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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;IdesOfMarch01, post: 7503769, member: 39084&quot;]I personally find this topic to be interesting on both a practical and theoretical level, and my thinking and analysis of it run along similar lines to Only A Poor Old Man&#039;s post.</p><p><br /></p><p>If a forger is willing to go to the effort that you describe above -- engraving original obverse and reverse dies, melting down ancient metal, and using ancient striking techniques -- the resultant forgery would have to be valuable enough to be worth the effort and cost.&nbsp; So I tried to think about the process, from start to finish, for a specific type of coin -- an ancient Roman aureus.</p><p><br /></p><p>The ancient gold for such a coin&#039;s flan will cost at least, say, $3,000 give or take a few hundred.&nbsp; Since you&#039;re avoiding suspicion by striking only one coin from these original dies, you&#039;d want an aureus that you could sell for at least, say, $15,000, but more likely $25,000 - $50,000.&nbsp; Remember, the Hadrian aureus that I won but later turned up a forgery hammered for over $30K.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>To be truly undetectable, the dies need to be from ancient metal as well, since traces will transfer to the flan during the striking process.&nbsp; But even if the forger uses modern metals and assumes that metal transfer from the die won&#039;t give away the forgery, he still has to engrave convincing obverse and reverse dies.&nbsp; Does he copy an existing aureus and try to make some subtle changes so that it doesn&#039;t look 100% like the original?&nbsp; If so, it will be unique but have no provenance and its sudden appearance in the coin community is sure to raise questions, due to the price at which it&#039;s intended to sell.&nbsp; But if it&#039;s an exact copy of a coin with an existing provenance, that, too raises its own problems, since it enables it to be compared to the one from which it&#039;s copied.</p><p><br /></p><p>Somehow, I don&#039;t think all this work and expense for one coin that realizes $30K at auction is enough of a profit to go through this process for each new forgery.&nbsp; So it&#039;s likely the forger will try to sell multiple (and thus identical) copies under the radar to high-end dealers or collectors, rather than increasing the forgery&#039;s recognizance at multiple auctions.&nbsp; But the more dealers by whom the forgeries, the higher the likelihood of detection.</p><p><br /></p><p>Ultimately, I think that there&#039;s too much risk and too little reward in high-end forgeries, and that&#039;s why there are many more medium- and low-end forgeries whose existence and appearance in auctions and dealers&#039; inventories doesn&#039;t arouse a lot of suspicions.&nbsp; And these coins certainly aren&#039;t worth the effort of melting down ancient metal, engraving original dies, and using striking rather than modern pressing techniques on the flan.</p><p><br /></p><p>While it&#039;s possible that unforeseen technological advances might make undetectable, high-end, forgeries possible in the future, I&#039;m not concerned about it in the present. Even my own forgery was detected, albeit by a diligent and scrupulously honest auction house.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yet... is that EID MAR aureus that sold for $3.5M recently truly authentic...? ;-)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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