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uess I'm clueless as to why someone would want to damage a coin on purpose. Sad really sad :( :)
It is usually difficult to know exactly what motivates someone to place a mark on a coin. But we can say several things about this one.
First, it was done deliberately, by hand. There's no way that someone could "accidentally" carve two sets of (roughly) parallel lines onto a coin, at (roughly) right angles to each other.
Second, it was not done to mess with coin collectors, or to try to trick anyone into thinking this was some kind of weird mint error. Presumably, the lines once passed across the high points of the coin as well as the low parts, but due to wear from circulation, the lines on the high parts have worn away. True, getting a knife and carefully cutting lines in the low parts while leaving the high parts alone would be an alternative explanation, but let's invoke Occam's Razor here. This in turn means that the coin saw considerable circulation after the lines were placed there. Which means, in turn, that whoever placed the lines there thought they were simply placing lines onto a coin to be used as money (rather than damaging a collector's item).
Conclusion: bored person with a knife (or other sharp object, like a screwdriver), back when these kinds of coins were in normal everyday circulation.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis