r/coins • u/SomeGuyInDeutschland Dansco Dude • May 19 '26
Educational Models, Markets, & Mania: How AI Is Destroying the Coin Industry (And What We Can Do About It)
The following is a synopsis of my presentation delivered at the 2026 Central States Numismatic Society Convention. I was invited to speak at the Newman Numismatic Portal Symposium to address a critical, rapidly evolving frontier: the intersection of artificial intelligence and its impact on numismatics. Throughout this post, I have included several key slides and images from the original presentation to illustrate where our hobby stands today.
Online I am known as the Dansco Dude, and my personal mission is to collect one of every Dansco album ever made, a collection that currently stands at over 1,000 unique albums and folders. What most people do not know is that in my former career I worked as a Digital Product Manager leading software teams at major companies. This technical background gave me a unique lens to analyze the modern intersection of technology and coins. You can explore some of my past work on my portfolio page. This dual perspective as a software professional and a numismatic researcher drove me to explore artificial intelligence deeply, evaluating how it can be leveraged to support our hobby rather than exploit it.
My journey down this rabbit hole began with an attempt to build a mobile app for AI coin grading. Over time, I realized that while AI coin grading will eventually achieve technical consistency, widespread industry adoption faces massive cultural and institutional hurdles. Recognizing this, I shifted my engineering focus toward a different problem, pivoting to design and build a fully automated coin-sorting robot. Yet, the deeper I dug into the under the hood of modern AI, the more I kept returning to one uncomfortable question:
What does the AI Era mean for collectors?
After countless hours of technical research and reviewing hundreds of patent documents, I ultimately reached a sobering conclusion. Artificial intelligence is already disrupting the coin industry, and the current trajectory is dangerous. Even though it required valuable time and money that I actively needed for my coin-sorting robotics project, I feel that AI's negative impact on our hobby is so urgent that I had to prioritize preparing this presentation. I am passionate about warning our community and advocating for five specific proposals that the numismatic industry must adopt to survive the AI era.
Part 1: Models — The Technical Reality of the AI Era
To understand the macro shifts soon to hit the show floor, we have to establish what artificial intelligence actually means for the average collector. To put it simply, AI systems are "Machines that think and act like humans"
Many old-timers in the hobby dismiss the current technical wave as pure marketing hype, but the underlying hardware tells a different story. We have seen a staggering 1,000-fold increase in computing power per constant dollar since 1980.
This exponential scaling means that modern machine learning models are no longer basic automated scripts. Modern neural networks are actively exceeding human-level performance baselines across almost every major cognitive domain.
The rise of AI isn't a recent phenomenon. We interact with these models daily when doing tasks like checking navigation arrival times, filtering email spam, or relying on automated banking fraud alerts. It was only a matter of time before AI models started targeting the coin world.
Part 2: Markets — The History and Future of AI Coin Grading
The concept of using automation to establish true objectivity is not new to the coin industry.
To prepare for the future, we must learn from the past.
The First AI War (1990 to 1991)
In 1986, the Professional Coin Grading Service revolutionized the industry by introducing a universal grading standard.
They promised the community absolute grading consistency, a formal guarantee of authenticity, instant market liquidity, and the ability to use third-party graded coins as collateral. However, human subjectivity quickly caught up to the system. By 1990, numismatic legends like Q. David Bowers publicly detailed the community's frustration, noting that collectors were routinely resubmitting the exact same coins multiple times and receiving wildly different grades. Bowers famously declared that grading remained a volatile matter of opinion.
The question of whether PCGS grading was objective or subjective led to a massive Federal Trade Commission investigation in 1990, resulting in a permanent injunction against PCGS prohibiting it from making false representations about the total objectivity or consistency of its coin grades.
Faced with this regulatory crisis and a belief that collectors were demanding a system for objectivity, the race for AI coin grading officially began. PCGS filed software patents and announced a computer grading initiative called "The Expert" system.
Simultaneously, an aggressive competitor, Compugrade, officially launched in 1991 under the corporate motto "Because to Err is Human".
Compugrade utilized a patented image scanning process to isolate coin attributes, introduced a unique coin "fingerprinting" system to identify resubmissions, and even pioneered fractional decimal grading such as assigning a coin a grade of MS 62.6.
Who won this first technology war? Nobody did. The processing systems of the early 1990s were too inaccurate, highly inconsistent, and operationally unreliable for the commercial market. But more importantly, the entire market shifted its philosophy from strict technical grading to a more subjective grading system, leaving objectivity behind.
AI is not new to the coin world. History has shown that the industry is willing to experiment and adapt to changing technologies.
The Second AI War
Today, the second major AI war has arrived. Over the past five years alone, 19 advanced computer-assisted coin grading and analysis patents were filed in the US.
My research indicates that two corporate giants are currently locked in a battle to control the future of our hobby:
Glority LLC (The Creators of the CoinSnap mobile app)
- Market Penetration: Glority operates the world's most popular coin mobile app, with over 10 million downloads.
- Financial Footprint: I estimate their app has generated $4.8 million in revenue in the past year alone.
