Threats to our hobby.....

Well, dipping could be added as a potential threat to the hobby, depending on whether you feel it's legitimate. But... here's some more thoughts after enjoying a protein-rich burger... the coins that are given the highest grades, say MS66 and up, will tend to be (tho are not always) blast white. I have read that graders look at the luster. Well, mild dipping can help bring out that luster. I'm not an expert on dipping, so anyone can feel free to correct me. So we are creatures of conformity, even if we think we're not, and we will tend to follow the money. If a big chunk of that money goes to the blast white coins, it follows we will gravitate to that. I mean, very few people completely ignore values, I think - and this includes people who prefer natural toning over possibly artificially enhanced blast white coins. So saying blast white coins are not legitimately mint state attacks the TPGs, the wealthiest collectors, and a general grading consensus that has formed in the hobby. However, and I'll finish blabbering right now, all of this is subjective in the end. No side is objectively right, because it is ultimately about aesthetic preference.

 

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If all blast white Morgans are dipped, that must mean that basically everyone is doing it. I kind of doubt that.

 

Many many bags of silver dollars were dipped in the '70's and '80's when most came out of storage. I'm told that dealers were buying dip by the barrel.

 

I think the truth is in the middle. We will never know the exact percentage of silver dollars that were dipped, but it's very high. Some estimates put it at 80 to 90 percent I believe. My understanding - and I think this came from ChatGPT's help yesterday - is that dipping was so common that it became a business decision for the TPGs to be lenient on it. However, given that cartwheel luster is so important for very high-grade coins, the system has a check - too much dipping will penalize them, relegating them to at best a lower-grade mint coin. I'm starting to see that there is a feedback loop between the marketplace and the hobby. We see the hobby as an individualized experience ("I really like that coin"), but it's as much or more a collective experience shaped by a community that includes businesses that need to run.

 

Going back to the bank vault toning. It would depend on the "canisters" or other methods of containing coins, which are usually burlap bags, and the gases contained inside the vault. The vault would be opened from time to time and other pollutants could be introduced besides oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc. Now in my own personal experience, I kept State quarters and National Park quarters in 35mm film vials for over 20 years. And the coins DID NOT tone. After I put them in albums, they still look great but the earlier ones show more toning than the newer ones. A lot of that is because of the materials in the cardboard in the albums, however, when the coins were kept in the film vials they didn't tone over many years. So the bank vault is a possibility. But I don't see how the coins would stay blast white over 100 years of this type of storage. Especially in burlap bags.

 

True, but most reputatable auction house, do a great job on making sure the coins they put up, are 100% geniune.
I have noted, TPG graded coins turned out to be good forgeries. With postage stamps its a must to have rare stamps expertized. Again auctions only sell stamps that are signed as geniune. WW2 memorabilia esp. German decorations, SS daggers, swords are ripe with fakes. Auctions are always a SAFER bet.

 

I will defer to you on a lot of this, especially since you know a lot more about high-end foreign coins than me, but there's something I do know about TPGs and auction houses in collectibles generally that needs to be brought up here. TPGs are specialists in grading, whereas auction houses are primarily sellers. They may function in a similar way due to business needs, but their interests differ. Let's examine sports cards. Because auction houses gain a commission on each sale, it's widely believed in the hobby that they are looking the other way to trimmed cards and selling them, even when they have been provided evidence of it. There are also allegations of shill-bidding. Mind you, these are allegations, so I am not saying definitively that this is going on, but the arguments are interesting. So if these controversies are happening in the baseball card hobby, I can't see why they couldn't spill over into coin collecting. I should point out that the TPGs are alleged to look the other way and even encourage card trimming (they also make more money on higher-value cards). So corruption can possibly infect many different parties in a hobby.