Revenant

Well.... It should weigh 2.7 grams, not 3.1, but it should stick to a magnet. How sure are you that your scale is accurate?

8 hours ago, Just Bob said:

You didn't get one for yourself? 

I didn't say that... But I won't crash the thread too much. I'll say something more later.

4 hours ago, Voltyris said:

 

No need to dig up your garden and hide the coins, bars and stuff like that. Only for us to hear about how a dog found the stash a hundred years later while playing in the garden. Wasn't this the way things were done in the good old days? Where do they hide now them, banks eh : )

In the r/Silverbugs Reddit the recurring joke is that the silver is lost in a "boating accident."

2 hours ago, World Colonial said:

She should have more soon than she has ever had in her entire life.

My wife and I aren't / weren't in the same boat as her but we're already in the category of having more in liquid savings than ever before. It had been taking a long time for us and our reserves to recover from my long unemployment and then the financial disruption of Sam's birth but it's done now.

I feel like I'm one step away form putting on my tin-foil hat some days but I've been making some long-term minded purchases lately - getting my wife and I new shoes (good branded shoes in unpopular colors that I got for $40 a pair). Buying a backyard playset so my sons can have playground equipment that we control exclusively that they can play on during lockdown that will last for them for the next 5-8 years. Buying some nerf guns for my son(s) that are from a good brand that they should be able to get low / no cost fun out of for the next 4-8 years... Lots of thinking and actions lately with a 2 to 8 year time horizon on my mind.

21 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

The only way those polls make sense is if many are making more from unemployment than they were working.  That may be true but if so, only temporarily.

If you were making minimum wage or close to it you'll be making more than you were when working - for 4 months. After that... not so much. The people who aren't working also aren't spending money on gas for their cars and aren't eating out or haven't been. There's also been a thing going on where people have been getting rebates on car insurance because of something the government did - my wife and I got $50 back from Nationwide.

Between tax refunds, the stimulus checks, them waiving student loan interest and payments for 6 months, the insurance rebates... some people are getting insane cash dumps right now. It's not going to last. It isn't even generating the sugar-high the Fed and Trump were hoping for. But certainly the people that haven't been laid off and the minimum wage workers getting more on unemployment than they were working are doing unusually well... for now.

29 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

Most people will be worse or much worse off than they were a few months ago even if this happens.

Well, unfortunately, even if your 401K bounces back with the DOW you aren't going to be thrilled if you're unemployed.

I'm not convinced that gold will be shooting up anytime soon - even though you have BoA and even Jim Cramer talking it up intermittently - just because there have been polls and studies showing that 90% of people are using those stimulus checks to either save or pay down debt and people are not spending on nonessentials and people are going to cash, which in the short term will be deflationary and not inflationary.

It's an interesting read but...

I don't imagine this will make many collectors happy. It might make some dealers happy. It might make some speculative short-term flippers happy, but I don't see how a debt-fueled bubble in the collectables market is going to be good for collectors, the community or the hobby. I don't see how more people seeing this hobby as an investment is going to be good for the hobby long term.

Just my 2 cents.

I give props to PCGS here for taking great photos. I can't see anything that suggests targeted retouching or editing of the photo. It just looks like favorable lighting.

I try my best to get good lighting for photos on my 10G and '32 set. I take pride in the presentation of those sets as I'm sure the people paying for these photos want to take pride in theirs. I don't think there's a problem here.

I think I actually do "worse" with my Zimbabwe set because I'll pull those into photoshop to straighten the note in the image and adjust the white balance to try to get the colors right, even through the holder. Some generations of PMG holders tend to cause photos of the notes to blue shift pretty bad.

I think you're going to have to explain better what you mean by "came back."

Did you submit the coin to NGC to cross and they put the wrong mint mark and "wrong" (lower) grade on it when it crossed? (they shouldn't have done that unless you agreed to it so I'm guessing not).

Did you add a PCGS coin to your registry / set and they entered the info wrong when they validated it?

What is the cert number of the coin? What type of coin is it?

