is no threat to these three workhorse denominations because prices would have to rise by more than four times to come close to face value.

The current dime has 2.22 cents’ worth of metal in it.

Did you know that the metallic value of the Presidential dollar is actually a bit less than the Anthony dollar? It comes in at 6.81 cents versus 7.93 cents.

You can find it on the Coinflation site.

It is nice that somebody else takes the trouble to do the math.

Don’t tell my father, a retired accountant, that I wrote that.