JKK

Looks like it was a good strike. That's probably what makes it seem high relief, since so many Peace dollars were so weakly struck.

I do too, provided they are dated before 1950 or so. Now and then one finds something interesting.

I'm guessing most of us have confronted that situation before and have thus had to look for solutions. If you buy out coin collections, at some point you're sure to come across a mixed fruitcake tin of assorted foreign coins. Probably Bampaw brought them home from the war or the postwar. The US not being a hotbed of geographic understanding, the descendants often have no idea where most are from, especially any in other alphabets, and in any case few are willing to look them all up once they find that maybe one in a hundred is worth more than a nickel (and that one's worth a quarter). There they sit until it's time to get rid of them. An experienced world coin collector, or a dealer, can pretty much rip through them with half a second each of face time to make the decision: junk or value? The dealer, who buys a lot of collections, hasn't time to waste, so he sets aside the few worth looking up. The rest he maybe pays a nickel each for, dumps in his assortment bin, charges 15-25c for, and makes a small but non-trivial income stream considering his margin.

I see: French, Israeli, Nicaraguan, Cuban (many), what I think is Haitian or Ethopian, Swedish, Mexican, Weimar German, Dutch East Indies, West German, Panamanian...probably as many other nationalities buried or too fuzzy to see.

We've minted quite a few, especially during the war years; most notably much of the Phillipine coinage pre- and during WWII. For example, if you ever wondered what happened to all the unused steel penny planchets, they were used to strike liberation coinage for Belgium (BFr2 pieces, I think). Mintage abroad isn't rare. Some Cuban coins were minted at Kremnica; the Franklin Mint has been hired to mint some Caribbean countries' coins; many WWII and pre-WWII Aussie coins were minted in British India.

I'll have to take your word for that, and count my blessings that it is so.

I'm just glad that the oxygen has been able to flow back into the room once more, now that someone has stopped having gas.

Takes brain cells. Did we see evidence of those?

Dream on. It's like coronavirus; it lives on surfaces for a long time. Unless the admins block the IP, there'll be another outbreak.

Yep. Looks like that coin experienced a couple of rough impacts. Since high quality examples are very inexpensive, damaged and worn examples are worth either US$0.01 or their copper value, whichever is greater.

90-O looks authentic, probably VG-8, CW price guide $25, $20 might be realistic. 04-O, nice piece, AU to MS (the plastic makes it problematic to see the detail and high points), also looks authentic, CW price guide $40-50 or perhaps a little more, realistic retail about $30-45 as a guess.

Pics not big enough. Kindly enlarge.

I'd guess you're in a tough spot. On the one hand, Indian heads get faked often enough that people are rightly leery about buying them raw. On the other, if authentic, their value doesn't skyrocket between VF and MS. Coin World puts that range from $320-400, which we know is inflated. Melt is $203 right now if authentic. The grooving through the date does not look to me like damage (I saw some on other examples I looked at), but it does seem rather pronounced compared to others. AU is probably a fair guess at the grade. I'd say AU-60 because I could see some dealers trying to pass it off as MS. I feel your pain because I recently had to look at a number of these, and the incuse design creates grading issues we don't have with most coins. Of course, if you send it in, you will at least find out if it's real in return for your $30-60. It may only get a details grade. Either way, $30-60 is probably 10% of its value ceiling, so it's a valid question if the concern is economic.

If the answers from the earlier post were inadequate, you could have asked more questions there rather than reposting the same coin again. We do not benefit from duplicate threads.

I recommend you spend it for 1c.

In answer to your question, it's not special, but it is a lightly circulated 43-S Merc. There are a great many out there. What you should do with it is up to you; I personally would put it in a flip to protect it. I would not send it in for grading, for the same reason you would not spend $70K refurbishing a very common type of $10K car.

Matter of opinion. Doesn't look better to me. Before, it looked natural with some discoloration. Now it looks cleaned, and the cleaning didn't even get rid of the discoloration. Two steps back, no steps forward.