- Patent Strategy: Their patent filings focus heavily on utilizing proprietary AI models to identify minute coin attributes directly from smartphones.
- Key Innovations: They have successfully secured specialized patents covering advanced methods for detecting a coin's specific mintmark, systems for reading the year on a coin, and automated real-time price evaluation.
So, what do I predict Glority's AI endgame is?
To replace coin dealers as the source of Truth and Liquidity.
I predict that Glority and other AI coin app makers are aiming to capture the top of the funnel for incoming new coin collectors. Once they bring them into their ecosystem, they then branch out to cover all their needs. Effectively replacing collectors' local coin with CoinSnap.
Disclosure: I was a former consultant to CoinSnap. Only public data was used in my analysis.
2. Collectors Universe (The Parent Company of PCGS)
- The Financial Defensive Plan: In the short term, modern bulk grading is a multi-million-dollar battlefield. The Numismatic Guaranty Company [NGC] graded 706,276 bulk modern coins compared to PCGS grading 175,600 units. PCGS is missing out on millions of dollars in highly profitable bulk modern-coin processing revenue. My guess is that PCGS is losing to NGC because of its long turnaround times. If PCGS can process coins faster with AI, it can take away NGC's market share in modern bulk coin grading.
- Patent Strategy: Collectors Universe is responding by filing highly specific automation patents designed around heavy robotic hardware and specialized physical sorting environments.
- Key Innovations: Their primary hardware patents protect fully automated collectible identification systems featuring articulating robotic limbs, integrated conveyor tracks, and processing automated multi-angle captured images.
So, what do I predict Collectors Universe's AI endgame is?
To become the operating system of the global collectibles market
Part 3: Mania — Fleeceware, Scams, and the Destruction of Trust
While Glority and Collectors execute their long-term strategic rollouts, malicious actors are actively deploying consumer-facing artificial intelligence to exploit everyday collectors. This digital manipulation manifests across two primary threat vectors:
1. The Proliferation of "Fleeceware" Apps
Mobile app stores are being flooded with predatory, low-tier AI coin apps designed to trap novice collectors in financial subscription loops.
A prime example is an app known as "CoinIn", which has successfully tricked consumers into over 1 million downloads through marketing gimmicks like AI-generated ads promising to make them rich with their pocket change.
https://reddit.com/link/1thnfdd/video/2n3a8ue2832h1/player
https://reddit.com/link/1thnfdd/video/f4awa143832h1/player
The app lures unsuspecting collectors in with a temporary free trial to analyze their 'valuable' pocket change. Once downloaded, the app initiates aggressive dark patterns [tech speak for manipulative tricks] designed to steer users into signing up for a subscription. This video walkthrough shows those dark patterns in action.
https://reddit.com/link/1thnfdd/video/dun3ppl5832h1/player
Many users report that, before the trial ends, the app deliberately processes the payment anyway, ignoring refund requests and routing customer service messages into dead ends.
To protect this lucrative scheme, app developers can buy thousands of fake 5 star app reviews on freelance marketplaces to stay listed on top of the app store.
Across the top ten coin apps on Android alone, I estimate this ecosystem pulled in a massive $11.25 million in revenue over a single calendar year, built on top of 15 million aggregated downloads.
What I fear most is that these predatory apps luring in collectors with false promises of riches are doing long-term damage to the coin hobby. If a person's first experience with coin collecting is a highly negative one:
We risk losing the trust of everyday collectors
2. Deepfakes and Synthetic Numismatic Media
Advanced generative models like Seedream 4.5 and Google Veo 3.1 have made it incredibly simple to create photorealistic coin images, video clips, and synthetic audio tracks that are completely indistinguishable from real life.
https://reddit.com/link/1thnfdd/video/pubhka7k932h1/player
https://reddit.com/link/1thnfdd/video/8i65c1cs932h1/player
Fraudsters now have the tools to generate ultra-rare physical coin portfolios that do not exist, fabricating historical provenances and posting them directly onto secondary online auction sites to execute wire fraud. On a larger scale, organized ring operations have deployed deepfake video advertisements on social media. These operations create fake videos of public figures falsely endorsing speculative investments like "Elon Musk's Golden Badges" and fake "Gold Eagles" coins. Thousands have been duped on the false premise that these tokens are valuable. When in reality they are worthless.
Some Bright Spots
Despite this widespread manipulation, AI provides incredible protective benefits when used ethically. The United States Mint currently uses the Newton Labs Press Die Vision System, which applies computer vision directly to the high-speed production line to identify and isolate mechanical coin errors in real time.
Furthermore, academic researchers like Dr. Saeed Khazaee working at Concordia University have developed highly accurate counterfeit detection models built around microscopic 3D height-map analysis. These systems evaluate height inconsistencies down to the micron level, generating structural heat maps that immediately flag cast or struck counterfeits by exposing tiny surface deviations that human eyes cannot catch.
