Not Brexit, just a hard fork.

Aye. We should just go back to using the Royal Mail.

To be honest, they have been fighting encryption since the 30's.

So has the US:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSA...

> * 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.

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.

> So you never know - but how would that work inside a metal coin?

That's a good point, I completely oversaw that.

Supposedly the super secret bonus prize is embedded luminescent particles[1], if you fancy reading about what that is

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US20110305919

I'm assuming it has an NFC tag or something similar... Can't wait to cut one open and look. :)

Yea, when I heard that, I immediately wondered if there was a tracking _feature_ in the coin.

Well people had been stating on this thread that if that was the hidden feature, it'd not be "hidden" for long as anyone can get and cut open a coin to see if there's anything like that inside.

Australian (NSW) drivers licenses actually have magnetic strips in them that cause interesting results in some credit card machines.

Interesting, I wonder if it's like the EMV credit cards. I wonder if this stuff is standardized, are the ID and credit card chips the same? Having the same readers would be useful, especially if all countries started doing that. Would be a little insane to have like a tower of card readers at like airports. "Oh your from America use the one in the middle" "Your from Canada use the one at the bottom."

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I always thought paper signing was a bit outdated, especially since schools don't teach cursive really.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.

They can, depending on how they work. If the values are being fetched from a secure chip, however, I believe it's not as easy. And as I said, even if it is copied, unless it is spent VERY carefully, it can be spotted and marked as copied.

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...

Not necessarily -

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...

It seems that cost-to-produce vs. face-value isn't a terribly important ratio. The US has continued making pennies for a lot longer than necessary, though it seems to cost ~1.5c to make them.

The 1 kurus was stopped being manufactured (still have one though: https://s.ave.zone/969.JPG )

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.

Odds are increased that Scotland will eventually go for independence. Northern Ireland is closer than ever to a Republican majority in Stormont and speculations are on the rise that a border poll might be on the table in the near future (as in within not too many years; it will still take time) and even some unionists appears to accept that there is a greater than ever chance of a unified Ireland. More importantly: at least some unionists appears more accepting of that possibility, as they see Brexit as yet another example of Norther Irelands concerns being ignored - how the negotiations unfolds will potentially have a dramatic effect on the Northern Ireland issue as a result.

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.