Here's how you learn: your best method is to search for a real example and compare your coin. Take a look at this link. Notice that the doubling on the date, motto, and legend are so major that there's air between the images. If you do not find any images of a doubled die for a given issue, that's a fair tell that there are none known. In that situation, one of two things is true. Either (99.9999% likely) you have not discovered a new one and your coin has mechanical doubling of some sort, or (0.0001% likely) you have, all these years later, discovered a doubled die that somehow over many decades, no one ever spotted despite armies of well-equipped cherrypickers looking at millions of examples. I'd go with the 99+%, myself. I wrote this mainly to encourage some of our regular novices (you know who you are) to stop and go searching for the real thing before asking. It's not that we mind people asking, but it's not especially fun always raining on people's parades. Sometimes we get less patient. If so, it's because--to use a metaphor--after the first several hundred times, we get a little fatigued of looking at losing lottery tickets where the person presenting it thinks they're winners, and we have to tell them nope.

Even with the fuzzy photo that you did not take time to rotate vertically, one can tell that's not a 55 DDO. The 1955 DDO is so blatant that even the newest collector would have zero doubt about it, so that's an easy spot.

Kurt told you what I would have. Here's the main trouble: what looks pristine to those who are not used to looking at a lot of coins, all protected inside the mint packaging, usually isn't as perfect as the novice thinks (which is natural, and nothing to fault you or anyone else for). My grading guide doesn't have state quarter specifics, but here's MS-67's general description: Has full original luster and sharp strike for date and mint. May have three or four very small contact marks and one more noticeable but not detracting mark. On comparable coins, one or two small single hairlines may show under magnification, or one or two partially hidden scuff marks or flaws may be present. Eye appeal is exceptional. [left out irrelevant part about copper coins] What it says for MS-68: Attractive sharp strike and full original luster for the date and mint, with no more than four light scattered contact marks or flaws. No hairlines or scuff marks show. Exceptional eye appeal. [same caveat] So what you are looking for, in football terms, are fouls so ticky-tack that the replay refs spend ten minutes reviewing, then usually decide there isn't indisputable video evidence. Even professional graders do not find this easy. So yeah, keep and protect them; don't let the plastic-sealed packages bang into one another. But you'd be unlikely to break even, let along profit.

I don't know what you're trying to show me.

This should be entertaining. Anyone got an urgent money available to spend?

Okay. The closest match I can find for the brass one is intriguing: Kwangtung (Guangdong, once Canton; surrounding Hong Kong and Macao for those seeking to advance geographic understanding) Province, 10 cash, pattern coin c.1888, KM# Pn2. The labyrinth reverse kinds of stands out, which is a big help in Chinese coinage when there are something like a dozen provinces all with similar coinage and subtle differences. While the price guide says $3250, don't start making big plans for the money, as there are many steps that are likely to lead to you getting about 10-20% of that (wild guess). Assuming it certifies as authentic (I don't know which grading companies would do that, but this is a good place to start asking), then you'd have to get it where the people who collect these things can find and buy it. That probably means an auction house. Then you hope its collectors happen to be following the auction. I can't advise you very well on this. The tael, if such it is, is a little tougher. I suspect it could possibly also be a pattern coin, since nothing quite like it shows up for Zhejiang (east coast; used to include what was then called Hangchow, if you're following along geographically). If authentic (looks possible, but that's a big if), it'll take a much more learned Chinese imperial coin student than me to attribute. I didn't find it in Krause or Numista. The weight is at least credible for the denomination. It could be anything from a contemporary fake to a rare pattern. I don't know how to find out more.

Just to rule out the most obvious avenue of potential fakery on the two non-copper coins, run a magnet over them. If they don't jump, doesn't mean they are real; does mean they are at least not in the Frequent Faker category. Next step is weight and diameter of each. Kind of suspect the bronze one is a token. I've never seen that obverse before.

So which post about this do you want replies to go to?