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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 2189260, member: 72790&quot;]Wear is your friend. I collect coins that would have circulated in Colonial America. I want my coins to be, and appear to be, well circulated. Why? I give talks to visitors at the Colonial Era tavern I am a docent at. I like to tell these visitors that they are looking at and handling (yes, given the group I will allow them to handle a few of the coins) may have been handled by William Penn or Benjamin Franklin (he arrived in colonial Philadelphia with a couple Dutch lion dollars he picked up passing through NY on his way from Mass.). Those coins with holes? Pierced to hang them around one&#039;s neck before pockets were common. Maybe this Spanish almost worn smooth eight real cob was spent by Captain Kidd in Cape May as he replenished his sweet water stock. These well worn George II half pennies (the most common coin found at colonial sites) would have bought a pint of ale here at the tavern. These crinkled, stained, multi creased, finger smudged,&nbsp; mica speckled Continental notes (their rag paper stood up to handling much more than our pulp paper would)? Maybe paid by Washington to get those Continental troops to extend their enlistments another month or so. What does this have to do with these counterfeit coins and currency? It is difficult to for counterfeiters to reproduce just plain wear from circulation. Or Chinese chop marks (18 chop marks on a BU plantchlet?). None of them are piercing their fakes for sale as that would reduce their value to bullion. No, this will not guarantee that a coin is what the seller purports it to be but it reduces the likelihood, reduces the cost of adding to your collection and removes from your treasure what to me is a sterile, bland, uninteresting slug of metal or currency spent by no one. Good honest, plain wear can be your friend.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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