NGC's New High-Tech Coin Holder
One of the many interesting corporate announcements made by the big players in numismatics at the recent ANA World's Fair of Money in Baltimore seems to have been lost among the noise. NGC has developed a new high-tech coin holder, or "slab," which is expected to be available by the end of September. The new NGC slab, called the EdgeViewTM Holder, has five new features:
High Security Label - The label, or "slab insert" as many collectors call it, will be micro-printed, include a holographic layer, and have UV-reactive watermarking.
EdgeViewTM Design - Most of the edge of the coin will be visible through the holder, unlike the current generation of holders which places the coin in a gasket that hides the edge.
Preservation-Grade Materials - The new NGC holder will be made of state-of-the-art preservation-grade materials, the same materials that the Smithsonian Institution demanded for the coins in the National Collection that NGC slabbed awhile back.
Directional Pressure Welding - The new NGC holder ensures that "every coin will be cleanly, safely, and fully sealed" according to NGC marketing materials.
State-of-the-Art Hologram - The hologram on the new holder will be fused directly onto the plastic holder itself, rather than inside the holder. New technology allows for a hologram that is "virtually impossible to reproduce."
An Analysis of NGC's New Holder
So, what is my take on all of the above? First of all, for a holder that is supposed to be an answer to the very serious and potentially-market-destroying problem of slab counterfeiting, I can only hope that NGC isn't disclosing the real meat-and-potatoes security here. Only two of the five highly-touted features even address security. Let's look at them one-by-one:
The High-Security Label - This is pretty much the whole security upgrade, the way I see it (based on what NGC has made public.) Although micro-printing is still useful against desktop counterfeiters, it will not thwart well-funded or serious counterfeiters. This is why U.S. currency stopped relying on micro-printing as a primary line of defense more than a decade ago. The UV-reactive watermark is another hurdle for counterfeiters to overcome, but again it's a modest one for the well-funded forger. The holographic layer is in the same category as the other two features on the label. Taken together as a whole, I would say there's a decent chance that even a sophisticated counterfeiter could somehow mess up getting all three exactly right, but in truth, slab security needs to move beyond features that exist only within the slab itself.
The EdgeViewTM Design - The security here is more for the sake of the coin than the slab itself. I like being able to see the edges of my coins, as a proper edge is an important diagnostic against fake coins.
The Preservation-Grade Materials - No security enhancement here at all, as far as anti-slab counterfeiting is concerned. But it will be interesting to see if copper degrades in this new museum-quality material like it does in the current generation of slabs.
The Directional Pressure Welding - Although NGC doesn't point this out in the new EdgeViewTM literature(PDF), the welding of the holder and the exact shape of the corners, plus the spacing between the "ribs" are some of the details the recent slab counterfeiters messed up the worst. I would like to have seen NGC go with a more complex plastic edge pattern, perhaps including colors or shards of metallic confetti or something, but the new holder is supposed to be a big improvement over the current one.
Getting the coins out of the slabs, though, has always been easy for those who know the proper method:
(Special thanks to A.C. Dwyer's Coin Collecting Blog for the video link.)
The State-of-the-Art Hologram - The final new feature in the NGC EdgeViewTM Holder is the hologram embossed into the back of the slab. NGC claims that the new hologram technology is virtually impossible to reproduce, so the enquiring mind can't help but ask, "if the technology is virtually unreproducible, then how is NGC reproducing it over and over for their new slabs?" The Chinese are very good at reproducing just about everything, from handbags to computer chips, even rare coins and the slabs that hold them. Will this hologram be just as easy?
If I sound a little skeptical about these enhanced new security measures, it's because I don't think the solution to the counterfeit slab threat lies in the plastic itself. The grading services need to develop an extraneous checkpoint that verifies the slab independent of its own plastic. Dominion Grading Service (DGS, who took over the bankrupt PCI) is on the right track with their photo database of slabbed coins, but too many high-grade coins look exactly alike to the naked eye (and in photographs) for this to be a final solution. I like the RFID chip solution. The chips have unique numbers that identify them, they can hold a goodly amount of data (such as provenance and a laser-value code for the coin) and the readers for the chips are about a $75 investment, which is less than many collectors and dealers pay to slab one medium-value coin. The laser-value code is a complex numerical value derived from doing a surface scan of the coin with a laser beam. Even two coins which are virtually identical to the naked eye will have a different laser value. Add a check-sum to these laser values, or perhaps even a public key fingerprint, and you have some real high-tech security that really wouldn't cost all that much to deploy. Sure, there will be some start-up costs that the grading services must bear, but the alternative is that their entire credibility might be utterly destroyed (along with our marketplace) if the next batch of German, Russian, Bulgarian, or Chinese counterfeit slabs rises adequately to the current low-tech level.Share your comments about the new NGC slab, or slab security in general, via the Comments link below.
Comments
Sounds like a step in the right direction, but I agree: real security will depend on some sort of encrypted data.