The new £1 Coin(thenewpoundcoin.com) |
The new £1 Coin(thenewpoundcoin.com) |
[1] Most western journalists rapidly moved off onto ISIL, which is a better translation (the name never referred to Syria the nation, but the geographical area better captured by "Levant"). Really only the right-wing sources continue to use "ISIS", presumably because it sounds more like a Bond villain's outfit.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/09/words-matter-...
I'm not contradicting you, just clarifying.
Former name; they dropped the geographical modifier years ago, and it's just (translated) “the Islamic State” now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islami...
Anyone stumbling across this comment and wondering WTF we're talking about - definitely check out Archer, it's pretty great
However, most central banks do that on a much larger scale at the moment to get that inflation and it doesn't really work (the Bank of England has stopped that though).
I think everybody should just accept and use counterfeit coins, if they look like the coins issued by the central bank.
"If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him"
IMHO, it is just childish, and to me, devalues someone's comments when they resort to insults. It's as if you were talking g about Trump or Clinton but referring to them as "idiot" rather than by name. It's simply unnecessary and shows clouded, emotional, judgement.
We know 1 in 30 £1 coins are counterfeit.
Take the amount of £1 coins in circulation. Sum the value. Divide by 30. Equals the market in counterfeit coins.
From http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/circulation-coin-... £1 are 1,671.328 £m / 30 = 55.71 £m
The market in counterfeit coins is therefore over 55 million pounds. This is, however the cumulative, total value of the market and not per year.
ref: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/costs_per_unit_of_min...
If you can make 8x1 GBP coins a hour, then you clear a cool 64 GBP each day. Better than nothing (and tax free!), but there are a lot of jobs that pay better than that.
Some people--though not many--survive that can remember when newly-minted coins still had silver in them. Then governments all over the world got greedy and debased their coinage, upping the seigniorage to obscene levels to turn their mints into profit centers instead of cost centers.
So whenever I see governments complaining about counterfeit currency, I feel that they are hoist on their own petard. They learned it by watching you. I am honestly impressed that a system run almost entirely on public confidence can get away with so much chronic, endemic chicanery.
I was really hoping that India's little experiment in destroying its economy by removing larger-denomination cash would have resulted in a tiny bit of blood in the streets, pour encourager les autres. Without pushback, the trend will continue. So the world really, really needs a currency system that no one can effectively manipulate. Bitcoin gave me hope, but so far no cryptocurrency is anywhere near ready for universal adoption.
What I don't know is the going rate for 1,000 fakes.
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?
Government officials really have no other reason to care about "cheaper for government", since it's not their money anyway.
Old pound: diameter 22.5 mm, thickness 3.15 mm.
New pound: diameter 22.63 - 23.43mm [1], thickness 2.8 mm.
Euro: diameter 23.25 mm, thickness 2.33 mm.
So close and yet so different! Why??!?
Edit: Okay, I'm not sure why I saw "so much sense" in having the pound and the Euro the same size. I go to the UK often and hate having different coin sizes in my pockets, but obviously the pound and the Euro aren't the same value, so there's no real reason they should be of the same size...
[1] Since the new pound isn't round but dodecagonal, the diameter isn't constant; the smallest value is the diameter of the incircle and the other value, the diameter of the circumcircle.
But, the old UK 5 pence and German 1 mark coins had quite similar dimensions, and were made from the same material, so vending machines at that time were fooled by the 5p, which was worth much less than the mark. I understand that truckloads of coins were sent back to Britain as a result.
The vending machine use setup of electromagnet to recognize the coin, not their size. [1]
[1] http://someinterestingfacts.net/how-do-vending-machines-work...
*86%
(1) or are sometimes, depending on how much of a mess Brexit ends up being!
Are you mad
That's staggering.
- You have vending machines which only take the old coins - You haven't sat down with your retail employees to make certain they can identify the security features of the new coins - You don't have sorting machines which can handle the new coins so that you can have an accurate inventory of your coinage - You don't have a policy in place for removing the old coins from circulation
Those are just off the top of my head.
Reminds me of the Indian Rupee 2000 'gps feature'
How much longer will we be using coins for?
I fear HN underestimates the amount of work people will do to avoid getting a boring (legal) job.
