The Late Great Toned Coin Lie

Well, the big bags of 1,000 each Morgan dollar hoard coins have been opened and photographed. Lots of color, right? Wrong. Overwhelmingly blast white. The photo is a bag of 1880-S examples. They’ve been in sewn canvas bags for 138 years, and have not been dipped. Anyone want to revise their wives’ tales about white coins yet? “At that age, anything white has to have been dipped.” Yeah, right.

 

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Less than 100 out of 16,000 were toned, and not a rare date in the bunch.

 

Where were they found? Dry climate?

 

Stashed away in a bank vault. The person supposedly did not want to pay the safe deposit fees any longer.

 

Was it temperature/ humidity controlled?
When they printed the list of dates, there weren't any good dates.
They claimed they were having them all graded, and I didn't see the
point in paying double the money for the same grade common coin, just because this one says "Hoard" on the label.
(I get that price from the value estimate of the hoard, which was way over valued. If I recall the estimate was approx. $90-$100 a coin and most price lists have them all in that condition for $50.)

 

Some of those in the pic look PL and some look like MS61 trash.

 

Thus my love of blast white specimens is now founded. Thank you for this.

 

I guess I missed this story. Somebody have a link?

 

Here ya go: https://coinweek.com/recent-article...ining-a-hoard-of-thousands-of-silver-dollars/

 

Thanks Cal..........

[aside, and out hearing range] I suppose NY banks must have climate control in the vaults.

 

Thank you!

 

But I read somewhere that, at that age, anything white has to be dipped. So your point is invalid.

 

Ya always believe everything ya read in the internet?

 

Hey, I'm still young and impressionable.

 

Be more discerning, my friend........

 

Wow, so some bags of silver dollars were kept in climate controlled vaults and didn't develop rainbow toning. You've convinced me, the thousands of other sealed bags that yielded rainbow toners must all be AT, I will never buy a rainbow toner again.

 

What I'm telling you is the supply magically expanded when they became popular. You are free to believe any myth your business model requires you to believe.

 

From the CoinWeek story, quoting Jeff Garrett:

“Our only disappointment was the relatively small number of attractively toned coins. There are probably less than 100 examples with rainbow toning. I would have thought that 50 years of sitting in cloth bags would have produced a much different result in that regard. Nearly all of the coins are frosty white in appearance.”

His “disappointment” is identical to my “skepticism” of the whole rainbow toning story writ large. I believe it’s OBVIOUS that many on the market are artificial. Further, the whole “if it’s old and white, it was dipped” meme has been proven to be a bald faced lie.

 

I think the numbers are consistent with what would happen if these bags of coins were kept in a temperature/ humidity controlled environment for 100 years.
Some show toning (there is air and there are gases they have been exposed to, as well as whatever is coming off the bags they have been stored in). But most don't.
Why would you expect the results to be different from that?
I guess if someone wants a coin that hasn't been dipped, they can pay double the price for one of these NY Hoard slabbed common date Morgans.