Thanks for your reply, Steve - I'm in no way insinuating that anyone, especially people registered as life-long chipper enthusiasts, would do something so unscrupulous. But I can't help to wonder what the real chances are that all these chips came from the ashes of the El Rancho Vegas fire, and if it comes out sometime in the future that someone somehow cranked out a large batch of unauthorized chips I will be disappointed but not surprised.

We've seen other fakes made, some incredibly good ones, and in some cases even from the exact same process and materials. I'm new to the hobby, and I hope I'm quoting correctly, that the Borland "fantasy" chips are pretty much exactly the same as the chips they are "honoring" and lucky for us the were not printed (that we know of) without the dates on them or we probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If someone somehow had the means to make a new batch (and you can't get a better backstory than the ERV fire) only to take a blowtorch to them we'd probably have no way of knowing.

I obviously hope this isn't the case, in fact I've been buying some of these chips and I'll probably be bidding on yours too ;^) But after you buy something that you believe is a rare find, only to find another... and then another... and ANOTHER.... You start to wonder if you're being taken advantage of by someone who perpetrated a scam on all of us, many years ago, without our knowing.

I still can't grasp why so many almost-perfect $5's $25's and $100's of the hub-design ERV chips from the 1940's could possibly be flooding eBay from many different sellers, I would expect them all to be worn down - or at least SOME of them! All the ones I see have crisp edges, etc.

I guess I'm just trying to believe that these chips are as authentic as we all assume them to be, I want to "buy in" to the nostalgia but I don't want to put thousands of dollars into something only to have it devalued on me someday when someone blows a whistle.