That area of ebay always makes me feel sick. Rare old parts and boards, getting crushed for a few cents worth of gold (after a lot of messy, polluting chemical processing, that might not even break even in costs.)
While I understand that sentiment and agree that a lot of people are using a really awful process and are only in it for the 'OMG SHINY!' feeling, there is a legitimate reason to recycle old electronics. Re-use is preferable, but if that's not an option...
Not saying that someone should not try to find a 'new home' for a lot of the stuff, but if you have 5000 pcs of a transistor that went obsolete thirty years ago, no one wants it, what are you supposed to do? Or wholesale quantities of EDO RAMs? Hold on to it till the end of time?
Of course. Recycling in general and recovery of precious metals is good. I should have been more specific.
What bugs me about the ebay 'scrap recovery' area is the very high degree of irrational expectations. What's needed is a way for people with old junk to easily pass it to expert industrail scale recovery operations. Entities with sensible, non-poluting, economically viable production line processes. Where the price offered for items to be scrapped, would be an actual sane estimate of the value of recovered gold etc, minus processing costs, plus a profit margin.
Instead, in that ebay category it's the norm to see stuff listed for what must be multiples of the actual recoverable gold cost, because the sellers are idiots and have an audience of idiots, all with 'gold fever' - it's shiny, must be worth heaps! Thus often pricing it out of the range of historical collectors.
Gyro's posted two fine examples of completely irrational pricing.
OK, it's a free market, but a very irrational one, because 'gold recovery' is such a cult of amateurs who have little idea what they are doing. Of course there are some who DO know what they are doing - some interesting youtube channels about gold recovery. Though I never saw one that added up their costs of chemicals, time, etc and worked out an actual operating margin.
In general irrational pricing in a market is no big deal - just a bunch of extortionists and suckers interacting. Except that in this case quite often there are real historical treasures being destroyed. With the sellers having no clue or care. Antistatic handling? What's that?
But hey, it's the same with everything isn't it? Ignorant bozos getting their hands on treasures they don't understand, and destroying them carelessly.
Also... every time I look in that area of ebay, I end up blowing cash. This time... 304188959597 Gold Plated Can and Transistor Legs Scrap Electronics 7.2 Oz Price US$50!
For some metal can ICs with gold plated legs. Appear to be socket pulls. But I notice they are Burr Brown, and at least some of them seem to be INA-1xx series. Looking them up, seem interesting.
I got them for $42, which is still way too much for a collection whim.
Anyone care to make an estimate on how much (little) actual gold is there? Not that I really care.
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