I can answer that.
Coins have numismatic value and may actually be investments. That's to say, if they are rare, they may appreciate the way that art does. But you pay a premium for them. Bars, therefore, are cheaper on a per ounce basis.
Large bars and numismatically interesting coins may not be as useful in a crisis, though. It's easy to tell what a 1 oz pure gold kruggerand is worth, after all. The relatively small size also makes it fairly easy to spend. But what are you going to do with a 50 oz gold bar? Cut it up yourself whenever you need to buy some chickens or lumber? Just go to a nearby farmer and hand him the entire bar? And what merchant is going to be interested in giving you whatever you think your 1640 Spanish doubloon is worth? Only a specialist. For that reason, ordinary gold coins might be a better choice. Silver - with its "per coin" value of only $15 right now - may be better yet.
There are also 1 oz silver “rounds” that look very much like coins but aren't and gold bars that have no collectibility. They’re good though since they’re stamped with the usual 99.999% purity and 1 oz assertion and sell for just slightly more than the spot price of the metal. If you ever need to spend a silver round or 1 oz gold bar on a black market, it will be relatively easy do and both the buyer and the seller can be pretty confident that they’re bartering with something of known value.
The last point I’ll make is that bars contain some minimal risk of having been hollowed out and filled with something cheaper. I’ve heard of gold bars being filled with tungsten – which has nearly the same density as gold but practically no worth. The only way most people can tell a bar has bee tampered with s to cut it in half and look. Who wants to be doing that? Not me.
Let me know if you have any other questions. Unfortunately, the one important one I can’t answer is who you should buy it from. I once dealt with Burt Blumert out of San Francisco. He was a wonderful, brilliant guy who ran Camino Coins and co-founded LewRockwell com, but he’s no longer with us. And I dealt with Tulving Company. Although I had great success with it, it eventually went bad and screwed over an awful lot of its customers. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of them. Tulving is no longer in business and has left me disinclined to ever again deal with an on-line seller. Your best bet may be to buy directly from a reputable jeweler.
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