There is the .uk domain in the uk, so www.newpoundcoin.uk would work.
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.
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.
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.
"Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit"
"16 October 2017 onwards - demonetisation - you are under no
obligation to accept the round £1 coin from your customers"Musical chairs, in coins.
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 it's fake.
EDIT: Here's the first page I found looking for example images:
http://www.larkinweb.co.uk/miscellany/counterfeit_one_pound_...
To my eye they look really shonky.
Edit II: A couple more examples:
http://www.cryst.co.uk/category/fake-pound-coins/
http://www.employees.org/~tw/quids/quids.html
FinalEditIPromiseNoReally:
Check out this stack, they're almost comically bad:
http://blog.alism.com/wp-content/2006/08/coinstack.jpg
(found on this blog: http://blog.alism.com/fake-one-pound-coins-part-three/)
I have indeed had some pound coins which were tatty round the edges and had to be pushed through a self-service checkout several times or wouldn't even go through at all. I still hadn't realised they might be fake, though.
I have noticed that a lot of old 10p coins are noticeably a lot thinner (presumably worn down rather than starting out thinner) than new ones. Is this as it should be or should I start looking at these with suspicion too?
Those coins just look like they've been battered a bit too much, I just assume lots of coins get really rough treatment.
Your second link made me laugh, both because the blogger guessed that I was admiring a specific photo and the gradual reveal of the true level of the incompetence on display.
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 to describe, but really noticeable if you compare it to a real coin.
This is a thing in black market channels, so, for the junkie with nothing in life except where the next high is coming from, you can imagine that they can spend all day passing off these coins to get legitimate cash back, for that next high and for that next batch of counterfeit coins to pass off.
Let's say you're one of three (or five) major creators/distributors of said coin. a third (or fifth, or whatever) of a thirtieth of all the pound coins in circulation doesn't seem worth it to you?
> As of March 2014 there were an estimated 1,553 million £1 coins in circulation
A fifth of that would be ~311 million pounds.
Let's say you're one of fifty or 500 counterfeiting rings, that's still £31 or £3.1 million. Even if the process for counterfeiting cost a million pounds to acquire (probably much less), it'd still be £1M pure profit. The numbers for both cost and slice of the pie probably scale down to a bunch of small-time counterfeiters, but the margin is definitely there.
I've definitely noticed worn coins before. Some of the current pound coins have been in circulation for 34 years, though, so I'm not surprised there'd be quite a range of wear.
"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...
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.
http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
It doesn’t really matter so long as they circulate like other currency though. Money is weird.
(Price fell to roughly the cost of production)
Except that it's all profit for the criminals counterfeiting them.
Have received many in my time.
Machines don't like them
They seem to be not quite straight.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/19/cost-new-pound...
Seems like there are £45m worth of counterfeit coins in circulation, but the switch may cost over £100 million.
____
EDIT: The percent of fake coins in circulation appears to be in flux, which makes me wonder what methods they use to estimate the fakes in circulation, if they use controls like injecting known fakes into the count to see if they are spotted, if the sample is truly random, the maths is correct, etc.:
1% 2004 [1]
3.03% May 2014 [2]
2.55% May 2015 [2]
Of note is that the Royal Mint states in the 2016 annual report that the last survey for fakes was in May 2015, but the report was issued in July 2016, which means at least as of that date they failed to do the annual survey; or at least publish the results.[3]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10707540/...
[2] http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...
[3] http://www.royalmint.com/~/media/Files/AnnualReports/ar_2015...
That took me completely by surprise. Is there really that much of a market in counterfeit coins? The profit margins just seem so modest relative to counterfeit bills.
If no one's checking for counterfeit coins, and the users themselves don't know they exist, it sounds like a pretty awesome opportunity for the counterfeiters.
Just take a look at the number of comments here saying the same thing as you - from a counterfeiter's perspective, it sounds pretty ideal.
You might buy new pounds as "secure" coins, but you'll probably some percentage of their value the next day...
On one hand finally getting clarity might be good news in that some people who have held back might spend more once the uncertainty of the immediate reaction is out of the way. On the other hand for a lot of people it makes things definite and will cause more cautious spending patterns, and there's still plenty of other uncertainty.
It also starts the clock, which will make people speculate about the timing.
