Peckris

Uh?

Uh?

There's a big M on one side, and on the other, what looks like Ma Andrews from down the road and her cat leaping up to knock the food bowl out of her hand.

If the "unsuspecting person" was a contemporary of the newly minted coin (which is why a lot of them were plated) then that gives the coin a reduced value (to us) but a certain historical interest. There was an entire cottage industry devoted to fooling people that a farthing or sixpence was a half sov. Risky though - it kept the hangman in business...

Nice!

Welcome! Some of us are just pretty ...

Hm. That appears to be a 2008 £2 with legend intact scott

It looks AUNC to me, though the pictures are rather small. As to value, if it's not Chinese then you're looking at a minimum of about £3000 but possibly quite a bit more at auction.

A Nice Pair! (To quote a certain 1970s record company...). Would it be rude to ask how much they cost? (I'm in the market for similar bun penny items providing not too expensive).

Agreed. The whole area to the left of the 9 looks grooved and as if possibly tooled. But if you were able to find a few more ... that would be evidence of a filled die and suddenly the coin would acquire rarity status. I speak from experience - I have a 1964 (coincidentally) sixpence where the I of GRATIA is totally missing. However no-one has found another, so - completely counter-intuitively - it has no interest or 'rarity' value, being "merely" unique!

Well I look in ALL threads where there are new posts, just to save you duplicating the effort in future

You've already put these in another thread Az, or am I suffering déjà vu?

It'll be interesting to see if I get a reply. I've also sent him a "FYI" rather than a question. Usually I get a reply, so it will be interesting to see if that happens this time.

Seriously.. NOT! Do you know how many possible permutations there are in a 44 character string that can be a mix of letters (upper / lower case), numerals, and non-alphameric characters? I have not done the maths, but I'm prepared to bet it's mind boggling. As for the computer generating passwords - don't forget each one generated would have to be applied to the file concerned, then the OS would have to 'accept' or 'reject' it - all of which takes time; multiply that by a vast number and 'millennia' isn't much of an exaggeration.

I know where you are coming from, but it is always difficult to tell from a photo when they state that the lustre is toning. It can very often give the appearance of not being there when it is, but has started to tone. True. True. But having bought from them in the past I've learned to downgrade slightly (though rarely disappointed in the coins themselves, I hasten to add)

The 1895 seems to be unusual in that the mintage wasn't that great but a much higher proportion than normal are in high grade. Which they would share with 1911, to a lesser extent with 1937 (especially silver), and even lesser extent with 1953 - all comparatively low mintages set against the average for the reign, but often found in higher grades.

Ski, if you go onto Colin Cookes website and look at part 2 of the Workman sale there was a 26 ME in that sale, in fact, here it is. Now you can see the difference between an ebay sellers AU and a real AU In fairness the one on Colin Cooke's is described as Choice Uncirculated with full lustre, there will always be a whole raft of difference between almost UNC and Choice UNC Yeah, but some of us take Colin Cooke's "Choice Uncirculated with full lustre" with a healthy pinch of salt

Plenty of collectors and dealers (all the Cs for example) would describe that as BU az

If someone' daft enough to pay £5 for the commonest crown after Churchill, then good luck to 'em, I say. Those cupro-nickel 1977s are real clunkers, a drag on the market. Even the silver proofs regularly sell for less than £20 - which considering I paid £11 for one in 1979, shows how little they've moved.

I'm no expert on those first two years either (in fact I need Freeman to decipher most bun varieties, truth be told). However, the variation in spacings of the date numerals - particularly the last one - is a common feature of those early years. You probably need to be looking at other parts of the design to see the respective die combinations.

Brilliant exercise Declan! It's late in the evening for me so I will study this at greater leisure. But as you say, the number of 1904 halfcrowns, compared to 1906/08/10, is positively alarming.

Here's my 1860 halfpenny (sorry about the image quality but I have to enlarge my life-size scans to be the minimum size you b*ggers need to see, so a lot of image degradation ) It is actually BU in hand, probably the only bun bronze I have that is genuinely that grade.

