Modern setting. One player said that since a penny is worth more than a penny, we should collect a ton and melt them...

Modern setting. One player said that since a penny is worth more than a penny, we should collect a ton and melt them. Realistic talking, what's the problem with this plan?

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>a penny is worth more than a penny

What does he mean by that ?

Basically that a penny value in metal is higher than the value of the coin.

Most modern (past ~1986) pennies are worth less than a cent, the "2 cents" figure is counting like electricity to run the machines and shit

Didn't copper price rise?

infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/copper/all/

Historically, melting coins was illegal

The profit wouldn't be immense, melting and destroying currency tends to be illegal, gathering a huge amount of pennies is not easy.

Imagine for example that for each time you do this, you get 20% more value than when you start. Assuming you sell 10000 melted pennies for 120 dollars, yo continue making money you have to convert those to pennies...Which is a herculean task. No bank is just gonna make the trade. You could steal them, but then it would be more profitable and pratical to steal larger denominations and cut the middle man. You could use some superpower to clean all penny trays in a large city, but if you have access to that, there ought to be better ways to make money with said superpower than penny melting.

Basically, even if it's possible, it's both illegal and less lucrative than other illegal activities.

>infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/copper/all/
After 1982, pennies started being made out of like 97% zinc, and are coated in a thin layer of copper. I imagine after a certain point, the cost to melt them is more than you'd get back

Just steal and melt all the metal you find in the city, like lukes and metal on the old abandoned buildings and trash places.
That's what homeless people do in my country. You can actually earn a lot if you are smart enough doing this. So if your players have scavenging skills of some sort, they can make a fortune.

Well, is it it worth it? Let's see. There's ~1.65 trillion pennies in circulation in the US, or sixteen billion five hundred million dollars worth. Additionally, only pre-1982 pennies are worth more than a penny (95% copper, melt value ~0.02 dollars); modern pennies are 97.5% zinc and worth ~0.008 dollars. So for the sake of the best possible scenario let's say every penny in circulation was made before 1982. Melting them will double your money so you'd make a 16.5 billion dollar profit.

Of course, that's logistically impossible (not to mention destruction of circulated currency is against the law). So the question becomes: How many pennies can your players realistically store, melt, and sell? Probably not enough to make 1 dollar for every 100 pennies worth it, and if they have the resources to create a penny-melting operation large enough to turn a substantial profit they'd probably be better off investing them in just about anything else.

Take your profits from this and buy BTC/ETH/Your shitcoin of choice. Thank me later.

Didn't zinc rise too?
infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/zinc/all/

The fact that any pennies made after 1968 are zinc core with a thin layer of copper around them, and thus aren't even useful in terms of copper.

Ah. Is there any law about harvesting junkyards?

This

A guy I knew used to break into abandoned buildings and strip the piping. He claims he made somewhere around the ballpark of a thousand or so dollars over the course of a few months until he got caught

>Realistic talking, what's the problem with this plan?
Setting up the kind of business required to pull this off would be a massive investment.

You're better off stripping copper wiring and maybe lead roofing from buildings and selling it to whatever shady scrap dealer you can find.

Yeah, but it's negligible.

Most of the cost is the actual making of the coin, not the metals used.

Uh, property law?

BTC is going to fall hard.
The last boom was completely artificial.

The real question is why the fuck the penny even exists anymore.

We need more widely accepted one and two dollar coins, not fucking chumpchange.

That's why I said shitcoin of your choice. There are still good projects, and most shitcoins have been up 10-100% over the last week. Good times.

If bitcoin crashes, all the alt coins will crash as well.

Already happened. Weak hands have sold and we are going back up. Most coins are still down in BTC value since 6 months ago. And total marketcap has risen drastically since then too. If people thought the rise of BTC and Alts was crazy this year, just wait until you see what happens next year.

>wizards create a new alternative magic-based currency
>entire magical schools converted into sweatshop factories to create this new shit
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! MY PRECIOUS GOLD!!!!! NOT AGAIN!!!! GODS FUCKING DAMN IT!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA EVERY TIME I BUY NEW TOKENS THEY IMMEDIATELY TANK!!!!!! SOMEONE KILL ME!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Veeky Forums is leaking

...

>the dwarfs wake up

NOOOOOOOOOOO THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE ELVES WAKE UP? SEEEEELLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!

>to much of a babby to understand supply and demand

That's when the orcs go to sleep so you invest in alt-teef

MISSED THE WAVE

>mfw skaven slavetokens start false-mooning after I pulled out

the cost to smelt is greater than potential profit

>tfw sold all my MANA before the Wizards Guild released an update on the MANA bag of holding.

>Invested in Dwarven ingots
>Dwarven forge halls are overrun by goblins - driving up prices
>Goblin control of forges makes it impossible to retrieve and sell my Dwarfcoins
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGH WHY DIDN'T I SELL?