It's worth pointing out that no one here is a mind-reader. Not the members and not the employees at NGC. The more information you give, the easier it is to figure out what the problem is, the easier it is to help you, the faster your problem gets fixed.

Good luck in resolving the problem!

1 minute ago, World Colonial said:

What I described is certainly the preferred and promoted view by the industry and at minimum, a noticeable proportion of the higher budget collector base.  "Collecting" would be a lot less profitable and the most valuable collections would lose a lot of value without the current price structure.

Yeah... but... They're tiny. Half the US doesn't have $500 saved for an emergency. The high end collector's market is what? 10,000-20,000 people?

19 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

I'm not that old but I'm older than you from your prior comments.  Maybe I hold this opinion because I remember when what are now otherwise common but (near) condition census coins being viewed for what it actually is as a collectible. Nice but not rare, not "investments", and not what current consensus opinion claims it to be.

I don't think that view of things is as dead as you think .There are plenty of people (I think) that reject the guidance of "buy the best you can afford" and, instead, buy the highest grade they can before a significant price increase / buy where they think they get the greatest value.

Of course, there was a while there where I kept seeing articles about how "Millennials" don't care about things and acquiring "stuff" at all and would rather spend their money on experiences and vacations. My wife follows that model.

6 hours ago, World Colonial said:

There isn't a competitive set for most of coins I collect.  But even where there is, I have no interest in "winning" if my set doesn't deserve it.  It's fake and the equivalent of winning a "participation trophy".

At the same time, I feel like that's one of the things that makes the major awards over here so much fun, because many / most of those are given based on the work that's gone into the set, the presentation and the love shown for the set and the subject, rather than just tank fights for points.

4 hours ago, World Colonial said:

On your last question, apparently it does to many.  In world coinage, I have never understood why winning an award when almost no one is competing is meaningful, especially when most of the sets are still comprised of common coins where there is limited to no practical difference between the highest graded examples.  With US coins, same principle but at least there are generally a meaningful number of participants.

With so many series /categories there's only 2-3 at the top that are in any way in the running for the top spot and I think it can be fun to "trade shots" and compete with another person for the top spot if you have serious competition from at least one person. There can at least be some fun / joy in the competition at that point anyway if you're into that sort of thing. It can even be quite friendly and you can swap messages and chat over the years about the series and joke about hating each other for scoring a big upgrade or something. When there's just one person at the top and they have no serious competition? I can't believe most people find that very rewarding to crow about.

But... there are those we've all seen over the years that attach (IMO) far too much importance to it and like to think it means more than it does.

My 10G set is easily the top in the registry. However, I'd be shocked if there aren't at least 1-5 sets out there, graded, that could easily beat mine. Probably more like 10+ or 20+. They just aren't on the registry.

As far as look/presentation goes I like the modern NGC holder with one of the more plain brown / blue labels and not the super fancy ones. Just my $0.02.

It sounds like Ali interpreted this as a request to make a competitive set for condor tokens and/or civil war tokens. Hopefully that was what you were actually asking about. This idea has actually been brought up many times before.

The biggest problem I think you or NGC would have in making a set of this would be deciding which varieties / types / slots to put into such a set and deciding what tokens would be eligible for each slot. I don't think that would be nearly as simple and straightforward as many people seem to think and it would probably result in an unreasonably large set. I think that's why they keep responding to the idea with "make a custom / signature set." And it's worth noting, as I did one of the last times that this came up, that several people have done just that and some of those sets have won major signature set awards. So... it's not like really great and cool sets of condor tokens and civil war tokens aren't getting made in the registry. They are! You just maybe have to be willing to look for them.

In case you're curious, here are links to three nice civil war token sets I've seen before and linked others to:.

https://coins.www.collectors-society.com/WCM/CoinCustomSetView.aspx?s=10287

https://coins.www.collectors-society.com/wcm/CoinCustomSetView.aspx?s=15784

https://coins.www.collectors-society.com/wcm/CoinCustomSetView.aspx?s=1354

Hopefully you can enjoy looking at those! Civil War tokens are an interest of mine too.

