Revenant

I feel the need to point out that any work of original authorship can be registered with the copyright office and they give you that letter / certificate. All you have to do is pay the $35 fee. Copyright registration does not have any bearing on the accuracy or scholarly merit of the work. It really just makes it easier for you to sue someone for stealing your work.

Interesting post though and nice pictures!

It feels like you "fell into a hole" and disappeared rather suddenly, Alan. Hopefully you're doing okay out there and you're just busy with other things for happy reasons.

On 4/5/2020 at 8:10 PM, Coinbuf said:

...hopefully you can put them under a stack of books and press them mostly straight and flat again.

As a small update on this, after about a week under / between the big heavy books I don't think you'd ever know they were bent up unless you were looking close to see it. I was rather pleased with how they flattened out. Fortunately some new PMG-graded Zimbabwe banknotes I recently ordered from a dealer were not similarly mistreated when they arrived.

Don't be so quick to say what Eliasberg did will never be repeated. It would be hard and take a lot of money but from what I hear someone is trying.

2 hours ago, CBC said:

 The lettering near the rim (or in Morgans, the stars) is the most common place for cracks to develop, probably because the stresses are higher there due to metal flow during striking.  It looks like the line on your coin starts at the point of a star but not through the star itself, extends to the K but not through the K, and then from the other side of the K to the rim. A scratch would go through the star and letter.

Those aren't things I'd really considered or given much thought to but they're good points.

I'd never really thought to look for / at die cracks in those areas with Morgans but that 1878 is cool.

8 hours ago, Whidbey Island Collection said:

Those are excellent pictures and I am sure that we are looking at a die crack and not a scratch.  You should be able to easily confirm that with a magnifying glass.  A die crack will be raised above the surrounding surface, while a scratch will leave a depression below the surrounding surface. 

And that is part of my thinking in that it looks raised to me but I'll admit that my eyes are not perfect and it is quite small so I tend to not be over-confident.

9 hours ago, CoinUtopia said:

Nice coin, but hopefully you can replace the capsule without issue. Thanks for the story and be careful !

The replacement capsules arrived on Monday and I swapped it out without a problem with a little help from a soft cloth. I'm just going to have to be more careful, but at least I have some extra spare capsules now!

8 hours ago, ronnie stein said:

Revenant,... My apologies, no disrespect intended. I tried to edit and delete but to no avail. I'm sure you've already recognized it for what it is, seen it before, and brushed it off. No need for a return response. One bottle of wine lasts all year, half a bottle twice year.. I'm good. I enjoy your journals, funny, good stuff. .

The apology is appreciated but I really wouldn't worry about it! You're right that I just kind of shrugged and moved on but me not responding shouldn't be taken to mean I take offense. While I respond to comments a lot I don't always respond - only if I have something I think is worth saying. You are far from the worst "offender" when it comes to long responses that don't always mesh well with the original point - and some don't need wine! It's something you accept when you post things online in places that allow people to post and comment back - and you really can't be too easily offended if you're going to go and post rants - as I sometimes do.

I'm sure the stress of these times are also going to get to all of us in one why or another and I think we all owe each other a little more patience and understanding than we offer during normal times whenever we can muster it.

11 hours ago, Coinbuf said:

Ouch that certainly does suck, hopefully you can put them under a stack of books and press them mostly straight and flat again.

We'll see how it goes. I have it under three old University year books that are each so heavy they could out-mass a small child. I guess with the rain lately I should be happy he didn't drop it in a puddle just to make it worse.

1 hour ago, gherrmann44 said:

However, it is not out of the realm of possibility and in fact likely that 18th and 19th century US gold coins came from stolen gold due to colonialism. Back in the early 19th century when the United States started minting gold coins people would bring foreign coins to a treasury window and exchange them for US gold or gold certificates. The mint would then melt the foreign gold to mint new US gold. Part of this was the impetus for the construction of the New Orleans Mint. Silver and gold from all over the world found it's way to New Orleans. Much of that gold had already been melted and re-minted by the the colonialist nation that minted it. For example some of the gold may have originally been Aztec or Peruvian gold. California, Dahlonega, and Charlotte gold is another story for another day.

