The edge tells you faster than the date
Pre-1965 US dimes, quarters and halves are 90% silver — many times face value. The edge test spots them in seconds, and cleaning them destroys the value.
From seventeen years of people sorting change jars and register drawers — with the stale silver price replaced by a dated 2026 one, two of the crowd's own corrections refused as factually wrong, and every brand name turned back into a category.
Real silver still turns up in ordinary change — not often, but often enough that people who handle a lot of coins develop a reflex, and the reflex is not reading dates. Dates are slow. The tell is on the side nobody looks at:
Check the edge: a modern US coin shows a copper stripe running through the middle, and a solid silver-coloured edge with no stripe means a dime, quarter or half dollar from 1964 or earlier — 90% silver, worth many times its face value — which you set aside and never, ever clean.
The edge works because of what happened in 1965: the US stopped striking everyday coins in silver and switched to copper sandwiched in nickel, and the sandwich shows. A glance sorts a handful; the date confirms what the edge suspects. The ear works too — silver lands with a higher, longer ring than modern coins, distinctive enough that two accounts here identify finds by sound alone. And three less famous stragglers reward a second look: Kennedy half dollars from 1965 through 1970 are 40% silver and get missed by people who only know the 1964 rule; wartime nickels from mid-1942 to 1945 are 35% silver and wear a large mint mark above the dome on the back; and wheat-back pennies, struck through 1958, are worth keeping out of circulation even in ordinary condition.
What the finds are worth moved dramatically while nobody was watching the jar. Silver traded around $66 an ounce when this page was checked (29 August 2026) — up roughly two-thirds in a year — which puts the melt value of one 90% silver quarter near $12 and a humble dime near $4.75. Most circulated silver sells exactly that way, as “junk silver” priced by weight, and the term is friendlier than it sounds: it means the value rides the metal, not the rarity. The rare-date exceptions are real but rarer than inheritance hopes run — the first FAQ walks the order of operations for a can of grandpa’s coins, and the accounts’ repeated plea is simply to check before spending them at face value or tipping them into a coin-counting machine.
Honesty about the odds, because one camp in these accounts learned it at a bank window: circulation was picked nearly clean decades ago, and a high-volume teller reports silver surfacing every few weeks or months, not daily. If you came here hoping for a side income, this is not one — it is a free reflex that occasionally pays for lunch and once in a long while pays for much more. And if the deeper question is whether stooping for coins or hoarding a change jar says something embarrassing about you, the accounts are warm on this point: keeping small money is thrift, not damage, and the sorting itself — dates, mint marks, the little archaeology of a drawer — is a hobby people here defend for the history in the hand, not the wage per hour.
One legal line, since these accounts argue about it: in the US it is federally illegal to melt cents and nickels (the 2006 rule carries fines up to $10,000 and five years), but no law bans melting pre-1965 silver coinage — defacement statutes require intent to defraud. In practice you never need a torch: silver coins sell to dealers a little under melt value as they are. The edge test costs nothing and takes a second. From here on, you will probably do it for the rest of your life.
Common questions
I inherited a can of old coins. What do I actually do first?
Three moves, in order. First, sort by edge and date: solid edges and pre-1965 dates go in one pile — that pile is worth many times its face value on metal alone. Second, before selling anything as a lump, check the standout dates and mint marks against a collector community online or a local coin shop, because a repeated verdict in these accounts is that most inherited collections turn out to be ordinary circulated change — 'junk silver', priced by weight — but the exceptions are exactly what a bulk sale throws away, and the recognized grading services exist for a coin that might be genuinely rare. Third, when you do sell the bulk pile, look up that day's silver spot price first and expect a dealer to pay somewhat under the melt value — that margin is how they make a living, and one seller's sale here got argued over on exactly that arithmetic — whether the price paid was fair against the pile's actual melt value. Knowing the number before you walk in is the whole negotiation.
Why exactly does cleaning ruin them?
Because collectors are buying the coin's history, and cleaning removes it. The surface a coin grows over decades — toning, tarnish, the darkening in the grooves — is part of what a collector reads, and stripping it does not make the coin look new; it makes it look cleaned, which is a recognized and penalized condition all its own. One useful distinction from the accounts: loose dirt is not the coin — if a coin comes out of the ground or a vacuum bag caked in mud, rinsing the mud off is fine; the tarnish underneath is the part you leave. The accounts argue among themselves about which toning collectors actually prize, but the cleaning argument itself runs one way in these accounts. The single exception: coins going straight to melt for their metal are priced by weight, and no polish changes what they weigh. How to store them so they tarnish no further is a fair question these accounts raise and don't settle — a coin shop can answer it for the pieces that matter.
Coins turn up where I work. Can I keep them?
Slower on this one than the finders-keepers instinct wants. The accounts include people who pocketed workplace finds for years without a ripple — and one warning that some employers treat found money as company property or require it to be turned in or donated, with firing on the table for policy violations. Which of those worlds you work in is written in your employee handbook, not in this page: check the policy before the habit, and if the coins are literally being thrown away, asking a manager whether you can have them converts the risk into permission. Who legally owns property found on company premises varies by place and situation, and these accounts don't resolve it — the policy check is the practical answer precisely because the legal one is murky.
Full tip: https://findangel.org/tips/the-edge-tells-you-faster-than-the-date · FindAngel.org — free, always.