Fenntucky Mike

Nope.

Welcome to the forum. Unfortunately your coin appears to be a crude counterfeit to my eye and has little to no value.

Nice accent piece for the collection Mr. B. I think I have a waffled SBA$ laying around somewhere.

I was hoping that the listing would discourage people from bidding and that I would be able to pick this up for a deal. No such luck this time. The listing for this piece, and a few others, is what prompted my previous thread on GPT descriptions.

I had placed a bid on this one. The use of the word token is what popped out at me when I saw the listing previously. I'm not sure it's an AI description or not, a pretty short one if it is.

Morbiducci was invited by the Irish government to submit designs, after which he was paid £50. It would interesting to know who retained the copyrights of the designs once submitted and if it was dependent on being selected for use in the final design. These pieces may not fit your or the U.S. Mint's definition of a pattern but I would classify them as a pattern of some sort. Counterfeit? Not even close imo unless there was some sort of copyright infringement if the government owned the rights to the designs once submitted.

I think we all agree that it is a privately made piece which was not commissioned by the government but presumably by the artist who submitted the designs to the committee. Why could there not be patterns for unaffiliated medals or tokens? Why couldn't a private party commission patterns of prospective designs? Perhaps Morbiducci medal or design pattern would be a better description.

Here are the original Metcalfe designs, see below. Not much changed with the penny, the hound, hunter, pig, and bull were altered to greater extents. Final designs below.

Interesting. Were all 10 of Morbiducci's designs produced as patterns or only some of the designs/denominations? Gut feeling for how many were minted of each or total, Krause estimates the number between 4-5 for the known examples. At least for the penny, patterns were stuck in three different metals. I don't know if this is the case for the other designs as well.

Were most or all of the Morbiducci patterns sold by his widow in '76 or were there others in private collections? It would make sense that Morbiducci distributed a few of the patterns, or sets of patterns, to individuals prior to his death, most likely at or around the time he submitted his models.

The pattern reverse is definitely more lifelike and has movement to it, the Metcalfe is more art deco which is fitting for the times. I'm really having a hard time choosing between the reverses but I do prefer the Metcalfe obverse hands down. The harp is too puny on the pattern, the layout on the Metcalfe design seems better to me. In all fairness we are comparing a pattern to a final design, Morbiducci's design would have gone through several revisions if selected to make it more friendly to produce, prevent premature die wear, etc.. I have not seen Metcalfe's initial submission for the penny but his initial designs for some of the other coins were altered considerably for several reasons. If I can find an image of Metcalfe's original submission for the penny I'll post it here.

A rare Irish pattern piece just popped up for sale, graded by our hosts PF64, it is the pingin (penny) pattern designed by Publio Morbiducci. Image From Atlas Numismatics, https://atlasnumismatics.com/1078211/ . I believe Morbiducci commissioned the patterns himself and had a handful produced in Italy, none of his designs were chosen for the new coinage as the Committee voted in favor of those submitted by Percy Metcalfe. The most recent auction record I could find for a 1 penny pattern was in 2022, the piece auction by Spink sold for just over $23k with BP. The coin above is listed on ebay and the seller is asking $30k ($29,500 on their website) but is accepting offers. I was thinking that a reasonable sell price would have been in the $10k range but it seems $30 is not too far off albeit a little high. Below is Metcalfe's design. Does anyone disagree with the Committee's selection? Image from NGC World Coin Price Guide. https://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/world/ireland-republic-penny-km-3-1928-1937-cuid-1126846-duid-1473460

AI will be used to try and maximize profits/sales by increasing efficiency in everyday business at auction houses, TPGs, dealers, etc.. Whether it is by generating lot descriptions, improving efficiency at the office, compiling information, identifying varieties/cherry picking, etc., the collector will have no say in most of these decisions, it's only a matter of if or when AI and the equipment to support it can advance enough to preform some of these tasks. For example, if at some point AI could cherry pick varieties, minor ones, at no cost to the user why not identify them in an effort to maximize profits regardless of public sentiment. If only AI could process monster boxes of ASE's at the TPG firms.

