I respectfully disagree but I always appreciate getting other perspectives. Here's my take. None of these coins have been handled. Most are absolutely mint because they've gone directly from roll to case.
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To the OP - thanks for entertaining the discussion, we're keeping your thread on top of the first page of the board!
With your statement about the coins being handled, I sold a handled coin
(Click here) for lower than what it would have been if it were pristine. (I bought the coin from someone else.) Yes there are many people that did roll to case, but there were people that did not with the cas brass coins. Nowadays most, if not everyone, should be doing roll to case, or kept in roll or other protective enclosures for Bitcoin coins as well as fine metal coins.
I don't think ANACS is doing ANY "extensive work" to grade coins. They're just getting extensively paid by all of us sending in our coins. And all we get is a hope that we end up with a grader that got laid last night and is in a good mood, handing out high grades.
ANACs doing extensive work? Well I may have misstated that. From what I have heard, multiple people at ANACs grade the same coin, then the grade is determined by the multiple "experts / judges / robots that are stealing the private key off the back of coins / people".
Someone once wrote here that they don't even consider the quality of the sticker in their assessment - that's half the coin (and the one thing that could be easily looking mint or looking askew). It's interesting that I can pay about BTC0.1 to get a coin graded and expect 8 times return on that expense. I mean, it's great for the seller but it's kind of fucked up, no?
Well to the sticker part, I believe that is true. I heard the same information.
But the 8 times return on expense is the risk the owner of the coin takes. In the coin trading world a higher quality coin is hard to get, depending on strikes of the coins, handling, and many more variables (*I believe but should be corrected if wrong). There were some series of coins that graded at a low chance of being perfect, while loads of them were graded at 68s and 69s.
That's just what I have seen anyways. But great to bounce thoughts off each other.