One of these days I'd love to get into them more but I need to finish some other things first. I very briefly had my own custom set for some graded civil war tokens I have but it was tiny, unimpressive, and I deleted it because I had no spare time and energy for it and looking at it made me sad.  

4 hours ago, physics-fan3.14 said:

1. Why did they mint any at all? 

2. Why did they mint just a single one? 

3. This is a proof, so clearly a presentation or collectors item. Why weren't a limited run made (100, or 1000, or something like that) and issued as part of proof sets? (Did the UK issue sets at the time? I assume they did). 

Yeah... I can't figure out why things like this were done either. If they made even one coin then they had a pair of dies that were probably good to crank out 100,000... Dies are expensive. And, after all that... they made... 1 penny. What???

Since it's in a pronged holder NGC probably has photos of it online that were taken when it was graded that you can see when you do the cert look-up / verification.

Maybe that can tell you if it was always there.

I don't think NGC does errors and varieties unless you indicate that you want it and pay an additional fee. Maybe ask them?

2 hours ago, Just Bob said:

When you say,"each tag ends 885 through 889," to what "tag" are you referring? Is this the label on the slab, or is it something else?

He's talking about the certification number, and the part of the certification number that is the coin identifier XXXXXXX-001, XXXXXXX-002...

I would imagine what he's talking about would be rather rare. They would just about have to be -001, -002, -003, -004 and -005, from someone getting lucky, submitting one set and just one set and getting lucky with all 70s. I think if someone submitted more than one set the coins of the same type / reverse would be grouped and numbered together so you wouldn't get them all in sequential order.

For example, with several of the notes in my PMG-graded Zimbabwe set come from large bulk submissions from a particular dealer.

They were submitting several of the same notes though so those were grouped together, so the serial numbers are close, but they aren't sequential.

1 hour ago, t-arc said:

ngc only and thats the way it will be from now on till dooms day.

Except it's not anymore. PCGS coins are allowed in US competitive sets again but not World / non-US sets.

The price guide that NGC links to on the registry almost always gives prices that are about 50% above market so I never really trust them. Just FYI.

4 minutes ago, Moxie15 said:

 

Then go to the bank to buy a $25 box of Cents. Get 100 or more Cent size 2X2 coin holders and a stapler.

Then get a magnifying glass or loupe.

Now go through the cents one by one look at each one under the glass. Keep the best looking coin of each date and mint mark.

In a year or so  (searching a box or two a week) you will build a nice collection of red/brown to red cents from 1959 to date. You may find a few minor varieties, some counter stamped coins a couple hundred wheat cents and an Indian cent or two.

But most valuable of all you will have gained much knowledge and understanding of what is valuable and what is nothing special and what you think is cool (that is the best of all).

 

ENJOY!!

I did this back in the day and I recommend it for anyone with decent eye sight that doesn't mind getting black fingertips - but it's going to give you an album of red cents. It isn't going to give you a sense of what's valuable or not IMO. I'm assuming that comes the the cherry pickers guide but I can't imagine he'll find many or any of those in bank boxes.

3 hours ago, kbbpll said:

Here we are again, crushing hopes and dreams.

Nah... Being honest in friendly, welcoming way. Hopefully he sticks around and stays interested.

If they actually had to impose an effective enforcement mechanism I think it would be impossible to run this place without charging for it - and I think that would hurt membership so bad you might as well close it down at that point.

Yeah, some fraud occurs and when it can be proven NGC acts on it. But you just have to accept some lying probably occurs.

Funny thing in reference to what Coinbuf said - I try my hardest on photos on sets where I'm #1 because those 2-3 sets are some of my most important long-term collecting projects and I'm quite proud of them. Other sets - especially sets I know will never win anything - I put a lot less effort into. If the set is going to be archived for winning I want the photos to be good and I want my grammar and spelling to be on point.  

4 minutes ago, UncleDano said:

The original holder was broken.  It was given to a dealer to reholder, but he sent it to PCGS instead of NGC, came back a grade lower.  One grade level on this coin is about $1200 in value.

Sounds like you should be giving the dealer a piece of your mind. That stinks.