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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Jaelus, post: 24058172, member: 46237&quot;]Why do you need to identify MS coins at all? Anything that happens to a coin is damage. Toning is damage, hits are damage, bag marks are damage, wear is damage. It&#039;s all the same. One coin with damage from a hit is damaged. Another with damage from toning is damaged. Yet another with damage from friction is damaged. They are the same thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Very few coins are actually truly &quot;mint state&quot; as they were when struck. Damage starts as soon as the coin is ejected into the hopper. Same as how toning starts damaging the coin right away. It&#039;s all the same thing. The coins you call mint state already have varying types of &quot;acceptable&quot; damage. The hard line between AU and MS does not actually exist once you realize the equivalence of damage. There is just a continuum of severity of damage. Singling out wear as the sole source of damage to move a coin across an artificial boundary in the grading scale is what causes the problems cited time and time again in these discussions - people obsessing over the illusion of having a mint state coin. You don&#039;t have mint state coins. You have lightly damaged coins with good eye appeal. You can also have a lightly damaged coin with good eye appeal if some of that damage is wear. It is the same thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Realize that wear is essentially just your favorite type of damage. We give coins damaged by wear a grade, but if they are damaged by hits from other coins we call them mint state when they are not, if they are damaged by toning but we like how it looks well that gets a bump up, if they are damaged by other sources still we call that details. It is completely arbitrary. All of these things are just types of damage. Do you see what I&#039;m saying here? Damage is damage. We just like some types of damage better than others because of its impact on eye appeal. But still, damage is damage and this distinction is both subjective and arbitrary.</p><p><br /></p><p>You justify using wear as being special to identify mint state coins, but they aren&#039;t mint state coins! They are equally damaged coins, but you give that damage a pass. You see?</p><p><br /></p><p>The current grading scale as you go down the scale from MS70, damage to the coin is increasing along with a reduction in eye appeal. Some of this damage can be from hits, toning (particularly unattractive toning), etc. With technical grading, you arbitrarily take all the higher quality coins with eye appeal commensurate to the 60-69 grades with just a small amount of damage that happens to be from wear, and you lump them in AU58. The red triangle represents the spread of quality that are then compressed into the AU58 grade. This renders a grade of AU58 meaningless because the quality and eye appeal have an absolutely enormous possible range. That doesn&#039;t work. And it&#039;s all because of this artificial AU/MS boundary tacked on to the scale.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1547303[/ATTACH] </p><p>Whereas what you really have is a quality continuum from the 50s through 69 where every coin has varying degrees of damage/detractors from different sources where they can simply be graded based on eye appeal commensurate with the level of damage (K.I.S.S. principle). With a purely numeric scale you eliminate all the problems encountered with the Sheldon scale as it stands that led to the creation of market grading.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1547302[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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