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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2297343, member: 1892&quot;]I&#039;m not saying I&#039;ve never seen a black-slab GSA coin adjudicated as cleaned before, and my concerns about the 1878-CC have been noted in the bespoke thread, but all the same the idea of cleaned GSA coins isn&#039;t seamless to me, logically. Here&#039;s why:</p><p><br /></p><p>1) They sat perfectly still for decades in bags, the overwhelming majority never leaving storage from the day they were struck. How could they attract anything which required them to be cleaned? That said, toning may be easily expected; many spent their early decades in a much more sulfur-laden atmosphere than you and I enjoy today, because so much motive power was produced via coal back then. The top layers of bags, even in still air (probably even better for toning) would be awash in the typical atmosphere of the day. This is likely why so many of the nice Mint State coins recovered from cello are there just because of the poor opinion of their toning.</p><p><br /></p><p>2) Of the ones which left Treasury possession and then returned, the overwhelming majority had to have circulated. There weren&#039;t Federal Reserve branches to store coins at for geographical need; coins were distributed in answer to specific orders (or crammed down the receiving throats who then dumped them into circulation just to be rid of them). Yes, the likelihood of Uncirculated coins (or circulated coins capable of being judged Mint State, we all know that&#039;s possible) having been cleaned in the wild and then returning is non-zero, and we can expect at least a few in a group of this magnitude, but....</p><p><br /></p><p>3) I simply cannot see the GSA people exerting enough effort to clean coins except in the most extreme of circumstances. Enough labor was already involved in the process of recording and packaging each individual coin, and as a Government operation you certainly cannot expect they&#039;d have manpower laying around waiting for the additional tasking of cleaning the coins. This had to be a fire drill, organizing and selling north of three million coins. Mind, there wasn&#039;t anyone on the payroll with the job title &quot;Morgan Dollar Sales Operator.&quot; They would have had to just grab bodies from other taskings, to the detriment of those taskings, so the whole operation would have happened under time pressure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Nope, I just don&#039;t see them going to the effort. So, my conclusion is that pretty much anything in black GSA plastic we adjudicated as &quot;Cleaned&quot; by a TPG - assuming we agree, which isn&#039;t certain as the 1878-CC indicates - has been tampered with since the sale. If the slabs can be cleanly broken and reassembled at all, some enterprising individual has mastered and exploited it.</p><p><br /></p><p>All the same, this is presented as just the theory that best fits the facts. Punch holes in it if you will. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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