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Comment by wcfields | Hacker News Reader

When exchanging money at a currency exchange kiosk in Koa Lanta Thailand they denied a few of my $20 due to almost unnoticeable rips, the kind that go no further than the outside border.

They were quite particular on the "quality" of the bills, with another older bill being in too worse of condition for them to purchase.

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Many countries are particular about currency being pristine. I remember in Austria it used to be forbidden even to fold their currency (old currency; not Euros). Had to be kept in a wallet; the wallet had to be large enough to hold the larger bills (different bills had different sizes!)

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/austria-and-old-banknotes-...

Yup different bill sizes is a very simple security feature to prevent bleaching a bill and printing a higher denomination on it. This works because the higher the value the bigger the bill and forging the paper itself is hard.

Seems like it would also be a nice feature for the visually impaired.

On modern colour notes one conventional way to help the visually impaired is to make the note have a distinctive colour theme. Most countries do this, and I believe the latest US notes finally have at least subtle coloured elements.

[Gets out British "paper" money that hasn't been touched since the lockdown started months ago because who pays cash now?]

As well as being different sizes, my £10 notes are orange, while the £20 is purple. The tenners have this big orange splodge that's actually a book with the initials JA (Jane Austen) and the twenty has a purple splodge whose meaning might be obvious to me if I liked art enough (relating to Turner, a famous British painter).

Comparing sizes is hard to do quickly, whereas you can see instantly if the money you're trying to pay with or receiving in change is the wrong colour.

"whereas you can see instantly if the money you're trying to pay with or receiving in change is the wrong colour."

Now try that when you're blind.

The new polymer notes do include considerations for the vision-impaired.

Check out the "tactile feature" section on the various banknotes at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/current-banknotes

While we don't use tactile features in Australia, similar consultation went into the design of our banknotes: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/mar/1.html

In australia the new bills do have tactile dots to distinguish them for people living with blindness. About halfway along the bottom of the new 5 you can feel it.

The vast majority of visually impaired people are not literally blind and that's really important when designing for the general population. If you force everybody whose sight has deteriorated to the point where they can't read text to resort to feeling note sizes you're missing a vast middle ground of people who'd have been served by just choosing a different colour for each denomination.

Isn't the rule in the US that any bill that's more than 50% there can be exchanged for a new one? Obviously it has to be that way to avoid people ripping their money in two.

Acceptable damage is just 33% actually.

Same here, when paying with USD in San Jose C.R. I had a food stand reject the first few $20s I tried because they were not in good enough condition. Interesting to see this in action.

...how much does a meal from a food stand in Costa Rica cost?? A $20 seems like spectacular overkill.

Costa Rica is not a "cheap" country by any means. Even in a "soda", which is about as cheap as you can get, a meal will be on the order of $7 per person. What the OP is probably saying is that he tried to pay with a $20 bill and would have got change, but the person wouldn't take it, not that the meal was $20.

When I go I hardly ever exchange money, I just use USD and credit cards with no foreign transaction fees (AMEX mostly). I get change in colones and will use that as I can (entrance to beach, small transactions, etc.), but in general everybody takes USD. You just need to be aware of the fact that you'll probably get a bit screwed over in the exchange rate at smaller shops/individuals. It's helpful to know what the rate is and negotiate a bit. Most true restaurants/shops will use whatever the bank rate is that day because it'll be in a POS system, but the farther out you go from the big cities the more likely you'll hit mom and pop stores that randomly choose some rate. If paying by credit card, always make sure they do it in local currency.

Source: Me, I have a house there and spend a lot of time there every year.

I think it was between $2-6 usd but I literally just landed and was grabbing a bite to eat at a small place at maybe 1-2am.

Once in India I took a taxi to the train station. I paid the driver and went inside to catch my train.

Ten minutes later while waiting in the station, the cab driver found me and made me replace a bill that he claimed I had given him that had a hole in it. He considered it worthless. Relatedly, it seems that stapling money is a pretty common way to organize bills there. I'm not sure how the two facts coincide.

Stapling was indeed how bundles of currency notes were kept together in Indian banks back in the day. It went out of vogue sometime in the late '90s if memory serves.

Edit: removed confusing reference to ATMs.

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