Yeah, it's called theft. Junkyards aren't just places where people drop off dead cars. Junkyards buy those junkers (super cheap) to sell for parts or scrap metal.

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>Historically, melting coins was illegal
Still is. But I don't think "get rich quick" scheming PC's are going to be overly concerned with that hurdle.

This is viable, and a common tactic of very poor people, since (while not THAT valuable) the thing you're stealing is often just laying out there.

Downsides are it's a lot of work, and if the construction workers catch you before the cops do, you'll probably end up in the ICU (good option) or buried under a few tons of concrete (bad option).

>Realistic talking, what's the problem with this plan?
I remember hearing that this thing actually happens a lot in India. If memory serves me well, the scam goes something like this: you take a 1 rupee coin, melt it, forge two razors from them and you can sell them for 2 rupees each, meaning you end up with a 3 rupee profit. That's fiat currency for you!

That said, the problem is mostly a long term problem in that the currency will probably get inflated. But that's none of the PCs' concern. The more short term problem is that this is highly illegal .

>Modern setting. One player said that since a penny is worth more than a penny, we should collect a ton and melt them. Realistic talking, what's the problem with this plan?

1) Super illegal

2) The metal is worth more but once you've paid for the gasoline driving around everywhere and the electricity to melt them down so nobody can recognize that you're illegally selling currency for scrap, you've spent more than you'll make.

First of all, it's illegal. And not "small fine illegal", but "spending a decade in jail" illegal. At this point you could simply rob a bank out of the drawer money and earn more without all the hassle and danger of exact same prison sentence in case of being caught.
Second, are you aware that you also need infrastructure and materials to melt pennies into scrap metal? Which means the meager margain of profit you could make on turning pennies into scrap are going to get eaten away by the running costs of the operation.
Third, from where the fuck you are going to get so much coins suitable for this scheme? You would have to rob blind all sorts of automats accepting small currency, because no shop, not to mention bank, is going to extensively change money for you for such small coins.

In short, it's illegal, inefficient and running costs exceed the profit.

Want to profit on scrap metal with relatively little investment in modern setting (or even real life, really)? Collect aluminium cans and then melt them in home-made foundry (in which the most expensive part is going to be the bag of BBQ charcoal). Aluminium from cans is always bought at third of price of "aluminium in other form" in scrapyards. Meaning if you know how to do it, each "ignot" weighting 0.2 kg or more will make pure profit, even after including costs of melting the cans.

IRL most people did fraud like that. Especially when coins were made of silver and gold. My country was retarded and for the beginning of the 20th century we still made gold coins. Immigrant Europeans took that coins, melt them and sent them to Europe for their families after WW2. They fuck up our economy but meh, we were retarded anyway.

Which country?

>what's the problem with this plan?
15 to 20 years in jail for currency destruction, while running one of the most impractical schemes imaginable. To make it in any way profitable in meaningful way (rather than simply making some profit at all), you would have to burn through literal tonnes of pennies. Which you won't get from anywhere.

Value, price, and cost are not the same thing.

In this case, pennies COST more to make than they're worth. But even if the zinc was worth it, you'd spend more on the equipment and operating costs than you'd make back.

Rule of thumb: if a get rich quick scheme held water, someone would already be rich from doing it.

Corollary: this applies even in fantasy settings. GURPS shows how to work backwards to calculate the value of conjurations and enchantments based on economics. You don't break the economy, you become part of the economy. At best, the equilibrium price of certain things changes.

The metal in a penny is not worth more than one cent. It costs more than one cent to make a penny. Production cost not material costs

>>entire magical schools converted into sweatshop factories to create this new shit
But magical schools already ARE sweatshop factories.
From where the hell you think comes the abundance of the low-tier and poor quality magical artifacts? That's just students doing their enchanting practice and then it's sold by them/the school.

Unless you make cool stuff outta all that melted metal, you'll face diminishing returns.
Like a sword, or a dagger, made from pennies. What would its stats be like?

Pennies poof into nonexistance as they did in argentina when this was a thing.

Peru

...

>Realistic talking, what's the problem with this plan?
> It's illegal
> You'd spend more melting the penny than you'd get in profit

Why not just shill pump-and-dump cryptocurrency?

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ITT

Tell us wise coinanon

>get $4000 worth of pennies
>Spend $300 building a forge to melt them down
>Acquire $1300 in zinc because your dumbass got new pennies
>Spend $4000 exclusively on pre 1986 pennies
>Spend $50 running your forge a second time
>Sell the mound of copper for $4500
>Get arrested because the banks notified the FBI some greasy nerd was looking for pure copper pennies for the last couple weeks

This covers it pretty well. Also, it's illegal to scrap coins in the US, though nothing really stops you from buying coins and scrapping them somewhere else.

Market demand.

Also it's illegal.

>penny is worth more than a penny

In modern Times that is more tied to the costs of creating the penny then the actual material cost of the penny