The Two Prices Of A Coin: PCGS Got Half The Story

Ask a coin dealer what your collection is worth, and you'll get a question back: "Melt, or graded?" Those are the two prices of a coin, and for forty years the tools have only ever computed one of them at a time.

The melt side is solved. PCGS — the Professional Coin Grading Service, the big dog of third-party grading — publishes a free app called Coinflation that does exactly what it says: live silver and gold prices, melt math for U.S. silver coins, base-metal coins, gold scrap, silver scrap. It's the standard, it's free, and it belongs in every stacker's pocket.

The graded side is solved too, sort of. NumisMedia publishes Fair Market Values for certified U.S. coins in every grade from Good-4 through MS-70. PCGS CoinFacts wraps similar numbers in an encyclopedia. A collector can look up what one 1921 Morgan in MS63 traded for.

Our research indicates the family's question has outgrown those solved problems. Nobody — not PCGS, not NGC, not NumisMedia, not the photo-recognition apps like CoinSnap — built for the question the family actually asks: what is the whole collection worth, both ways, in one total?

## The Dealer's Workflow, Undigitized

Watch a dealer work an estate, and you'll see the gap. Half the coins go on a scale — junk silver, worn Morgan dollars, a jar of pre-1920 British sterling. The other half are in plastic slabs with grades on the labels, each one looked up individually, price scribbled on a pad.

Then he adds it all up. By hand. On the pad.

That pad is the last un-digitized step in a hobby that has otherwise gone digital — and it survived for a reason. The melt apps answered the melt question; the price guides answered the lookup question. Each tool solved the problem of its day, and solved it well. But our research indicates the market's needs have moved on, and an estate executor — usually a widow or a son with no coin background at all — still has no tool that answers today's question.

## The Foreign Silver Blind Spot

The gap widens on world coinage, where the numbers surprise even experienced stackers. Our research indicates a pre-1920 British pound face value in sterling coinage holds 3.36 ounces of actual silver — about $216 at recent prices — in coins that often get tossed in a drawer as "old foreign money." The debased 1920–1946 era still holds 1.82 ounces per pound face. Canadian 80% silver, Mexican 8 Reales and 50 Pesos, French 20 Francs, Australian pre-decimal — the coins that actually cross estate desks — go unpriced for the simple reason that the melt apps stop at the U.S. border, and the price guides stop at slabs.

Foreign silver is not junk silver's poor cousin; it is just poor tooling.

## Why the Big Guys Didn't Build It

Fair question, and the answer is structural. PCGS is in the grading business; an app that helps you value slabs without paying for grading is not obviously their product. NGC likewise. NumisMedia sells price data, not interfaces. The photo apps chase the novice with a phone camera. Each solved the problem it chose — and solved it well.

Think of the tool bench. The melt apps and the single-coin guides are the standard socket set; the collection question is metric. Many benches in America have one or the other. The unified-collection question — both prices, one total — sat unanswered until the patent office began receiving filings for it; one such filing, U.S. Application No. 64/139,708, covers on-device collection valuation tied to live metal prices. Third-party verification that the gap was real, documented, and novel.

Fill that gap and the executor, the inheritor, and the honest dealer all get the same transparent number — which is, not coincidentally, how trust gets built in a market with an eternity-old reputation problem.

## The Standard Caveats

Estimated collector values are exactly that — estimates, drawn from NumisMedia's daily Fair Market Value data. Melt values track the live spot feed. Coins worth serious money deserve a professional appraisal, and nothing in a browser replaces one. What unified valuation offers is a defensible starting number before anyone with a pad shows up.

Silver stacks, inheritances, and old foreign coin drawers are having a moment with silver in the mid-$60s. The two prices of a coin have never been further apart — and never easier to see in one place.