I haven't the faintest clue how that will make traders respond. What I do know is that because I don't have the faintest clue how it will make people respond, I'm acting accordingly cautiously, and have cut my spending considerably since the referendum, and I know many others in the same situation, and indeed the UK has a whole has seen consumer debt levels drop substantially.
All this to say that it is foolish to assume that it boils down to whether or not the actual event itself is expected or not.
But so far only as collector coins.
Unfortunately it doesn't work as well for the commemorative coin dated 1937, which is worth closer to £2.
I have about a dozen £1 coins in my informal 'collection of currency from other places' bag and it looks like 2 of them are probably counterfeit (at least by the standards of the Royal Mint) one clearly is, the date and back picture don't match, the other has fairly poor milling around it.
"security through obscurity" as a feature?
If Scotland votes to leave it will be to remain in the EU debate after Indyref1 led me to conclude that Scotland would have to petition the EU to join as a new member instead of inheriting the UK's membership, and the EU requires new members to adopt the Euro... so if Indyref2 passes then they'll have the Euro.
There are much older examples of latent image technology on coins, for example Russian 10 ruble circa year 2000 (look at the middle area of the '0' character): https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/coin-rubles-russian-commemor...
>iSIS™ (Integrated Secure Identification Systems) is a direct derivation of covert and forensic features used in banknotes, comprising a unique additive technology – already used not only in banknotes but also in other industries such as fuel and perfume. This, however, is the first time it has been applied to coinage.
>The additive is incorporated into coins using The Royal Mint’s aRMour® full-plate technology and can be authenticated via high-speed automated detection. As it forms part of the electroplating process, it is not a surface coating and will not wear off over time.
Maybe it can be detected by spectral analysis of light like they do to see what gasses the sun is made of?
http://web.archive.org/web/20131119210211/http://www.currenc...
but it might give you some insights...
IIRC when copper-plated steel 1p and 2p coins were introduced (up until then they were bronze), they caused havoc with vending machines, whose manufacturers weren't forewarned.
Also from wiki:
> The new design is intended to make counterfeiting more difficult, via an undisclosed hidden security feature, called 'iSIS' (Integrated Secure Identification Systems). [1]
Huh.
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 triangles)
If I'm not mistaken it has to have an odd number of sides, but it has 12.
The sides looks like they might be very slightly curved in order to facilitate rolling. But it not being of constant width could still make life more difficult for vending machines etc.
Is there just too much metal sitting around that they thought that would be an ok use of it?
"Part of the reason for this change was that notes, on average, lasted only nine months in general circulation, while coins could last forty years or more. The government also believed that the growing vending industry would benefit from the introduction of a one pound coin."
Maybe the economics have changed with polymer notes. But the BoE inflation calculator tells me that the £1 notes withdrawn (in 1984 money) would be worth about £3 today. So maybe the fiver is next.
Then there's the lunatics that want to abolish physical money altogether...
Something like that is already being discussed on the continent.
The memorial 5€ coin recently (which is legal tender) wasn’t just that, but it was also a test if a 5€ coin would be accepted, and doable.
yay. Australians didn't die when they introduced the $1 note and remove 1c and 2c coins - they seem to do just fine.
I bet there's an RFID in each coin that uniquely identifies each one. If true, it'd also let them (or a thief!) identify the total value of the coins jingling in your pocket.
> Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit.
That seems incredibly high! Anyone have comparable stats for US dollar bills or 1 Euro coins?
> The legal tender status of the round £1 coin will be withdrawn on 15th October 2017. From this date shops will no longer accept these coins, but you will still be able to take them to your bank. We would encourage you to use your coins or return them to your bank before 15th October.
Six-months is a pretty short window for something like this.
What prevents a shop from accepting the coins after Oct 15th and then they take it to the bank?
Also, how does the 1/30 fraud number impact the returns of the current pound notes?
The law, which only allows individuals to exchange the old coins after that date. Yes, shopkeepers could change their bills for old pounds and then deposit them in person to their current accounts at the local branch, but if I'm a shopkeeper then I probably have better things to do with my time.
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 the exact same problem with distributing drugs.
Like, what would you do with a kilo or two of cocaine just lying around? Get many smaller dealers to handle the problem for you instead and make their money along the way.
