JKK

This is misleading information, Edwardram. This person has a bad habit of that, shows no signs of regret for misleading new collectors, doesn't seem to want to learn, and thus I wouldn't place any credibility in what he says. The red toning of an uncirculated, untarnished copper or bronze coin is not the same red that you are seeing on your cent. Those are added designators to uncirculated Lincoln cents. That red color looks like freshly stripped copper wire, kind of a salmon pink, and the coin is graded something like "MS-65RD". Then it tones to part red and part brown (for example, MS-62RB), where you can still see some of the pink or at least it still looks half fresh. When that's all gone, the designator of brown shows up as "MS-64B" or whatever the main grade might be. That brown is a rich attractive chocolate brown, generally about the color of a Hershey bar. None of that is at all germane to your coin and it was imbecilic to introduce it to this conversation, which is why I expended time to demolish its relevance. Your coin is in a different situation. It might be thought of as a variation of the "brown" designation except that the designations typically refer to uncirculated coins, which yours isn't. Yours is a normal 1969 cent with light wear and significant environmental toning which leads to a variety of shades from black to terra-cotta (yours leans that direction). Some will develop verdigris or in some cases, bronze disease. Verdigris is the bluish-green mess often seen on bronze or copper-nickel coins; yours has what might be spots of it on the obverse, 1200 (highly likely) and 400 (not as likely; could be something else). Bronze disease looks like a smurf sneezed on it, and is nasty to remove. I've done it, but the process is something most people would not care to undertake. So. While your penny would look nicer in a pleasant chocolate brown, and the reddish toning is indicative of something other than simple air exposure (not sure about sulfates or other forms from air pollution; not an actual chemist), it has zero relation to these discussions of red, red-brown, and brown. That dumpster is burning out of control.

That penny is actually a nice little class in coin chemistry. When struck, it was a steel planchet clad in zinc. Original unc examples are striking. Circulation tended to wear the zinc off the high points (and except for the areas just outside the wheat, that's where this wear is most concentrated), baring the steel. We understand what happens to steel when exposed to atmospheric moisture over a period of time, and you can see the rust coming right up to the edges of what's left of the zinc. However, the remaining zinc cladding also tarnishes into an oxide, though this one's remaining cladding is more in the bluish-gray stage that will ultimately become a powdery very light grey. And if you think it's a pain to remove tarnish, zinc is one of the worst. (Yes, I had to do it in order to identify the coins in question. Foreign wartime issue stuff.)

If authentic, it might be AU-50 to 55. I'm not convinced it's authentic.

Neither. What you have is hot garbage. It is a badly damaged coin, probably messed up in a parking lot. Any experimentation in play would have been some kid saying: "Just how badly could I screw this coin up if I really put my mind to it and got into my dad's tools" It barely holds a value of one cent. The odds of this being a mint error are roughly equal to my odds of being named the next Dalai Lama. My best guidance to you is to spend it so that you no longer have to see such carnage.

It depends what the motive is for grading. The most common grading motive is financial, sometimes accompanied by a motive to authenticate. If it's purely financial, the question is whether the best foreseeable outcome might add $50-60 to the coin's value. New collectors rarely have those sorts of coins. Authentication is another story, but that's a lot of money to be told that one's modern worn coin is only a modern worn coin worth face value. It starts to make more sense with heavily counterfeited issues and rarities. For some, it's sentimental: this was part of Bampaw's collection and while it turns out Bampaw wasn't the numismatist everyone assumed he was (in the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is king), he was a pretty good guy who left them a nice stash of junk silver plus a couple of LHNs he overpaid for, and they want to honor Bampaw. Fair enough. He was probably a real good guy and honoring him is easily worth the money. The most misguided reason, though, is the assumption that this is the "right" way to collect. A part of me greatly admires that outlook because one of my pet loathings is people who cut corners, do things wrong, just don't care. Pretty much includes 90% of contractors, about that percentage of people at four-way stops, and shippers who cannot be bothered to pack correctly--everywhere that it either matters now or will matter later. It doesn't apply to coins unless you're planning on limiting your collection to just a handful. If each slabbing costs $50, by the time you reach twenty coins, you have wasted the amount that could have purchased a 1909-S VDB penny. I personally would rather have the coin than all that plastic. At our coin show, less money than that bought me a beautiful Athenian tetradrachm in great condition. So imagine I'd forgone the tet in order to get eighteen common modern coins graded, all in the belief that I was "doing it right." Yeah. There's such thing as taking "doing it right" to insane extremes, such as if one mowed one's yard with a ruler and a nail clipper. One thing that really impresses me about NGC is that they stand aside and permit us to spend all day and well into the night telling people not to send their coins to NGC--not because NGC isn't a good place to send them (consensus is that they are at least one of the two top grading services), but because NGC evidently understands the economics well enough to realize that collectors who waste money on stupid grading decisions are likely to drift away from collecting. There are businesses that would ban anyone who even suggested not buying from the business. In fact, the main reason NGC would be my grading choice (if I ever sent a coin in, which I never have and probably never will) is because of that permissive outlook. While some of it might just be there aren't enough hours in the day (if they were, some chronic trolls and misinformers would be banned a lot sooner), I have to think part of it is policy. Enormous respect for that policy.

