Bank of Canada: The New $100 Note | Hacker News Reader

Bank of Canada: The New $100 Note

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131 pointszoowar110 comments

Odd video, but since we're on the topic...

After a trip to the US last year it was easy to see the US currency is awful. Coming from Aus where we have polymer banknotes, the paper was just terrible, and I wondered why they hadn't changed it yet.

And don't get me started on having $1 notes and 1c coins. Immediately found them (the coins at least) entirely pointless and just ignored them.

US paper currency is made up of 75% cotton and 25% linen. Source: http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/cotton-currency.cfm

Ok.. you know what I mean :P It's more the fact that US notes tear extremely easily whereas polymer notes... you have to be pretty determined to damage one without scissors.

I actually really like US currency. Most other currencies I've handled seem to be almost entirely paper, too large, occasionally different sizes... I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet, and the fabric in the bill seems to improve durability and lend a nicer texture.

Other currency just feels... cheap. No offense.

Agreed on pennies though. They had their place back when they were useful, but they are almost pointless now.

The different sizes, I'm not entirely sure but I thought they were for blind people... somehow. Or I might be making that up.

This from Wikipedia also explains my dislike for $1:

    Approximately 42% of all U.S. currency produced in 2009 were one-dollar bills.

The different sizes make it possible to select a given denomination without either doing an O(n) lookup, or having to keep your wallet sorted.

What sort of barbarian programmer doesn't sort his bills? Unthinkable.

Having different sized bills is kind of like keeping your money in a visual/tactile hash-table. An array is the wrong data structure for your wallet!

The kind that profiles. The common case to optimize for may be insertion (especially with US $1 notes) rather than withdrawl. Semi-sorting by putting all change at the front while withdrawing for payment from the large bills at the rear is a decent tradeoff.

That's what I've found myself having to do. I've never had to have a sorting strategy before living in the US. The lack of distinction between notes is frustrating. I love it when Americans tell me they have colored notes too.

I still can't understand the preference for one dollar notes. Whenever I use a washing or vending machine I need to flatten out and align a dollar bill or insert dozens of quarters. Every few weeks I have to buy a couple of rolls of quarters from the bank. I paid a cashier with dollar coins yesterday and she did a double take and inspected each coin.

You actually got me to realize how natural it is for me to sort my bank notes. I also put older notes on the top of the stack so that they get out of it first.

I can't be bothered to manually sort something. Tell me when I can just call wallet.sort().

That is correct. Differently sized bills enable blind users to differentiate them without having to rely upon the honesty of a cashier or a complicated filing scheme (and, additionally, allow sighted people to more-easily differentiate denominations in low-light conditions).

Edit: specifically, I learned about this from Gordon Legge[1], the chair of the psychology department at the University of Minnesota when I took a graduate level course on human-machine interaction from him back in 2002 or 2003. I lucked out and had a very forward-thinking advisor in the Computer Science department who let me apply Professor Legge's class to my Senior year electives ;)

[1] see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Legge and http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/legge/ for more on him.

My grandfather was blind and had to resort to his family telling him what the denominations were beforehand and then he folded the bills into different sizes. Apparently one day a cashier attempted to scam him by claiming the bill he gave was too small. Different sized bills would be helpful in that situation.

Different-sized notes also defeat counterfeiters who bleach smaller denominations and print a higher one.

I usually have a bunch of $1 bills in my wallet. I'm not sure I'd want $1 coins, given that they're heavier than a paper bill and are more likely to get lost.

Not at all. It's great, actually. My toonies, loonies, quarters, etc go in my change jar. My wallet is for bills (>= $5). I never carry change with me, and so don't have to worry about the hassle, and when I run out of money I have easily $50 in my change jar, which is enough for a frugal grocery trip. The proliferation of self-checkout stands also makes paying for $50 worth of groceries in coins slightly less embarrassing.

The old Canadian bills already had a braille-like pattern of raised dots that allow blind people to identify denominations without assistance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_currency_tactile_featu...

Hopefully the new bills will retain this feature.

As for the good ol' American green-back. Americans are excessively conservative when it comes to their currency. Just look at how long it took them to add colors other than green! At least we no longer have to put up with Americans mocking our currencies for being multi-colored monopoly bills. If americans are skeptical of polymer bills I can only take that as a good sign for these new Canadian bills.

>I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet

You do realize your wallets are just smaller, right? Canadians don't go walking around with bills splayed out of our wallets, our wallets are just big enough to hold them.