That's all true and interesting history, but does it mean that we shouldn't be bothered by questionable practices that are ongoing today?

4 hours ago, deposito said:

We used to like yo watch American Greed back in 2010-2013.  Sounds similar.

Most of my "2600 years of gold coins" I figure were struck on gold mined by slaves, plundered from defeated enemies, or even gained by melting down south american indian treasures.  doesn't really bug me, and really, adds something to the allure of gold as being the motivation for such dastardly deeds.  nice reminder of how comfortable and peaceful my life is lucky enough to be.  

Gold is gold, I think it is a little much to burden Englehard with knowing where it came from once it is in Miami.  And if the US MINT is so worried about it they should mine it themselves or burden themselves with figuring out where each planchet came from.  

I loved American Greed when I still had cable! Haven't seen it in years though. That was a good show.

I'm sure the 19th century European gold coins I've been picking up have the same problem and you make a good point there. I suppose the gold has almost always been acquired on the backs of the downtrodden, but it certainly doesn't have to be the case in modern times with large miners that operate in politically stable parts of the world like the US and Canada.

1 hour ago, gherrmann44 said:

I do not remember where I read this but I read that the gold planchets for use in striking gold eagles was to be struck from new gold mined in America. The US mint by order of congress and signed by the president has had a long history of being the primary customer of American mining company's.

I don't know if that's the case or not as far as the US Mint buying American gold or maybe just buying from American companies / refiners, but, based on the show, part of this seems to deal with the companies not being truthful or accepting false documents regarding the origins of the gold.

Like I said, I found it to be an interesting show and I thought it made good points and raised good questions. At the end of the day investigations don't prove wrong doing on the part of the companies. 

1 hour ago, deposito said:

It looks like coin collectors are disproportionately ants.  these auctions I've been bidding in the last 2 weeks have not shown any evidence of easy pickings.

Anyways, this country has turned before and in our lifetimes from a country of mostly ants to mostly grasshoppers.

Well, the coin collectors are going to tend to be disproportionately older. Given that, whether you see it as coming from proximity to / experience with past hard times (Per Just Bob) or as a process of maturing with age (Per Eagles Nest), you're going to see them tend to be more fiscally conservative and more prepared for times like these than the people in my generation (Millennials - I'm an old millennial, but I'm still included with them).

7 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

 I pray this will bring about real change in our society...

1 hour ago, Eagles Nest said:

I have to agree with Gary. all of us have been grasshoppers at some time in our life ...

 

You're both good guys / good men and I respect your opinions on this. I don't rejoice in the suffering of others and I've given aid the past whether I felt it was deserved or not, just because I don't think children should suffer because their parents are pinheads. However, I don't share your faith in people in general and these people in particular. They've shown me too much in the last 5 years for me to think they'll get things together and start preparing for the future in a more responsible way.

As far as positive change in society? My Facebook feed is starting to look like the precursor to a modern re-imagining of the French Revolution. Even if we do somehow get to a better place at the other side of this, I suspect it's going to get extremely ugly first.

1 hour ago, Just Bob said:

Just post the other pictures in a reply.

Agreed. Granted, some of us are better at manipulating image files than others and some of us have access to better programs / tools than others, but I tend to find that you can get file sizes down to 100-500 Kb and still have them be more than high-res enough for web use, and at that size the 4 Mb limit is more than enough.

6 minutes ago, Just Bob said:

Those of us whose grandparents and parents grew up having to struggle just to get by tend to think more like the ant.

 

I grew up in a house with my grandmother, who was born in 1924. I never understood as a child why anyone would get so happy / excited over getting a loaf of bread that was just "so fresh and soft." I guess that still influences how I plan and prepare, but I never want to go through a period when I worry about affording food.

"When it seems too good to be true, it usually is." I'm glad that you came out ahead overall though.

But... No pictures? I feel cheated. 😆

45 minutes ago, Just Bob said:

Don't you just hate it when your threads get spammed?

Always, but such is life I suppose.

