Coin

A coin is usually a piece of hard material, generally metal, usually in the shape of a disc, and most often issued by a government. more...

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Coins are used as a form of money in transactions of various kinds, from the everyday circulation of the United States quarter, to the storage of vast amounts of bullion. In the present day, coins and banknotes make up the cash forms of all modern money systems. Coins made for circulation (general monetized use) are usually used for lower-valued units, and banknotes for the higher values; also, in most money systems, the highest value coin is worth less than the lowest-value note. The face value of circulation coins is usually higher than the gross value of the metal used in making them.

Exceptions to these rules occur for non-monetized "bullion coins" made of silver or gold (and, rarely, other metals, such as platinum or palladium), intended for collectors or investors in precious metals. For examples of modern gold collector/investor coins, the United States mints the American Gold Eagle, Canada mints the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf, and South Africa mints the Krugerrand. The U.S. Eagle coin has a "face value" of ten U.S. dollars (and theoretically could be used to pay for goods or services worth ten dollars), and the Double Eagle has a "face value" of twenty U.S. dollars, but these denominations are historical references to pre-depression times when this was the case; of course, these face values are no longer relevant, since the market value of the coin, and the gold in it, is many times the face amount. The Canadian Gold Maple Leaf also has nominal face value, but the Krugerrand does not.

Historically, a great number of coinage metals (including alloys) and other materials have been used practically, impractically (i.e., rarely), artistically, and experimentally in the production of coins for circulation, collection, and metal investment, where bullion coins often serve as more convenient stores of assured metal quantity and purity than other bullion.

Collecting coins

See Coin collecting and Numismatics for more information on the collecting of coins, bank notes, token coins and Exonumia. Also see mint mark

The value of a coin

In terms of its value as a collector's item, a coin is generally made more or less valuable by its condition, specific historial significance, rarity, quality/beauty of the design and general popularity with collectors. If a coin is deeply lacking in any of these, it is unlikely to be worth much. Bullion coins are also valued based on these factors, but are largely valued based on the value of the gold or silver in them.

Most coins nowadays are made of a base metal, and their value comes from their status as fiat money. This means that the value of the coin is decreed by government fiat (law), and thus is determined by the free market only as national currencies are subjected to arbitrage in international trade. This causes such coins to be monetary tokens in the same sense that paper currency is, when the paper currency is not backed directly by metal, but rather by a government guarantee of international exchange of goods or services. Some have suggested that such coins not be considered to be "true coins" (see below). However, because fiat money is backed by government guarantee of a certain amount of goods and services, where the value of this is in turn determined by free market currency arbitrage, similar to the case for the international arbitrage which determines the value of metals which back commodity money, in practice there is very little practical economic difference between the two types of money (types of currencies).

Read more at Wikipedia.org