#coins

badon: got my bitcoin!

hey N0ZYC

Looking

I expect to hear a groan after you see it, but hey, it's nice looking and will make a fun gift

N0ZYC: No, actually there are serious collectors of physical bitcoins

See ##cryptocoins

huh

Oh, nevermind, it looks like that channel is dead.

well these don't come with an actual bitcoin hash of any sory

sort

I guess it's just this channel now.

you can buy physical bitcoins that come with a hash, giving them spendable value

this was just a fun looking one to get

oh, btw, I have determined by specific gravity that the counterfeit panda 10Y coin is almost certainly magnesium, BUT the little bit of chipping on the edge of the coin reveals a copper color.

I was expecting the coin to be copper until I figured the SG, and it's pretty much dead center on Mg, nowhere near Cu. ever seen magnesium look goldish in color?

er, correction, "manganese" would be more proper of a name

That could be because it's brass.

oh... http://www.periodictable.com/Samples/025.7/s13.JPG

manganese and magnesium are different elements.

wow. I thought it was white looking. guess not! magnesium is siver. manganese apparently is copperish

I think they choose brass because it has less copper, which makes it cheaper.

yeah copper would raise the production cost

Pure manganese is silver if I remember correctly.

ok that color matches the little chipping on the edge pretty well

silverish

it was high time for me to get a better scale so I bought one on ebay recently. another decimal place of precision on weight. with that I will be able to check things much more closely

my current scale has a precision of 0.1g, that's about 0.003 oz, and the scale will only read ounces by the 0.005, so its hard to measure the specific gravity of gold to enough precision to get a confident result

how did you say you were testing coins?

N0ZYC: I'm not testing coins, for the most part.

N0ZYC: I buy certified coins from NGC or PCGS to ensure authenticity. That said, sometimes I can tell what a coin is made of just by looking at it.

I have a lot of professional experience in manufacturing, so the way the metal flows under the pressure of the dies, or the look of the crystalline surface might help me guess what it is made of.

Plus lots of experience studying coins, too.

measuring specific gravity seems to be a very simple and yet very effective way to verify the composition. it measures the density of the object, regardless of size or shape

the only possible corruption of the result would be from alloying or including an airtight void (an alloy of air I suppose) either way it would likely need to be alloyed with a more valuable metal, which isn't really a concern

its also nondestructive, unlike say an acid drop test

Yes.

It can sometimes beat XRF, but XRF is much more convenientt.

And it handles alloys OK.

gold is a problem though, because it is 19x as dense as water. so there is only a very small change in weight when dunking. requires a high precision scale

my 1/10 oz gold coins only measure 2.5 grams of buoyancy

on a scale with +/- 0.1g of precision, that doesn't make for a very precise test

er my bad, that's silver. gold 1/10 oz is 1.61 buoyancy

do you hear much about coins with lead cores in place of silver? the specific gravity of the two is very close

No, I've never heard of that.

Not in coins.

It happens in very large bars sometimes, but shenanigans like that are more common in gold bars.

Silver and lead probably mix too well, so it would be revealed by accident.

"mix too well"?

gold is almost twice as dense as either silver or lead. I'd think that would make a poor choiceto sub with, the bars would be sooo light

I meant silver and lead mix too well.

I don't know what you mean by that

They dissolve into each other. You can't just put a lump of lead in the center like you can with tungsten rods in gold bars.

oh okay. again probably due to their similar densities

Gold and tungsten don't mix at all, so there would be no way to detect the tungsten from the surface of the bar.

No, it's mostly because of their similar chemitries.

Chemistries.

ok

Tungsten has a much higher melting point than gold, and it isn't soluble in gold even if they were both melted.

so you were thinking a silver/lead alloy bar would be easy to detect because it would have lead on the surface... I was thinking more of a lead core with a thick silver plating

It's sort of like salt in water, with lead in gold. You can't put a secret lump of salt in water, because the salt mixes with the water.

but with a plated core

The cost of making a good 1 oz silver fake would probably be higher than the cost of a real 1 oz silver.

That's why it's not done.

a

Lead has too many problems with silver that make it easier to detect.

that makes sense

With gold, the difference in value is huge, plus tungsten and gold work well together with minimal difficulties.

how far off is the density?

oh.. that high

was just comparing... that is insanely close

19.32 vs 19.6

that would be extremely difficult to spot, 1.5% off

N0ZYC: Yes, gold and tungsten are almost identical.

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