If you also have some fake money lying around, I can't see any reason why you wound't try to combine the two.
It works if you need to employ petty criminals for jobs other than sales, though.
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!
UK notes are much more sophisticated even for the lower denominations, so probably there is more focus is on coins..
BTW: dodecahedron is the solid object, dodecagon is the 12-sided polygon. D&D style dice as currency would be pretty awesome but it might make it difficult to resolve dilemmas using pocket change.
"The pound won’t be around for much longer"
so the original sentence is sort of a pun. Maybe "around" is a local use of English.
Fair warning: People are going to put these things in pneumatic presses, hit them with sledge-hammers, etc. and then claim their brand new £1 coins are defective and "just fell apart". You should probably ignore these people. I'd be very surprised if the Royal Mint hadn't talked to the Canadian Mint and made sure they know how to make these things absolutely bomber.
If a one-time cost of £100m will remove the fake coins and prevent new fakes, it's well worth the price tag.
(am brit)
We also don't know anything about the volume of forged coins withdrawn from the market each month. If detection at pubs, grocery stores, etc. is poor, then fake coins enter the market at will and are detected only when merchants present their cash to banks. That's annoying for everyone, and it's possible to come up with scenarios in which each year sees 2x or even 5x the introduction of fake coins, with many of them staying in circulation for only a few months but causing damages anyway.
In either of these scenarios, clamping down now on forgery is economically prudent, even if the 100 > 45 comparison doesn't reveal the true cost.
But I would guess from a public relation perspective, asking a whole population to replace their coins just to make it cheaper and easier for banks is a harder sell that arguing security.
Meanwhile the entire currency is debased annually by failing to include land prices into the inflation calculations, despite most credit creation being against land.
This debases GBP for workers every year. Therefore propping up confidence is vital.
The old £1 Coin was relatively easy and cheap to counterfeit and the counterfeits were practically perfect (I've had a few over the years, they're REALLY hard to spot unless you know what you're looking for, just Google "spot a fake £1" for some examples of how good they are).
Seems like many of the counterfeit coins come from abroad, in particular countries with a much lower cost of living and where counterfeiting foreign currency may be ignored. There's also a huge market in pushing counterfeit money onto foreign exchanges in other countries.
Unless they can fool machines, it seems very inefficient.
For a merchant the cost of annoying a potentially unaware customer is more than the value of the coin that he will probably simply give back to another customer as change.
Try using an actual real 500€ bill anywhere else than Germany.
I paid for a 17K CHF car with 17 notes once. The Swiss trust their money completely.
Take the amount of £1 coins in circulation. Sum the value. Divide by 30. Equals the market in counterfeit coins.
From http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/circulation-coin-...
£1 are 1,671.328 £m / 30 = 55.71 £m
The market in counterfeit coins is therefore over 55 million pounds. This is, however the cumulative, total value of the market and not per year.
BrexitCoin
* It's backed by usual pounds by the treasury, which means only they get to issue new coins (no public mining rewards).
* Court judgements must be able to block, reverse or force transactions. This means either the government gets a copy of all private keys, or simply has master keys for the system.
* UK government would probably want to attach names to all accounts, so new wallets could probably be only generated on some gov.uk site, or participating businesses like existing banks.
In the end, the blockchain is wasteful and inefficient when you could just have a big-ass server somewhere with an API.
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, that can significantly reduce the counterfeiting by the means of somehow cloning the RFID chip (which wouldn't be simple if done properly -- there aren't any successful attacks on proper implementations of stuff like mifare desfire EV1/EV2 afaik). A coin was used on a market on london on 10am and with an ATM on Glasgow on 10:30am? Yeah, flag that coin down.
So you never know - but how would that work inside a metal coin?
(edit: when I say "cost" I mean the production cost)
That’s actually quite an old idea – most european countries’ IDs just have a normal smartcard in them, allowing normal signing and verification.
Pretty sure the knowledge that there will be a new £1 coin has been known far longer than brexit has even been a thing.
For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends:
> For external-facing servers, reconfigure service banners not to report the server and OS type and version, if possible
http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublic...
Obviously I have no idea of the veracity of that, or the accuracy of my memory of the potentially fictitious article.
