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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 7848739, member: 74282&quot;]I would argue that <i>obtained legally</i> and <i>legal to buy today</i> are different, strictly speaking, and it is very, very hard to determine if a given coin you can buy today, even one with an old provenance, was <i>obtained legally </i>if you are strictly worried about that. The reality is, even many old provenance coins were not dug up or exported with the express approval or supervision of the source countries they came from, even if they have a pre-1970 provenance(I believe Italy for instance passed its big Cultural Heritage law in the 1930s!). As Andrew points out, there are certain later cutoff dates that largely can be used as good proof that a coin is legal and unencumbered when acquiring coins today, but if you have to know that every single coin you ever bought was dug up and exported legally, realistically collecting ancient coins may not be the best hobby for you.</p><p><br /></p><p>That said, you can still consider provenance and avoiding recent finds an important part of your collecting strategy without having to be a billionaire. The average cost of a coin in my collection, as of writing, is about $200, and each one has an average provenance to about 2006(almost a decade before I bought my first coin), with a number in the first half of the 20th century, and quite a few pictured in catalogs, papers or other literature published in the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s. That information isn&#039;t free, I have had to build a small library to research provenances for instance, and pre-Covid I would travel to the American Numismatic Association library yearly and spend a day in the basement researching provenances and going through hundreds of old auction catalogs, but there&#039;s a lot of value in doing such research. Not only do you learn a bit more about the ownership history of your specific coin when you find a provenance hit, you get a much better feel for things like the different stylistic varieties of various types, flan shapes, etc by looking through all those examples and developing an eye for that sort of thing extremely valuable. I usually come home with at least 50-100 photos of interesting coins I don&#039;t own to add to my photofile any time I leave the ANA.</p><p><br /></p><p>In general, as has been pointed out, old provenance coins have a certain look. It&#039;s not entirely foolproof, but you shouldn&#039;t usually expect to find provenances more than a few years old for any coin that is &quot;blast white&quot;. Silver coins <i>usually</i> tone noticeably in as little as a decade, and dark, uniform toning covering an entire coin takes quite some time to form. These coins usually go for a premium as such, even if no provenance is listed, but you can usually be sure they likely weren&#039;t dug up yesterday and in my experience, with a bit of legwork you can usually find some kind of provenance for coins that have a decent bit of natural toning. Those provenances won&#039;t always be the wonderful early 20th century or even older provenances you sometimes see posted here, but even a 1990s provenance is pretty safe today since it predates any MOU the US would have signed with Italy, Greece, Egypt or any other source country and pre-MOU is roughly what I shoot for, even though those MOUs don&#039;t cover the majority of the coins I collect(yet).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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