Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids The Royal Mint has begun pumping out the fetching 12-sided pound coins which will hit the UK's streets in March next year. The retro-styled nugget - which pays homage to the classic threepenny bit - is rolling off the production line at the rate of 4,000 a minute. It's heralded as "the world’s most secure coin in circulation …
..and why must every announcement from the UK always say "Britain leading the world, world's best, world leading, world's most...."
Often it's clearly not true and often it turns into a fiasco.... why not just say, in this case, "with greatly improved security" or "with a cunning system designed to reduce counterfeiting".
Oh well, let's hope this one turns out OK.
"Given inflation,mightn't the Pound be now worth what thruppence was then?"
Not exactly, but close enough. 80 thruppences = one decimal pound by 1971 decimal conversion. By consumer price indexes there has been roughly 1:40 price increase between 1946 and 2015.
So one 1946 thruppence would be worth half a quid these days . For 1:80 CPI ratio we have to go back to 1916.
Actually the UK mints coins for many other countries, and is actually largest exporter of minted foreign currency in the world - it's been doing it for centuries.
There's a few unusual "accidents" whereby a coin has had two different countries sides when dies have been mixed up (known as a mule), not as common as something like the undated 20p, and much easier to spot than the very rare 1970 halfpenny with the early obverse but usually rare enough to suspect it wasn't completely accidental.
They actually seem to have quietly dropped that name since 2014 - the link from the article redirects to a different page. Can't think why.
The potential security features are intriguing though. Could the coins, rather than being just a lump of metal, actually contain some kind of chip?
Most coins have basic "counterfeit" measures, even the humble £1 coin as it is.
http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-pound-coins
Same as notes, most people know about the ribbon, but ask them about folding up the note and the actual denomination hologram and they will be baffled.
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>Isn't ground breaking technology usually call a shovel?
I'd call it a spade. A shovel is used for, er, shovelling material that is already loose like sand, snow or gravel, whereas a spade will cut into mud, clay, turf and the like.
Harder substrates - rocks - will call for picks, bars, explosives and other handy tools.
Why don't they use it as an excuse to retrofit them all with contactless technology and largely do away with coins? I'm sick and tired of having to have the right cash in hand to park at hospitals or stations...
And given that even 8 year old kids can get their hands on contactless cards, I don't buy that they're not ubiquitous enough. Fitting contactless to most parking meters would probably mean they need to be emptied an order of magnitude less often, which would surely pay for itself anyway.
In fact, if kids could only use contactless cards on vending machines, that would be a bonus - I frittered away so much money on crap from vending machines when I was a kid that my parents were clueless about - if I'd had to use a contactless card which reported back to my parents everything I was spending, I'd have been far healthier and more careful with my money...
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In the meantime, all the parking machines get blocked up with the new coins giving the users the excuse not to pay the truly outrageous fees that many conncils use these days.
and in other news
Businesses in the high st report an upturn in trade that coindsides with the problems with the parking machines.
Cause and effect?
> The old thuppence and the new quid probably do have the same relative buying power ...
You beat me to it, it's probably a sign of the amount of inflation over those years. Thinking back at what I could buy with thruppence, it was less than I can buy with a quid now - so not quite equivalent, but also not that far off ! And at the local flicks, they are showing some retro adverts - the one relevant to this is for Fry's Chocolate Cream which was clearly "1/-" (ie 4 thruppences) on the paper sleeve in the ad, but's its less than 4 quid now.
I was passed a lead pound coin in some change once. It must have been almost two decades ago. Given inflation, the cost of the lead and gold spray paint, it probably doesn't make it profitable to pass these on any more anyway, and if it still is, the people making these are only going to need to buy some putty, and a can of silver paint for spraying the middles before they can start casting good enough fakes of the new ones to pass over to shopkeepers again. The whole counterfeit currency argument sounds suspicious to me...
I have a collection of about 20 of them that I have been given in change over the years. They got better and better as time progressed. The early ones were quite crude in comparison. If you have more than 5 or 6 quid coins in your pocket there is a pretty good chance one might be a fake. They never got the edge quite right.
I mentioned to a friend I had better spend them before they are removed. He said "Oh it's illegal to spend counterfeit money and they aren't worth anything!"
