For those members who can not read Chinese, the discussion in this thread is related to the importance of knife marks on the detection of counterfeit coin.
Linlaujiou claims that coin with visible knife marks is always genuine, since the knife marks can not be copied. In his opinion, the four coins with identical deep scratches/marks in the same area of the device are genuine, since knife marks are clearly visible in those coins. He further claims that NGC MS64 coin posted in Reply #41 is a counterfeit, based on artificial toning, lack of 3-dimentional details in Chinese characters, incorrect style of Chinese character at 3 o’clock, die crack lines are added to the fake die and the shape and size of dots in the inner circle is too uniform to be considered as genuine, most likely is made by a computerized machine.
IMO, the knife marks can be copied, similar to the scratches lines. Clearly, those four coins were made with a die copied from a genuine/fake coin. The valuation of NGC MS64 coin was about $23,000 in 2010 HA auction.
Attached is a picture of the 1903 Fengtein silver dragon dollar found in website. IMO, this is another coin made by the same die for the four coins posted by linlaujiou. So we have quintuplet now. Additional pictures of NGC MS63 and PCGS XF details-tooled coins are also attached to show the dots of inner circle is quite uniform in size and shape without any extra material in the space between the dots.
Just for information,
Transfer dies are most common practice used by modern counterfeiter. A genuine coin is scarified to press into die steel to make a working (production) die. In general, the genuine coin will be about XF condition, since mint state coin is too costly for counterfeiter, especially for rare one. The working die so produced will have all defects such as scratch marks generated during the circulation of the original copied coin. The deep scratches will create lumps on the die surface, so the same scratches in the produced coin. Sometimes, the counterfeiter will try to remove those lumps by chipping or polishing the die surface. However, if the counterfeiter is not skillful enough to fix the die properly and remove too much die surface, the resulting coin will show small pimples or short raised lines at those areas. In order to remove/mask the pimples, raised lines and scratch marks from coin surface, the reproduced coin will be polished by the counterfeiter. The counterfeiter also will add additional marks to the surface to avoid the detection. The collectors shall always be very careful to study highly polished coin before buy.
