Skip to main content

Rare Coins - Fraud or Real?

A hypothetical possibility

Suppose a rare coin dealer offers for sale a newly discovered cache of mint condition silver dollars dating from the late 19th century.  The pitch says they were found in the ocean on some century-old shipwreck. Prices are $150 (minimum) per coin range.  Suppose the coins are kinda-fake.  They are genuine, in the sense they have not quite pure silver content, but identical to the real thing.  But they are fake, in the sense they were minted last week. (So cheap is the current price of silver in comparison. Less than $16 each at current market prices.)   So while they are counterfeit they are not quite fake - melt-value wise

Note. The "mint" condition implies little post processing is required.

Detecting such coins would require a rather serious and scientific assay analysis by metallurgists that can perform such tests.  You could buy one or twenty of these coins with the confidence of resale by your estate.

I don't know, but I will not buy.  Seems like an easy way to make money.  Skeptical am I.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Accepting Fake Information

Every day, we are all bombarded with information, especially on news channels.  One group claims it's false; another calls it the truth. How can we know when to accept it or alternatively how can we know it's false? There are several factors which influence acceptance of fake or false information. Here are the big four.  Some just don’t have the knowledge to discern fact/truth from fiction/fact/false*. Some fake information is cleverly disguised and simply appears to be correct. Some fake information is accepted because the person wants to believe it. Some fake information is accepted because there is no other information to the contrary. However, the acceptance of  information  of any kind become a kind of  truth , and this is a well studied topic. In the link below is an essay on “The Truth About Truth.” This shows simply that what is your point of view, different types of information are generally accepted, fake or not.   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/g-donald-allen-420b03

Your Brain Within Your Brain

  Your Bicameral Brain by Don Allen Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword? You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused. But maybe you didn’t forget.   Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use. Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of

Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious?

  Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? I truly like the study of consciousness, though it is safe to say no one really knows what it is. Some philosophers has avoided the problem by claiming consciousness simply doesn’t exist. It's the ultimate escape clause. However, the "therefore, it does not exist" argument also applies to "truth", "God", and even "reality" all quite beyond a consensus description for at least three millennia. For each issue or problem defying description or understanding, simply escape the problem by claiming it doesn’t exist. Problem solved or problem avoided? Alternately, as Daniel Dennett explains consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. However, he goes on to say that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist [1] . Oh, well. Getting back to consciousness, most of us have view