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The new £1 Coin

thenewpoundcoin.com

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Re: The new £1 Coin

#311

Post by andrepd »

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?

This is the most British thing I have seen in a while.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#312

Post by OJFord »

robk wrote: post #224
mootothemax wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never spotted a fake - they must be very good Some regions seem to get more than others, I used to see large numbers in the change I got in London. The quickest "tell" for me is the lettering on the edge. Some of it is shockingly poor quality and almost looks like someone took a soldering iron to draw it on. The next time a machine rejects one of your pound coins, take another look at it, there's a good chance…

I think it's really hard for a layperson to detect these. I've been checking for months my change and still havne't spotted a convincing example. Every blog or page explaining them requires generally deep knowledge around what dots should be where or what the correct symbology is for the issue year, etc.

It's lettering/patterns/quality on the edges that I find I can spot counterfeits for, and misalignment is a dead giveaway - see GP's first link for examples of that where it's a few degrees off, or completely reversed.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#313

Post by SaltySolomon »

tehabe wrote: post #141

It looks like a nicer version of the 1 euro coin. I like that the coin isn't round but 12-sided, which will certainly help visually impaired people use the coin. I wonder if they will introduce a new 6-sided 50p coin.

Euro Coins are actually designed to be distiguishable by blind people, they have different edges and sizes. I once was at a blindness awareness workshop and it is just one of those things you usually don't think about it.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#314

Post by OJFord »

pja wrote: post #25
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #3

As a UK citizen, it stuns me that one-in-thirty pound coins is a fake because a) i can't imagine how it's possibly worth it b) out of the thousands of pound coins i must have handled, I've never spotted a fake - they must be very good. Still, the new coin certainly looks nice!

Nah, the fakes are fairly obvious once you know what to look for. It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though. Money is weird.

> It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though.

Except that it's all profit for the criminals counterfeiting them.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#315

Post by Angostura »

MattBearman wrote: post #162
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #3

As a UK citizen, it stuns me that one-in-thirty pound coins is a fake because a) i can't imagine how it's possibly worth it b) out of the thousands of pound coins i must have handled, I've never spotted a fake - they must be very good. Still, the new coin certainly looks nice!

I briefly worked in an arcade a few years back, so was changing a lot of £1 coins. 1 in 30 sounds about right, it was amazing how many fakes we'd see. Like others have said, the lettering around the edge is always the biggest clue, but also the head and tails stampings will sometimes be off centre, and misaligned to each other. The fake ones also make the 'wrong' noise when you drop them on a hard surface. It's hard…

What was the process when you found one? Report it in some way, or hope the bank didn't notice?

Re: The new £1 Coin

#316

Post by tyingq »

ars wrote: post #308
tyingq wrote: post #201

Looks a bit like the failed US Susan B Anthony $1 coin. https://en.numista.com/catalogue/photos/etats-unis/g1288.jpg

That failed because people don't like to carry coins, they prefer bills. In the UK they don't have a 1 pound bill, forcing people to only use coins. Coins are cheaper for the government since they last much longer. So if you were a government, which would you pick: What your people want, or what's cheaper for you?

I wasn't implying that because it failed, that the £1 Coin would fail. I mentioned "failed" so that non-US readers would know it's not popular.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#317

Post by kpil »

jessriedel wrote: post #231
pdog wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The societal cost of counterfeiting goes far beyond the nominal value of the fake coins in circulation (approximately one in thirty one pound coins is a counterfeit).

Yea, it would be a bit like conflating the nominal value of currency in circulation and the actual value to society of having physical currency at all . There are huge multiplier effects.

I used some coins today. It was probably the first time in a year I used cash...

While I see the value of failsafe money (except it really isn't) I think the returns are diminishing...

Re: The new £1 Coin

#318

Post by Symbiote »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #276
katerberg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the article, one in thirty of these coins are counterfeit.

Occasionally you do get a pound coin that is slightly heavy. I guess those are the counterfeit ones. Bit hard for the layman to tell.

It's not too difficult for most of them.

Drop it edgeways on the table. Most counterfeit ones don't give the proper 'clunk', maybe the material isn't right.

Or, the colour or alignment would be bad, or they'd appear more worn than normal.

I don't think the 1/30 fakes are evenly spread around the country. When I lived in London, they were much more common than that.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#319

Post by blacksmith_tb »

iandioch wrote: post #180
wolfgke wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

US 5 cent coins (aka nickels) are (or used to be) the same diameter and weight as 20p sterling coins as well, as a grad student in London I may have accidentally used a few in vending machines and doing laundry...

Re: The new £1 Coin

#320

Post by Roedou »

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)

It seems that cost-to-produce vs. face-value isn't a terribly important ratio. The US has continued making pennies for a lot longer than necessary, though it seems to cost ~1.5c to make them.
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