Humans have been successfully minting coins for around 3,000 years. It’s not exactly a mystifying dark art.

Scores of defective Rio Olympic medals fall apart

The article is a little lean on details, but it seems that a bunch of Rio medals (6 or 7 percent, mainly silver medals) are having trouble with their “coverings” and are “flaking apart.”  This is pretty vague, but what it sounds like to me is that the medals were actually made out of some base metal and then plated in silver. Lame.

I honestly don’t have a good explanation why for something like the Friggen’ Olympics the silver medals would be made out of anything but pure silver. It’s not like silver is *that* expensive.