
12-sided...
So I was told there was a reason why the 20p and 50p had an odd number of sides, something to do with mechanical detection.
Was that bollocks or when you get to 12 sides is it close enough to a circle that it's not worth worrying?
In agreeable news for those readers who can remember when it was all trees round here and you could get an enormous paper bagful of gobstoppers for thruppence, The Royal Mint has unveiled a decidedly retro 12-sided design for Blighty's £1 coin. The proposed 12-sided pound coin. Pic: The Royal Mint The mint reckons that a …
Why not bury a RFID tag in them? I know this would put the price up by a penny or two but wouldn't that be a difficult one to duplicate/fake, make the fakes easier to spot using a reader and it might come in handy when you want to know how much you've got sutffed down the back of your piggy bank/sofa.
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The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne, enthused: "...paying tribute to the past in the 12-sided design of the iconic threepenny bit." before continuing with the astute observation that this is also a quite fitting tribute considering that the new £1 coin of 2014 will also have roughly the same purchasing power as the iconic threepenny bit of 1953 had in its day.
Do you have a reference for that? It sounds like a hell of a lot to me. The ONS suggests an average wage of £9.30 but neglects to mention if that is a mean or median average.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/freedom-of-information/what-can-i-request/previous-foi-requests/labour-market/average-gross-weekly-earnings-in-1953/index.html?format=print
9.30 times 52 weeks a year = 483.60 per year. That's specifically for manual workers, so the population average is likely to be somewhat higher, although less than double surely.
Anyway, 9.30 works out at 744 thruppeny bits a week. If, as posted by someone else, a modern pound is equivelent to about 8d in 1953 money, that means the 'average manual wage' in 1953 was equivalent to about 14,500 pounds a year in today's money.
So that's how far living standards have risen in over half a century. Isn't progress nice?
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Buying power... That was my first thought, when I read the article.
My other thought was, introduce the Euro, it is already a 2 metal coin, you'd get a good deal on them as well, 1.2 Euros for every pount - if it goes like the rest of Europe, the shops would then also be able to double the price of all goods over night.
"the shops would then also be able to double the price of all goods over night."
No, it could be beneficial on balance because shops like to round prices up to the next multiple of £10 and then take 1p off to make silly shoppers think it's cheaper. €9.99 is less than £9.99.
"This was originally introduced as an anti theft procedure when electronic tills were introduced- it gave the customer a reason to hang around and see the sale registered cos they were waiting for their change."
I'm sure there were prices such as £2 19/11d (one old penny short of an exact £3) long before there were electronic tills.
According to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/inflation/calculator/flash/default.aspx) £1 in 1953 has the buying power of £23.64 in 2012, or, if you prefer, £1 in 2012 had a value of 4p (or about 8d) in 1953.
Back in the '50s, 3d was the price of a Mars bar. Thanks to "Mr. Rising Price" Mars bars got proportionally smaller as the years passed. Sometime around 1960, Mars finally restored the size, but upped the price to 4d. Using the Mars bar standard suggests that the present day pound is a bit more valuable than 3d in 1953. (A normal (58 g) Mars bar is now about 60p.)
Foreign readers please note that there are no nuts in a Limey Mars Bar, d=denarius, the standard abbreviation for the old penny that was 1/240th of a pound:) and 3d was, of course, pronounced "thruppence".
Beer: A nice pint of Massey's, with a proper head, to toast those pre-Grotney years when you could buy a round with a ten bob note and still have change for fish and chips.
"Some of the fakes are pretty good"
Indeed they are. I've only had a handful over the years which I've suspected to be forgeries, and I suspect have had more I didn't even realize were fakes. Although, apparently, the quality is getting worse. There's an article on the BBC today on how to spot a forgery.
That's my point, though. Surely there's a high cost to manufacturing a decent forgery? And how do you spend them in bulk? I imagine you could get away with handing over 3 or 4 at a time in the pub (or mixing them with real ones, if they were good enough), but walking into John Lewis with a big bag of 800 shiny coins to buy a new TV would look a little suspect.
I think it doesn't really help that they change the design on coins and banknotes so often. There are so many designs in circulation now that I don't necessarily recognise them all and I'm not that surprised when I see a new one. If I got given a pound coin with a picture of Mickey Mouse on one side, I'd probably assume it's some stupid attempt to commemorate Walt Disney or something.
So now I suspect the fraudsters could start minting 13-sided pound coins and still get away with it. People would just assume it's a new official design.
" 3 per cent? That sounds like a lot."
Depends where you are - I've seen quite a few poor quality forgeries, and quite a few that I couldn't tell weren't but looked "different" to all the other pound coins in my pocket. Luckily the criteria for judging authenticity in the shop is basically size and weight, so it's an open door for forgers.
Having said that, I'm most disappointed with the pound coin forgers - there's so many different designs on pound coins there's a fantastic opportunity to get their own design into circulation, with a latin edge logo something like "less dishonest than bankers".
China.
