To my above post...some older gold coins are obviously rare and very collectible, but the story doesn’t say what they were.
The recent story of the family that found $10M in coins on its property confirms your post. Everyone thought the couple was stupid to report the find... We later learned they had the coins for one year before the find became public. They were probably appraising the coins to determine value. If the coins were “scrape”, then they would have been quietly melted and sold. But it turned out the coins were very rare and worth more as antiquity. Thus the publicity even though they will pay much more in taxes....