SilverStorm

Magicians coins are “cored” like this and available for not a great deal of money.
I have a one pound coin that has been done and without really close examination it is not possible to tell.
Technically it is not hard to achieve although to achieve one coin it might be necessary to machine two coins for a really good fit.
Thanks for the video, I have thought about this for some time (something to watch for) but is the first time I have seen one in the wild….

Thanks to @Pilsbury for these coin tubes. Just the thing I've been looking for. I've got full sov's in the red cap tubes, a half sov in a black cap tube and 1/10ths in the other black cap tube. My left over red tube will be for the 1/4 TB and/or 1/4 QB. Now I have some order to what I'm doing and a goal to fill them. Happy days 👍😁👍

4 half sovs with shield reverse and some 22 sovs

Thanks to @James32 for the auction and entertainment last week. 
Received this lot this morning, including a 67 half dollar mystery coin 😁

Many thanks!
 
Thanks for your comments.
Yep, I am fully aware there are risks involved, nothing is risk free!

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2022 Majestic Polar Bear, 1 oz 99.99% pure silver.  First Strikes limited to 5,000 mintage, comes in light gray packaging.   Regular is limited to 35,000 mintage, comes in blue packaging.   I apologize for less than perfect pictures in not ideal lighting conditions; I am not taking the plastic wrapping off in order to maintain the authenticity seal at the back of the packaging.   Enjoy! 
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I saw this on YouTube several days ago, and I thought it was interesting how this criminal had the audacity and devilish ingenuity to pull this off.   In a nutshell, the AGE was cored out and replaced with tungsten.  So the outsides is genuine, but the inside is not.  So a surface test will NOT pick up this fake.  This takes a lot of skill (IMHO) to pull it off.   See the YouTube video below for details. 
 
 
 

I am currently behind schedule, the cost of every day living and damn income taxes has cut into my stacking ability.  Hopefully I can double up somewhere and get to my stacking goals by end of the year.

Of course it was 160, what else could it be?  😜  All kidding aside, this is good, accurate info.  Thanks for posting this Lawrence.

I saw this on YouTube several days ago, and I thought it was interesting how this criminal had the audacity and devilish ingenuity to pull this off.   In a nutshell, the AGE was cored out and replaced with tungsten.  So the outsides is genuine, but the inside is not.  So a surface test will NOT pick up this fake.  This takes a lot of skill (IMHO) to pull it off.   See the YouTube video below for details. 
 
 
 

I saw this on YouTube several days ago, and I thought it was interesting how this criminal had the audacity and devilish ingenuity to pull this off.   In a nutshell, the AGE was cored out and replaced with tungsten.  So the outsides is genuine, but the inside is not.  So a surface test will NOT pick up this fake.  This takes a lot of skill (IMHO) to pull it off.   See the YouTube video below for details. 
 
 
 

2022 Majestic Polar Bear, 1 oz 99.99% pure silver.  First Strikes limited to 5,000 mintage, comes in light gray packaging.   Regular is limited to 35,000 mintage, comes in blue packaging.   I apologize for less than perfect pictures in not ideal lighting conditions; I am not taking the plastic wrapping off in order to maintain the authenticity seal at the back of the packaging.   Enjoy! 
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I did ask Perth Mint some years ago how much they would sell their one tonne gold coin for, as I thought I knew of a potential customer.
It's not the first time I tried to get my hands on it:

They said that it was not currently for sale.
I suspect that if someone approached them with a serious offer to pay a sufficient premium, that they might be tempted.
I also asked if they could make a one tonne silver coin for us.
It would fit quite easily in our strongrooms, but we might need a bigger capacity lift, and I don't fancy trying to manhandle it down the stairs to our bunker.
😎

If I do decide to go ahead with the purchase, then I'll let you know whether the Perth Mint include free delivery !  😁

@James32 has this piece in his stack.
It was so big he couldnt fit it in his hoover bag!

