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Comment by taway_1212 | Hacker News Reader

I was cheated in the most crude way in London once - gentlemen selling African street food gave me (in my change, amongst other coins) a coin that looks and feels very much like a British pound, but is Ugandian (IIRC) and has some kind of ostrich-like bird's head on it instead of the Queen's.

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That could have been a mistake. Some coins from New Zealand, for example, look a lot like British currency.

Likewise for the euro: the Thailand 10 baht coin (worth about 27 cents) is quite similar to 2 euro coin, similar enough that you actually have to look carefully to notice.

Each euro country mints their own coins with different insignia, so people are used to 2 euro coins that what whatever figurehead.

That always piqued my interest as to how more easier Euro coins were to counterfeit given the numerous variations on coinheads.

Yes, compared to most of the previous national currencies; in the U.S. there also seem to be a number of variations of coin heads (for quarters at least). The coins in U.S. are smaller value so it does not matter as much.

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 got a NZ$1 in my change the other day. Didn't bat an eyelid. Time for a trip to NZ I guess

In a similar fashion, here in New Zealand, I've been using 5 Piso coins from the Philippines instead of $2 coins for my washing recently.

In the US, it's reasonably common to get Canadian pennies for US pennies.

You get NZ 20c coins in place of Australian ones a fair bit.

I once got a Swazi Lilangeni coin [1] in change from a machine at Paddington station. Could it have been one of those? As an entirely above board numismatic dealer selling them in bulk [2] says:

"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...

It happens a lot around here (in New York, a few hours from the Canadian border) with Canadian coins.

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.

I find that in cities near the border, Canadian and US coins are interchangeable and usually accepted at par. In Toronto there are a fair amount of US coins in circulation, and I've never had an issue using them here.

Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.

I just got back from Whistler BC. Because Vancouver tends to take USD, and Whistler is not far (and is even more heavily touristed by % than Vancouver, I'm sure), I figured we'd have no problems with USD.

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.

The toll both machines don't accept them even though the coins are superficially quite similar.

Where I grew up, in MA, canadian coins were accepted, generally.

I'm in a city now and I've had people refuse to accept 2 dollar bills (which are rare, though absolutely legal tender).

Steve Wozniak's hilarious book of perforated $2 bills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM

You can buy it here: http://www.moneypads.com/products.html

I've done it both ways with Korean and Japanese coins because they look nearly identical, I assume due to the colonial past. The values differ by 10x.

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