Not sure which countries you're talking about in regards to the paper feel. I certainly noticed that in South America. Bolivia's currency, in particular, tended to be both in varying stages of decomposition and incredibly dirty. OTOH, the portrait on the 10 Boliviano note [1] was awesome enough to make up for any lack in paper quality.

[1]http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG

Some countries (Malaysia, that I'm familiar with) actually have notes of a different physical size within the country. For example, the dimensions of the five ringitt and twenty ringitt note are different. I believe this is what the GP was referring to.

Great Britain is the same way. I hate it.

Aesthetically I love how the £50 note looks, in part thanks to its size, but it is really annoying. I guess most people don't often really come in contact with it, but anyone playing in a casino is likely to get them when cashing out, and they stick out of my wallet just a little, but enough to annoy me. And if you're cashing out a decent sum, asking for £20s isn't really an option,too many notes and the wallet won't even fold over.

Mexico has this too. 20 pesos bill, 50 pesos bill and 100 pesos bill are all three different.

Yes. It's an accessibility thing. It's easier to tell them apart if they're not the same size.

So why wouldn't they just have the denomination embossed in braille?

This implies actually knowing Braille. Even in very developed countries, not all blind or visually deficient people know Braille. Arguably, they should be pushed toward Braille rather than left in a "comfort" zone.

There are many ways for Braille to fail, particularly if embossed on a regularly-used banknote, and not everybody can use it. Differently-sized notes are much harder to break, and are potentially useful for everyone. Make the notes differently-coloured as well, and they're straightforwardly distinguished by most people, regardless of disability (or lack thereof), in a variety of situations.

(I would imagine Braille costs a fair bit to print, but banknotes are somewhat expensive to make - compared to most pieces of printed paper, I mean - so perhaps that wouldn't be an issue.)

Because when you are eighty years old and you become progressively blind, it's difficult to learn a completely new 'tactile' language.

And I'm pretty sure the euro too.

The Euro has notes of different sizes too.

Pennies do have their place though. As much as I dislike carrying them around, imagine not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents. Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should. Those pennies add up.

If you simply round to the nearest penny (3,4,5,6,7=5, and 8,9,0,1,2=0)on all transactions, then it evens out.

Those pennies really don't add up. See if you can find a store that won't add in the extra pennies to round you up, seriously - they certainly don't care.

A lot of fraud has been perpetuated by people shaving fractions of pennies off payrolls etc. Of course it adds up, and nobody's going to be rounding down anything. If a product costs 1.37, you will pay 1.37 with a credit card, and 1.40 with cash. And yeah it's the blue collar slob with two bankruptcies whose going to get his pennies shaved off.

No you won't. I never see charges with fractions of pennies when I use my card at the gas pumps (which charge 9/10¢ extra per gallon, remember); why would I see charges with fractions of nickels when pennies are gone?

I'm pretty sure the IRS cares though. GAAP don't allow you to just adjust numbers.

I'm pretty sure they don't, or else they'd be hounding you for the fractional pennies that you owe them (3/20 of every penny earned, remember!).

The IRS generally allows rounding to the nearest dollar on tax forms (at least individual and small business; not sure if large corporate are allowed to round even more). In fact, all the common tax software does so automatically; the only way to file a return to the cent is to do so by hand.

I doubt they care, as long as you pay 10% (or whatever it is) of total taxable revenue. I think that's how it works in Australia, where we do round.

The tax man only cares about aggregates, unless they are in audit mode.

In Australia, the shops will say "4.99", and round the total (say $24.87) off. The occasional crazy old granny will go through the supermarket checkout multiple times, forcing them to round down multiple times, but it's not that common. Inflation means that even 5c coins are seen as an annoyance by shopkeepers.

> Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents.

Um, you know that sales tax results in prices with fractional pennies? And that stores simply round the prices?

> Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should.

You mean like how gas stations add on 9/10 of a cent to every gallon?

We should get rid of the penny and the nickel, and then issue 10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 cent coins.

We don't need to "imagine" not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Here in Australia, pennies have been abolished and everything is either rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents.

New Zealand has already taken it one step further and has abolished 5-cent coins as well, rounding everything to the nearest 10. There's talk of doing that in Australia as well.

Keep in mind that the Aussie dollar is worth more than a US one, and Kiwi dollar is worth only 20% less, so we're talking similar amounts of value being rounded up/down.

Now, if only Australia hadn't compensated the abolishment of 1 and 2 cent coins with the GIANT 50 cent coins, my wallet would be very happy.

I have completely rid myself of coins. I leave them All in the penny tray. If they object, I give them to a friend I'm with, or finally toss them in the trash on the way out. At the drive-up, I toss them all in the donation slot.

