UK New Pound Coin Designed To Combat Counterfeiting

I don't know how they can encapsulate Britishness in one design. Unless they pick something obvious like the royal crest or Britannia.

How does that affect the estimated 3% fake coins in circulation?
As long as you can fake one of the older designs, what does a new coin matter?

Yeah, making designs with "britishness" in one design is almost impossible. I have a few things, but there isn't much to go on.

Thanks for the link On reading the document it occured to me that this was exacly what I suspected - the inner core of the coin will be a cheap nickel plated metal , typical of the Gvt they are in favour of the cheapest option I hope they go for a non ferrous metal instead because if they go for steel I can predict that counterfeiters will try to make steel fakes ..... havent they learned from the current generation of pound coins & the associated fakes ? if you make them from cheap metals then are easier and cheaper to fake which is why we are seeing good quality fakes that look almost if not as good as the metal alloy the Gvt uses ... Oh dear oh dear

They are still falling over themselves glossing over the fact that it is likely to cost £100m-200m (based on http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive...ew-coin-roll ) for the sake of £2m in fakes having to be withdrawn every year, which is hardly a credible return on investment. I suppose the costs to the police and criminal justice system of forgery will go down as fewer people will attempt it.

The security "iSIS" (unfortunate acronym) "is not a surface coating" and coins will have "multiple levels of banknote-strength security built in" (http://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/ne...1-pound-coin ). This is most probably electrically resistive foil in the core sandwich.

Only cash handling centres will have iSIS detectors initially. The consultation document notes: "1.17 It is expected that the new technology would be adopted first at cash processing centres, although there would be scope for rollout throughout the entire cash cycle, including at the vending stage. This knowledge would serve as a deterrent to potential counterfeiters" (my emphasis).

So it would cost another small fortune to enable consumer cash machines to detect iSIS. And how much of a deterrent would that really be? I don't think any fake £1 series has consistently got the weight right even (see http://ukfakeanderrorcoins.50webs.com/POUNDS.HTML ), is there one?

I guess it's better to start things rolling, make it harder to make coins the right shape (because all the forgers machines will need to be adapted, I guess, I have no idea how they do it anyway) and then in 10 years time these things will exist, the other coins can then be put on a system and well, by then the forgers will have figured that one out, and the game continues.

But hey, we get a new coin, great!

Thanks moralclimate for the info on iSIS (This website is now being monitored). This is quite a clever advance in validating a coin.