The MaTé (Maria Theresia thaler) is worth about an ounce of silver. Odds are it was minted in the 20th century and those are a common medium of exchange in the Yemen and Horn of Africa. Dealer probably gives you melt -5%, something like that. The Peace dollar, maybe dealer gives you $18-20--they typically give a little premium because they can always charge one. You probably get $36-38 for the two put together.

Grading services are not gods. They have knowledgeable numismatists, good resources, and a lot of experience. None of that makes them infallible--and I'm speaking of the three respectable ones. The dozens of Joe's Grading Services out there are a complete crapshoot by comparison, but they are likelier to have a motive to overgrade because people prefer to be told what they want to hear (and paid to hear).

I don't think that's glue. Glue would stick up. The side photo shows indentation. The shape looks enough like a reverse Lincoln that it's tempting to think it was a pitifully aligned vise job, but when one looks at it, the outline is incorrect. Occam's explanation would be that it just took some real hard impacts from whatever.

There aren't separate layers. I believe you are thinking of original surfaces and mint luster. What you originally asked about was how to detect cleaning. We don't grade (for the most part) with magnification, but we do use it to attribute it and inspect for signs of cleaning and counterfeiting, and sometimes to identify varieties. For abrasive cleaning, high magnification will reveal lateral or circular scratches. They look very different from normal wear. For chemical cleaning, it's harder. Often the cleaners do a poor job and leave some crud on the coin. Sometimes the chemical cleaning takes off the mint luster. Under normal wear situations, the protected areas (shadows of the devices) will keep mint luster longer than the raised parts; if the luster is no longer there in the shadows, but it's all bright and shiny, pretty likely it was chemically cleaned. Be very clear on this: dull-looking is not bad. It's not bad. It might mean tarnished/toned, it might mean worn, but it is not bad. If it were in my power to mentally assault every new collector with indoctrination they could not refuse, I would force into their brains that "shiny = great" is wrong, misleading. Circulated coins are supposed to look dull, and they get spotted when cleaned because they look wrong. There is a way coins are supposed to look based on how they have been used and handled. Mint state coins can be flat dull, provided they show no trace of wear. A worn-flat Merc that shows a blast white color is much worse than the same Merc if it were dull grey, because dull grey is how worn silver looks. If it were up to me, every time someone picked up a worn coin and said to herself, "You know what? I can make this 'shinny' [that type of person usually can't spell, either] and no one will know," a coin deity would touch their privates with a cattle prod and leave it there until they recited a formula: "Shiny is not fundamentally better!" Look for the scratches. A microscope can be helpful. Look for the crud, or for aspects of the coin that are not natural for its level of wear; a microscope can also be helpful there. Most of all, look at a lot of coins. The biggest tell is the coin doesn't look right for its age and wear. Only by looking at a lot of coins can you determine what is a normal look. Also, remember strike weakness vs. wear. Some coin issues had a tendency not to strike up fully. Not sure which are our worst examples, but my guess would be everything silver from the 1920s--Peace dollars, SLQs, some Walkers, and such. What might look like wear might simply be the planchet's surface metal that was not forced all the way up into the high points.

What on earth is "heavy silver layer"?

Those arclike marks are damage, if that's what you are referring to. The coin, which is very common, is worth its bullion value.

No. It is worth $0.05. Nearly none of these coins from the last sixty years are going to be worth anything and you are throwing a lot of time down a rathole taking time to photograph and post them. You can keep doing it, but the conclusion will be that you aren't really paying attention to the answers.

That's very heavy wear, in which the rims are worn away (condemning it to the lower grades even if it weren't damaged). Dryer coins have a different and less natural-looking form of damage.

I think the logic is that since the coin lacks a prominent feature of the real McCoy, it would be considered an art creation. However, I'm pretty sure someone passing it off as legal tender could not fall back on that. In other words, it's illegal to possess or pass counterfeit money. If the modified reverse means it's not a US coin, just having it's no big deal. If however someone tries to pay with it, that could possibly be construed as fraud.