You have to decide whether you want to buy gold coins or gold bars.
My advice is to choose 1 oz coins like new Britannias that are 24ct gold.
If choosing bars keep below 50g size.
Avoid larger bars because what you may see as a small discount isn't worth it and when ( if ) it comes to selling you may find it harder to sell at a decent price.
Some will suggest buying sovereigns.
Perhaps this is good advice and I would definitely consider if you can find them at a decent price meaning say 2% over spot if that's possible these days.
Selling sovereigns is fast and easy and there are lots of buyers keen to buy.
Dealers worth checking are - Atkinsons, Chards, Sharps Pixley, BullionbyPost to name a few.
You have to constantly check prices as they fluctuate every minute.
Another consideration is whether you want to plunge straight in and spend all your money at one go.
No-one can forecast the price of gold and there is every chance it can fall as fast as it can rise.
It is trading quite high at the moment but with high global inflation some will argue it can only rise ( not in value but not falling like fiat currency ) so retaining true value.
As for where to keep it.
£20k in gold is only about 13 x 1 oz coins so not even filling a tube.
Either hide this at home, maybe get a decent safe or consider a bank safety deposit box.
If you are likely to increase your holding then definitely a proper home safe or a bank vault.

1977 One Ounce Bullion Krugerrands - 177 Serrations According to Numista - Wrong!
According to a Numista page about Krugerrands:
1977     3 331 344                                    7%    Hern#K12; 188 serrations on edge
1977                                         0.3%    Hern#K12; 220 serrations on edge
1977     8 500                                    0.8%    Hern#K12; Proof (188 serrations on edge)
1977                                         0.3%    Hern#K12; Proof (220 serrations on edge)
"Hern" is the author of Hern's Handbook on South African Coins & Patterns, and much of the information on the Numista website is quite reliable, but...
... in this case we don't believe it.
If it had said "180", I would have presumed it was just the usual old misinformation, but 188 sounded credible, but of course, we checked:

And the correct answer is of course, the usual 160.
😎

In June 1940, the Second World War was not going well for Great Britain.
More than 300,000 Allied soldiers and sailors had just been rescued in the desperate evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk. The French army soon crumbled, and by mid-month German troops were marching into Paris.
 
