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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1111269, member: 19463&quot;]Also lets remember that there is a difference between worn coins and ones that have suffered damage since they stopped circulating as money and became items buried in the ground to be eaten by chemicals in the soil or those used bycoin cleaners. We have our personal preferences. I do not mind coins with &#039;honest wear&#039; gained through years of circulation but I am rarely attracted to corroded, pitted, scrubbed and otherwise damaged coins.I&#039;ll add an image showing a coin with a lot of wear. Surely I&#039;d rather have one with more details but the smooth surfaces allowed this a place in my collection.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Have you noticed that some coins are more often sen in badly worn condition than others?&nbsp; Alexandria bronze drachms like this Hadrian (year 2 with elephants) circulated for a long time and are often found even more slick than this one.&nbsp; On the other hand, the later period tetradrachms of Alexandria issued by Diocletian, for example, circulated for only a short while before the system of branch mints striking regular Roman coins made the provincials obsolete.&nbsp; We see low grade coins of the later types but usually their problems are not &#039;honest&#039; wear.&nbsp; Certainly there are exceptions but coins at the start of a period stayed in circulation while the last issues before a coinage reform are harder to find worn slick.&nbsp; The easiest coin to find worn out are denarii of the Mark Antony legionary type.&nbsp; The silver in them was debased so much that it took two centuries before they were worth saving for their bullion content.&nbsp; As a result, they were spent over and over again and got worn badly.&nbsp; Perhaps half the ones you see are worn so badly that they have lost their legion numbers.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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