There are many reputable sellers, myself being one of them, that would not want to willingly sell a counterfeit. But after a certain point we have to ask ourselves whether it's plausible that so many of these partially-melted chips could POSSIBLY exist, or are we just perpetuating a lie.

The hub-design chip with the bold black font for the denom is allegedly from the 1940's, yet almost every one I see so far looks virtually uncirculated. There seem to be a massive number of chips on ebay, and all relatively cheap for a chip that is 80 years old. Where were all these chips kept for the past 80 years such that hoards of them are trading daily today?

Then we have the "burnt" chips, that were supposedly in circulation the night of the fire. As John said previously - how many of these things could have survived in a fire that totally destroyed an entire casino? How were they only singed around the edges when everything they sat in became ashes... Where are the chips melted into the racks or trays?

And why would the "error chip" TCR# N1572.E have been in circulation at all on the night of the fire? If the chip was of ambiguous denomination it would have been destroyed on sight by the casino themselves, or at least taken off-premise as to not confuse the hell out of employees, casino guests and the newly-minted Nevada Gaming Commission.

I understand a certain level of plausible deniability, and I want to believe that some of these chips could have been licked by the flames that took down the ERV, but to have piles of them on ebay just seems like a silly fairy tale to me. At what point do we want to admit that someone probably made some extremely authentic-looking bootlegs a few decades ago? It's a lot more likely than the story where someone went digging through the rubble of the destroyed casino days after the fire and unearthed partially-burned chips - with virtually flawless inserts made out of paper - that somehow survived a raging inferno.