No more pockets with a clump of metal in the bottom. No more fooling around trying to make a purchase come out even. Certainly no more counting them.

Its an amazing, liberating feeling! And it costs me far less than the time and effort I win back.

Many supermarkets in the UK have donation jars at the checkout. I'd usually just leave all the coins I got in change. I haven't noticed that here in the US.

Recently the in the Netherlands shops have started rounding the total cost to 5 cents. It saves work, nobody complains (even though euro cents are worth more than dollar cents).

Different size (and color) make it way easier to distinguish the different bills – especially for blind people.

Other currency feels cheap? Are you kidding? Whenever I go the US I'm always reminded of how crappy the currency is. It looks and feels like it's printed on low grade recycled paper. Counterfeiting is such a problem that half the shops won't take 50s or 100s. And your wallet is perpetually stuffed with dirty, crumpled, near-useless $1 notes.

Imagine if you ordered a credit card from a bank and instead of receiving a shiny plastic card you got a low quality bit of printed cardboard. You'd think that was pretty low class, right? Well that's how I feel comparing the US and Aussie money in my wallet. The production quality on the American banknotes just does not match my expectations for a modern country in 2011.

Nothing against America of course, but I don't get the country's weird resistance to progress in certain areas, no matter how much of a no-brainer improvement that progress is. "Protect the greenback" - this is nothing but resistance to change, any change, no matter how beneficial. It's baffling how it can seemingly win the day, again and again. For me it is analogous to not upgrading to OSX 10.7 because you have nostalgic feelings about 10.6. I just cannot fathom how people get themselves into this state of mind.

OK, going rather off on a tangent there .. anyway other currencies do not look cheap : ) except the japanese yen, which IMO is the only major banknote series even worse than America's.

Shop's won't take 50s and 100s for another reason. Almost nobody uses them within the borders of USA. The clerk at the store (often a kid from a high school) just don't know how they are supposed to look. ;-)

50s aren't particularly common, but ATMs in Nevada and Reno disburse all large amounts using Benjamins. They are a pretty common bill. I'm guessing 99% of those clerks in a store would have no trouble recognizing one.

It is also a pain to make change for a 50 or 100, one example would be buying a coffee from Tim Hortons with a 100.

Maybe now that Ted Kennedy isn't around to get paid off by the New England paper mills, we'll see the idea of removing the paper USD$1 get some movement.

Although, we've botched up the dollar coin (by not removing the paper buck) so many times, it'll probably never happen.

Source please?

Only one mill in the world is allowed to produce the "paper" for US currency. Paper mills in general have equipment that works well for wood pulp paper, not the specialized equipment required to prepare and process the cotton based paper used in US dollars.

Because of the mandatory security costs involved and the fact they have to buy additional secret materials other than cotton and linen from the government, the profit margins on currency paper are razor thin. The only real benefit they get is a huge reference customer for their other secure paper business.

"Save the Greenback ultimately prevented a phaseout of the dollar bill thanks in part to Trent Lott (Mississippi's cotton industry makes the dollar's fabric) and Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts' Crane Paper Co. produces the dollar's paper)."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-stei...

"Kolbe and many other coin supporters said politics has also been a major obstacle. Prominent Massachusetts Democrats such as Financial Services ranking member Barney Frank and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy have been ardent defenders of Crane & Co., which manufactures the cotton-based paper used in U.S. currency."

"One-dollar bills represent nearly half of Crane’s currency business, and replacing the $1 note altogether would mean the loss of hundreds of jobs, the company said."

"Clearly they had an interest in maintaining the use of the paper,” Kolbe said. [Pay big attention here>>>] “Crane was the only company that could qualify as the producer.”

http://www.rollcall.com/news/Dollar-Bill-Coin-Coalition-Lobb...

And just to add to how much a paper dollar costs compared to a coin: A dollar bill costs $0.04 and is remade every 18 months. A dollar coin costs $0.08 and lasts 30 years.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/lca_coins_notes.php

Looks like a bunch of personal quotes from opinion pieces. Just because you don't agree with someone, dosen't mean they are fueled by some grand conspiracy. Occasionally people will just have a different view.

Crane & Co. has yearly revenues of about 300 million (revenues mind you, not profits). Less than a quarter of that is US currency paper. A 75 million dollar a year business is hardly worth it to invest in bribery or lobbying.

You don't have a firm grasp of how American politics work. Every single member of Congress works to keep as much money and power in their district as they can. Retaining even a couple of hundred jobs in a given district can be a huge advantage in an election.