I was under the impression that the Italian lira was demonetized, which would mean it wasn't worth anything. Was I incorrect?

No.

We're being trolled. No one is this clueless, not even in Murrica.

"fishbone"? Maritimes? Or someplace like Port Alberni? At first it didn't register with me, then I noticed. If you're going to move about the Canadian coin world at all--the one that any dealers near you will operate in, of course--it's important to know a couple of things. (I'm from Kansas and live in Oregon, but I'm that rare USian who can name all your provincial and territorial capitals, and likes poutine and Arctic char.) I've collected your coinage for decades and enjoy it very much. I especially like pre-Confederation stuff. One is that while the RCNA standards follow a descriptive and numbering pattern similar to the ANA's, they have important differences. To some degree Canadian grading is easier because the obverse is similar across the board, and they don't change the monarch's picture too frequently. I believe QE II had three total portraits. Anyway, once you learn what's important about a given portrait with regard to grading, that will apply to all issues bearing that portrait. Another important difference is that the RCNA standards are less muddy. In those, the details either are there or they are not, and there's no wiggle room for eye appeal in most grade levels. (Maybe at very high levels, but I am only experienced in grading circulated Canadian coins.) Your best reference on this is the Charlton book. It's the Canadian equivalent to our Red Book. It has excellent blowup shots of varieties, pricing information that at least has use showing relative values, and RCNA grading guidelines. I don't buy it every year but it has helped me a lot. I think nowadays it comes in two volumes. And they're right; there is no way to remove the clasp that would make it like it never happened. I can think of nothing even a professional goldsmith could do that would conceal the former location of a clasp. If you spent a fair bit of money on one, you might get one that would fool a novice, but fooling an experienced collector would be almost as hard as fooling a reputable grading service. Not that you would seek to fool anyone; rather, it just means there's no way to turn that clock back far enough, sorry to say.

It is worth $0.10.

You are rightly advised not to clean them, so your instincts are good there. The gold depends. A lot of gold from that era does not get a big premium. Good sharp photos of both sides will enable us to give you some idea. Same for the dollars and dimes.

I thought "no" was a pretty clear, unambiguous answer, thank you very much. Not sure how anyone could be clearer. You did not ask "and why?" but I'll go ahead and tell you. Because from the first view, even though we did not get full photos, I could see that it was a 1970s D Kennedy, circulated. That told me it was worth fifty cents. The mechanical doubling was an obvious irrelevancy (granted, not to novices, but to experienced collectors). If you put $50 into having it graded, it wouldn't make it easier to sell because serious collectors know it's not worth $0.51; thus the $50 would be a sunk cost that potential buyers would describe as "Wow, NGC really took that guy." Or I could have just said "No." Which I did, because none of the qualifiers really matter. It's like asking if throwing a hamster in the air will help it to fly. One can either say "no," or one can waste everyone's time by painfully explaining that hamsters cannot fly. So. No. Simple, economical, and in hopes of not wasting any more of either of our time on a subject that can't go anywhere.

A good example is railroad tracks. Not only will people try to race the train--as any thinking person can see, not a great idea--but we require signs (at least where I live) telling people not to stop their cars on the tracks. And even then people still do it. When I see it, I am torn between hoping a train comes along so that Darwin can improve the gene pool, and hoping one doesn't because the offenders would probably either panic and wreck every car around them, or fail to notice and have their car rammed into others who do not deserve it. Another. Every day, on my local BegsDoor, the same people whine for money. All negative events are excuses for a gofundme. Had COVID? "Give to me!" Car broke down? "Give to me!" Can't afford to take care of my pet's vet needs? "Give to me!" Don't want to work even though a fern with a felony record could get hired at a stop-and-rob or McDogfood's? "Give to me!" And people keep giving to them. Every time. That's the low-level scam: the begging, the explosion of tip requests on credit card taps, and so on. One I've reposted a few times is a local Craigslist dude who has a somewhat browned quarter he claims is bronze and therefore wants, what is it...$700 nowadays. On the positive side, he's been at it for at least two years and still doesn't seem able to sell his quarter, so that's at least good. Anyone who wants to email him to yank his chain, don't look at me to discourage you.

You obviously have not spent most of the last twenty years in the United States. If you had, you would surely understand how that could happen. Stupidity and ignorance are these bottomless wells of gullible brain death in our national culture, and there is no such thing as a scam so ridiculous no one would fall for it. In a developed and educated country, perhaps, that might apply; nowadays, ours is neither. Not only will people fall for it, but they will walk, crawl, or dive into any scam. Any.

No.

Definitely not.