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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 1668604, member: 112&quot;]Sorry, but I have to disagree with your assessment that the scratch is not visible with the naked eye - without magnification in other words. I say that because professional graders do not use a loupe or magnifying glass to grade coins, they do it with their eyes only. So rather obviously the scratch is visible to the naked eye.</p><p><br /></p><p>Collectors should do the same thing, that is the standard grading procedure. You are not supposed to grade coins with a loupe. The only time you should use a loupe is if you see something that makes you think the coin might be a fake, and you need a closer look to make sure. Or, when you think the coin might be worthy of a 69 or 70 grade. Only those two grades require that no hairlines be visible at 5x magnification.</p><p><br /></p><p>The only other time a loupe of any kind should be used is when trying to identify a particular variety or error. But that is not grading, that is attribution and attribution has nothing to do with grading.</p><p><br /></p><p>The only other thing I would say to you keemao is what I said before. These practices and standards about what constitutes damage and what does not constitute damage were established by the numismatic community before most of us were ever born.</p><p><br /></p><p>Bag marks, reed marks, and the like are not now nor have they ever been considered damage. That is largely because two coins banging together can only cause a mark of very limited severity. Simply put that is all that is possible. And severity is one of the issues. </p><p><br /></p><p>Damage on the other hand has no limitation, a gouge, a scratch, a rim dent, harsh cleaning, over-dipping, corrosion - none of these things have any limitation on severity. And all of them are caused by something besides normal use and handling of the coins - the other issue. Coins cannot get scratched, gouged, or dented, by other coins in a bag, it cannot happen. This damage can only be caused by outside forces.</p><p><br /></p><p>Those are the two things that define damage.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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