I also think this is a
good thread, but a better way to pose the question might have been "What coins don't you like?" Along with the impossibly of stopping coins, there's also the impossibility of stopping
fakes of them.
I can see people not liking
fourrees or
fakes of any kind because of the possibility of getting fooled by one. But despite draconian laws including being deep
fried to death in hot oil, authorities throughout the ages have never been able to stop the production of
counterfeits. I personally like them, like studying them, like collecting them, like the challenge they pose -- contemporaneous
counterfeits meant to fool merchants as well as later
forgeries meant to fool us foolish collectors.
Somebody here mentioned wanting to stop
Alexander the Great from posing as
Herakles for 300 years, bringing up again an old debate. There's no evidence Alexander posed as such for 3 minutes let alone 300 years and
plenty of evidence he didn't, most notably the same
Herakles image featured on coins before he was born. I like Alexanders myself, both lifetime and
posthumous, and wouldn't have wanted to see them stopped, but just as with Owls I can see some people tiring of seeing so many of them.
Interestingly,
CNG seems to be trying to
buck the tradition of classifying
posthumous Alexanders as Alexanders, giving them instead to the ruler responsible for minting them. I believe the Bibliothèque nationale de
France in
Paris does this as well (those
French!), but as far as I know everybody else except
CNG has followed the tradition starting since at least Mueller in 1855 of basing their
attribution of
posthumous Alexanders to Alexander on the
reverse legend that translates into "[Coin] of Alexander."
I can see the logic of both approaches. The traditional approach is safer since we know it's a coin "of Alexander." The
French approach in some cases may be more historically accurate, though in many cases I don't believe the dating is secure enough to give a coin to a specific issuer.