Courtesy of Heritage Galleries & Auctioneers, Dallas, Texas.

By Jim Halperin

The year is 2040, and like most people he knows, 40-year-old Joseph Numisman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, maintains several avocations, not because he needs to, but because variety helps keep life interesting. Joe currently writes software that helps test micro-assemblers, designs rock gardens for residential high-rises on a drafting processor, coaches junior high school paintball (in person!), performs volunteer campaign work for a mayoral candidate, and invests in biotechnology start-up companies using several freeware artificial intelligence programs. He also does coins.
Numismatics is quite different now from what it was like in the year Joe was born, or even 2006 when he was in Kindergarten and first began collecting State quarters. Following in the footsteps of numerous other careers and hobbies, coin collecting and dealing no longer exist separately. Instead, the two categories have blended into one: coin enthusiasm. Enthusiasts buy, sell, study, teach others, and invest; each enthusiast with varying degrees of commitment but each having access to the same tools and information. So, although every numismatic enthusiast has unique taste, none has any discernable trading advantage over another.

Joe is too young for marriage, and still on a budget. He happens to like twentieth-century half dollars with exceptional strikes, but doesn't care as much about wear, surfaces, or color, so his information e-bots have been programmed to seek out and report coins based more on detail than on any other characteristic. Which is not to say that other characteristics are ignored, merely that they are less meaningful to Joe's e-bots than to those of most other enthusiasts.

With the current state of technology, coins can easily be viewed remotely through wireless brain implants (which only recently replaced Joe's rather retro Virtual Reality goggles as his medium of choice), in three dimensions and with far more detail than the human eye can discern. Yet many enthusiasts don't even bother inspecting their coins, even virtually, until weeks, months or sometimes years after they purchase them. Any household or wearable Artificial Intelligence device can analyze the grade of a coin with far more accuracy and consistency than the best human grader or even a panel of human graders. And they can easily be programmed to account for individual preferences as well.

But Joe is a hobbyist at heart. Except when he's occupied or asleep, he still previews every coin through his implant before letting his e-bots accept any transaction or submit an offer, and usually makes a point of viewing each coin in physical form once it arrives.

Several times an hour, whenever a coin Joe needs, or a coin that will upgrade one he already owns, appears on the market, his e-bots notify the central multitasking computer he wears on his wrist. The computer automatically analyzes the price and value, weighs these factors against his current financial resources and the desirability of the coin by Joe's unique preferences, and calculates the highest price Joe is willing to pay. Then his e-bots wait until the price drops to that level, or if they calculate that it's worth the gamble, Joe might even instruct them to wait until the price is even a little lower than his maximum, at which point the purchase is made and his central account debited. At this rate, Joe transacts two coins a week on average, and is nearly always within 10% of his budget at the end of the month.

If a newly purchased coin replaces one he already owns, Joe's computer immediately puts the duplicate up for sale on the NumEx, one of dozens of free coin exchanges paid for by corporate sponsorship. The data, virtual imaging in formats compatible with all major viewing protocols, and his ownership records are already posted, so the process takes less than 15 seconds. Once, last year, as the result of a software error, his computer priced a coin about two percent lower than the market. The coin sold immediately, of course, then resold, which was an unusual -- and to Joe, quite a disturbing -- event. After that, as a safeguard, he reprogrammed his Artificial Intelligence unit to always set his initial asking price 2 or 3% too high, then drop the price by .02% per minute until the coin sells. Now, it usually takes two to three hours to consummate a sale and receive payment, but anything over a minute is enough to reassure Joe that he didn't give away another coin.

Joe knows from his numismatic studies that there were thousands of full-time coin dealers at the end of the twentieth century, but he can't quite fathom how anyone could have ever made a living at it.

Copyright 2000, published by permission from the June 12 issue of Coin World.