I just looked at him as if to say "Really?!?" and said "Well in my experience they are valid and accepted anywhere!"
I have noticed a lot more shiny new 2015 pound coins in my change. I guess they are clearing all the stock into circulation before they are phased out.
Yup. Until just a few months ago, I was on a leccy meter that demanded pound coins in order to continue to supply me with 'leccy. You'd be startled how many pound coins wouldn't fit into the meter - and got spent at the same bunch of shops that'd given them me in change.
"Anon because youd also be amazed that no one, not even the banks, check for fake pound coins. So just do the maths."
I was using the auto tills in Morrisons once and got a couple of pound coins in change, Then I realised I'd forgotten something and went round again. £1.50 item. Put two pound coins in the machine and it rejected both of them. Three times. I had no other pound coins, they had to be the same ones I'd just got it change from their machine. So went to a human operated till and paid using the same coins there instead.
It *may* be that the machine was faulty, but they did look a slightly odd colour.
On the other hand, small shops will often check bank notes you give them with the ultraviolet pen and light trick but always seem to get upset if you ask them to check the note they are about to hand you.
The old-old 10Fr piece in France in the 80s/early 90s was almost the same shape and weight as a British 2p. The 10Fr was worth about a quid, and gave 5 goes on the arcade machines in the cafe in our campsite until someone noticed when they came to empty the coin hoppers... blatantly unfair to claim it was me, even if I was the only adolescent British male in the campsite...
"The old-old 10Fr piece in France in the 80s/early 90s"
Likewise the old 1DM in Germany (worth about 26p) was the same size and weight as the old shilling when still in circulation as a 5p coin. Many of us took a small coin bag along with us on school exchange visits for the vending machines and pinballs.
Not as good as your 2p/10Fr deal though, but then we didn't get caught :-)
Counterfeit pounds do seem to exist, if the number of coins rejected by machines is any indication. Then again, a lot of 20p coins are rejected, and I really can't believe anyone's faking those.
It's not just the cost of materials that makes it seem improbable. Assume you have £1000 in fake pound coins - how long will it take you to spend them and get the value back from the change? You'd be lucky to make the minimum wage.
"It's not just the cost of materials that makes it seem improbable. Assume you have £1000 in fake pound coins - how long will it take you to spend them and get the value back from the change?"
That's not how it works. Small shops buy bags of fake £1 coins and then use them for change given to customers.
You would be surprised, I used to often come across lead filled snide pound coins and when I lived in France in the eighties, most of the larger coins were snide as well.
The army even paid us in fake 500 franc notes. You would have the surreal experience of receiving your cash, moving to the bank on the next table and having some of the notes rejected. You were told to take them and "D'emmerde toi" or more literally in English to "unshit yourself" . A trip to the local bar / brothel / pizzaria normally cured the problem.
Corsica and Marseiiles in the eighties, what joyous places.
"The problem of counterfeits wasn't exactly helped by the mint introducing almost as many designs as there were coins in circulation"
That's part of the anti-counterfeiting measures, less for us mortals, but often the design on the sides of fakes doesn't match the design on the faces.
Swazi lilangeni are/were produced by the Royal Mint for the Swaziland government and are exactly the same size, weight and colour as the current pound coin; but you get 20+ of them at current exchange rates.
Surprising how many visitors from the southern African countries had/have 'discounted' tube travel or vending machine purchases while in London.
"wazi lilangeni are/were produced by the Royal Mint for the Swaziland government and are exactly the same size, weight and colour as the current pound coin; but you get 20+ of them at current exchange rates."
In Yea Goode Olde Daze of the mid 1980s, Jamaican 10 cent coins (now sadly one with the dodo) were close to the size and weight of American 25 cent coins. As, at the time, the exchange rate was somewhere between five and ten Jamaican dollars to one US, many is the person who took a few Jamaican 10 center coins out on flights heading to Florida or Puerto Rico. After a while the vending machine companies which serviced machines at the airports got wise and rigged their machines to reject the Jamaican coins (and a percentage of quarters, causing much annoyance to those feeding actual American currency into the machines) but those further away didn't go to the trouble.
