I recently joined Pete as a guest on the Coin Story Podcast. We ran into each other at the Orange County Coin Club and he asked me on to talk about Dansco albums and how AI is starting to affect coin collecting. You can watch the episode here.

I started collecting US coins when I was around 15 and kept them in Warman folders. Club members in their 80s pointed me toward Dansco albums because their coins still looked as good decades later. Dansco has been a small family-run company since 1937 and still makes its albums in the US. I began with a US type set and later started digging into the company's history after I found almost no research online besides some work by David Lange. That turned into a project to collect one of every Dansco album and folder made since 1937. People started calling me the Dansco Dude.

Then Pete and I got into AI. I spent ten years as a digital product manager leading software teams. One concern is that we do not have a unified voice. Collectors graders and museums are being flooded with apps that promise accurate IDs and grades and then use dark patterns to push subscriptions. I have seen ads claiming a 1976-D Bicentennial quarter is worth $75,000. I described a lot of these apps as fleeceware. If a younger collector's first experience is losing money to one of those apps they may walk away from the community for good.

I also shared why I do not think AI coin grading will take off. The market does not really care about a more technically accurate grade. It cares about making money and I do not see how AI grading helps with that. If PCGS and NGC both adopted an objective grade they would risk commoditizing the service and racing each other to the bottom. Where AI could matter is in the workflow. Faster turnaround and better checks for counterfeits and resubmissions are more useful than replacing the grade itself. PCGS and Collectors have filed more than ten patents in the last five years around sorting robotics and cataloging including for trading cards.

This was only part one. Pete and I will continue in a second episode on what it would mean if the community did adopt AI.