PCGS Secure Plus conspiracy theory

Uhhmmmmmyeah!

Al-Queda, but close!

 

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Bigtime 4 sure!

 

it was a joke, apparently you didnt catch it.

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bart9349

guy

Many thanks for your lucid, comprehensive and informative response.


LMAO at this!!!

​

 

I know you kid but there are folks that are so frozen with paranoia that they will never even consider submitting ANYTHING to PCGS or NGC for two reasons:

1. They would have to entrust that the USPS will NOT somehow figure out whats in their package and make off with their "retirement funding" 1921 Morgan.

2. They would have to entrust that the TPG would NOT make off with their "retirement funding 2.3 million dollar penache" and simply claim they never received such a coin and instead claim that all they received was a "flip over double struck Canadian worth a couple of hundred bucks"!

 

or even worse --

a post mint damaged coin, without the slightest hint of penache!


After all, the OP knew what he was talking about-- we are all dummies.

OOps!

NOT the OP of this thread! Mr. Penache!

 

I have less of a fear of the postal system than I do of PCGS themselves. I usually send even valuable coins by priority mail with delivery confirmation. Not lost a single one yet over the last 20+ years. This is another hype generator for making quick $ off collectors. IMHO every little "service" actually cuts into the value of the coin itself. I have yet to have a coin stolen from my possession after living in various places across the country from apartments to homes. No one know what you have till you boast about it. And to conclude my thesis I had sent some valuable gold commems to PCGS for grading and they came back covered with enamel. When I complained to PCGS they simply put the coins in an ultrasonic cleaner and harshly cleaned off the enamel while scoring the fields with particulates in the cleaning solvent. Oh! and when I complained about this they responded that their grades were "guaranteed." My response: The original mint surfaces of the coins are NOT any more! They are idiots in my opinion.

 

The government faked the moon landing too!

 

I wonder if these 2 are related.

 

Methinks there is going to be a run on aluminum foil and metal coat hangers soon!

 

and the great penny vs. cents debate.

 

My vision for SecurePlus is almost as pie in the sky as Major's is paranoid. I actually hope SecurePlus helps PCGS clean up some of its population reports. Hope springs eternal!

 

It's an amazing service.
I had a slabbed 1889 CC ms60 come in. It looked a lil off.
So I checked it against the database. It didn't match with the photo scanned.
Cracked the slab to see a spliced and glued coin.

 

Nothing to debate about, I was right and everyone else was wrong. A cent by any other name is a misnomer.

 

if I was going to break into PCGS. I wouldn't steal the computer data when there is millions of vakuabke coins there

and the only time I have heard of a major theft drom PCGS was in the movie
"getting even with dad"

 

I am confused ... Does anybody on this board know the answer to this? (I would ask PCGS customer service, but they never respond)

Are PCGS Secure Plus "Digital Fingerprint" images available to the public? I just had some coins graded by PCGS through their Secure Plus program and I can't seem to find any images of them anywhere. Do all PCGS Secure Plus coins have digital fingerprint images made, automatically and at no additional charge, or do you have to ask for it (and pay extra)?

If Digital Fingerprint images are automatically made for PCGS Secure Plus coins, should I be able to see the digital fingerprint images online (of coins recently graded through Secure Plus). If this is true, does anybody know the link?

I am assuming that PCGS's Secure Plus "Digital Fingerprint" images are a different service than PCGS's "TrueView" images. I think it must be. I see that "TrueView" photographs cost an extra $20 per coin but does provide a nice photo of the coin before it goes into the slab. Below is a sample of a PCGS TrueView Photograph.

From what I can tell, TrueView images (like the one shown below) have to be specifically asked for (and the extra $20 per coin paid in advance) -- while I think the Secure Plus "Digital Fingerprint" images are automatically made for Secure Plus coins (at no additional charge) but they may or may not be publicly available???? Although the poster above seems to have implied the digital fingerprint images are publicly available.


These TrueView images are definitely accessible by the public and can be viewed on the PCGS certification look-up page

http://www.pcgs.com/CERT/16880169.html


I have no idea if a PCGS Secure digital fingerprint image would look as nice as a PCGS TrueView image or not. Maybe the digital fingerprint image is something that is not really for public consumption as perhaps it's not very eye appealing (as it might be made to show marks and flaws on the coin for identification purposes only ???)

 

A digital fingerprint is not a image is it? I understand it is a data file of the obverse of the coin only from reading the info released and watching Mr. Hall's video.
And I still like the Lemonade better than the Koolade.....

 

well, if a digital fingerprint is not an image, how did cerdsalicious compare a coin to the digital fingerprint database in the post above?

 

I don't know exactly what PCGS does, but I do know in general about generating compact "fingerprints" from a larger dataset (like an image).

There are techniques for capturing a set of features from an image and encoding them in a short string. (It's sort of like generating a "hash code" from a computer file, but not exactly -- you can't just compare two digital photos byte-for-byte, because you'd never get exactly the same positioning and lighting.)

If your technique is solid, two images of the same coin will yield the same "fingerprint", but the odds of getting the same fingerprint from two different coins (or one coin before and after tampering) are essentially zero.

More importantly, the "transform" from the image to the fingerprint is one-way -- there's no feasible way to start from a fingerprint and generate an image (or a coin) that will match it.

Now, there's nothing to stop PCGS (or anybody else) from doing some magic high-resolution 3-D scan of a coin and keeping the data for nefarious purposes. But the "fingerprinting" service neither requires nor implies that.

 

thanks jeff ... that clarifies this for me.