Tipsico Coin
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Tipsico Coin

WElcome to Tipsico Coin

About Tipsico 

Tipsico Coin LLC is a well established, full service mail order coin firm. We buy, sell and trade all manner of coinage, currency and exonumia (tokens, medals and related items), but we concentrate on U.S. collector coinage of the popular series.  We also offer more individual services such as servicing want lists.  We principally attend coin shows in the Pacific Northwest, but also travel to major shows in other areas of the U.S.

WElcome to Tipsico Coin

Resources

These pages and associated links include material for our customers and others needing useful, accurate and truthful information on subjects all collectors need to know in order to survive and thrive in the coin hobby. We have sections on grading, authentication and other matters.

 

A Rogues Gallery

 

Here we’ll discuss one of the ugly truths of the coin business: majority of coins that exist in the collector market have some sort of problem, whether they have been cleaned, damaged, or otherwise abused. Unfortunately, many companies choose to treat these coins as normal inventory and send them out to customers without any comment as to their liabilities.

In these pages, which will be added to as time allows and as we have material to use as examples, we will show some of the overgraded, cleaned, damaged or otherwise abused numismatic material that we have purchased back from our customers.  While expensive, both in terms of time and money, our goal is to educate the consumer to help them avoid such pitfalls, and of course hopefully steer them towards considering doing business with us.  While we are not perfect by any means, we do believe that our standards for grading and quality make us stand out among the field of mail order coin dealers.

Over-graded Coins

The key component of coin value is naturally its condition.  This is usually described as its "grade".  The best way to think of this is a comparison of the coin's present state of preservation (amount of wear) as compared to the "ideal" condition, as it was new when it came off of the dies at the Mint of origin.  The most critical component of determining a coin's grade is the amount of wear it has received, but strike, luster, color and originality are all factors that are used today, especially by the grading services.

Altered and Counterfeit Coins

Our goal is to help educate our collector customers to learn how to distinguish genuine, unimpaired coins from spurious or altered items.  Please note that this is for purely educational purposes only.  Even "experts" sometimes disagree on the authenticity of an item, or whether it has been altered from the original state, so the information here should be considered a guide only and not taken as an absolute.  If there is any doubt about a particular coin, token, etc. in the mind of a viewer of this material, we recommend strongly that professional authentication by competent authority be considered.