Whatever is causing the milk spots in general (the coin rinse or whatever it is) seems to have proliferated in the past several years. None of my Australian coins has a milk spot except 1 saltwater croc (my 2 spider coins are fine now but there is time yet for spots to appear). Out of my Canadian Maples, none of them in the plastic sheets from the old days have any milk spots (at least on the ones I have), but once they started putting them in tubes it seems the problem has gotten worse. I had a few slabbed 25th anniversary Maples I got cheap and none of them were spotted when I bought them, now they are all spotted pretty badly.
The local stores all carefully review any incoming Maple, etc and pay far less if milk spots, but that is OK because one guy then lets me buy them for $1.25 or so over melt if he gets them in, a bit more if it is a wildlife maple, etc. Someday if someone creates a cure that does not involve rubbing the coin, I will have a cool set of wildlife maples that are perfect that I got cheap. If not, it's still silver and that's really all I care about when I can get them cheap like that.
Like posters have said before, I guess we can look at the milk spots as a sign of genuineness until the Chinese figure out how to "fake" that as well.
PS Although it is not talked about as much, I have seen solid gold coins get funny red "spots" (American Buffaloes, Canadian Maples) and those would bug me more since gold is more expensive. I would understand red spots like that on the 22K coins or 90% gold coins (due to copper, etc) but not 9999 gold coins.
Jim
