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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Finn235, post: 8162792, member: 98035&quot;]One could make a convincing argument that prior to the current Digital Age, antiquities and coins in private hands were being hoarded away to benefit one person instead of being for all to enjoy.</p><p><br /></p><p>That is no longer the case; in fact I would likely argue the opposite. I&#039;ve never personally been to a museum with a particularly noteworthy coin collection (save for the site of the Dalonegha Mint and the displays at the Denver Mint - but those aren&#039;t relevant). I do know that the majority of museums&#039; coin collections are stashed well away from view, only to be seen by the public under appointment in some back room.</p><p><br /></p><p>I know that a lot of ancient coins go into black holes, never to be seen again, but increasingly, the collective communities of coin collectors in places like CT, CCF, FORVM, WoC, Zeno, Reddit etc are becoming a hive mind, drawing in more thinking power, more observant eyes, and connections to legacy &quot;dead tree&quot; knowledge that would be out of reach for others (ever looked up the price of Mitchiner lately? Ouch!)</p><p><br /></p><p>If the goal is to learn from our past, allowing the experts to extract their findspot data and then making an impartial judgment call on whether they would be best kept as national treasures or returned to the free market (with only <b>the most important</b> being retained) - we would maximize the amount of knowledge that could be extracted from each object. Museums don&#039;t want or need literally tens of millions of ancient coins to be sorted through by a dozen or so overworked curators. </p><p><br /></p><p>As we say in IT - ten thousand users can find more bugs in an hour than ten QA testers can in six months.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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