Weren't there supposed to be new security features in the 2021 Eagles?

Or anything else they include that happens to go up a lot. If it goes up a bunch they just don't include it in their calculations. Their way of keeping inflation low.

 

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I'm trapped in California for the time being, so I have to mentally correct for that skew. Everything is needlessly inflated here, certainly gasoline, housing, etc. because of pervasive and relentless government coercion of commerce and economic matters. I assumed it was much better elsewhere, and when I look up average gasoline prices by state I always see everyone else having much cheaper gas, especially Texas.

 

That's not how security features work. They have to be known to be useful. You can't authenticate a coin if you can't observe the security features... If they're invisible, they have definitely not served their purpose – they'd be useless in that case, and the mint would be upbraided for its stupidity, by Congress, the media, the public, etc.

The goal is to have security features that can be easily used to authenticate, but are not easy to forge. It's not that hard, since the technology used to authenticate can be very different from the technology used to manufacture or forge. There's probably a fruitful body of research possible here to formalize the theoretical foundations of this kind of physical security, the nature of the technology split between authentication and manufacturing, etc. I wonder if anyone has done this.

This is why the US Currency Education Program exists, where they lay out all the security features of US banknotes, up close and interactively on their website: https://www.uscurrency.gov/denominations/20
And why the Aussie and Swiss central banks have released smartphone apps to help people authenticate their banknotes. Security features have to be publicly known. One of the many things that makes US banknotes terrible are the chaotic and obscure security features that vary from one denomination to the next. Hardly anyone knows what the security features are for any denomination, or looks for them, which makes them useless.

It's structurally similar to encryption and hashing, where you have data or messages that can be easily decrypted with the key, but cannot generally be decrypted without the key, and where the original message cannot be retrieved from the hash output. Here it's more about being able to use cheap optical tools to authenticate, but, needing much more expensive tooling to manufacture coins with those optical effects, or needing tooling that may not be available at all.

 

In April 2020, gas in Texas was at $1.50. I spent my Trump check on a down payment on a Corolla Hybrid that was $5K off list because of cheap gas prices. They are now hovering at the $3 mark in 18 months.

I've seen the cycle before and the future is bleak. But at least I have a gas mizer.

Anyway, I forget which forum I'm on and don't want to get kicked off AGAIN.

So let's move on.

 

Technology to replicate visible security features through use of new transfer die technology will render these useless. It's easier to fake a new coin than an old one since they all look fake anyway.

 

That's kind of an either/or thing isn't it?

 

Oh kripes.........I'd rather watch Dexter and Paint drying........