Russian hobbyist, Ivan Zakharov, is building his collection and outsmarting his peers in the process.
Ivan Zakharov, 27, was just five years old when his grandfather showed him his coin collection, which immediately grabbed the young boy’s attention.
Now a Kingston University student, Zakharov did not anticipate that numismatics – the technical term for coin collecting – could be such a useful hobby.
He said he made his best purchase in 2010, when he was only 12 years old.
Zakharov had saved his lunch money for over a year and had enough to buy either a PlayStation 3, or a single gold coin from the times of the Russian Empire.
“I went with the coin, obviously. My friends made a lot of fun of me for making such a poor decision,” he said.
“But the jokes on them – the PlayStation 3 is worthless now and the coin is priceless!”
The market value of the coin is around £900, enough to buy an up-to-date PlayStation 5. However, Zakharov said he would rather keep it for his grandchildren so they “could buy out the whole company”.
Zakharov’s collection is estimated to be worth around £3000 currently.
However, his interest in numismatics was not born out of a desire to make money, but in its deep connection to history.
Each time he got a new coin from his grandfather for his birthday he would investigate its history and learn about different time periods.
While Zakharov has accumulated hundreds of coins – most of them are worthless, some due to very high mintage, while others aren’t “old” enough.
His main collection consists of around 40 coins, spanning from 1850s to the late 1920s.
He chose this time period, as the manufacturing quality back then was similar to contemporary standards, which made it possible to obtain samples that looked almost new, yet carried a lot of history behind them.
He has also found other, more nefarious, uses for the change from his collection over the years.
Once, when Zakharov received a pouch of old Soviet coins from his other grandfather, he noticed their similarities with the modern currency.
“I figured out that three cents from the Soviet Union are the same size as the ten Ruble coin which was minted in 2009 in the Russian Federation,” said Zakharov.
He decided to try his luck with a vending machine selling newspapers.
He loaded in a three-cent coin and pressed the button that returned the change. The plan worked and he got a ten Ruble coin back.
Whenever he needed extra money for lunch or snacks, he would go to the vending machine.
Zakharov said he is not proud of what he did, but he was just an 11-year-old kid back then.
“It was not scamming,” he said. “It was business, as we call it in Russia.”
