...you never find FEWER chips! When more chips are found, previously rare chips become less rare. That's a risk with any collecting hobby. If I pay big bucks for a rare chip, and then later more are found, that's the breaks. That's balanced by the rare chips I bought that stayed rare and have gone up in value.

What sucks is when people conspire to conceal quantity. EBay makes that way too easy. You just throw up a previously rare chip, say nothing, and see who bites. Do we know whether hotbid22 is the buyer of the hoard or just an uninformed middleman? If hotbid22 knows the true quantity, then this auction is the worst sort of offense, because the chip is deliberately presented as a "rare" chip.