SimonW

Probably more than you think. The production cost is probably only a few cents a piece, and each one will sell for 10, 20 or 30 USD/EUR. Multiply that by a few hundred coins.

In my experience, not only the degree of cleaning/restoration/tooling of a coin varies greatly, but also the definition of these terms. Many/most ancient bronze coins that have been mechanically cleaned have also been smoothed (more or less extensively). Mechanical cleaning inevitably leaves traces in the patina that a restorer will usually smooth away. Smoothing, on the other hand, can go so far as to enhance/strengthen certain details without changing the image of a coin. Some may say that this is already tooling, others may disagree. For me personally, tooling is definitively starting as soon as the image is changed (e.g. by adding new details). If this is your definition, then the majority of ancient bronze coins are certainly not tooled.

Short update: After some back and forth, Naville informed me that the "somewhat tooled" was added as a precautionary measure because of the mechanical marks that can be seen on the obverse, presumably from cleaning. They assured me that they have examined the coin carefully and that they do not see any traces of tooling on the reverse, nor do they believe that the coin is a forgery. The coin will now be sent to the IBSCC by Naville to get some further opinions. I'll keep you posted.

These belong to a run of cast forgeries produced in Turkey. Here are some more:

There are two reasons for the ever-increasing buyer's commissions: 1) The fierce competition among auction houses for consignors has led to lower and lower seller's commissions. In some cases, they are now negative, meaning that the seller also receives a share of the buyer's commission. 2) Some buyers include the buyer's commission in their bidding calculations and therefore do not pay more when the buyer's commission increases. However, some buyers do not and pay more than they would if the buyer's commission were lower. As a result, an auction house that charges a lower buyer's commission than all the others puts itself in a worse position. The buyer's commission will therefore continue to rise until it is so high that it negatively affects the final price. Premiums of 30% and more are not uncommon at art auctions today.

Don't worry @Rand, it's perfectly fine to browse past auctions, that's why we keep them online. You may also copy auction information, lot images and descriptions for your personal use. Web scrapers are programs that systematically download an entire website (or parts of it), sometimes making tens of thousands of requests in just a few minutes, and can be a huge burden on the infrastructure. If there are many aggressive scrapers at the same time, it can be like a DDOS attack, blocking out regular users, or - if the infrastructure scales automatically - greatly increase costs. @Ed Snible, if you are interested in the PDF catalogs, I can send you a list of all PDF URLs. You can then download them all at once with a download manager. Using them to train AI is not forbidden at the moment, but since we are not the copyright holders, I can't promise that it will stay that way. Content creators around the world are starting to take action against AI services that make money from models trained on their content.

I think @Ed Snible is referring to this paragraph: 4.1. Any action that affects the website or part of it in any form is prohibited. This includes in particular: the use of software or any sort of equipment that could affect the proper function of the website, the use of so-called Web Scrapers, Web Robots and other software to systematically collect data from the website of biddr.com, actions that overload the biddr.com infrastructure in an unacceptable way, blocking, deleting, overriding or modifying any content on the biddr.com website or disturbing its proper function in any other way. This is to protect the site and its infrastructure from anything that could affect its normal availability and functionality. Biddr is first and foremost an auction platform that needs its resources for running auctions, and not a data store for crawlers and the like. @Rand are you missing a particular auction house on acsearch? Although not all auctions are publicly available, all data is collected and as soon as acsearch has permission to publish them, they are moved to the public domain. Some auction houses prefer not to have their auctions available in the archives, and some we haven't asked yet.

Sure, you're very welcome!

Thanks for the link to this paper! Makes more sense now. It would be nice to have a website/platform where collectors can upload/share their coins within the Nomisma ecosystem (redacted of course, similar to RPC). Individuals launching their own Numishare applications as a contribution to the linked open data doesn't make much sense. And it's probably too clumsy to be used as a simple collection/gallery tool. What kind of SPARQL queries did you try that didn't work? I've run a few here https://nomisma.org/sparql/ that seemed to work fine. I've also successfully tried some of their API endpoints here https://nomisma.org/documentation/apis/.

Thank you @Ed Snible, that's very helpful. I will let you know if it works once I get a chance to give it a try. I find the following passage in their "readme" funny: The architecture is a major departure from typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) content management systems, enabling far more sophisticated data models which allow for the creation of an advanced public user interface. They should have stayed with the "typical LAMP content management systems". I don't see how Orbeon and an XML database are in any way superior to MySQL and PHPMyAdmin, for example. It's always those who scrape the web themselves who forbid scrapers, isn't it? 🙂 No, but seriously, it literally takes years of work and effort to compile the amount of data that acsearch has, and of course this data will be protected. If you are looking for information about just a few hundred or thousand coins and don't need price details, feel free to contact us and we will try to help. After all, acsearch was created to help collectors and numismatists, which is also why we keep access to all data after 1999 (except price information) free of charge, while others limit it to the last 6 months.

Did you use Docker to install it? With Docker you should be able to get everything up and running in minutes. I haven't tried it yet, but will definitely give it a try for a project of my own when I find some time.

@Roerbakmix, do you know the nomisma.org project? The software they use (Numishare) is open source: https://github.com/ewg118/numishare.

Congratulations @David Atherton on a phenomenal year! My personal favorites are your Titus colosseum sestertius (of course!), your Domitian/Titus mule denarius and your stylish Vespasian sestertius.

That's an amaizing list, @savitale! My favorites are your Augustus, Nero and Hadrian denarii.

Not only spectacular coins, but almost all with great pedigrees. You had a great year, @Curtisimo! I particularly like your Octavian and your presentation of the pedigrees.