After all, your fakes don't need to be perfect; they just need to be good enough to enter the system without you getting caught every time.
(Which leads me to wonder - how do counterfeiters insert their fake coins in the monetary system? Where can you spend a lot of coin without arousing suspicion?)
-Coins sold at a discount to people who, perfectly aware they are fakes, use them for small purchases?
-Perhaps more likely - the customer is your friendly neighbourhood cigarette shop, which then mixes them in the change they give?
-Are some vending machines so bad at detecting fakes that you can use those (preferably ones with no security camera watching, which can be a challenge in the UK nowadays) to launder your fakes?
-Other?
Off to google I go. I really wonder how one can make a viable business model from getting fake coins into circulation.
I just looked over the £1 coins in my desk drawer (22!) - I found two dodgies. Perhaps I should bring them to the UK next time and ask in a bank - they may be just worn...
If this security feature could only be reproduced using a bunch of PhD chemists and millions of dollars of lab equipment, then the security can be considered to be pretty obscure. Even the strongest key based encryption system is vulnerable to brute force attacks if you have enough computer power.
My understanding is there is some luminescence profile that is very easy to create from basic chemicals if you know the quantities of those chemicals. But that it is very difficult to establish the precise quantities from the luminescence profile. In effect, a "one-way chemical reaction hash".
Presumably some people will know about it, but who? If banks are the only places that can detect a fake, for example, does that gain you anything?
I suppose you can do something like "ah, this bank is getting a lot of fake coins, which means they're probably getting injected somewhere in the local area, maybe let's interview some people who've been cashing them in and see if there are any businesses they all frequent". Might be valuable.
Something I've missed?
While I see the value of failsafe money (except it really isn't) I think the returns are diminishing...
Either way, being rejected by vending machines is probably neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for being a fake, but it's almost certainly correlated.
edit: oh yeah I see it now
There's been a British £5 coin since 1990 along the same lines (commemorative, but technically legal tender).
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.
You can certainly avoid that, just make it part of the protocol. You could create currency with such rules on top of Ethereum today. Court judgments simply become a part of trusted oracle.
The cost of changing comes primarily from businesses having to update vending machines, coin counting machines, etc (as well as increased production costs due to the new security features.)
But this switch has been planned for many years, so businesses have had a long time to prepare.
By comparison, the new, smaller coins are much harder to grasp and the new denomination (2kr) is hard to tell apart from the new (1kr). The new notes are similarly hard to tell apart, as they all i) have the same height, and ii) use similar (pastel) colors.
"Never attribute to malice what you can blame on stupidity", but it almost feels like they are making the new cash hard to use on purpose.
Given the expense of rolling out the new coin, it probably makes more sense from a economic and moral point of view to spend money investigating these crimes rather than preventing them.
Is this not already true? When my laptop was stolen, I was advised "don't bother reporting it to the police".
That's a good point, I completely oversaw that.
> 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...
After reading your comment I immediately tried to visit the page and was very disappointed to see that the content was now being displayed directly. But just as I was about to close the tab I was placed in the queue! Hooray! :)
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.
[0] http://metro.co.uk/2016/04/13/how-very-english-visitors-to-t...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi...
Here's mifare desfire EV2's leaflet that talks quite a bit about the security features it has: http://www.nxp.com/documents/leaflet/MIFARE-DESFire-EV2-Leaf...
Probably easier to disperse the coins and hopefully not let them be traced back to you
Well, a pound coin is used more than once, and there is tax applied on every time it is used, so it'll pay off for itself in a relatively short timespan, imo. Plus, it pretty much beats counterfeits, so loss from that is gone too.
Problem with 1 kurus was that it wasn't used often, the monetary value was small and that it had no anti-counterfeit stuff. Also, people were melting it and selling it. You can't really sell a broken or write-protected rfid chip for much.
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...
Developing a new coin for hundreds of millions of people in daily use is a big task, it’s easier to start with a subset of 80 million potential users to demonstrate feasibility, and test.
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.
Make it look like a normal coin so people can trade by hand, but in any store interaction they could be checked.
There are plenty of corner shops that'll happily sell you duty free tobacco amongst other non-legal things. I'm sure they'd be happy to take £100 worth of fake coins and mix them into their tills/takings/change if it only costs them £40. The difference can go into their pocket.