The Toronto Transit tokens had to go to two colour because of fakes from China being sold from corner stores. The Canadian two dollar (toonie) coin is also a two colour coin but the reverse of the new pound coin, steel on the outside, brass colour in the middle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twonie
Back when pound coins first appeared, there was a "rumour" that the then "terrorist threat" for us old un's, the IRA, were going to flood the UK with fake pound coins.
This was not for "profit" but seen as a way to disrupt the government of the day and cause chaos for the treasury.
Not everyone wants to counterfeit for profit
Mild....that takes me back. 20 odd years ago, as a student, I used to drink mild in a particular pub in london. Didn't really taste of anything at all. However, it was a massive 80p a pint cheaper than the equivalent horrendous keg bitter, which if I recall, was a then shocking £2 a pint. So, for £10, I could drink 8 pints, to my colleagues 5, and I had a little change too. Unfortunately, it was so weak that I seemed to piss it out quicker than I could drink it, and I once lost count at 15 pints. You also spent most of the afternoon or evening out standing at the urinal, trying to dissolve a 'trough chunk' all by yourself by way of entertainment. Deodorant block based sports should be in the olympics.
After all a pound now has about the same purchasing power as a thrupenny bit did 50 years ago.
Statutory whinge:
"I remember when you could go t' pub, get pissed then on to chippy for thy supper and still have enough change for a prostitute, all from a 10 bob note, and if you tell the kids today they don't believe you."
...and raise you a Daily Mash
Each year the royal mint produces coins and notes with Charles's head on them, just in case the queen dies. A couple of years ago some of these found their way into general circulation. They are now worth a fortune in coin collectors circles, because they have his head, and what was the current year on them, and they are legal tender.
I've got several thruppeny bits hanging around, along with ha'pennies, pennies, farthings, tanners, a few two-bob bits, think I've got a half-crown somewhere...
The missus uses 'em at school to freak out the smart-arse kids who have got their decimal maths down pat. I love one of Terry Pratchett's footnotes which concludes something like 'the British resisted decimalisation as they thought it would be too complicated'...
Somewhere I've got a Guernsey thruppenny bit, but unlike either the Jersey or mainland one it was silver and had a curved edge with 12 high points.
When I was a kid I dreamed of owning one of those 5 pound notes, that seemed as big as a tea towel and needed folding to fit into a wallet. (5 pounds was the price of the Government Surplus R1155 receiver that I used to drool over in the window of the radio shop.)
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Breaking news: Anon lands failwhale, promises to readmore in future.
One of the reasons I never was fond of the Euro (yep, I'm from the continent) is diversity of coins. I always liked all these funny different ways you can shape coins, and it's more fun the more different currencies you have. So be glad you still have your pound and can fool around with it.
/Zane
BTW a 12-based system for money is better than a decimal system - but you are not going to change that in the foreseeable future, are you?
No where does it actually say what the 3 layers of security are other than:
Overt
Covert
Forensic
I can only assume this equates to..
Laser etched micro text
Calibrated machines for X-ray spectra of composition
Some form of crypro key encoding (possibly using spacing of edge striations)
As someone said what about £2 coins and of course the limited edition £5 coins....
Lovely place. Woodside Cottage.
£69,000.
Didn't even haggle, as a 'yuppie' then taking home £4,000/mo, and my (then) missus getting about £2,000, £500/mo mortgage was chicken-feed.
In the house, forgotten by the previous owner was a porcelain pot, full of 3d bits.
Took me back awhile. I remember burying a 3d piece when I was a kid of about 10, remembering even 47 years ago *precisely* where I've hidden it. Sadly, 1500 Km from where I am now.
Gave 'em away. Now, if I had a pot of silver paint....and as I'm on the dole now...
Nah.
No, because shortly after hitting MMXXXVIII, it'll roll back round to MCMI.
All our systems will crash, the financial system will collapse, nuclear weapons will get confused, spontaneously launch and kill us all and we'll have a newly-crowned Edward VII on the British throne (again).
I know that I have spent old George VI 3d coins Wikipedia image.
Unless you meant to post with the "I'll get my coat" icon. >>====>
First a 12 sided coin then this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/19/culture_committee_online_safety_report_urges_stronger_age_verification_for_smut_and_use_of_obscene_publications_act/
What next? Rationing? Well they are pushing smart meters.
I like the idea of a new multi sided coin but the mockup really doesn't show much. Someone has just cobbled together a "best guess" of what it may look like based on the 12-sided description.
It would be nice to see a coin utilising a metallic ink, a complex blended pattern of alloys, a hologram, micro etching, or even an rfid to combat forgery. I assume some or all of those things are what they intend. I could see the nutcase brigade exploding with rage if an rfid were put in the coins, even though the coins would be so transient as to be useless for tracking people.
The iSIS site doesn't say very much about what this type of security is based on. As noted, metal being conductive, one wouldn't think one could put an RFID chip in a coin, but the way they're talking about how secure and quick to validate it is, one can hardly think of anything else that would achieve it.
