Okay, so I am done. No more coins for me, thanks.

[mustbebob]

Geez Sean...Just leave him alone and let it go.

You asked me for my take, and I gave it. If you are so interested in all of it, then send him an email. Chances are he will not get into it much more than he already has.

[seal006]

I am not battering him. I AM TRYING TO HELP HIM!!!!! These are questions he will be asked by anyone who is truly interested. These are questions he needs to prepare to answer.

[coppercoins]

First things first...I placed the $50K price tag on coppercoins.com as an idea that **IF** it were for sale and a person wanted to buy it, they had to be very serious about wanting it. Second, I never said it had ANY value. $50K is its value to ME...which likely means it will never be sold, which is perfectly fine to me. I simply do not care if I die owning the site. It's mine. Nuff said.

What coins I have here I would rather keep than sell to a typical generalist coin dealer who has no idea what a die variety is. Much of what I have has very little value if the Cherrypicker varieties are all you know and care about, and everything else goes to the bank. Coin dealers are often very haphazard about how they handle the coins they buy, and they have very painfully little specialist knowledge in anything. They cash in the quickest way they can on their purchases treating the coins as 'widgets' instead of the pieces of history they are. I am dead in the right to make these statements because not only is the stuff MINE and I can choose who I want to sell to, but I also happen to know dozens of brick and mortar generalist coin dealers personally, and unfortunately every single one of them carry a similar genetic trait - they are unable to understand the world of die varieties, and do not treat their purchases from specialists as special purchases.

My buyer is a specialist. My buyer is someone who wants to make a business out of die varieties and Lincoln cents as a specialty. My buyer isn't someone who tries to set up a shop with my stuff, rather sets themselves up for much success selling Lincoln cents and Lincoln cent die varieties online. I know a few of them, and they are all doing fine with what they have, and I respect all of them. And NONE of them are your "typical" coin dealer. They research, they write, they KNOW what they are doing, and they hunger for information and knowledge. They do not just have 'widgets' to sell, they have coins for which they understand the rarity and value. I stand by my statement - I would rather bury the whole collection and get nothing for them or cash every one of them in to the bank than sell to a typical coin dealer.

With all that said, I am NOT emotional about what I have. I am practical. I want a return on my investment from someone who sees the potential in what they are getting. If you have a rare car of a specific type, you don't run it in the classifieds of a small-town newspaper for "best offer" - you find specialists who understand what the car is and how much it's really worth. That's not emotion - that's smart business.

In actuality, the direction that die varieties have taken over the past couple of years have driven me away from the scene. More and more minor stuff being touted as collectible makes life for attributors a complete hell, doesn't serve much of any purpose because NOBODY collects all of them, and muddies the waters as to what makes a good collection of scarce coins. Sure, by die each one is scarce in its own right, but when you have a hundred different dies listed that are nearly identical in every way, the type becomes common, and nobody really cares that there are a hundred different dies any more. All they want is their one "similar" example as a conversation piece, and leave the hunting for a hundred different coins that are nearly identical to one another up to the truly obsessed.

It used to be fun. I turned it into a profitable hobby, tried to turn it into a career, and it became a very low paying job. It became a chore to look at coins, to bother with other people's coins at WAY below minimum wage, and to continue wasting time and effort going through thousands and thousands of coins to find three or four $5 items. It was no longer fun to plow through thousands of coins looking for what probably wasn't going to be there just to find out that it indeed wasn't there. I have NEVER found a 1983 DDR. I have NEVER found a 1984 DDO. Heck...I have NEVER found a 1939 DDO #1. I have the eye, just not the time or luck.

After this hobby became a job for me, I wanted to be able to do it at my pace - my speed. I quickly found out that there's no money in treating a job like it's a hobby. I could no longer sit around with a few rolls and punch through them in a lazy afternoon. I had to make it through a whole box a day to find ANYTHING worth selling. I was pushing myself toward blindness for NOTHING. I made ten times as much money doing web programming...at least that fed the family, because the coins were never going to do it.

Coppercoins was a labor of love. I enjoyed working on it, taking the photos, adding to the die system, and making some order of the piles of coins I had. I enjoyed the time I spent with the coins, but lost a lot of family time in the mean time - family time I will never get back. I often spent 12 hours a day seven days a week trying to do SOMETHING that would make $400-500 a week so I could keep the bills paid. After a while it became so much of a job that I was constantly depressed because I was sitting in front of a computer or piles of coins instead of outside enjoying the fresh air with my son or my wife. I HAD no time to enjoy because it was ALL consumed trying to make a buck.

So...emotion? Yeah...relief. I just want all of it gone - I have ZERO passion right now to talk about coins, to look at coins, to collect coins, or to bother writing about them either. I have no passion to come here and answer questions for beginners. I've just lost what it took to be who I was. But I don't want to GIVE all the stuff I have away, sell it to some dealer who will toss it in bags and wholesale it off, or take it to the bank where my life's work will end up in gutters. I am not emotionally attached to the coins - I just want the NEXT person who has them attached emotionally to them enough to understand what they have and what they should do with it as a continuation of a legacy and service to the collecting whole. History only happens once. Once this lot of coins is gone from my house, it's up to the next person out there to know - understand - how they should be dealt with.

To answer another question from above...I have been collecting cents in some form or fashion for the past 39 years. I began specializing in Lincoln cents and die varieties in 1984. I started the first iteration of what would become coppercoins.com in 1997. I started selling Lincoln cents on eBay the same year. I opened what became lincolncent.com in 2005. I wrote my first book in 2004, and upgraded and re-released it in 2005. It is still in print and still available through book sellers online.

My hoard started growing in 1986 with my first bag purchase of wheat cents. It has since grown to nearly 50 bags of coins, thousands of assorted BU rolls, an inventory worth $20K plus of individual coins, and nearly a thousand rolls of 'searched' coins that need to be wholesaled out the door. The hoard also includes at least one example of nearly every different doubled die and repunched mintmark listed on coppercoins.com in just about every different die state known, which involves dozens of coins for which my example is the only example known to exist on the planet.