I'd be interested to find out about who makes the molds / dies and sets up the machines to manufacture these. I like to think its some eccentric retired machinist in a shed in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside :)
At the Canadian/US mint, seemingly zero.
Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.
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.
I'm in a city now and I've had people refuse to accept 2 dollar bills (which are rare, though absolutely legal tender).
You can buy it here: http://www.moneypads.com/products.html
If the same hardware, then I guess the only different would be that the public keys would be associated with somthing else. But it's probably a huge patent mess to make this a standard for all countries and states.
I know two stores in my area that don't even support chip cards and this was within going in the past year. One has the readers, but they don't work. The other has no chip readers at all.
I always thought paper signing was a bit outdated, especially since schools don't teach cursive really. We spent like a hour on it, and then next topic!
But then if someone stole your ID, lost it, etc... They could sign for things... but people can forge your signature anyways... Maybe if the machine had a camera in it to take a selfie when you use the card, but a bit creepy in a way to.
The Turkish Govt's new ID allows you to- no, it requires you to set a password. You are given an 8 character PIN code when you apply for the ID, and you can change it from the kiosks at the citizenship bureau. It allows between 4 and 16 characters (while I chose 16 myself, most people will choose a 4 character one :( ).
Plus, even if it gets stolen along with the password, technically the certificate can be revoked as soon as you report it, preventing forgery.
In Germany this is actually used in all cigarette or alcohol dispensers.
You can pay via EC card or via cash, but you first need to verify age via EC card or ID.
EC cards (kinda like debit cards) and ID cards have two age verification functions, of which only one per minute can be called, these just verify if the account holder is > 16 or > 18.
So you press the button to get a bottle of beer, the system checks if you’re 16, you pay, and you get it.
Or you press the button to get a bottle of vodka, the system checks if you’re 18, you pay, and you get it.
All this is standard tech, supported by any normal RFID or card reader, and you can use the same reader for secure home banking, for verification, etc.
Irrespective of that, it's pretty clear that Brexit will force Westminster into promising drastically increased levels of devolution not just to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but also to the major urban regions like Greater Manchester and Greater London that will reduce the de facto power of Westminster dramatically and allow the regions to drift even more apart in terms of differences in public policy.
At the same time there is a major split amongst those who considers themselves predominantly or only British or who considers themselves British first vs. those who predominantly see themselves as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish first, and British second or not at all, with "Britishness" being weak and fractured.
Basically, to a lot of people living here, the UK means as little or even less than the EU, compared to other parts of their identity.
And a lot of the political discourse has been around how the elites ignore people. What people are about to find out is that in that respect the London elite were the ones ignoring them, not Brussels, and accordingly Brexit will not solve any of the problems they had in that respect.
Expect to see increasing upheaval and pressure for more power to be devolved from Westminster as a result. E.g. after the Brexit vote there was a brief flash of people talking about pushing for independence for London, and while that won't happen anytime soon if ever, expect to see those debates flash up again and lead to an actual (if miniscule) political movement at some point over the next couple of years.
I personally think that while the UK may persist in some form, the UK 10 years from now is reasonably likely to exclude Scotland, and the UK 30 years from now is likely to exclude Northern Ireland, and be more like a loose federation with massively devolved powers to Wales and several English regions and at least Manchester and London. Maybe even with increasing support for Welsh independence.
It's been nine months and starting the article 50 process is suppose to happen soon, but I have a feeling the UK will negotiate its way into the Economic Zone instead, keeping trade and immigration without work visas, while forfeiting their place on the EU parliament. Either that or they'll just ignore the will of the people and never leave.
And we need all this new cruft because the current situation is insufficiently complex.
thankfully you aren't the majority; we really would have had a recession if everyone had cut their spending
I for one thinks that recession or not, a lot of people are setting themselves up for major pain once interest rates start moving up again and would be best served by doing what they can to cut down on spending.
At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day. Instead it's looking scarier and scarier.
[1] https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2017/02/consumer-spendi...
[2] http://myinforms.com/en-gb/a/184905009-consumer-spending-gro...