Meanwhile, Jamaican vending machines happily accepted American coins, much to the amusement of locals in finding yet another way to make profits off of Great White Whales, a.k.a. tourists.
Absolutely; I had experience with procuring some self-service machines a while back and the coin collectors were absolutely standard whether the currency was £ sterling, Azerbaijanian Manats or Flavian pobble beads*. Configuring them to accept the local currency was just a matter of setting the appropriate option (although in this instance it was DIP switches rather than software). The over-riding factor, as I understand it, is the weight of the coin.
*I have yet to encounter a machine that will accept Ningis, though.
if the coins were either round, or constant diameter, like all the current ones, then yes a software update would do it.
The shape of these is the issue, as the diameter changes depending on where you measure it, so it depends on how they are validating the coins and ingesting them. If it's some combination of weight and an optical check, then it might be that easy, but as the shape means these aren't necessarily going to roll, this 'feature' could scupper a lot of systems.
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On the ones I was looking at, there was no "roll" beyond the initial insertion. The coins dropped vertically down a tube which narrowed in one direction but not the other (so the exit was a wide slot), to a sensor box, where they were scanned and weighed. Depending on the outcome, they were then dropped into the return slot, the relevant change tube, or the cash box, again by gravity. There is no more problem with handling these coins than there is handling a 50p or 20p piece (and, for example, distinguishing between a 20p and a 1p piece).
A firmware update would be needed, either by updating from an external source with an "image" for the new coin (optical/magnetic scan characteristics) or by "training" the machines by putting them into a training mode, inserting a number of the new coins to provide a baseline scan result, and telling the machine (by means of a USB keyboard) what the value is and into which change hopper they should be sorted).
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So if I have one of these coins, I'm protected from terrorists? Is this like the tiger prevention rock on the Simpsons?
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It’s just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
Using that old standby "the price of a pint" the value works out as follows:
Value of a threepenny bit in 1971 - 1.25p
Average price of a pint of session bitter in 1971 - 13p
So you would have had to hand over 11 threepenny bits to buy a pint (and got a little change in return)
Handing over £11 in most parts of the UK will buy you three pints of session bitter, so the £1 coin is worth approximately three times as much as the threepenny bit was when it was withdrawn.
"...or about the same in London."
What are you drinking? Brew Dog? :)
I have seen session bitter in London going for up to about £4.50 in pubs (more in "bars" and clubs) but where I live (20 miles outside the City) it's still possible to get a regular or guest session bitter for about £3.40 - £3.80 a pint.
According to the Bank of England, a 12-sided 3d coin at the time of its introduction (1937) would be worth the equivalent of around 77p today; the same coin in 1971 would be worth around 16p in today's money.
My coin sorting/counting machine is probably going to think some of the new £1 coins are 10p's because it sorts them by their diameter, smallest first so a £1 that doesn't fit in the gap will then slide along and fall through the 10p gap, screwing up the counting result.
£1 = 22.5mm diameter
10p = 24.5mm diameter
New £1 coin = 22.5mm to 24.5mm diameter
Time to drop the machine back on eBay before everyone gets wise...
i don't like this new coin, it looks too much like Euro coins, just like the £2 one. whihc I never see much these days.
Saying all of that I still prefer the good old pound note.
Anyway I thought cash was going out and we was entering a cashless society, so another lie then? Governments they are all the same,
Saying all of that I still prefer the good old pound note.
This was withdrawn because it was circulating so much that it had to be replaced too often. This is why coins are used for smaller denominations. I always like the reference to gravity on it (pace "The Belly of an Architect").
Of course, in order to achieve the apparent aim of double-digit inflation, it's only a matter of time before cash is replaced by some form of digital currency which, like air miles, can be devalued at whim.
i know why the pound note was withdrawn, I am surprised that the 5 pound note is still here for the very same reason, but then it will soon by made from plastic not paper.
Be a few years before cash is replaced, by that time I doubt I will be worrying about it, for the last 40 years or more we have been told that cash will vanish and yet it is still here.
As has the UK with the £2 coin since 1998.
Edge lettering was introduced in 1983 on the £1 coin.
Bi-Metal coins go back to Roman times
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