Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonderous | Hacker News Reader

How the "hidden high security feature"* in the new £1 coin works is covered here:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/53673/how-does-...

* Royal Mint’s new anti-counterfeiting technology, which can be authenticated by high-speed automated detection, was called Integrated Secure Identification Systems (ISIS) - but for obvious reasons, they've stopped using that name.

View on HN

tl;dr:

special uv-altering particles in coating allows using a light to detect counterfeit; basic and high end scanners avail. for detection.

reading between lines:

sounds like the 'basic scanning' can be used e.g. for consumer/POS equipment to keep out the unsophisticated counterfeitters (e.g. coating is/is not present, perhaps some 'watermark' in the coating), and the 'sophisticated scanning' could potentially identify serial numbers/coin hash values in the light patterns or other means so that individual coins could be tracked, allowing discovery of more sophisticated attackers once these coins pass through banks or similar.

Erm.

If your assumption is correct, it's the _legit_ coins that could be tracked, not the counterfeit ones. Which, incidentally, makes this feature much more interesting.

Could be that it isn't a signature that is intentionally generated. It could just be based on how the light scatters, which is likely to be unique per coin. Like a fingerprint.

  "Approximately one in thirty £1 coins in circulation is a counterfeit"

  "16 October 2017 onwards - demonetisation - you are under no
  obligation to accept the round £1 coin from your customers"

This is the big deal for users of the current pound coins. Somebody is going to get stuck with a lot of irredeemable £1 counterfeit coins.

Musical chairs, in coins.

It is my understanding that the banks will still accept them but as a retailer you no longer have to.

i think the banks will not have to accept counterfeit coins. So 1/30th of the coins in circulation will be urgently shunned by everyone with the capacity to notice them.

So this means every coin in circulation would be uniquely identifiable through a unique random pattern of embedded luminescent particles.

K, damn.

Per the article, one in thirty of these coins are counterfeit.

Just adding another source:

> The Royal Mint regularly conducts surveys to estimate the level of counterfeit £1 coins in the UK. A survey undertaken in May 2015 found that the rate of counterfeit UK £1 coins in circulation at the time was 2.55%, compared to 3.03% in May 2014.

http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-p...

This link first loaded the page, then unloaded it and put me in a queue! I was told how many people were ahead of me and an estimate on when I would get to read the page, complete with elevator music. Why would anyone even make that?

This is the most British thing I have seen in a while.

It's hilarious. ;-)

After reading your comment I immediately tried to visit the page and was very disappointed to see that the content was now being displayed directly. But just as I was about to close the tab I was placed in the queue! Hooray! :)

> Why would anyone even make that?

Right? I thought the exact same thing. Seems like the time and effort and expense it takes to build a queueing system could be put into building a site that could handle infrequent heavy loads.

If you're using something like an F5 for your load balancer you can implement the queue there. Cheaper than provisioning hardware for occasional peaks and F5s can serve a lot of traffic.

The British love a good queue.

You're not wrong - and tutting, you have to tut. In Honkers people queue for buses but then when the bus doors actually open it's every umbrella-fella for himself. A sort of Sino-British now you queue, now you don't. Not much fun if you're 6'5" and at the front of the scrum though. Well they used to anyway.

I've never ever seen anything like this. It would appear that this functionality has been there for a while and was also triggered on the Queen's birthday[0]

[0] http://metro.co.uk/2016/04/13/how-very-english-visitors-to-t...

Similar queuing mechanisms are used on things like Ticketmaster which experience extreme demand peaks when high-demand tickets go on sale.

Presumably the Royal Mint experience similar demand peaks occasionally when limited-release collectable coins go on sale?

Yeah, but, this displayed the article that I wanted to read, then redirected me to a queue system, now i'll eventually go back to the actual page. Its causing more work for the system. The ticketmaster queues block a heavyweight process (ticket search), not simple page displays.

This is the equivalent of ticketmaster not letting you see pages with lists of upcoming performances without waiting in a queue.

Exactly! The redirection to the queue happens after the page loads. Why would you ever want to build this feature? :)

I can't say for certain about the Royal Mint, but the US mint certainly does experience such a load pattern. It responds by either crashing or failing to load, unfortunately. A lightweight order-taking site that pushes orders to a queue for fulfillment would be a massive improvement over the strategy they actually choose (per-household quantity limits).

Occasionally you do get a pound coin that is slightly heavy. I guess those are the counterfeit ones. Bit hard for the layman to tell.

It's not too difficult for most of them.

Drop it edgeways on the table. Most counterfeit ones don't give the proper 'clunk', maybe the material isn't right.

Or, the colour or alignment would be bad, or they'd appear more worn than normal.

I don't think the 1/30 fakes are evenly spread around the country. When I lived in London, they were much more common than that.

I remember getting a counterfeit bi-metallic 10 Franc coin. I was excited I had a "defective" one where the center was falling out, until it was pointed out to me this meant it was fake.

Depends how heavy. Modern circulation coins, not having any precious metal content anymore, tend to have fairly loose manufacturing tolerances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com