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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 8334423, member: 19463&quot;]This answer is simple.&nbsp; NGC Ancients was created to enable people who know nothing to buy ancient coins from people who know less than nothing.&nbsp; By opening the market to ten times as many people with money to spend and no way of telling a good seller from a bad one, they have made quite a business out of plastic boxes.&nbsp; I have some respect for the higher priced, full service (1/5 to 5/5 service) slabs where a genuine expert looked at the coin for a second or an hour as required BUT NGC and several other companies also accept input of huge numbers of presorted coins that get bargain / bulk slabs on coins that were glanced over as a group.&nbsp; I suspect some coins are kicked out of such groups but I have no idea how many.&nbsp; At a show this weekend I saw a stack of about 300 NGC slabbed Widow&#039;s Mites.&nbsp; I strongly suspect that all were genuine.&nbsp; The same dealer had nicer coins cheaper (under half) but those were in flips.&nbsp; Slabs have given people a choice.&nbsp; I guess that is good but I&#039;m not sure it is good for the hobby as I know it.&nbsp; Why should a big dealer hire and train another generation of expert numismatists when you can mail off the stuff and pay a clerk to fill orders? </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I wish that you had posted a view of that whole slab with label.&nbsp; I know no one in the market for such a coin would pay extra for knowing what is &#039;special&#039; about that coin.&nbsp; I sold the one below for less than the price of postage to send the thing to Florida and back but mine is not as interesting and has at least as many faults.&nbsp; The plastic coin will sell for 10x the &#039;free&#039; one.&nbsp; That is why slabs exist.[ATTACH=full]1477602[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yup...and that is why we see Coin Talk degenerating to the same half dozen posts over and over and over again.&nbsp; Relatively few people search to see if something has been covered in the last week let alone the several years that people like Mat and TIF have been trying to make this place worthwhile.&nbsp; Few people would listen to what they would say anyway.&nbsp;&nbsp; Everyone gets to a point they miss the good old days.&nbsp; I apologize to the management of CT for once suggesting this might be a place to discuss World coins other than Euros (back when the non-US section of CT was labelled World Coins including the Euros.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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