The Nazi invasion of Britain seemed both imminent and inevitable.
The newly formed government of Winston Churchill needed a plan to keep the nation's wealth out of Hitler's hands. Some of it had already made its way across the Atlantic, but Britain needed a way to move the rest.
Operation Fish was hatched and would soon become the single-largest transfer of material wealth in history at the time — though very few people in Britain or Canada, where billions of dollars worth of gold and securities would be sent for safekeeping, ever caught a whiff.
"[It was] totally in secret. People just never knew about it, and all of those resources were there to prosecute the war in the event of a German invasion of Britain," explained James Powell, an Ottawa historian and retired Bank of Canada executive who has researched and written about the daring wartime operation.
  Prior to Operation Fish, Britain had already sent some of its gold to Canada. One of those earlier shipments arrived aboard two warships that escorted King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Canada for a royal visit in the spring of 1939. (Library and Archives Canada) 'A load of fish'
Powell's telling of the story begins with Sidney Perkins, an employee of the Bank of Canada's Foreign Exchange Control Board. On the morning of July 2, 1940, Perkins left his home on Euclid Avenue in Old Ottawa South and arrived at work to learn he was being sent on a top-secret mission. The stakes were unimaginably high.
Later that day, Perkins and David Mansur, the bank's acting secretary, met Alexander Craig from the Bank of England at Bonaventure Station in Montreal. The men shook hands and Craig announced he'd brought them "a load of fish."
In fact, the heavily guarded train that had just arrived from Halifax contained no seafood. Instead, it held a nearly unfathomable amount of wealth in the form of gold and securities — the latter seized from the British public under the Emergency Powers Act.
  The first shipment under Operation Fish arrived in Halifax aboard HMS Emerald on July 1, 1940. (Wikipedia) Craig and his "load of fish" had arrived in Halifax the previous morning aboard the light cruiser HMS Emerald following a harrowing seven-day voyage. A relentless gale had forced two destroyers escorting the shipment to turn back, leaving the Emerald and its precious cargo at the mercy of the U-boats that lurked in the North Atlantic. In the month of May alone, more than 100 Allied and neutral ships had been sunk.
For Britain, to lose a single vessel loaded to the gunwales with gold and securities would have been disastrous.
"To take the gamble and to ship all these resources over was truly a gutsy decision, to say the least," Powell noted.
A desperate decision
Gutsy, but absolutely necessary. Britain needed free access to its own financial assets in order to buy much-needed materiel from the United States, which remained officially neutral at that time and as such was not allowed to extend credit for war supplies. It was strictly cash and carry. For Britain, losing that buying power would likely have meant losing the war.
"Britain isn't moving the equivalent of hundreds of millions in gold because it's an easy thing to do," said Tim Cook, director of research at the Canadian War Museum and author of a dozen books on Canada's military history. "They're forced to do it because it really looks like Britain is going to fall."
  RCMP officers guarded the sealed trains full of British gold and securities on their journey from Halifax to Montreal and Ottawa. (Imperial War Museum) The shipment that arrived in Montreal on July 2 was split in two. Five hundred boxes stuffed with securities, then worth an estimated £200 million, were taken to the Sun Life Building there, while the gold — some 9,000 bars packed into more than 2,000 bullion boxes, worth a total of £30 million at the time — continued on to Ottawa's Union Station.
Under cover of darkness, armoured cars transported the treasure to the newly built Bank of Canada building on Wellington Street, where men worked in 12-hour shifts carrying crates and bags down to the bank's 60-by-100-foot subterranean vault.
"The story that I have heard is that there was so much gold coming in at one point, they were just stuffing it everywhere, in hallways, in the incinerator room, just stuffing it to keep it safe before the accountants could come and look at all the boxes and tally it all up to make sure it was all there," Powell said.
'A cold chill'
That shipment paved the way for more, including a much larger convoy that left Britain just one week later.
"Seeing tens of millions in gold piled on the quay gave me a cold chill," Perkins would later remark about one of the subsequent shipments he witnessed being unloaded in Halifax.
  The Bank of Canada building on Wellington Street in Ottawa, circa 1940. Very few would have been aware at the time that its vaults were brimming with British gold, secretly sent to Canada for safekeeping. (Bank of Canada Archives) According to the Bank of Canada, some 1,500 tonnes of gold bullion and coins eventually made their way into the vault, where they remained for the duration of the war.
Powell estimates the value of all that gold at £470 million, the equivalent of nearly $90 billion Cdn today — making the Bank of Canada's Ottawa vault the largest cache of gold outside Fort Knox. The value of the securities stored and traded by British bankers in Montreal is incalculable, Powell said.
How Canadian scientists decoded a Nazi war machine So, too, was the value of Operation Fish to the Allied war effort.
"It was a bureaucratic act, but you can imagine if there had been an invasion of Britain, the Germans would have gone after all this gold and securities right away," he said. "If that gold had been seized by the Nazis, who knows what the course of the war would have been?"
  Workers unload a shipment of gold in the Bank of Canada's sub-basement vaults in 1955. During the Second World War, much of the gold stored here belonged to Britain, France and other allies. (Library and Archives Canada) Mission remained a secret
Perhaps one of the most astounding aspects of Operation Fish is that while hundreds of Canadians were involved — including bankers, brokers, secretaries, labourers, guards and many others — it remained a secret until after the war. Not a single gold-bearing ship was ever lost, and not a single ingot was ever misplaced.
"Secrets are very hard to keep in times of war. Only one person talking could have set off a real chain of events here," Cook said.
B.C. family shares in $21M award in Nazi confiscation case For Cook, Operation Fish stands as a testament to the "quiet professionalism" of the men and women involved.
"This is a story of tremendous courage on the part of many, of bureaucratic planning ... the stuff that doesn't usually get written about in histories, but really one of those key events that allows Britain to keep fighting," he said.
"I believe that Canadians should understand this history. It's part of what makes us who we are today."
 
Link: How Ottawa seized a golden opportunity to help defeat the Nazis in the Second World War | CBC News

Today I received some 'roos courtesy of @1stsovereign, and a 2016 QB Lion of England, courtesy of @Auronum(sorry fella, my pics dont do it justice through the capsule :/)
Also received some Holy metal tokens from @James32earlier this week but photographing them seemed...sacreligious 🤣🤣🤣

Received my 2022 TSF silver bar this afternoon.  Thanks BYB!

I love the beavers..lol.

Dragon Rectangle 2022
 

The beauty of gold (and silver in a more limited way) is that it is portable.
Digital currencies require internet/computers etc. Bank accounts can be seized or frozen, not to mentioned be tracked and spied upon.
Gold and silver transcend boundaries and are recognised across cultures. Consider a situation like Ukraine, having to flee with what you can carry. National currencies are only of value really in the country they are issued in (except for reserve currencies perhaps). What happens if that country ceases to exist or is under international sanctions? A ounce of gold has value across all countries of the world. If you have to flee tyranny and you can take the gold with you, it can be bartered in any country on Earth.