Things I've Learned Since Joining Coin Community

Good points iindeed. Glad you're enjoying the experience.

One comment about #1 - it's not necessarily true. While counterfeits are most often higher value coins, they fake pretty much anything worth more that $2. Lower value coins get less scrutiny and are still profitable.

This is true - once I won an ebay auction for a $2 coin that ended up being fake. But the cheap fakes tend to be easy to spot, as in my case, the weight was wrong so it obviously wasn't silver.

So true about kbbpll point:
Just look at the problems concerning the Canadian Toonie (two dollar coin). Counterfeited in the tens of thousands. https://cameltoetoonies.ca/

Any coin that has an issue that prevents it from reaching the technical grade it would otherwise have. Things like cleaning, environmental damage, scratches or other damage, altered surfaces, filled rims, questionable colour/toning, etc.

Panzaldi, your comment about the 09-s was interesting. We've all seen coins with worse scratches than that in straight graded holders. Shows what a crap shoot TPG's can be. I imagine at some point AI will get into the act, which might turn out to be a more objective method for grading.

I'm glad we've been helpful to you. That's why we're here.

1. Counterfeiting has always been a problem, ever since coins were invented 2600 years ago. Anyone with a large enough coin collection almost certainly has at least one fake coin lurking in it, unknown and undetected. I know I've bought several coins as genuine that years later turned out to be fake. There's nothing anybody can do about that, so I don't really see it as something to get paranoid over. There's been a lot of noise on the forums for the past decade or so about Chinese-made counterfeits, because making fake foreign coins is legal in China and the Chinese fake-makers are churning them out at a much higher rate than traditional counterfeiters. Plus, the Chinese are also learning to make fake slabs, which kind of undermines and nullifies the whole "trust the slab" philosophy that's arisen in American coin collecting over the past few decades.

2. Error coins are going through somewhat of a craze these days, fuelled by the power of the Internet: quasi-truthful social media posts along the lines of "I found this rare $2000 error coin in my change, you can too!". Interest in errors and varieties has come and gone before; where the current craze will lead is anybody's guess. It's also very much a cultural thing - interest in errors in Britain and Europe, for example, remains much lower than it is in places like America and Australia. Until very recently, your typical British coin collector saw "error coins" as defective, and therefore by definition always worth less than a perfect specimen.

3. The negative attitude towards "cleaning" has more or less been the same since the mid-20th century - this isn't a new thing or a fad. Pick up any "how to collect coins" book from the 1960s or later, and they will probably give you much the same advice that we've given here: "don't clean coins unless you really know what you're doing". This is simply because of the lived experience of coin collectors: that it's really hard to clean a coin well enough to make it actually look better, while it's really easy to clean a coin badly and ruin it.