Joel,

Fantastic question and one I have been asking for several years now. I have a gotten blasted just like you for even bring up the subject. However, if you take one element of what you want to do it might be something that can be done if the community behind it. As you can tell from your comments the grading part of slabbing chips is what gets everyone nervous and is usually stops the process dead in its track.

I have suggested that you take baby steps before we run. Why not build a national database that holds scanned photos of chips that have survived over the years. Yes this would require to slab them and put a serial number on them but we would have a better idea on which chips are actually rare and which ones are not. No we would not identify who owns which chip. The database would only contain the chip images and the serial number of that. Those who are really interested in best quality chips could see how the one they have in their collection stacks up with the rest of the ones known.

Also yes I know new chips are found every day but they are also found in other hobbies like Coins and Comics. This would only be used for those with populations of about 100 known to exist.

Just my 2 cents and now I will go back to basement.

By the way I have run a cost analysis and the cost could be less than 10.00 per chip.

Paul S.
LM-7745-264