June 2024 - Denver Coin Club Meeting - Grading over the Past 100 Years

Participating in the Denver Coin Club has been hit or miss for me.  Doors open at 6 PM and I usually arrive around 7 PM.  There are announcements, introductions and an auction that usually takes on the order of an hour and then a presentation of 30-45 minutes starting at 8PM.  Maybe it was the temperature of the room, but my patience had been exhausted.

The talk itself was interesting enough.  Bob has a measured speaking and presentation style honed over years of being a school teacher.  He walked through descriptive grading (new/used, uncirculated, brilliant uncirculated), the Sheldon scale, technical vs market grading and finally third party grading and post slab "stickering,"

One new thing I learned was that PCGS originally got started as a means to buy coins back sight unseen.  Another new thing was to date failed attempts at computer/AI grading which should eventually succeed.

The discussion of the future was most intriguing.  Plus designations on grades, finer and finer slices.  The importance of confirming a coin is genuine in the face of increasingly amazing counterfeit coins.

One unanswered question for me was coin doctoring over the last 100 years and into the future.  Cleaned to improve surfaces, whizzed to hide scuff marks, tooled to improve hairlines and other techniques were pretty rudimentary.  I would think that techniques for doctoring coins has likely improved and will continue to improve.