I was recently at my local coin shop, and a slab caught my eye. It was an NGC vault box slab of Faustina the Elder. It was buffed to a mirror shine and on a tiny little flan. It was priced at 35$ - considerably less than the 235$ per coin you get from vault boxes! You can glean the story from this little slab - Someone uninformed gambled on a vault box, lost a ton of money, and sold their meager winnings for less than $ 30$. Not a great way to get into the hobby! It just goes to show the quality of coinage you get from these vault boxes - for $235, you are almost certainly going to get a coin worth 10% of that. These vault boxes are almost certainly harming the hobby. Newcomers who don't know better will lose big, pushing them away from ancient coins (and numismatics in general)! Gambling has no place in numismatics. If you are considering buying a vault box, don't!
I agree, I would never buy something like that, that would be like buying one of them Fort Knox 'evidence bags' that Chopper sells on his TV show! It's all for someone else who don't mind losing their hard earned cash!
Wow, another marketing gimmick to wrap ANOTHER box / slab around a slab, that should be offered RAW. Ugh. Scam.
Well, VaultBox has a multi-tier market. There is the initial purchase, which you pay for the chance of catching the big win. For every big win, there are 100s of losers. Now, once you buy it, you can sell it back to them for their instant offer. That takes some of the pure gamblers out of the market. The low-end stuff gets resold as you saw. The better stuff is either kept in people's collections. Or it's sold on fleaBay or to the LCS for reasonable money.
Ummm.. Yes, No, Kinda 1st Vault Box IS a gamble and some people lose.. that's what gambleing is. But the odds are over 40% you will "break even" and while there are some BIG prizes in every series at least 25% are of higher value then cost (base cost, not aftermarket) I have bought into 4 series now, 5, 7,9 and funbox. I broke even on series 5 and the funbox packs, lost a little on series 7 but was still happy with what I got and series 9 well let's just say outright I came out $500+ ahead. In the end, the worst coins offered going to the losers still beat the hell out an empty quarter bucket at a slot machine or a pile of losing scratchers or lotto tickets "reveal posts" from the last series i bought (I didn't do the last ancients series they just did) https://www.cointalk.com/threads/long-drawn-out-vaultbox-9-reveal-d.416239/ https://www.cointalk.com/threads/box-3-so-much-for-waiting-until-tomorrow-lol.416252/#post-26067290 https://www.cointalk.com/threads/oh-my.416241/
Well, I had never heard of this before, either. Thanks for enlightening me. I agree, gambling has no place here.
