gmarguli

It's very difficult to tell from these pictures, but the 1936 looks low MS, the 1942 AU58, and the 1943 cleaned. 

20X magnification is perfect for looking for authentication markers. Not much need for magnification when grading Walkers. 

On 7/6/2021 at 8:19 AM, Iku said:

3 hours ago, Iku said:

Real bummer to find out that parts of coin's edges are so corroded due to PVC that color changed to brown.

This looks like dip residue. It'll likely come off with a quick dip. 

I've always found these interesting. Some meaningless facts I found when looking into them:

Minted by Osborne Coinage. They were produced 24 hours a day with as many as 80 million being made in one day. 5 billion total tokens were minted.

There are 30 red and 24 blue letter combinations. What the letters mean has never been divulged. While some people think they were random, the fact that it has never been publicly stated leads many to believe there is something behind the lettering.

They are made of vulcanized fiber.

Blue tokens were used for processed foods. Red tokens for meats and fats.

At least one TPG will grade them:

Probably XF Details, Environmental Damage. 

48 minutes ago, Hoghead515 said:

It was a Panama coin. It may be pretty common to find them in places but here where we live we hardly ever see anything like that. They were nothing special but neat finds for the geography   

Are you saying that Eastern Kentucky isn't a popular tourist destination for world travelers? 

Los Angeles, circa 1990, I met a guy selling world coins by the pound. It was heavy in Mexico, stripped of Canada, and the rest was an extremely wide variety of countries. Turns out that he was buying it from the City. It was all the foreign coins that were put in parking meters, thrown in fountains, etc. He told me they held sales fairly regularly, whenever they accumulated enough. He would buy a couple thousand pounds at a time. 

My guess is that coin never saw the Turks & Caicos islands. The county only mints NCLT. This and the same date 1/2 Crown are the only coins that come close to having the appearance of actually being able to circulate. 

I find their designs very generic and rather dull. This is actually one of their nicest design, IMO.

Article should read: Jeff Garrett: The World's Most Valuable US Coin

There are many world coins that have sold for $1M+ and with the extreme wealth being created outside this county, there is no reason one of these super rarities couldn't surpass the record for the 1933 $20.

2 hours ago, Quintus Arrius said:

There were plenty of artifacts, coins and bars recovered from shipwrecks.  I do not recall anyone having the audacity to dismiss same with a wave of the hand saying they had never heard of such a refiner or mark, heretofore unknown, or examples of other such unknown numismatica.

Found eight inches down on a Florida beach. Silver. Aged, battered, with foreign inscriptions.  A true collector puts authencity first. There is plenty of time to determine its rarity, and Fair Market Value.

Even unknown examples have one thing in common, they tend to be somewhat similar in characteristic to known examples of type/date. The writing and symbols on this "coin" are gibberish. No date, denomination, or anything to indicate a country of origin. Clearly cast (XF condition with no wear), not to mention the seam. And anyone who has experience can instantly tell that this "coin" is not old based on its look. Based on the attempted style, it should be 300-500 years old. My guess is that it was produced post 1960.

1 hour ago, RWB said:

...or possibly a guillotine, which creates a different kind of "severance package.".

Or possibly he just hated the job. A prior PCGS President told me he hated the job. 

2 hours ago, KyCoinKollektor said:

I have found out that this coin is indeed real. Took it to several coin shops in the area and all 3 said it looked real. It was acid tested and passed for silver. It is a silver pillars with waves, Found that it is 8 reales, made in 1790-98, mint mark is Peru. I’m completely blown away, and next step is to send it in for grading. 

Did any of those shops want to buy it? Because if they did, I'd sell it to them ASAP.

Nothing about it looks authentic. 

AU Details, Cleaned.

This coin and the one linked to the Met site do not match. The borders don't look anything alike. Lots of other areas don't match up. 

Immediate gut feeling when seeing the pictures was that the coin looks modern in strike. I suspect you coin is counterfeit. 

Anyone who wants a cheap hedge and quick liquidity is not buying physical. 

As much as some dealers of high priced coins would like you to believe, it says nothing about the coin market. Money is super cheap right now and investors are begging to find places to park it. It'd be very interesting to know the motivation for the bidders. We don't know if any of them were actual coin collectors. 

1 hour ago, Alex in PA. said:

Some years ago, when I was living in Anchorage, the local Post Offices gave SBAs in change if you bought a book of stamps from their little kiosk thing.

Same here. I'm pretty sure it only takes credit cards now.

On 1/13/2021 at 9:20 AM, VKurtB said:

Somehow the British manage to make their current coins work in vending machines, with three denominations being non-round - 20p, 50p, and 1 pound.

Vending machines used to take coins?    How'd you fit them in the credit card slot? 

1 hour ago, VKurtB said:

I have yet to find and speak to even one European numismatist or collector who doesn’t already thoroughly know how to grade coins himself. I think that’s the difference. Only here has there ever been an attempt, silly as it is and was, to commoditize collectible coins. Besides, when you’ve seen a collection in a gorgeous Italian made Abafil case, all slabs become instantly extremely ugly.

I think this is country specific. In my experience I've found the Swiss to be able to grade consistently. Germans are far less consistent, tend to micro-grade by focusing on one flaw, and are not good at detecting cleaning or PVC. Italian grading is all over the place. French are optimistic...

15 hours ago, Coinbuf said:

The recent release of the 2021 dollars will for sure be having a big impact on the turnaround times, I have no doubt that there are boxes and boxes of those new dollars showing up every day and lots of flippers that need those graded right now in order to meet their eBay presales.   Turnarounds are going to be very slow for awhile now.

Doubtful modern stuff like this would ever reach the eyes of most coin graders. They are likely graded by modern-only graders.

And even if every single 2021 Morgan were submitted to NGC, the modern graders blow thru these type coins at an amazing rate. 

12 hours ago, Just Bob said:

22 years on the job, "regarded as a faithful and excellent workman,"  and he blew it all by stealing quarter planchets. 

That $5.25 in quarter planchets is roughly equivalent to $150 today. Tax free. He stole more than most people make in a day working 8 hours. 

Sad? He was a thief. He worked there for 22 years. Wonder how much he stole before he was caught. 

49 minutes ago, VKurtB said:

The more I think about this story of 40,000 fakes, the more one aspect disturbs me. The Secret Service had no in-house expertise to tell these coins were fake. THAT WAS THEIR ORIGINAL MISSION, not “setting picks” for assassins’ bullets. They used to be in the Treasury Department. Then Tom Ridge drafted them into Homeland Security. Just imagine the silliness of the fact that NO ONE at Secret Service knows (or cares) squat about counterfeit coins. Wow.

Maybe we now know why the Colorado counterfeiter, D.C., hasn't been arrested. The Secret Service doesn't have the ability to tell that the coins are counterfeit.

And given the quality of the counterfeits pictured in the article, no expert would be needed. They were bad fakes. Anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge about coins would have spotted them as fakes instantly.