Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The new £1 Coin

thenewpoundcoin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 421 posts

Re: The new £1 Coin

#351

Post by vidarh »

blibble wrote: post #250
vidarh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sort of doom-saying and cherry-picking of statistics to derive a narrative is in itself harmful, as the economy is almost entirely based on consumer demand and confidence Consumer demand and confidence largely comes from how safe people feel in their jobs and whether or not they get raises, not statistics. I'm sure there's some feedback, but my own cautious spending is a direct result of knowing of direct thre…

the plural of anecdote is not data

In my case the anecdote is data for my specific case: It explain the direct causes of my decision to reign in my spendings. It is not data that we can use to extrapolate whether or not consumer confidence is softening, but I have already presented a number of references to actual data on that.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#352

Post by huhtenberg »

cat199 wrote: post #290
wonderous wrote: post #223

How 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 iden…

Erm.

If your assumption is correct, it's the _legit_ coins that could be tracked, not the counterfeit ones. Which, incidentally, makes this feature much more interesting.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#353

Post by larelogio »

nraynaud wrote: post #146
andy_ppp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there was no point in doing it? This seems super weird for a financial institution that should be looking at hard data; maybe they did some analysis about the increasing ease of forgery?

There is some kind of psychological cost too, since the money is only valued as much as people want to value it. Too much fakes might damage the brand more than the face value of the fake coins.

This is legal tender inside the UK, people can't put a value on it. Outside the UK the coins have no value as only bank notes can circulate abroad.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#354

Post by ojr »

OJFord wrote: post #314
pja wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it cost money to make money though so not all profit

Re: The new £1 Coin

#355

Post by nthcolumn »

finnh wrote: post #288
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?

The British love a good queue.

You're not wrong - and tutting, you have to tut. In Honkers people queue for buses but then when the bus doors actually open it's every umbrella-fella for himself. A sort of Sino-British now you queue, now you don't. Not much fun if you're 6'5" and at the front of the scrum though. Well they used to anyway.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#356

Post by shitgoose »

wtvanhest wrote: post #331

They probably should have continued using the letters. The more things called ISIS the less important those letters are to any one thing, including the terrorist org.

Sure. NSA has plenty of resources to process and store all of them.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#357

Post by rconti »

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.

I remember getting a counterfeit bi-metallic 10 Franc coin. I was excited I had a "defective" one where the center was falling out, until it was pointed out to me this meant it was fake.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#358

Post by rconti »

JamilD wrote: post #299
JshWright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just got back from Whistler BC. Because Vancouver tends to take USD, and Whistler is not far (and is even more heavily touristed by % than Vancouver, I'm sure), I figured we'd have no problems with USD.

Mostly we paid with cards, but my wife brought a few US$100 bills. It was silly to try to spend them for small purchases, but one night we had a CAD$60 dinner and we asked if we could use USD (hadn't been a problem anywhere else). They said yes, BUT they'd only accept it at 1:1. Obviously that's their prerogative, but it seemed silly to expect us to eat $18 or thereabouts, so instead they ate the credit card transaction fees. shrug

Granted, this is probably not bad policy in general because they're going to be even less expert at spotting fake US currency than US-based merchants are.

Re: The new £1 Coin

#359

Post by twic »

taway_1212 wrote: post #120
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 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.

I once got a Swazi Lilangeni coin [1] in change from a machine at Paddington station. Could it have been one of those? As an entirely above board numismatic dealer selling them in bulk [2] says:

"they are lovely looking coins, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the British One Pound coin [...] All of the One Lilangeni coin attributes are exactly the same as the British One Pound coin."

[1] https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces29731.html

[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/One-Lilangeni-Coin-19...

Re: The new £1 Coin

#360

Post by foota »

huhtenberg wrote: post #352
cat199 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iden…

Erm. If your assumption is correct, it's the _legit_ coins that could be tracked, not the counterfeit ones. Which, incidentally, makes this feature much more interesting.

Could be that it isn't a signature that is intentionally generated. It could just be based on how the light scatters, which is likely to be unique per coin. Like a fingerprint.
Post reply on HN