Get real!

Ignore the Hype - Gold as Currency is Dead

Chris B said, "> Maybe only 0.5% of collector coins are forged."
Chris, you're actually suggesting that 1 out of every 200 gold coins is a forgery? If it was one in every 20,000 (0.005%) it would be big news!

Forgeries are difficult to create and easy to detect.
Even a simple jeweler's scale, higly accurate to 1/100 ounce or better, can detect any change of metal.
I'm an amateur, but I've already used a digital scale it to tell the difference between silver plated medals and pure silver (not coins in this case, but "silver medals" I'd purchased that were actually silver plated). There's a much greater difference between the weight of gold and lesser metals, except lead or depleted uranium.

And as for minting coins, it's not that easy, you need not just equipment but artists to get it right -- it's an art.
Go ahead, take a chunk of lead and try to mint a coin, then plate it with gold -- you'd waste millions trying to perfect the process and the results would still get laughed at by any coin collector at first glance!
Or if a government tried it, the only way they could succeed is if they had one assembly line minting the REAL coins, and a separate SECRET assembly line minting one out of 100 with base metal cores -- and then when they got caught, they'd be out of business on both assembly lines.

Moreover, most true collector coins are graded by professional grading services (e.g. PCGS, NGC, ANACS, ICG), who are experts at detecting whether a coin is genuine.

Furthermore, the most likely type of "forgery" is to add or remove mintmarks from genuine gold coins in order to make them more valuable -- but then they are STILL gold coins, and still have the same bullion value. If you only invest in bullion coins, you don't care much about mintmarks and dates anyway, and if you're investing in RARE gold coins, then you'll take the trouble to get them professionally graded.

If someone is going to go to the trouble of forging or altering coins, they'd make a much better profit doing it on base metal RARE coins than on bullion coins -- for example, alter a 1909 VDB penny to make it a 1909 S VDB penny worth over a thousand dollars. But then again they'd get caught, thanks to professional grading services.

On Oct 31 11:24 AM Chris B wrote:

> OK, close your eyes to risk. Say it couldn't happen. Say it never
> happened before. Real estate never went down either, and people who
> warned that it could were once considered moonbat conspiracy theorists.
> Who were they to question the pros at Moody's with their mere common
> sense? After all, demand was through the roof!
>
> If you really think it is a manufacturing impossibility for criminals
> to find a way to coat a correct-density non-magnetic core with pure
> gold for 100+% profits, perhaps you should consider that somebody
> went through the trouble of building your cell phone for maybe $10
> profit. Consider that North Korea produces perfect forgeries of US
> currency, with all the security features. What I'm talking about
> is low tech in comparison, much higher in profit, and harder to trace.
> In an environment of manic demand for coins by unsophisticated buyers,
> where there is massive profit potential, you can expect to find fraud.
> It is naive to assume otherwise.
>
> Maybe only 0.5% of collector coins are forged. My only point then
> is that gold is not risk free. It would only take the publicized
> discovery of a few of them to sink the value of such privately owned
> coins. I could care less if it happened, but for some reason I feel
> the need to warn all the faith-based investors out there that nothing
> is ever perfectly safe - much less precious metals.