They beat the snot out of that one. Yikes!

AI is in its infancy and is quite often wrong or misleading when generating descriptions, documents, etc., for coins and most things in general as you have stated, but where can it go from here? How useful can it become and how will it be used in numismatics in the future? To expand on my hypotheticals in the OP. If auction houses generally shift to AI and use it for lot descriptions will subpar and misleading commentary provide an advantage to a more knowledgeable bidder who relies less on descriptions, or will it just keep the riffraff out and the sharps keep sharping? A good description can help a lot and a poor or inaccurate one can hurt but how much? As AI becomes more accurate will there be less lots slipping through, e.g. varieties that are not listed in a description or on a TPG label, minor doubling that would not normally be noted is, etc.? Will AI cherry pick all the lots, list them, and be more accurate and find more than is done now resulting in fewer deals or bargains for bidders? With more and more high resolution images being taken of coins and banknotes, available data, and most cellphones having the capability to take these images how soon will AI become proficient at determining a relative grade or condition of a coin? When will AI be a useful numismatic research tool, if ever? FlyingAl's proof cameo project comes to mind, if and when enough images are collected can they be ran through an AI program to determine die varieties and identify differences (die markers)? Could AI be used to decipher mint documents from scans or images of the originals , transcribe, sort, and provide meaningful data, information or articles? How will TPG's use this technology? Plenty of scenarios out there for AI and numismatics, good and bad.

...are pathetic at the moment. I noticed the other day that one of the bigger overseas auction houses is using GPT to generate auction descriptions for all lots, and the few I've read so far are either misleading or flat-out wrong. What, if any, consequences will there be? Will there be more opportunities for knowledgeable buyers? Will there be less "deals" to be had in the future as AI advances and is able to identify coins and banknotes better and pick out varieties? When will AI be used to grade coins and determine value? Will AI solve the '64 SMS coins riddle? Below is one listing with GPT description. This is not the worst I've read but wanted to pick out a U.S. coin since that is what most here collect.

I guess I'm a little surprised not to see Germany on the list and that earnings are supposedly tops in Switzerland. When compared to the NGC top 10 most coins graded list there are only four crossovers. NGC's Most Graded List by country, top ten. U.S. China Canada Australia South Africa Great Britain Mexico Russia Poland Germany

I would not hesitate to add a contemporary counterfeit to my collection, it adds to the overall narrative of a series and depth to a collection imo. The coin in question appears to be weakly struck in places and has an abundance of what look like raised lines in the fields on both sides. I've not viewed many coins from this series but I can say that the few I have did not have those attributes. I'm a little skeptical that it is a counterfeit having an identical composition as an authentic piece and nearly the same weight but...

I wonder how long SB will have to sit on these. I'm not sure if SB purchased them from the RM to auction or if the RM consigned them. Seems like the RM consigned them if I'm reading everything correctly. I just got another notice from SB for post auction buying of the Pyx coins, looks like there were 376 passed pieces and 244 that sold between the two Pyx auction sessions.

My thought is ambitious reserves coupled with the condition of the coins caused people to shy away.

FedEx may have unintentionally bailed you out of a potential $1,000+ loss, not as good as if the coin turned out to be authentic, which I'm still skeptical of, but you wouldn't be out anything either as long as the package was properly insured. Just saying. Hopefully they find the package, the coin makes it to NGC, and it turns out to be authentic.

Wow, a lot of reserves were not met in the Pyx auction. SB is listing the passed coins with BIN price tags. I haven't seen this many passed coins in a long time.

Complete rubbish if you're talking about the orientation of the edge lettering.

NGC has been slabbing colorized coins for years, the only caveat is that the colorization must have been done or authorized by the mint producing the coins. I haven't seen these coins before but the Cook Islands are always selling their name to Mints, allowing them to produce gobs of NCLT pieces. Tuvalu and Niue are two more countries that cash in on NCLT.