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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;V. Kurt Bellman, post: 2466758, member: 71723&quot;]I think both PCGS and NGC, but especially PCGS, has so fallen in rapturous love with its own work, and its own submitter base, combined with the facts created by cracking out and resubmitting so much material at the drop of a hat, that they have reasonably assumed since they&#039;ve been seeing the same coins over and over again (they have to know this) that they think they&#039;re seeing all that&#039;s out there. Trust me, they&#039;re not.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, in the world of collectors who will only collect PCGS slabbed coins (What snobs!) there only is what PCGS says there is. Here&#039;s the bottom line - coins are not ephemeral, they&#039;re durable goods. They don&#039;t disappear, except during times and circumstances of big actual melts, which aren&#039;t that big or that often. Domestic U.S. classic gold coins are&nbsp; the exception. Most of them are gone gone, melted into the bars that sit in Ft. Knox and the basement vaults at the New York Federal Reserve. Most pre-1933 U.S. Gold we see today has been repatriated, mostly from Europe but worldwide, since the 1974 lifting of the gold ownership ban. They survived the furnaces because they weren&#039;t here, by and large.</p><p><br /></p><p>By far most silver coins, whether from the 1980 boom, or the 2011 one, that were surrendered &quot;at melt&quot; weren&#039;t actually melted - they merely found hoarders who were &quot;true believers&quot;. I know some actual large scale silver refiners. They report some coin shipments, but not that many. Scrapped radiographs, medical and industrial (remember the weld radiographs in the movie <i>The China Syndrome </i>?) Those and other old film negatives, plus silver-bearing liquids from photo processes are still the primary source, and were right through the 2011 peak. Silver halide print-making is still quite big, even though the exposing method is different. Instead of shining colored light through a negative, the scanner either creates a digital file on the fly or the customer&#039;s own digital file is &quot;painted&quot; stripe by stripe either with lasers or tiny LED&#039;s onto photosensitive papers, primarily from Japan and China, not so much Rochester, NY any more.</p><p><br /></p><p>Point is - silver coin survival rates are bigger than most care to believe, and copper, aside from its reactivity and corrosion issues, is even bigger. I live where people are generations deep in being exceptionally, (let&#039;s call a spade a spade), <i><b>cheap! </b></i>They don&#039;t care that a slabbed coin is more liquid in the market - they&#039;ll die before they sell <i><b>any coin! </b></i>They view spending money on certification as a pure cost and a waste of money that could go to buying another coin. They view attending shows out-of-town the same way. ANA 2018 will be less than 50 miles away and almost no collectors around here will even go. Too much to pay for parking.</p><p><br /></p><p>Price range? Anything $100 and up. It&#039;s absolutely common to see 4-figure and even occasionally 5-figure coins in private no-Internet auction sales that no previous owner ever even thought about spending money to have them slabbed. I saw the best 1916-D dime I ever saw, slabbed or unslabbed, picture or in the hand, last March at a local coin club coin show 20 miles from where I sit. It was in a cardboard 2x2. Several people examined it, including a Farran Zerbe Award winner. It was real, and it was sweet. The lowest grade it was was a MS-65!!! I&#039;ll bet it&#039;s in plastic today, but it wasn&#039;t then. The dealer had at least two other 5-figure coins in cardboard 2x2&#039;s, too. That&#039;s life in south-central Pennsylvania.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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