The old adage of "don't clean your coins, you will ruin their value" has been around for a long time. I don't promote the cleaning of coins, but here is where it does not make sense. If cleaned coins are presumably worthless, why do they still bring good money? I was following eBay and Teletrade auctions on holed, cleaned, bent and damaged slabbed coins. They all fetched a decent amount of money, more than half of a problem free's counterpart. So if cleaned coins are worthless, then why do they bring lots of money? I'm not talking about a key date, where a cleaned example would be cheaper, but common date capped bust, seated, and barber halves.
It appears to make little difference on eBay with lower grade silver coinage worth basically melt. I think when it comes to copper, such as large cents (where numismatic value is considerably higher than metal value), the effect of cleaning is dramatically more.
I just saw an NGC, cleaned AU details, capped bust half jump from $112 to just over $500 in the last few hours. Incredible. The coin is not worth half that (in my opinion).
I'd presume the SLAB (authentification) is what gets the premium, for "damaged slabbed." I'm curious to know what general premium the slab gets for 'average coins.' You haven't shown that to be true. "Lots of money" ? And eBay is the very bottom of the known-price coin market though, isn't it? (Beyond that: pawns, hot goods, fakes, etc.) "Cleaned coins are presumably worthless" sounds wrong to me. I see such identified & sold in my LCS... CHEAPER YES, WORTHLESS NO. As for "ruined value" - maybe that was true 30 years ago for most 'modern' Silver. But you see how a cleaned coin has (perhaps very seriously) IMPAIRED value, so the adage/caution still rings true. A silver lining maybe? I suppose buying cheaper 'cleaned coins'/junk and giving those examples to beginning stage YNs - with stern warnings against cleaning - can serve a dual purpose. Older collectors really need to cultivate the next generation if the numismatic value of their collections is to be maintained - cheap junk might be instructional and aspirational to that end. That's my two cents.
That's because its only a part of the adage. The full version sounds something like "don't clean your coins, you will ruin their value for people who can spot cleaning or care about it". If I can only allow a cleaned coin, in some cases I`ll prefer that to not having it at all. Also, I get it to enjoy for many years and not resell, it might retone nicely eventually.
Instead of returning a coin in a body bag because of cleaning or damage, TPG's now will slab a coin as authentic give it a general grade as to the coin's details.
I'm often surprised by how much damaged $1 US gold coins sell for on ebay with holes, soldering on them, bent,etc. Even more so for the slabbed problem details grade coins.
