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Comment by ijafri | Hacker News Reader

Others do, I am talking on Govt level and such counterfeit currency according to my assessment would be hard to detect, given the 'press and printing' technology Govts especially Russians and Chinese may have.

Ok. If they already did or are doing it, then won't it hit US economy really hard or even make the paper currency irrelevant to begin with?

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It's simpler than that. Given that the idiots running the Federal Reserve for the past 10+ years have no plan to obsolete even the oldest notes, all an enemy has to attack are the simplest notes (pre-modern anti-counterfeit techniques).

It beats declaring bills in circulation obsolete with 24 hours notice, like India did with the INR500 and INR1000 notes last fall. It's months later, and you'll regularly encounter ATMs with no bills available; and retail establishments which won't break the new INR500 and INR2000 notes which are the ones you will get if you find a stocked ATM. (INR100 ~= USD1.50, or 5 1L bottles of drinking water, or an entree at a decent restaurant that doesn't cater to tourists)

source: I just returned from a vacation in India :)

Anyway, how do you think the US should deal with old notes in circulation, any suggestions or examples from other countries doing it in a sane way? Perhaps the Euro currency transition could be a model?

Here in the EU they seamlessly update bills. So far they've updated 5, 10, and 20€, with the 50€ following suit: http://www.new-euro-banknotes.eu/

I see that "The €20 banknotes of the first series will remain legal tender and continue to circulate alongside the new notes, but they will be gradually withdrawn from circulation." http://www.new-euro-banknotes.eu/News-Events/PRESS-RELEASES-...

If I understand correctly, this is very much like the situation in the US, where there is no specific date on which the old bills change from being currency to being non-currency, which is what DrScump is getting at: "all an enemy has to attack are the simplest notes" (except for the way that it would be REAL WEIRD to show up somewhere with a big stack of 100s that ALL happened to be series 1988 bills, i.e., some of the last ones from before the metallic strip and microprinting were added. "oh yeah we found this in grampa's attic when he died, donchano")

Well, I can say from daily use that it's increasingly rare to see "old" 5 or 10€ bills, banks are quite diligent in retiring money! So as you say pretty much anyone you would try to pay with an stack of "old" money would be quite suspicious. Although in our case even the "old" ones are pretty "new" compared to the old US ones.

.. though apparently some banks will sometimes turn down these older notes now, hah. http://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=136439 (edited to clarify: reportedly, in this case, a European bank turned down pre-1990 USD$100 bills because they did not have post-1990 security features; later an American bank accepted them)

I was limiting my scope to simple retirement and replacement for older notes that are less counterfeiting-hardened.

Removing overall currency availability is something else altogether (and IMHO indicative of planned government suppression).

I'm not familiar with the EU strategy (another subthread addresses this), but what I'd seek is the removal-by-attrition of vulnerable notes coupled with a hard "expiration date", maybe 2 years or so after passage.

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