magnetic penny ?

[daz]

How come a new penny is sticking to the pickups of my P bass ? I thought these were bronze (96% copper. 3% tin, 1% zinc) ?

[d-basser]

Composition changed early 90s

edit: have a look here [url="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4900524.stm"]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4900524.stm[/url]

Edited November 15, 2011 by d-basser

[daz]

I feel debased. Wot a swizz, coppers no longer copper (or bronze should i say. they were never [i]copper[/i])

[icastle]

Yep.
The value of the raw material was more than the face value of the coin...

[gjones]

Fiat money is the type of money the western world uses these days. Fiat money is a method of exchange which has no intrinsic value......only the value we project onto it. They could make it out of recycled plastic. 95% of money circulating in the world is not in the form of paper or coins but bits & bytes on a computer these days. In reality money only has any value if people accept it as having value.

Ever heard of quantative easing? It's a method of making money out of thin air. It's all a big con and part of the reason we're in the economic misery we're in now.

[flyfisher]

Many years ago I got interested in metal detecting and found quite a few silver ha'pennies and farthings. They were easy to identify as they were, quite literally, silver pennies that had been cut in half or quarters. http://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/denomination/40

In their time, they were 'real' currency and worth their denomination - not like today's 'tokens'.

[Dom in Dorset]

Some years they revert to copper alloys again! It must be down to prices of metals.

[daz]

[quote name='flyfisher' timestamp='1321385180' post='1438604']
Many years ago I got interested in metal detecting and found quite a few silver ha'pennies and farthings. They were easy to identify as they were, quite literally, silver pennies that had been cut in half or quarters. [url="http://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/denomination/40"]http://finds.org.uk/...denomination/40[/url]

In their time, they were 'real' currency and worth their denomination - not like today's 'tokens'.
[/quote]

I have always fancied doing a bit of metal detecting myself. Being a bit of a history buff, it all ties in. However the prices of any half decent metal detector has always put me off though.

[TimR]

[quote name='gjones' timestamp='1321384276' post='1438592']
Fiat money is the type of money the western world uses these days. Fiat money is a method of exchange which has no intrinsic value......only the value we project onto it. They could make it out of recycled plastic. 95% of money circulating in the world is not in the form of paper or coins but bits & bytes on a computer these days. In reality money only has any value if people accept it as having value.

Ever heard of quantative easing? It's a method of making money out of thin air. It's all a big con and part of the reason we're in the economic misery we're in now.
[/quote]

LOL. Even precious metals only have the value that we "project" on to them.

Nothing has any value at all. It only starts to have a value when you can find someone who wants it and they have something you want that they will swap.

The idea that Gold was worth anything is pretty ridiculous. If you start to base the economy on Gold, the price of gold has to rise to astronomical amounts so that it can support the trillions of dollars that make up the world economy. This would make electronics prohibitively expensive and we wouldn't be able to build the computers that do all the banking.....