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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 3112649, member: 27832"]As others have pointed out, "take [a coin/not-coin] to a store [today] and try and spend it" isn't a good test. If we extend that from "recognized as money today" to "was ever recognized as money", it takes care of trimes and gold. It just leaves us with defining the boundary between "coin" and "not coin". Is a 2% off-center coin still a "coin"? I'd bet most people wouldn't look twice at it. 5%? 20%? 50%? Somewhere along the line there, it starts being "weird", then moves on to "I don't think there's a place for this in my cash register". But a numismatist can still easily recognize it as an error coin, and tell its denomination. That's true even for the oddity in this thread. I can't fault TPGs for taking a numismatic perspective on "coin" vs. "not coin". The coin was struck (badly) at the mint, it was issued as money (presumably in a bag of not-so-defective coins), it's still made of metal, and its value is still identifiable -- to anyone who's more than slightly familiar with classic 20th-century US coins. If you want to start hauling the goalposts around by saying who needs to be able to recognize it, this becomes a very different game. (Blind people? People who've never seen US coins and don't speak English? True Scotsmen?)[/QUOTE]