Topic: 🌟CLOSING SALE🌟 [DENARIUM] | Next Gen Physical Bitcoins 🌟CLOSING SOON🌟 - page 16. (Read 56311 times)

I agree totally.After minting process coins should not be touched to preserve original mint luster.
In some weak metal alloys, the preservation of the mint luster can be discussable but with 999 Fine Silver should not.
Maybe unpolished coins weren't that bad at all but without a picture is hard to comment.

I think finding quality silver blanks is getting harder and harder.  This is probably going to continue to get worse as the global silver supply is crunched more and more in the coming years.  It is hard to not view this as writing on the wall from a silver bug perspective.  However, I do feel your pain.  No coin is perfect and standards are high around here.

Yeah, I'm no expert either. I'm going by the comments I've received from our mint. They seem to know what kind of metal plates the "real mints" use, but they simply can't purchase those from anywhere. And they're trying to do the best with what they have. And so are we.

But we are certainly changing mint if we can't solve those issues with our current one, that's for sure.

From my own personal experience I've found that getting as much of a mirror finish has everything to do with the polishing of the die that is cut (and pressed into the metal during the minting process) and not the metal quality that would determine if the coin(s) have scratches.

Metal quality (from what I gather) only determines the purity of the metal content, not the shape it forms (i.e. scratches etc).

Disclaimer: I am no expert in minting coins.

Here is a simple promo video that we just came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwwpEvPDFsU

This, unlike some of the other comments, is actually good advice. The problem has been that our "mint" simply can't find / purchase high quality raw metal from anywhere at the moment. And we know even less about that than they do. We are looking into this. It seems that proper mints have sources that are not easily found or available in the open market.

I recommend that you find an advisor/board member from the numismatic world, hopefully someone who is very familiar with high quality mints.

Bummer... Coins should not be polished.  You need to find a different mint that can stamp out a high quality silver round for you...

After the minting process, coins should never be polished.  It destroys the numismatic value.  Cleaning and polishing was a practice long ago from the bygone years, in today's world such a coin (polished/cleaned) is considered damaged.

From what I gathered they weren't using a real "mint" to begin with.  It sounds like it was a shareholders Metalworking company most likely used under the basis of keeping profits high without utilizing a real mint.


I don't think it's fair to your customers to keep producing coins from that location either, especially pre-order coins where the quality is expected to be extremely high.

You should have refused the coins and had them redone. Polishing a coin ruins it from a collecting standpoint.

https://coins.thefuntimesguide.com/2009/05/cleaning_coins.php

http://www.numismaster.com/ta/inside_numis.jsp?page=how-to-handle-clean-coins - This is a good place to repeat, “Don’t clean your coins.”

Your mint obviously sucks (sorry to be so blunt...not trying to be mean).

Good points there. Our process of polishing has undoubtedly only improved the coins. The variance in quality in our silver auction coins is in fact only because we didn't polish the silver coins enough at the time of the production of the auction batch. But it is very true that the polishing must be done properly and with care to not introduce damage to the coins. We are giving everyone instructions on this if we're sending tools for further polishing.

Thank you Henry for being very open about the issues. 

I've found that on mirrored finish silver products, using a polishing cloth adds small scratches.  I now take a complete hands off approach to making my silver coins.  Cotton gloves and touching the coin on the edge as little as possible.  Unless I fumble a coin, the face or rear of the coin is never touched by anything but a hologram.  If the buyers want to try and polish away any small marks, I leave it to them, but highly recommend against it as it usually does more harm than good unless you have the right chemicals and knowledge.  Just my 2 satoshis.  Polishing cloth on a mirrored finish coin = bad news.

Yes, I remember. It was nice meeting you too.


1. The silver coin capsules were a bit of a problem for us initially, we had to re-order them once already before we got decent ones. The current ones are ok-ish and shouldn't fall off by themselves. I think the one you have was somehow more loose than they are on average as we haven't had many issues with them. As for the variance in quality, that is of course unfortunate and it's all because of the relative inexperience in producing coins but on the positive side we are gaining experience with each coin. This was the first silver coin and the polishing issues were quite unique compared to the brass coins.

2. We are generally fairly happy with the 1/10 and 1/100 quality relative to the price point but they do show these stripes occasionally, some more so than others. We've talked about this with our mint.

3. The Custom coins are, to be honest, not of the best quality. Some of them are decent but many are not. We are still not completely sure why they became worse than the 1/10 and 1/100 coins and are actively investigating this with the mint. The variance in quality for Custom coins is certainly high.

Safe to say we aren't going to produce new coins with the same issues and are making sure each new coin is better, regardless of which mint we use. The mint we have used so far is actually quite inexperienced in making coins, their primary business is in other type of metal making. Not coins per se. We've used them because of good connections and pricing, the owner of the business is a shareholder in our company. But we're actively evaluating the relationship.

The main issue at the mint is not the process they use or the tools they use, it's the metal plates they use. The brass and silver plates have both had their issues, brass plates simply being low quality and the silver plates being non-polished, thus requiring huge amount of manual polishing. They simply can't find proper raw metal from anywhere. Many of the proper mints have good raw materials which is extremely important and unless our partner can't get their hands on proper raw materials in the future, we may have to change the mint indeed.

I'd like to add a few things..

First thing...Henry it was a pleasure meeting you in person at the Miami Inside Bitcoin conference a few months back.  We spoke for maybe 20 minutes about your coins and other things.

I'm a little disappointed in a few things, and hope you can address:

1.  The auction 1B Silver top capsule was very loose to the point it fell off on its own the moment I touched the packaging and the coin inside almost fell out, until I had to do a ninja maneuver to catch it.   These capsules arent tight, especially for shipping.   Its also rather disappointing to hear that earlier auction Silvers are lesser quality, especially when people paid a nice premium for those.

2.  When I received the 1/10 and 1/100 Brass some time ago, they had what I would describe as 3 or so discoloration stripes end to end across the front.  I looked at roughly 50+ Brass coins in person in your display case.  Some looked better than others to a large extent and showed a similar issue.  

3.  In the 3 custom brass I received, all were pretty scratched up, though shiny, as if they were in someone's pocket for some time.

I implore you to consider other mints that do a much much better job in quality of the silvers and brass for future coins.  I'm sad to say the quality is not there now, and needs to be addressed.

Denarium Bling Detected

https://twitter.com/DenariumBitcoin/status/720292724793020416

I consulted our team and the polishing done at our end was done with a basic silver polishing cloth bought from a jewelry shop. We have decided that we can send any auction coin buyers that type of cloth free of charge for further polishing. Just send us a message to [email protected] and we'll send it. We can also send it as part of another order if you happen to be ordering in the near future.

I'll need to ask our team for the specifics as I don't know the exact product used. It's not a secret. I'll respond later regarding that. The coins can actually be polished afterwards as well, which does improve them, significantly in some cases. Depends on how much polishing was done initially. They are polished in 2 stages at the moment, first at the mint and then we do extra polishing at our end.

The first & current front promotion picture of the 1 BTC coin is fairly representative of how the later 1 BTC coins are, on average. The picture hasn't been photoshopped. Each coin is a bit unique in the sense that they haven't been polished 100 % in the same way. The coin shown in the video review of Chronos Crypto is also representative of the average coin.

We've tried to make each coin as good as possible but there are still differences individually. In any case the later coins are on average slightly better since we've been improving the manual polishing process as we go along. We still have approximately a third of the 250 limited edition run on sale, the rest have been sold.

This is also something we'll do better for future coin series. Try to make sure the coins are of more equal quality. But it's all a learning process - this was our first silver coin and the silver ones are a completely different beast due to the different material and also the size.