It's interesting that they chose .com versus .co.uk for their domain.
The new £1 Coin
281–290 of 421 posts
Re: The new £1 Coin
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for Euro coins (are these more difficult to fake?) it often happened to me that some vending machine accepted a coin only after multiple tries.
What might be fun to try is to use a Euro 5c coin in a machine that expects 20p sterling coins. Living on the border with Northern Ireland, we figured out when I was young that the sweet machines in Northern shopping centres could be conned like that.
In the 80s I was able to use 5p coins (same size as the modern 10p) instead of quarters in arcade machines when I was on holiday in Florida.
Re: The new £1 Coin
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the article, one in thirty of these coins are counterfeit.
Just adding another source: > The Royal Mint regularly conducts surveys to estimate the level of counterfeit £1 coins in the UK. A survey undertaken in May 2015 found that the rate of counterfeit UK £1 coins in circulation at the time was 2.55%, compared to 3.03% in May 2014. http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
This link first loaded the page, then unloaded it and put me in a queue! I was told how many people were ahead of me and an estimate on when I would get to read the page, complete with elevator music. Why would anyone even make that?
Re: The new £1 Coin
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just adding another source: > The Royal Mint regularly conducts surveys to estimate the level of counterfeit £1 coins in the UK. A survey undertaken in May 2015 found that the rate of counterfeit UK £1 coins in circulation at the time was 2.55%, compared to 3.03% in May 2014. http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
This link first loaded the page, then unloaded it and put me in a queue! I was told how many people were ahead of me and an estimate on when I would get to read the page, complete with elevator music. Why would anyone even make that?
I've never ever seen anything like this. It would appear that this functionality has been there for a while and was also triggered on the Queen's birthday[0]
[0] http://metro.co.uk/2016/04/13/how-very-english-visitors-to-t...
Re: The new £1 Coin
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Royal Mint is a state-owned enterprise and not a government department. For a start, they produce currency for other countries directly, which is not something the government would want to do.
This coin is being produced for the UK.
Yes, but they also produced coins and notes for 39 other countries in 2015-16: http://www.royalmint.com/~/media/Files/AnnualReports/ar_2015...
Re: The new £1 Coin
#286I'll be glad to see the back of the old Thatcher.
Re: The new £1 Coin
#287Many commenters in this thread are speculating on how counterfeiters are inserting the, apparently large volume of, counterfeit coins. Maybe one source is actually unrepudible /merchants/. In dispensing change to customers, market participants it would seem be less likely to scrutinize the coinage.
> Many commenters in this thread are speculating on how counterfeiters are inserting the, apparently large volume of, counterfeit coins I've written elsewhere that I reckon other criminal channels might be in use. If you offer your street level drug dealers a choice of 1,000 pounds in "real" money or 2,000 in "fake," (or a mixture of them both) that'd probably do the job. I'm working off the assumption that there's t…
This doesn't work because "your street level drug dealers" pay you, not the other way around. They get paid by keeping a portion of the proceeds, or of the drugs.
It works if you need to employ petty criminals for jobs other than sales, though.
Re: The new £1 Coin
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just adding another source: > The Royal Mint regularly conducts surveys to estimate the level of counterfeit £1 coins in the UK. A survey undertaken in May 2015 found that the rate of counterfeit UK £1 coins in circulation at the time was 2.55%, compared to 3.03% in May 2014. http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
This link first loaded the page, then unloaded it and put me in a queue! I was told how many people were ahead of me and an estimate on when I would get to read the page, complete with elevator music. Why would anyone even make that?
The British love a good queue.
Re: The new £1 Coin
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
The coin does appear to be a Reuleaux solid, which was a relief to me. British coins are some of the most common Reuleaux solids in the world. The sides are not straight; they are curved outwards. The curve is defined by an arc of a circle whose center is the opposite corner on the coin. It's a neat class of shapes! My dive into them came while researching the rotary Wankel engine (rotors are roughly Reuleaux triangl…
But with an even number of sides (12 in the new coin), can that work?
It can not. Reuleaux solids must have an odd number of vertices, or they indeed don't work. It would appear that I didn't have my brain fully on this morning.
To apply the principle of Reuleaux geometry to a regular shape with an even number of vertices, you'd make arcs tangent to the point in question, extending in a curve that increases the coin's diameter as the arc gets longer. The arc would come to an end in a point midway to the next point, where it would intersect with that point's arc. You'd have a star-shaped solid where all geometry external to the inscribed circle are tapered triangles. Kind of neat, but it would be tough to put through a vending machine.
Re: The new £1 Coin
#290How the "hidden high security feature"* in the new £1 coin works is covered here: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/53673/how-does-... * Royal Mint’s new anti-counterfeiting technology, which can be authenticated by high-speed automated detection, was called Integrated Secure Identification Systems (ISIS) - but for obvious reasons, they've stopped using that name.
tl;dr:
special uv-altering particles in coating allows using a light to detect counterfeit; basic and high end scanners avail. for detection.
reading between lines:
sounds like the 'basic scanning' can be used e.g. for consumer/POS equipment to keep out the unsophisticated counterfeitters (e.g. coating is/is not present, perhaps some 'watermark' in the coating), and the 'sophisticated scanning' could potentially identify serial numbers/coin hash values in the light patterns or other means so that individual coins could be tracked, allowing discovery of more sophisticated attackers once these coins pass through banks or similar.