Researching the Ft. Knox thread I saw these reports. They were mostly on pages that were linked to precious metal marketing. There may have been something from the ‘legitimate press’, but nothing with a source, or details. As Chronos noted, both lead and people are dense enough to make the scam work. The gold coin sellers will want devices like this though. They’ll offer a free one with the first purchase of $10000 or more. Their machines will always read their coins as pure gold. Somehow other coins will always be a little off, so you’ll only buy from them to be safe.
stellar. So go teach them the smarter way of doing what they want to do and make some money in the process.
It did not occur to Henry Ford’s customers that they needed a car rather than the “faster horses” either. That didn’t stop him from teaching them the right way.
ok, makes sense. Well, in every market there ought to be space both for scamsters and for honest merchants. And if the honest merchant does a good job branding his wares and making sure that there are lots of coins for calibration floating around, he will have his marketshare regardless of what the slimebags do.
OTOH this could also be a nice way to create new products in the gold space per se. Let’s say I want to get some markup on retail gold sales, just like all the established firms are doing. So, I produce this wonderful decently priced gadget and convince everybody (including MIT Department of Material Science) that it is fair and correct. Then all of a sudden it turns out that the coins best suited for measurement are the coins I am selling, for purely geometric reasons. So I end up first on the market with coins of that shape and sell some, before the competition either makes a better gadget that works with all shapes or else copies my shape. And maybe the local jeweler starts offering the “reshape your gold into the verifiable standard form for just $50” service for people who have already bought the gold and are keeping it for long term.
The above notwithstanding, if the perfect gadget can be produced that works equally well with all reasonable shapes, then to hell with new gold products. Let’s just sell it to the masses yearning to have some security against the counterfeiting bastards over the long haul.
**code_grey **- You could simply take the industrial device, combine the scanner with a scale, change the readout to give the value in currency of the gold, put it in a package that would look good in a gold coin seller’s outlet, and make a pretty penny selling it to them. No special size or shapes needed. If it’s packaged and marketed well, the first entrant into the market will do well. Re: your manufacturing thread, this is something that can be made and sold in small quantities at a good profit margin.