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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 63351, member: 57463&quot;]<b>Up front and personal. Live and direct.</b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I could have used an adjective.&nbsp; &quot;<u>Some</u> eBay feedback...&quot;&nbsp; and &quot;<u>Some</u> eBay sellers...&quot;&nbsp; Whether that is properly hardly any, very few, few, maybe a few, some, too many, many, most, perhaps some, probably most, or every darned one, is up to the reader to fill in.&nbsp; What I said was literally and exactly true, no more and no less.&nbsp; Read into it what you want.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I agree with what I expect is your own opinion, that &quot;most&quot; eBay sellers are fine and honorable but that &quot;a few&quot; problem sellers taint my view of the rest.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>How would that work for an ANA convention?</b>&nbsp; I mean, would you go to an ANA bourse floor, or an auction from Heritage or American Numismatic Rarities and figure that it was OK because probably only &quot;a few&quot; of the coins are fakes or if only a few of the sales become one-way transactions?&nbsp; Could you imagine going to a convention bourse floor and telling dealer you want this coin and handing him the money and he takes your money and closes up shop right then and there... and heck, there are 300 dealers on the ANA bourse floor, so if this only happened 3 times, that would make the ANA convention 99% reliable, right?&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I understand the value in commerce at a distance.&nbsp; We have been doing that since the Sumerians traded with the Hittites via promises on clay tablets.&nbsp; There is an excellent article called &quot;Bourgeois Virtues&quot; by Daniel McCloskey.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;A potent source of bourgeois virtue and a check on bourgeois vice is the</p><p>premium that a bourgeois society puts on discourse. The bourgeois must talk. The aristocrat gives a speech, the peasant tells a tale. But the bourgeois must in the bulk of his transactions talk to an equal. It is wrong to imagine, as modern economics does, that the market is a field of silence. &quot;I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following....What news on the Rialto?&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;A market economy looks forward and therefore depends on trust. The persuasive talk that establishes trust is necessary for doing much business, and that is why coreligionists or co-ethnics deal so profitably with each other. Avner Greif has explored the business dealings of Mediterranean Jews in the Middle Ages, accumulating evidence for a reputational conversation. In 1055 one Abun ben Zedaka of Jerusalem, for example, &quot;was accused (though not charged in court) of embezzling the money of a Maghribi trader. When word of this accusation reached other Maghribi traders, merchants as far</p><p>away as Sicily canceled their agency relations with him.&quot; Reputational gossip, Greif notes, was cheap, &quot;a by-product of the commercial activity [itself] and passed along with other commercial correspondence.&quot; A letter from Palermo to an Alexandrian merchant who had disappointed the writer said, &quot;Had I listened to what people say, I never would have entered into a partnership with you.&quot; With such information, cheating was profitless within the community.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Numismatics is a community.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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