I read that the US is experiencing a coin shortage.
What prevents coins from being melted down?
If the metal in the coin is worth more than face value of the coin, then you can melt down the coin and sell the metal.
You also need to cover the cost of melting, selling, storing…etc.
To prevent this, governments make sure that the value of the metal content is less than the face value of the coin.
What if you expect the value of the metal to shoot up? Then hoarding all of the coins and melting them down would be profitable.
Or what if metal prices stayed constant and the USD collapsed.
It's either metal price up or USD down. If both happen, then you are really raking it in.
So how high can the price of various metals really go? The government probably thought about this when they decide how much metal to put into each coin.
How low can the USD go? [Before we saw what was really going on.]
So if you expect that the BLM protesters, coronavirus, plague, China, …etc will bring the USA to it's knees, then you will hoard coins and scrap metal.