I thought there might be a discussion on my grading, so I captured the image ... ok, here we go. (Judged purely on the reverse - as you say, the obverse is harder to rate on a 1926ME) 1. Britannia's trident fingers are blurring together 2. The helmet where it edges the face is completely worn 3. The hand on the shield is quite worn too - too much for EF 4. The completeness of the shield design is misleading - it can be intact right down to F 5. The folds of Britannia's gown across her lap and by the shield is blurred - much too heavy wear for EF 6. Her right breast is flat (I'm not talking about her bra size ) The obverse isn't going to be any better - in fact that series usually wore quicker on the obverse than it did the reverse. I'd go GVF no problem. But that's still only a £300 - £350 coin IMO.

Sadly, as you correctly point out, the A=1, B=2, C=3, etc, Cipher is the flaw in this system. As it is possibly the most common, and perhaps well known, of all systems I would think. I have experimented using the same basic concept but changing the Cipher. To be honest the results were better as it would be much harder for anyone to figure out, but the complexity of actually creating the Password in the first place was at least doubled. I like the simplicity of it, as it is so easy to encode and decode, but that sadly is also its 'Achilles Heel.' lol I do like that idea of adding a non Alpha-Numeric Character in the way that you suggested, I will sit and have a play with that idea. In fact I do something similar in that I exchange the Vowels themselves for them. This does of course add an element of randomisation to the overall system but has the downside of a simple transpositon which would show a pattern if looked at closely enough. I sat with a pen and paper last night and devised a couple of new ideas for a basic yet secure way to create strong Passwords, but I will have to play with them a little longer to see how they develop. If I am honest, I do only use that system for Forums and various other Websites. I have a modified system for E-Mail, etc. So if it were to be 'Cracked' then all I would lose is a few Forum accounts, which is no great loss to me. They way that I think about it is that no 'Serious Hacker' would waste their time or effort in trying to 'Crack' a Forum Password as there would simply be no challenge in it for them. So as long as my Passwords are strong enough to keep the 'Average Joe' on their toes, then I do not worry at all. True enough. All my sensitive (i.e. financial) data is encrypted, and behind a password that is 44 characters in length ... that should take a good few millennia to crack

Strangely this basic principle is probably also true for any KG5 penny, it's just that we don't notice it. Most coins were collected from circulation either around the date of issue or much later on when they were likely to be withdrawn at any time. When was the last time you saw a GVF 1914? Yes, I agree. Though only for the series 1913 to 1921. There seem to be quite a few mid grade 1911 - 1912 protected behind high rims, and for some reason the 1922 - 1926 OE also turn up quite a lot in the VF range. (And from 1928 onwards, VF is very common for most dates) I simply can't see how this could be done objectively now that they are no longer circulating. What you will probably end up doing is monitoring the periodic release of hoards of so-called rare dates when the hoarder has got fed up holding on to them such as the roughly 4000 1925 halfcrowns sold at Noble earlier this year. The additional need to police ebay for recycled pieces (as this would presumably be a major source of data) would be a pretty thankless and probably impossible task given the quality of images provided. We are also talking about comparing pieces that in the main are common or less common with only a handful of real rarities found in the last 150 years. The amount of data would be mind boggling. Double counting is a big problem. A few years ago when I still listed things on ebay, I had to prove to someone that my contention of a particular Charles I shilling type being rarer than another was true. To prove to the person asking and to ensure I wasn't making a complete tit of myself, I redid the exercise. That required finding examples in general sales only, i.e. random sale data points. Named collections are out because if you use a person's collection as the basis for data, then that person is likely to have one example of each variety they can lay their hands on. Consequently you can easily end up with the erroneous conclusion that a coin which has 2 common varieties and one maybe unique error exists in the ratio of 1:1:1. Serious rarities aside, there isn't an easy way. Yes, I never thought it would be easy. But it does seem time that the 'deadweight inertia' of 1960s price ratios, which depended heavily on rarity vs common circulating dates, was adjusted. BU 1946 and 1949 threepences will always be rare, but I'm prepared to bet that 1946s in F are little scarcer than - say - 1939 or 1948, many of which would have been hoovered up in the meltdown. More so proportionately than the key dates. I wonder if a quick search for certain dates and denominations on eBay could be the first step in such a survey? Repeated monthly for a year, that might provide a snapshot.