One sees microprinting from the picture of the coin, as well as fancy milling, and they do say that it's plated rather than really built from two parts in different metals.
I was able to find out that the new technology in these coins was disclosed - in a patent. And that patent was issued to a firm in Wales. However, reading about the problem, the 3% of the current pound coins that are counterfeit still get detected in vending machines; the problem is when people get them in change. So an RFID-like magic security system that allows vending machines to detect coins infallibly, while nice, is solving the wrong problem. But the microprinting and fancy milling may help people to recognize the real thing, so the actual problem is also being addressed.
Incidentally, note that transistors you can see through, made out of materials containing Indium, are printed on active-matrix LCD displays, which are just about all LCD displays these days. So one could have an RFID on the outside of the coin. I suppose with a layer of glass or clear plastic or something so that the coin doesn't become 'counterfeit' as soon as it is scratched.
MooseNC, given that all of the US non-commemorative five-dollar coins have been at least 899‰ gold, I’d happily accept one of them in preference to Lincoln on a Federal Reserve Note. Our “Peace” dollar coins of the 1920s and 1930s were probably the best-looking of our dollar coins, but the Saint Gaudens twenty-dollar piece was certainly our most beautiful circulating coin.
A little more
http://tiny.cc/f5bzcx
The additive is incorporated into coins using The Royal Mint’s aRMour® full-plate technology.
The Mint has developed three types of reader – hand-held, desktop and, importantly, a low cost version that can be retrofitted to coin accepting and processing systems, in the latter case reading to the highest speeds capable of today’s detection units in cash centres and central banks.
security by obscurity... so until someone reverse engineers a reader and we know what and how its looking for the additive.. however im guessing it wont take long before someone works it out when it hits the public domain.
This is interesting regarding paper money: http://tiny.cc/miczcx
Going back to iSIS, its very likely similar to this: http://tiny.cc/lkdzcx
Some power-Googling uncovered this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlzC_xMpEw#t=22
Fast-forward to about 6 minutes in...
Basically it seems they are embedding some "optically active" particles throughout the plating (other sources say plating wears off at a rate of about 1µm/year in real use). The Mint is very pleased with themselves for developing techniques of getting this uniform dispersion of particles into the plating, btw.
The particles are detected by shining light on them, and detecting the light that comes back.
Presumably the three levels of security are {overt} basic fluorescence (or phosphorescence) from everyday 365nm UV, and the higher levels {covert} and {forensic} are based on much more specific spectroscopy (or polarisation, or birefringent or geometrical) effects...?
Umm interesting so its part of the nickel plate and consistent throughout the plated layer... if the nickel is doped.. i wonder how the dope would survive re-plating (probably not well).. or if the optical additive is instead trapped in the plated layer using using something to catalyse it.
For example using 1 existing coin (with dope) to then electro plate a non doped coin with slightly surface only covering, only producing a sufficient layer to make the coin work, then you could potentially use one valid coin to create multiple coins.
Or the more likely approach to use the same particle during the plating process to produce a coin that would give the same optical response e.g. using this sort of process:
http://tiny.cc/2gl0cx
Essentially if some ones going to create a fake it only would be required to beat the basic florescence test to be useful to the counterfeiters.
CoinTune must be based on a magnetostrictive material (similar to that used in the kind of security-tags commonly seen in music/DVD shops and DIY stores). This approach is rather neat as it effectively embeds a contact-microphone within the coin, facilitating detailed acoustic analysis without the problems of having to externally contact the coin.
This is completely different to the Royal Mint's iSIS system.
To absolutely prevent any coin value confusion, a 12 sided coin should be £12. For the amount used for the project develop the conversion, a 1 sided (ala unidimensional) £1 coin can easily be implemented based on the mere budget overage of the 12 sided re-tooling costs.
As in the United States, the $1 coin is one dimensional, thus providing a simple accounting solution for money that is not there.
I found a site where this was being discussed, and they seem to have found the patent. (US 20110305919 A1, CA 2801418 A1, EP 2580374 A2, WO 2011156676 A2 and A3) Phosphorescent particles are to be mixed with the brass with which the coin is electroplated, following methods used for putting lubricant particles in certain types of machine part, and so they will remain present on the surface as the coin wears.
I don't see anyone pointing out on the question of compnaies making and operating coin processing machines that will have to be set for the new coin, that that is part of their bloody job. The currency is updated from time to time, partly because the metal in coins gets more valuable than the value of the coins, and coin detection machinery has to be updated to handle the new coins. Your digital home moneybox might not work, though.
The old 12-sided thruppeny bit broke the centuries old practice of having a coherent set of currency - well three sets if you count gold: copper (bronze), silver (cupronickel) ... and gold.
Coins increased in size related to value and were exactly proportional in weight. Banks supplied bags and 'copper' and 'silver' could all be weighed together. With the new coin they had to introduce a 3d bag. Last time I checked there were bags for copper, 20p, 50p amd £1s.
If the mint want to show off let them introduce a complete coherent range of coinage. There could be a good argument for dropping 1p and 2p altogether?