Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2924923, member: 1892&quot;]If one can talk about things by &quot;feel&quot; rather than conclusions based on known fact, I have the &quot;feel&quot; that such doctoring was generally accepted (if quietly) practice in the hobby for higher-end coins at one time or another. PCGS (and it would be remiss not to mention NGC, which hasn&#039;t happened much in this thread....) at one point tended to just roll with the accepted practice. Don&#039;t forget, the people who founded those TPG&#039;s <i>came from the ranks</i> of higher-end dealers, movers and shakers in numismatics....</p><p><br /></p><p>I have no firm knowledge because I&#039;ve never been able to afford to play in that pool, but we can look today at the still-general acceptance of dipping at the TPG level as an indicator that altering a coin towards a more-original appearance isn&#039;t/wasn&#039;t necessarily considered disqualifying. Like many other manifestations of morality, numismatic morality evolves as time passes. </p><p><br /></p><p>Then, at some point, things changed. I have to wonder what role the founding of CAC might have played....enmities we&#039;ll never know about may have been created, and played out in the form of this legal action. </p><p><br /></p><p>Evaluating things like this, when one will never know the full story or even enough of it to fill in the blanks, is always a game of probabilities. <i>Probabilities</i> have no relationship whatsoever to <i>certainties</i>. And it may be personal prejudice peaking through, but it&#039;s simply not possible for me to assign altruistic tendencies to PCGS, then or now. It could well have been simply the financial and reputational damage caused to PCGS by the fools who leveraged their guarantee policy against them; Heaven knows that would be enough for me in their position. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /> </p><p><br /></p><p>All the fact we have is that PCGS went to war with a certain subset of the dealer community, and the strong indication that it resolved due to a realization (perhaps, indeed likely, known all along) that a court decision would not produce any winners. Unless somebody with an inside connection publishes an expose, we&#039;ll never know, and even such a document would have to be taken with a grain of salt since everyone has an agenda, be it benign or not.</p><p><br /></p><p>Certainly fun to talk about, though, as the last half-dozen pages have proved. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in