Basil II, Bulgaroctonos. 976-1025 Ad, Bronze Fouree Of Silver Miliaresion?

It is certainly the design of that miliaresion, and certainly doesn't look "silvery". However, I wouldn't class it as a "fouree" - that term is for a specific type of counterfeit, more common with thicker ancient coins than thin medaieval ones, where the planchet for the fake was made by wrapping a thin piece of silver foil around a piece of base-metal.

The "silver wash" which originally featured on your coin, and may be visible in parts, seems more akin to the surface treatment given to genuine Late Roman base-metal coins: a blank made of debased-silver alloy is "pickled" in vinegar or somethign else acetic; this leaches out the copper fromt he surface, leaving a spongy mat of purer silver which compresses down into a silver layer when the blank is struck.

While it might be officially struck from an illegally debased blank, I suspect it's actually an outright counterfeit. The hole might even be a contemporary attempt at either testing it's metal or rendering the coin unfit for circulation after it was detected; I don;t know if it was common practice in the Byzantine Empire, but I know that in Britain at a much later point in history, merchants and innkeepers would nail examples of counterfeit coins to the wooden walls and pillars of their establishment, as a reminder to both themselves and their customers that "counterfeit coins were out there and this is what one looks like".

The main argument against this theory is that Byzantine nails were normally square in cross-section, and this hole is round. The hole doesn't appear to be "for jewellery", though, since the pictorial design on the obverse would be upside-down, so I'm having trouble explaining why it's there otherwise.

Is this coin, from vcoins, relevant to this discussion?

https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/pa...Default.aspx