And, given the claim "built in technology for high speed authentication and verification everywhere from ATMs to vending machines and point-of-sale."*, they will have to go to extraordinary measures to prevent the secret from being leaked.
The skeptic in me thinks the only real way to prevent fake coins (or bank notes) from entering circulation is to make production more expensive than their nominal value (that approach is economically valuable because one could see the loss of value of a coin when recycled as a tax on each transaction. Let's say a one pound coin costs 1.5 pounds to make, with half a pound of raw materials, so that 1 pound is lost over its lifetime. In 30 years, that coin may change hands, 5000 times, so that the loss per transaction is .02 cents)
You could make it expensive to make a coin by putting more than the nominal value worth of raw material in each coin, but that, obviously, is a bad idea for a different reason: people would recycle the money.
So, a solution must be sought in making it hard to make coins. Any complicated technology will work.
The mentioned electroplating method might be such a technology. I think it might even be possible to write a pattern over the surface of the coin by using techniques similar to those used in chip making. Unbeatable? No, but it might drive the cost of counterfeiting a coin up enough to kill the market, that is, until somebody figures out a cheap way to replicate the technology, or until somebody finds a just good enough approximate technology that beats the scanners.
The skeptic in me thinks the only real way to prevent fake coins (or bank notes) from entering circulation is to make production more expensive than their nominal value (that approach is economically valuable because one could see the loss of value of a coin when recycled as a tax on each transaction. Let's say a one pound coin costs 1.5 pounds to make, with half a pound of raw materials, so that 1 pound is lost over its lifetime. In 30 years, that coin may change hands, 5000 times, so that the loss per transaction is .02 cents)
You could make it expensive to make a coin by putting more than the nominal value worth of raw material in each coin, but that, obviously, is a bad idea for a different reason: people would recycle the money.
So, a solution must be sought in making it hard to make coins. Any complicated technology will work.
The mentioned electroplating method might be such a technology. I think it might even be possible to write a pattern over the surface of the coin by using techniques similar to those used in chip making. Unbeatable? No, but it might drive the cost of counterfeiting a coin up enough to kill the market, that is, until somebody figures out a cheap way to replicate the technology, or until somebody finds a just good enough approximate technology that beats the scanners.