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[–] 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Bi-metallic design is mainly used to make the coins harder to counterfeit, to make it more expensive to counterfeit than the coin's value

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    To elaborate, it's really easy to forge "regular" coins and really attractive to forge high value coins.

    For example, the 1 British Pound coin was, before the redesign, widely forged:

    As of March 2014 there were an estimated 1,553 million of the original nickel-brass coins in circulation,[6] of which the Royal Mint estimated in 2014 that just over 3% were counterfeit.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_coin

    (Note for any languages that use the comma as a decimal separator: 1,553 million is referring to 1.5 billion)

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