Not a techincal question, really, so posting here.
I like to buy commerative coins for myself, friends and family. I'm a poor fellow, so I buy silver coins, usually with a year, as in the year of the event I want to commemorate.
Anyway, when I look on websites at various companies around the world, something struck me today, looking at Perth Mint, that says the following on their site:
"Renowned globally, The Perth Mint is the place to buy 99.99% pure gold, 99.99% or 99.9% pure silver and 99.95% pure platinum in the form of bullion coins, minted bars and cast bars."
What caught my eye was the bolded numbers (my bolding). The reason is not so much the theoretically thousands fraction of purity, but the work that has to be put in to achieve that purity and how that (apparantly doesn't) affect prices.
I'm an avid viewer of Sreetips' videos on Youtube, and thus I realize the trouble he goes through from getting cement silver (he says about 96% pure) to 99,9 and eventually 99,99 or even 99,999 fine.
Now, I know industrial size operators have different profit brackets than a semiprofessional garage-refiner, but never the less, it must be more difficult - and expensive - to get a kg of 999 fine to 9999 fine. But when you look at their prices, this either doesn't trickle onto their pricing or they just treat it the same (so 999=9999 on the shelf).
So how difficult (expensive) do you think it is for an industrial operator to refine further? How much actual cost (not just the tiny fineness difference) is associated with bringing 98% silver to 999 compared to 9999 (Sreetips re-refines through his silver cell, meaning at least double time and power, but can you set it up differently somewhere so you get 999 in one operation and 9999 in a different operation (same feedstock) or would you possibly have two different types of feedstock where one yields 999 and another 9999 on first run?
I don't know where Perth Mint gets it's feedstock, but it's possible they buy scrap fine silver (999) at spot and give it a new refining getting 9999, whereas another feedstock (newly mined silver or maybe a less pure feedstock, maybe even sterling?), but where initial cost is similar, so the final result (999/9999) carries the same production expences and thus doesn't need actual price difference.
I know that a lot of other things goes into the final retail price that could drown out these differences, but since there's an extreme focus on purity, I'd expect it to play a pretty big part in the final pricing.
I like to buy commerative coins for myself, friends and family. I'm a poor fellow, so I buy silver coins, usually with a year, as in the year of the event I want to commemorate.
Anyway, when I look on websites at various companies around the world, something struck me today, looking at Perth Mint, that says the following on their site:
"Renowned globally, The Perth Mint is the place to buy 99.99% pure gold, 99.99% or 99.9% pure silver and 99.95% pure platinum in the form of bullion coins, minted bars and cast bars."
What caught my eye was the bolded numbers (my bolding). The reason is not so much the theoretically thousands fraction of purity, but the work that has to be put in to achieve that purity and how that (apparantly doesn't) affect prices.
I'm an avid viewer of Sreetips' videos on Youtube, and thus I realize the trouble he goes through from getting cement silver (he says about 96% pure) to 99,9 and eventually 99,99 or even 99,999 fine.
Now, I know industrial size operators have different profit brackets than a semiprofessional garage-refiner, but never the less, it must be more difficult - and expensive - to get a kg of 999 fine to 9999 fine. But when you look at their prices, this either doesn't trickle onto their pricing or they just treat it the same (so 999=9999 on the shelf).
So how difficult (expensive) do you think it is for an industrial operator to refine further? How much actual cost (not just the tiny fineness difference) is associated with bringing 98% silver to 999 compared to 9999 (Sreetips re-refines through his silver cell, meaning at least double time and power, but can you set it up differently somewhere so you get 999 in one operation and 9999 in a different operation (same feedstock) or would you possibly have two different types of feedstock where one yields 999 and another 9999 on first run?
I don't know where Perth Mint gets it's feedstock, but it's possible they buy scrap fine silver (999) at spot and give it a new refining getting 9999, whereas another feedstock (newly mined silver or maybe a less pure feedstock, maybe even sterling?), but where initial cost is similar, so the final result (999/9999) carries the same production expences and thus doesn't need actual price difference.
I know that a lot of other things goes into the final retail price that could drown out these differences, but since there's an extreme focus on purity, I'd expect it to play a pretty big part in the final pricing.