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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtisimo, post: 7321435, member: 83845&quot;]One aspect of the discussion that doesn’t get pointed out that much is that widespread adoption of slabbing ancient coins would be bad for the hobby in a multitude of ways. </p><p><br /></p><p>One: Treating ancient coins as a commodity is a bad message to send when private ownership of them is under attack by some cultural property advocates. I recently bought a coin that I knew had a very old provenance but it had been slabbed since it’s last sale at auction. I was sent the coin in the slab without the ephemera that proved the link to the provenance. I responded that I would return the coin if the ephemera couldn’t be found and was lucky that it was. My point is that slabbing made it easier for the provenance to be lost in a way that it wouldn’t have been if kept in its original storage box / flip etc.</p><p><br /></p><p>Two: Slabbing doesn’t guarantee authenticity and there is no logical need in my mind to seal the slabs so that they cannot be opened. This seems nothing more than a rollover from the way modern coins are handled without any thought to if it makes sense for individually made ancient objects. Prices, even for slabbed ancients, are driven more by eye appeal than by the grade so why not make them removable so they can be further tested / handled / displayed if needed. NGC would be such a fantastic option for an authenticity opinion if they made their slabs to be opened like some of the above products mentioned. </p><p><br /></p><p>Three: Among new collectors there is a slab premium that just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like a restaurant charging me extra to put a pane of glass between me and my food. I don’t get it. The last thing we need is for slabbing to become the norm and people to start talking about red sheet prices (or whatever the modern thing is) for ancient coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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