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The new £1 Coin

thenewpoundcoin.com

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Re: The new £1 Coin

#291

Post by [deleted] »

chiph wrote: post #242
_archon_ wrote: post #179

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

Re: The new £1 Coin

#292

Post by bradbatt »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #283
kawsper wrote: post #268

Earlier 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?

> Why would anyone even make that?

Right? I thought the exact same thing. Seems like the time and effort and expense it takes to build a queueing system could be put into building a site that could handle infrequent heavy loads.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#293

Post by cat199 »

bhauer wrote: post #278

That coin is a beauty. It looks like it would be a denomination much higher than £1. As someone who collected coins a child, I've been a tad disappointed by some of the newer designs coming out of the US Mint. Some are classy, others seem a bit goofy. But this new pound coin is very tasteful. Well done, Royal Mint!

US Mint's seeming priority is cost cutting in metals rather than counterfeit coins, since our paper money is so simple I think counterfeiters are focused on that in the lower denominations..

UK notes are much more sophisticated even for the lower denominations, so probably there is more focus is on coins..

Re: The new £1 Coin

#294

Post by VLM »

JorgeGT wrote: post #26
TorKlingberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems expensive, and easy to find by cutting one apart. I suspect it's something about the metal composition, detected with spectroscopy.

It could be a passive radio device, maybe just a loop of ferromagnetic material that gives a particularly noticeable electromagnetic response when excited at a certain radiofrequency.

A 1 uCi radioactive source is exempt in the USA yet quite easily detectable.

I suspect sooner or later someone is going to try radioactive currency.

I'm so old that when I went to uni we did a neutron activation of silver experiment in physics class because the half life of whatever isotope of silver was about a minute, so after an hour of lab you could put the coin back in your pocket. I don't know if they'd let college kids play with either a solid silver quarter from a few decades ago (probably worth a couple bucks today) OR a low level neutron source today. I could see picking some very obscure isotope of some obscure metal and dissolving it into the metal of the coin and if your xray metal analysis machine that scrapyards have (a kilobuck ish cost in a hand held device) detects the proper amount of iridium or whatever or a simple neutron activation followed by gamma spectrometer shows the right isotope in there...

Aside from spontaneous emissions and activation reactions, there are some weird cross sections out there. Whatever's irresistable to thermal neutrons thats used in reactors, probably a cadmium alloy, could be the core of a coin, and then blasting boring thermal neutrons that are semi-transparent to fakes but the cadmium core coins would look pitch black from eating all the neutrons. Or play the opposite game and make the coins out of pure neutron-transparent zirconium and only the neutron transparent coins are legit.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#295

Post by Reason077 »

petepete wrote: post #284
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Similar queuing mechanisms are used on things like Ticketmaster which experience extreme demand peaks when high-demand tickets go on sale.

Presumably the Royal Mint experience similar demand peaks occasionally when limited-release collectable coins go on sale?

Re: The new £1 Coin

#296

Post by cat199 »

gkya wrote: post #254
ardaozkal wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda hoped that they'd include something like an RFID chip with something like a certificate inside, signed by the royal mint (Turkish government recently switched IDs to something like that). That'd allow verifying every single new coin (unless it is damaged to the level of breaking the rfid chip, but I suppose that's not that easy). It'd also enable tracking. I kinda regret that idea now. BUT if used responsibly…

How much would it cost, though? I mean if a pound coin costs more than a pound, that's not good (that's possible even with the dumb coins, I recently heard that the turkish one kurus costs two and a half turkish kurus). (edit: when I say "cost" I mean the production cost)

Not necessarily -

Since most money is held in banks, electronic transactions, etc - the question is more the 'value of supporting this denomination in currency to the economy' than the cost of a coin.. Like of $100M USD worth of tax/federal reserve interest revenue is generated from $10M of $100 bills that cost $15M to produce, it's not really a loss, but a business expense...

Re: The new £1 Coin

#297

Post by cat199 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #271
sergior wrote: post #207

Coin has WiFi and a microphone and sends data to the nearest surveillance spot if it is in range.

If they weren't metallic, it wouldn't be a bad idea to put some RFID in them, or even set some secret handshake to automatically detect false coins.

There is likely an embedded known hash/serial number/other identifier in the U/V signature for exactly this.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#299

Post by JamilD »

JshWright wrote: post #161
taway_1212 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was cheated in the most crude way in London once - gentlemen selling African street food gave me (in my change, amongst other coins) a coin that looks and feels very much like a British pound, but is Ugandian (IIRC) and has some kind of ostrich-like bird's head on it instead of the Queen's.

It happens a lot around here (in New York, a few hours from the Canadian border) with Canadian coins. Obviously it's a bit different here, as the values are roughly the same, but I can see how that would happen as an honest mistake.

I find that in cities near the border, Canadian and US coins are interchangeable and usually accepted at par. In Toronto there are a fair amount of US coins in circulation, and I've never had an issue using them here.

Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#300

Post by falsedan »

mootothemax wrote: post #89
TillE wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, what do you do with your counterfeit coins? You've invested all this money and effort in minting equipment, but it would look extremely weird to spend more than like 20 at once. Unless they can fool machines, it seems very inefficient.

> But, what do you do with your counterfeit coins? Launder them through your other criminal activities. "Hey, you want to be paid for all the drugs you've sold recently? You can have 500 in 'real' or 1,000 in fake notes + coins."

I think you'll find most people drug dealers interact with don't take kindly to being passed funny money.
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