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Comment by katerberg | Hacker News Reader

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?

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).

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.

> 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.

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! :)

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.

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

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.

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