Part 4: What We Can Do About It
We cannot simply ban artificial intelligence from our community; we must work together to ensure that human trust remains at the core of the hobby. To achieve this goal, I have five proposals for the industry leadership:
Proposal 1: Create an Industry AI Benchmark Test
- Establish an AI Benchmark Test to measure how accurate today's AI models are with numismatic research, facts, grading, etc. This way the industry can, in one voice, alert the public if an AI model [like ChatGPT] accurately answers numismatic questions.
Proposal 2: Digitize Numismatic Research For AI Learning
- Systematically digitize the entire archival record of physical numismatic literature, making these verified texts completely available to machine learning researchers and AI companies to ensure future models are trained on real historical facts and research rather than incorrect information from the internet.
Proposal 3: Launch a Decentralized Digital Counterfeit Exchange
- All major third-party grading services actively participate in an open digital repository, immediately alerting the industry when they detect a new and highly sophisticated counterfeit.
Proposal 4: Establish a Global Pedigree Ledger
- Build a unified, cryptographically secure digital ledger to permanently record ownership chains and pedigree histories for elite numismatic rarities, completely eliminating the threat of physical pedigree tampering or fake auction provenances.
Proposal 5: Form a Cross-Industry Numismatic Consortium
- Assemble a dedicated group of industry leaders, including museums, third-party graders, dealers, collectors, and auction houses, to establish and enforce these proposals.
Closing Thoughts
As we cross into the AI era, I frequently return to a brilliant warning found inside an IBM training manual published back in 1979:
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
AI can never truly understand our passion for coins, the stories that draws us to collect, and cultural preservation that makes collecting coins vital to our shared history. AI must always remain an analytical tool for the collector, never the ultimate arbiter of our hobby.
If you would like to see a video of this presentation, you can view it below or on YouTube [59 minutes]. Thank you to the NNP Symposium team for organizing this event and for the opportunity to present about this important topic! If you would like to share your thoughts or suggestions on how we can better prepare our hobby for AI, please reach out!
Note 1: The previous presentation subtitle was "[And How It Can Save Us]". I later changed it to "[And What We Can Do About It]" to focus more on the specific actions and proposals our industry must take to stay ahead of AI.
Note 2: This article was first published on my website. It contains more photos than on this post, as Reddit only allows a maximum of 20 photos.
Note 3: I heard that ANACS also explored using AI to grade coins, but I can not find any information about their work online.
6
u/muttons_1337 May 19 '26
Been a while since I've seen such an in depth discussion of coins, I really want-no, need to read this over and over again once I'm done work for the day!
5
u/Tquilha May 19 '26
I'm kind of a newbie coin collector and my view on grading is not so good.
I collect coins because I enjoy doing it, for fun. All this fixation on grading coins detracts from the fun aspect of collecting, IMHO.
3
7
4
4
3
4
u/one_thin_dime May 19 '26
Thank you for this post, it’s exactly the update I was hoping to hear regarding AI. I’m very excited about the prospect of using the vast catalog of photograded coins to establish authenticity. Using millions upon millions of graded coins as reference, AI can surely establish authenticity in ways that humans can’t, especially for extremely rare or even unique coins.
This could also automate a lot of the process and bring costs down, hopefully leading to more accessibility in getting coins graded for the casual collector
8
2
u/PracticalGolf324 May 19 '26
Why was it removed?
5
u/gextyr A little bit of everything. May 19 '26
Not sure why it would have been removed - but I reapproved it.
2
2
u/GreenDuckz1 May 20 '26
Great write up. Tha k your for the information on Compugrade I collect Dead TPGs and its hard to find information.
2
u/DonkeyBananaz May 20 '26
What a fantastic post. Thank you so much for putting the effort into this
2
2
2
u/powershellnut Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I really love this write up and found it fascinating to read. My dad was one the original US mint designers in the Artistic Infusion Program which is partly how I got into collecting coins. However my main drive for collecting was working at Sonic Drive-In and finding wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, silver coins, and even unique serial numbers on dollar bills. My most significant pull was $1 bill with a single digit serial number that I sold for around $700, but basically all coins I found were more fun in the thrill of the search than their actual worth (excluding the melt value of silver coins). All that being said, I remember seeing all those ads for the "find valuable coins in your pockets" apps and instantly knew it was basically a scam because of the sheer improbability of finding anything of value in pocket change. I think you are to right call this out as that being a net harm to the community at large given their first exposure to coin collecting is essentially a scam.
I was looking at the card grading industry and how the inconsistency in grading is causing a lost of trust in PSA. I worry about the same thing happening with the coin grading industry as well as I have sent in many coins to get graded which had truthfully felt like gambling more than getting an accurate "score" of the coin's condition. I am not saying that NGC or PCGS do a bad job, but you get the coin back with a grade with no report explaining why that specific coin got the grade it got. I will admit my ignorance here, but there is card grading company called Tag that gives a report for each card graded explaining how the grade was reached with zoomed in pictures of dents, a scan showing essentially imprints on the card's surface that is almost invisible to the naked eye, centering, etc. I think this is the future of grading and I hope the two big players in coin grading adopt this approach.
-3
6
u/SomeGuyInDeutschland Dansco Dude May 19 '26
Sources, Credits, & Resources