Reimagining Coin Collecting and Investing

AN EXCITING VIRTUAL WORLD FOR YOUR HOBBY AWAITS

- JOSHUA MCMORROW-HERNANDEZ

The future is here. It's a brave new world, and the exciting future we were all promised for decades is quickly arriving. Americans are slowly emerging from quarantines, lockdowns, and isolation amid the wake of a global pandemic. We are learning new social protocols and health regulations that affect everything from how people might attend religious services to how far apart that it's suggested that we sit in places of public accommodation. For coin collectors and investors, the impacts of this are paving the way for implementation of at-home trading and virtual venues that have been dreamed about for years.

Though ours is a hobby often pursued in the quiet and solitary confines of a den, a study, a she-shed, or a man cave, there are many social components to numismat-ic: coin shows, coin clubs, coin dealers, meetups, author signings, ask-the-expert panels, seminars and more.

As the summer turns to autumn, there is usually a bevy of events on our calendar. The month of August sees the American Numismatic Association (ANA) World's Fair of Money, an annual event that has long been considered one of the nation's most important coin shows and one that draws international attention and participation. This year, the show is suspended, but we are all looking forward to reimagined ANA conventions. The ANA convention is generally followed up by a litany of important regional shows. These include the Blue Ridge Numismatic Association in Dalton, Georgia in late August, the Long Beach Coin, Currency, Stamp & Sports Collectable Show in southern California in mid-September, and the Virginia Numismatic Association Convention and Coin Show right before the calendar turns to October. But that calendar in 2020 doesn’t look like it did in 2019.