ISIS?
They've infiltrated the Mint!
A 15-year-old West Midlands lad has won the public competition to design the tails side of the forthcoming 12-sided British pound coin, the Royal Mint has announced. David Pearce's rose, leek, thistle and shamrock ensemble triumphed over 6,000 rival entries for the honour to grace the decidedly retro polygonal quid, which pays …
The kid may not get a royalty, but by goodness it's a great opener for every interview he goes to hereafter. 'Have you brought any samples of your work?' 'Why actually, dig in your pocket'.
Overdue, I see so many hooky £1 coins and just pass 'em along as people losing faith in the currency is a bigger problem than one coin from every 40 being a pup.
Either you're lucky, unlucky, or very bad/over vigilant at spotting fakes! Royal Mint is a pretty good source to cite...
http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-pound-coins.
I was using old data, 2.5%, where the current figure is 3%. Hope this helps :)
Overdue, I see so many hooky £1 coins and just pass 'em along as people losing faith in the currency is a bigger problem ...
I suspect that even if every single £1 coin was a fake, the damage would be negligible compared to HMG's efforts, generally referred to as "QE". And yet, faith is not being destroyed!
(Total value of coin in circulation in the UK: a mere 4 billion quid or thereabouts. Excluding the fakes, of course. )
"Six months."
By the time I next return to the UK I'll have completely forgotten about this and will be left wondering why the handful of coins I keep (because it's handy to keep small denominations when visiting different countries) aren't accepted.
It would be a lot easier to create the fake ones if they didn't keep changing the design. I expect this new design is a lot more difficult to counterfeit.
Yes. You need much more specialized equipment to produce bimetallic coins that stay in one piece (even the royal mint had trouble with early production £2 coins). 12-sided is also harder than round. Also assuming the density of the inside and outside metals are different, then it'll be very easy for coin-accepting machines to reject fakes made of any single metal.
OT, but you never see many £2 coins these days.
I suspect people tend to hang on to them, because they are rather pretty and there's a new design out almost every year. I recently got a bunch of brand new ones out of a Sainsbury self-service till when I gave it a £20 note as payment.
It is a secret. The Royal Mint's explanatory web pages and video say it is excellent, but does not give a word of detail. So if you get an ISIS coin, you can tell it is genuine because ... err ... erm ... well you cannot tell it is genuine because all the new security features are secret. I assume the security features are like the emperor's new clothes - if you cannot see them you are not fit for your job.
Unfortunate choice of name. The videos on the site seem like a sales pitch to other countries/issuers rather than explaining our new pound, but then the Royal Mint makes a lot of money for other countries. It's one of those fun Treasury/Central bank things. To me it's a humble quid in my pocket, to them it's the cost of that coin and TCO of money. Plus the arms race between Mints and counterfeiters and the cost of replacing coinage or notes if they're too easy to fake.
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And the symbol for Scotland is a lion rampant, for England one or three lions passant gardant, and for Wales a dragon.
These are all plants which commonly represent the individual countries concerned. As I've been reminded watching the Six Nations, where they show the emblems of the individual rugby unions. The IRFU emblem (and the IRFU covers the whole island, not just the Republic) has several shamrocks on.
Other than that nostalgic retro "because the thruppeny bit was 12-sided" argument, anyway. Particularly when it's a bimetallic design, I'd have thought the last thing the vending machine manufacturers would want is a coin bouncing up and down, rather than a constant-diameter one rolling smoothly past their sensors.
This is slightly OT, but I have to tell somebody.
I wanted to buy a 70p item from the office vending machine. I had the exact amount in my wallet. No problem with the first three 20p coins, but my 10p was repeatedly rejected. So I pushed the coin return button, and got nothing back. It seems the machine will give change, but it won't allow you to cancel a transaction if you haven't inserted enough money to buy something. I expect this would the source of a tidy profit, were it not for the cost of replacing wrecked machines. Who designs the firmware for these things?
"It generally returns the deposited amount in 1 euro coins, or at worst 50c ones."
The same applies to the self-service tills in some shops. Morrisons in particular use a big cup-like thing with a conveyor belt in the bottom but return any overage using the minimum number of coins. Asda and B&Q on the other hand are coins slots so it's a bit less convenient to just dump a pocket full of change in them.
It's certainly cheaper than using those Coinstar machines so long as you're not dropping the entire piggy bank or penny jar in them :-)
Oh, for....
The British pound was the *one* coin I could easily identify by feel when my Canadian and British money gets mixed up, and I'm trying to catch a bus, because there's no other coin I've encountered that looks or feels quite like it. Now they're making the bloody thing exactly like the Canadian $2 coin, as if 5ps weren't already annoyingly close to dimes, and 10ps weren't annoyingly similar to quarters. Thanks a bunch. Now the only coins I definitely know at a glance are British are the penny and 50p, because Canada doesn't have them.
I doubt that the pay and display machine wranglers will bother, trying to find ones that take the £2 coin is almost impossible and they have had years to adapt to that.
New machines get the new form, old machines get replaced as they are broken is the likely replacement route. I would also guess they may be able to get some form of compensation from the government too to help things along, sort of like the PPI botherers - have you been mis-sold a new currency....
So how long before they change the trolley mechanisms, it will really waste my token collection. I bought enough from charaties and now I'll have to chck them out whilst waiting for the new tokens. Of course the tokens may just be more valuable than the new pound coin anyway.
Mines the one with the trolly load of groceries in it..