[3] https://sputniknews.com/business/201701201049832161-uk-retai...
brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
> At the moments large parts of the handling of the UK economy appears to be based on trying to push problems ahead of us in the hope that things will start looking rosier some day.
capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
Presumably the Royal Mint experience similar demand peaks occasionally when limited-release collectable coins go on sale?
This is the equivalent of ticketmaster not letting you see pages with lists of upcoming performances without waiting in a queue.
Each euro country mints their own coins with different insignia, so people are used to 2 euro coins that what whatever figurehead.
The 1 and 2 euro coins are dual metal though, making the counterfeiting much less lucrative. The Finnish 10 mark coins also used to be dual metal; so I think was the French 10 franc coin; I don't recall if others had much security against counterfeiting.
Yeah, I was the same until a machine failed and a colleague said that the coin might be fake.
There is something rather delicious in the fact that we're so used to machines and computers failing that the idea the coin could be wrong never entered our heads!
Prior to about 2010, 5p and 10p coins really were thinner. They were changed from copper/nickel alloy (Cupronickel) to nickel-plated steel to reduce costs. But in order to maintain the same weight, the coins had to be made thicker.
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 threats to a substantial number of jobs, and seeing the consequences of e.g. potential clients pulling back on spending. I'm not very worried about my own income, but the only reason I'm not very worried is that my disposable income is high enough that I can sustain drops without being affected much.
Meanwhile e.g. my ex. has to deal with knowing that hundreds of jobs where she works will be cut (and no, that's not rumours - she works in HR and has direct knowledge of the plans) as a consequence of Brexit. If the negotiations goes badly, it will be several times that.
That is the kind of things that's causing consumer confidence to soften.
> brexit itself doesn't change the fact there's a short term business cycle driven by credit and low interest rates
No, but it has directly affected that starting to come to and end because of softening consumer confidence.
> capitalism is based entirely on eternal exponential growth, which is clearly not sustainable, there's nothing UK specific about this
No, but there is something UK specific about currently being in a situation where the government has chosen to drastically cut public spending at a time when low salary growth has left people using low credit as a means to keep the party going, and are then suddenly hit by events that cause a great deal of uncertainty over their ability to continue to service debt.
I was given a South African 5 Rand coin in my change in Amsterdam (should have been a €2 coin):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:5-za-rand.JPG
Broke a 20 getting intoxicated in a bar/coffeeshop, then bought a kebab after on my walk back. Kebab shop was only place I got metal change that night.
I didn't notice until the next day when a coffee place threw a fuss when I used it to pay for my espresso.
I suspect they often mix them in for drunk tourists.
Adjusted only for changes in the CPI, Josh Tatum netted $121 in today's dollars every time he spent a gold-plated nickel.
(0) https://www.pcgs.com/News/The-Man-Who-Could-Stop-The-Mint
A relative who works in the industry told me he sees large numbers of counterfeit pound coins. I would guess counterfeiters might launder coins through machines. Or even, though I've never seen it, sell discount coins directly to gamblers? In any case machine recognition would be a high priority. The machines in question would be relatively unsophisticated ones with a thickness gauge and a 'ski jump' that effectively checks the weight.
One could probably go to a casino with a bag of fake coins, put 50 in each machine, and take any and all winnings. Some machines even pay out winnings in notes.
FOBT winnings are paid out via a receipt that is redeemed over the counter, so you can use them to convert coins into notes very easily. Gambling winnings are not subject to tax in the UK, so these machines are an extremely attractive money laundering method. Britain has around 9,000 betting shops, so it's easy to move around and avoid suspicion.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mac...
Note that this was a great way to get millions of coins into circulation back in the early 2000s, not so easy now.
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."
Also, this is not a case of the supplier trying to con its "client", but one of choice. "Would you prefer real or or more in fake ?"
So I put my money in the drink machine and hit the coin return. Nothing happened. I tried a few times and figured the coin return was broken or that it was out of coins. The only thing in the machine was soda, which I can't drink if I don't want to trigger my acid reflux. But I bought one anyway since otherwise my money was "wasted", thinking I'd give the soda to a friend later.
Of course, once I bought the soda, the machine spat out all my change: 3 quarters and 2 dollar coins - now I finally had coins that I could buy food with. Naturally, the food machine didn't accept dollar coins. Most machines here don't, so no food for me.
