… It is our premise that coins graded during the spring of the Third Party Grading (TPG) formation, were graded under a very new (AKA: Disruptive in millennial speak) concept of creating “buy-back guarantees” and public population reports. Now, I needyou all to grab your shorts and think about what these guys did. They put their money where their mouth was. Literally. Then, they provided the results of their grading efforts to the collecting public so that EVERYONE could have access to real (standardized) information on things like rarity, variety and condition. Now, maybe I am suffering from 20/20 hindsight, but how could this not work? Why would there be a COLLECTOR anywhere that would not want this? That is why the TPGs took-off. While many of the early ones went the way of the Edsel or the Rio, PCGS and NGC cemented the two concepts as corporate mandates. Also, this is why they are the bulldogs they are today. They added more collector value then all dignified numismatist’s throughout history before them combined. That is not a critical statement of our forefathers, it is just a good solid look at numbers and the literal “100’s of millions” of dollars that appeared out of piles of change as a result of their success. Sure, these guys got rich, but they made everyone at least 10 dollars for every dollar they made and in that process changed the course of coin collecting. It helped to create a process of such consistency that really for the first time, a collector did not have to be a grader, nor did they have to rely on only what the selling party was telling them. We now had an insured 3rd party telling us what grades our coins were and they meant the same thing no matter who was talking about the coin…