Okay, I'm blind and I can promise you that it's only in the last few years the government has given a damn about us being able to identify currency.

And while the pound coin itself may be new, so is the decimalised pounds sterling system, and it is entirely plausible it is still a leftover design feature from previous coinage. I'm sure they really didn't give a rat's arse about blind people in the 50's.

As far as I've seen old coins (pre decimal) used to smooth edged. The pound coin came in about 15 years after decimal. The main blind friendly feature that Britain has had for a long while is notes of different values being different sizes. The additional things like raised values to allow easy id are very new I have to admit.

Raised values are somehting I haven't noticed. They would do sod all, too fine to feel accurately. Raised print is *not* effective.

The purpose of milling was to prevent shaving, which drastically debased precious metal coins. It wasn't that the coins were worth less than their face value. Rather, the coin's weight should have been equal to its face value, but it was not. In this case coins were simply precious metals with intrinsic value based on weight and purity rather than promissory instruments.
One of the big reasons for the adoption of the pound sterling standard and the Royal Mint's subsequent monopoly was the debasement of currency by private mints and by the Royal Mint under the command of previous English monarchs.
It is only later that the Royal Mint began debasing pound sterling coins and eventually stopped issuing precious metal coins altogether.

The use of promissory instruments has the advantage that they cannot be debased by private individuals because their intrinsic value is tied to the issuing institution's holdings rather than to the material that the instrument is made of.

The other thing about money is, it has to be worth exactly as much or more than the paper that it's printed on (or more than the metal it's stamped in). IIRC, that's why they changed the US penny from solid copper to copper-plated (I don't remember, zinc core?). The value of the copper was exceeding $0.01. That is to say, you could go to the bank and get $100 worth of pennies, then go to the scrap yard and sell it for $110 worth of scrap copper.
Bad for economy.

Same happened in Britain with our coppers.

Just for the record I'm looking at atenner now and in the left hand corner,on the queen's side the re is the number ten embossed in ridges, it has a definate different feel to the paper around it. I guess me saying the queen side is not that useful to bland person though, my apologies unsure of how describe it.

In any case while it may be raised it does nothing to someone with no useful sight.

However I recall seeing the notes while my sight was going down and the denomination was printed far more clearly.

Examples though, the letters of the alphabet are not readable by touch effectively if raised. There is an alternative set of symbols called "moon" which solves this. The A loses the cross bar, the B becomes a reflected j without the dot, the C is similar but has less curve at the tips, a D is a reflection of the C, and the E is an inverted capital L and so on.

While I'm more sighted than I suspect cx2 currently is, I am partially sighted, and speak from the American side of the issue...

The raised numbers, Ophis, are an anti-counterfeiting measure.

cx2: Moon was rejected in favor of Braille for very, very good reasons. (Among them being, try being dyslexic and reading Moon?) However, that is a horribly off-topic debate.

So if i have a newyen certified credstick, will it be less traceable if I convert it to a different currency before I deposit the funds in my account?

Re tech for the blind:
Sent you a PM, don't want to derail this.

Re moon:
It has limited use here in the UK especially in cases like me, my sight loss was in my mid to late teens and even now at 22 I still haven't found anywhere I can learn Braille. It was a quick and easy to learn method, certainly useful for people like me who were used to reading print and suddenly need tactile labelling. The idea was also to get me used to reading through my fingers. But again I don't want to derail this, feel free to PM me if you wanted a discussion on the merits of moon though I don't think there's much to say.

Re currency changes:
Interesting concept. It could certainly extend the data trail, assuming there is one.

CX2: If you could PM what you sent to lovesmasher, I'd appreciate it: There's a convo thread here, definitely.

I'll PM re moon.

All I basically said in the PM was it depends whether he meant general tech, or stuff like the camera wired up to the visual cortex and that there is controversy regarding whether a lot of blind people would go for a technology that would restore sight. I've heard concerns that governments would cut benefits for blind people who refused the treatments or whatever you would call them.

I think the 'controversy' aspect is overrated re tech that restores sight. In the US, at least, the overwhelming proportion of the blind are elderly; if the government were to pay the bills, I doubt many would not go for it.

Blind from birth or young age is an open question, but the number of people in that situation is minimal, and declining over time. Also, there isn't so much of a "blind culture" as there is a deaf culture, so there isn't the likelihood of the same reaction that cochlear implants have/had among the deaf.

Also, lovesmasher, the tech is a *lot* less useful at the moment than in the case of cochlear implants. You'll get "vision", but it's hardly functional. Certainly, you couldn't drive, read, etc. with it.

Which is in many cases the issue. Cochlear implants *do* restore, AFAIK, functional levels of hearing. Therefore, someone who has been deaf can become hearing again. Disability in that case is not the irreversible, life-changing thing it is for other disabilities and for those that can't take advantage of the technology.

That reduces a lot of the motivation for people to get involved with the deaf culture, a lot of the reason for people to accept and come to terms with being disabled (why should they when it can be reversed?) and it reduces the number of people with hearing impairments significantly; this is a threat to the organizations "representing" the deaf and to a lot of the insitutions of the deaf, which currently are facing a bit of a crisis as to how deaf is "deaf enough". (Hi, Gallaudet!)

True enough, perhaps I phrased it wrong. It's more a potential controversy, with some mild speculative concern.

And there is more issues than simply "fixing" someone's eye. My eyes are utterly intact, something I am grateful for since it helps when dealing with other people (I don't look unusual, except when my eyes occasionally point slightly different directions). On the other hand my optic nerves are completely frazzled.

Well, yeah. Retinal detachment (thanks to Retinopathy of Prematurity in my case; My optic nerves are fine, so I forget about that.

However, one would think that in any development of methods, they'll look too for ways to repair the optic nerve.

Until, finally, we get cybereyes.
Edit:F3.0 nsfw pic on link, look it up yourselves on wiki if ya' like.

thanks for the shitty link. nsfw

the wiki article is correct, but there's a pic attached at the top that would get me fired if my SUP saw it.

*tries opening the page with Internet Explorer*
Holy hell! That doesn't happen when I open it in Firefox!!!!!
Yikes!

There is? Maybe Firefox is editing it out in my browser, because I just don't see it.

[edit] Yep!

luckily for me its a really big image and I was able to close the window before the uh, bulk of it downloaded.

Apparently it has been defaced by an idiot who doesn't know how to write proper code. The great think about IE is that it displays broken code as good as, if not beter than, its display of properly formated code.

And it has been fixed.

Well, as a person who, in his early teens was told that the rate his vision was declining predicted legal blindness by 40, I've always been interested in ways to compensate. As a person who has been a geek since about the same time, I've also been interested in cybernetics. Since I also work with people with muscular control disorders, I can do a bunch of internet research while at work without getting the stinkeye.

If any of you folks with sensory impairments have interest in discussing future tech regarding the issue with sci-fi writers and whatnot, I reccomend hitting up WisCon in Madison Wisconsin next year, last year's panel was pretty cool and I got to take a look at a choclear implant up close while getting an explanation of the sciencing it does.

My apologies...I typed the link from memory, did *not* check for vandalism.

No sweat err.... I mean... null sheen .. yeah,.. that's it!