4 hours ago, mannelig said:

Similar situation. It's hard to reconcile work and study. I used to ask for help here https://studenterra.com/, maybe it will help.

Mine are paid off at this point and I haven't been in a lecture in close to 8 years. So I'm good. But thanks!

Well, oh well. This had seemed like a fun little father-son thing but I'm not letting Ben near a band saw.

2 hours ago, Mokiechan said:

I find ANACS slabs are the easiest, PCGS are in between, and NGC are really hard.  My technique involves a large vise mounted on my basement work bench.  I place the slab in the vise with the label exposed and tighten it down enough to hold it firmly in place.  I then take my best hammer and swing like a golf club at the exposed label, decapitating the slab.  The rest is just a matter of careful prying apart the remains so as not to scratch the coin.  As I said earlier, NGC slabs are really tough and take more than one healthy swing.  ANACS (at least the recent versions) are easy cheesy and can lose their label with just a half swing.  . 

2 hours ago, Whidbey Island Collection said:

Opening a slab is easy if you have a band saw.  My saw has very fine teeth like a hack saw and I simply carefully cut around all four edges and lift the two halves of the slab apart.  Never any danger of having a coin fall or get scratched that way.  

Andy

 

So... What you're saying is it isn't easy at all to break one of these caskets. I'm wondering why people keep saying it is.

We have a collection of shot glasses in a little cabinet that we've stopped adding to because it was becoming difficult to store and keep kids away from.

We collect ornaments from places that we travel and have quite an interesting Christmas tree every year as a result.

I used to play with collectable cards and miniatures for tabletop war gaming. I still have some of them but most of the game systems are defunct and they're not worth much of anything.

I actually work as the sole US-based consultant for a small Scotland-based engineering company. It's always a bit fun getting emails from them at 3 or 4 AM and me responding when the kids wake me up at 6 AM. They tend to be surprised by how early I reply sometimes but the kids aren't very good conversationalists yet. Always fun having my morning coffee while talking to someone that just got back from lunch.

It's a shame that there aren't George VI Sovereigns.

2 hours ago, deposito said:

Interesting strategy to collect by holders too.  When I Get a coin in one of those un-pronged holders I break them out and send them in for the new-style NGC holder, because I don't like the obstruction and shadowing.  I never thought about the time they got holdered even being "long ago" or part of the coin's history

It wasn't something I started out doing. I just realized at a certain point that I had several in old fatties and then I realized that the serial numbers were REALLY close on some of them. This got me thinking / speculating on the possibility of these coins having a shared history or maybe passing through the same dealer years ago who submitted them all. It amuses me to think that I could be bringing a set BACK together after years of the coins being apart. It's funny to imagine / think about their journey through history.

There's a good chance that one day the whole set will be reholdered because I prefer the look of the new holders and I think it'll do great things for how the set looks in person if all the holders match.

7 hours ago, Coinbuf said:

So PCGS just announced late today that the state of California has issues an emergency order declaring nonessential businesses that operate within the county to close, effective immediately, through March 31, 2020.  Thus they are shut down no grading until April 1, I wonder if this might drive a few more submissions NGC's way.

I doubt it. I think most people want who they want in terms of grading. I think NGC folks might be more open to using PCGS than the other way around. In either case, I think most will just be holding on to their submissions until things are more settled.

21 hours ago, Jade Collection said:

I think I overpaid for all my coins but I'm happy and enjoying this hobby. The coin looks great, hope your happy with it!

One of the things I asked myself, "Six months down the road, am I going to regret it if I let this one slip away?" and I decided the answer was, "Yes." I'm quite happy with the decision - even as gold and silver are tanking right after I bought it.

8 hours ago, rons said:

Isn't it amazing that a coin that old is still in incredible condition after 200+ years in the wild? 1880 in ms65 is amazing. Well done

Well, it was minted in 1880 and, based on the slab and serial number, it was graded and put in there in 1992 or 1993 - nearly 30 years ago now if you can believe that. I'm assuming with most of these that they spent most of the time in the middle (112-113 years for this coin) in a bank vault or in someone's collection. I doubt any of these really spent much time in the wild.