"Golden Toned or Gold Impurities?": CoinTalk Replies Say Toning
In a CoinTalk forum thread titled "Golden toned or gold impurities?", a member posting as Heavymetal wrote about a coin held since 2010. The members who replied all said it was toning. The source gives no posting date and does not name the coin.
Correction (Oct 13, 2026): The earlier version, titled "NGC Grading: Coin Color Drives 30-50% Price Difference," included material not found in the source, such as the gold purity of ancient aurei and solidi, the chemistry of silver sulfide and verdigris, the effects of burial environments, and a figure for price differences driven by color. These have been removed, and the article has been shortened and rewritten using only the original post and members' replies in the CoinTalk thread, presented as the posters' own opinions.
This article is based only on posts in the CoinTalk forum thread "Golden toned or gold impurities?" The source does not give a posting date. The source text contains no photos and does not identify the coin. What follows are the statements and opinions of individual posters, not facts confirmed by grading or testing.
The Original Post
The poster, Heavymetal, wrote of having had the coin since 2010 and said it may need an XRF check. The poster wrote of being into it for $2.50, "so it's a winner."
Replies Say Toning
Mr. Numismatist replied that it looks like toning. medoraman called it a very common form of toning on silver and wrote of having seen hundreds of identical examples.
Collecting Nut wrote that it is just toning, weird but silver nonetheless, and added, "That's about $14 today."
-jeffB agreed: toning, not gold. -jeffB added that one could layer enough gold onto a silver coin for it to be worth something extra, but that -jeffB had never seen or heard of it being done, and that most "gold-plated" coins carry at most a few tens of cents worth of gold, even at today's prices.
Pickin and Grinin wrote "Definitely toning" and wrote that both of these came from the same proof (PF) set.
Source: CoinTalk, "Golden toned or gold impurities?"
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