One doesn't need an op-ed to know that Congressmen lean to help companies in their districts that also make campaign contributions. Crane may be a small fish in the global paper mill business, but how much did they contribute to Kennedy's campaign fund over the last 5 decades?

Every other country on the planet has managed to smoothly eliminate the paper dollar/deutschmark/pound/etc when introducing an equivalent coin. All the claims of "oh, the people want to keep the dollar" are bullshit. Where's the documented public protest over keeping the paper dollar, other than the astroturfed group Save The Greenback?

"In 2006, then-Rep. Jim Kolbe (R) of Arizona, the country’s largest supplier of copper, introduced a bill that would have done away with the dollar, but it lay dormant in a Financial Services subcommittee. Kolbe, who introduced similar legislation AT LEAST FIVE TIMES throughout his career..."

The facts remain. Any legislative movement to eliminate the paper dollar has either been stalled in committee or never even mentioned in dollar coin legislation. Why is that?

If my beliefs are off base, let's hear your theory.

Yeah, the penny thing is annoying. 100 years ago a penny was worth about a dime today. At the very least we should make the nickel the smallest unit.

So what you're saying is that the penny got nickel and dime'd to it's current value?

The weirdest thing about the penny is that it costs more than one cent to manufacture. Given, they last for quite a while.

That's why it's illegal to melt them down, and the US restricts exporting them.

According to Wikipedia:

1982-present US pennies, which weigh 2.5 grams, are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper (coated over the zinc) by weight and have a metallurgical value of 64.376% of the face value

So, while the production costs are more than 1 cent, the actual value of the metal inside is still below 1 cent.

I think the quarter should be the smallest unit. And phase out dollar bills for coins.

The worst possible thing about US money is that it is all the same colour. Whomever thought of that was obviously not working at maximum power.

The new bills ($100, $50, $20, $10, $5) are colored differently.

No they're not. They're green. It's so frustrating. Our Australian notes may look like Monopoly money but at least they are much easier to use.

I do a bit of traveling and collect an awful lot of currency- http://i.imgur.com/CWkjX.jpg - So I'd also like to chime in on this. I like the US cotton bills as they get better with age. Of course, having crisp bills is nice, but nothing stays that way for ever. My polymer bills maintain creases and it makes them hard to sort. Where as the cotton bills age gracefully.

Check out the AUS 10, see how folded it looks? Now check out the $5 Military Payment certificate from around 1951. Just an observation.

I'm American, and I have to agree with you. I travelled to Ireland last month and having 1 and 2 € coins was great. The different sized bills took a little getting used to, but even that was great because I could quickly tell them apart (along with the different colors). I'd like to see wider adoption of 1 and maybe 2 $ coins here sometime in the bear future.

I'm canadian, and I hate hate hate the $1 & $2 coins. (I don't like change in general) It's really nice to be able to just carry paper most of the time and get your change in mostly paper vs coins.

Inflation has been so rampant here in Vietnam that the smallest bill worth mentioning is 1,000 Dong and I hardly ever see coins at all. It's actually a lot more convenient not to have to separately juggle coins and bills though.

Skip to 1m 42s to see a clear double Eurion along the bottom edge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurion

That's damned cool. Presumably only commercial software would be affected? That is, I assume GIMP works fine for scanning bills.

Implementing it is voluntary, there is no law requiring it, so there are probably many commercial software which lack this modul. But yes, GIMP doesn't have it too.

http://www.rulesforuse.org/pub/index.php?currency_lang=-1...

"The CDS has been voluntarily adopted by hardware and software manufacturers, and prevents personal computers and digital imaging tools from capturing or reproducing the image of a protected banknote."

Hmm. I wonder what the impetus for adoption is. If governments aren't making it mandatory, then there has to be something in it for canon, xerox, adobe, et al to go through the trouble of adding that functionality.

Being from Canada, I for one welcome our new plastic overlords. I'm curious about the actual hand feel but the durability will certainly be welcome. Also curious to see how these affect counting machines, etc. I do a lot of work at large cash events so I'll quickly get feedback from the cashiers and cash managers on if they like them or not.

Is this for all of the bills? My parents were.given a fake $5 bill at a store last weekend. $5 and $10 seem to be more common

All bills, starting with the $100 and working down.

Aussie here. Polymer notes are probably a bit harder to handle for a cashier. They don't flatten well out after being folded up. They have lots of benefits to make up for it. You won't find yourself taping up torn bills as much.

Australia got these in 1992. The main benefit is that they don't suffer when you accidentally put them through the wash/ocean/pool.

Trust Australia to introduce the beach-proof banknote.

Go to the bank and order $20 australian for an example.

In Romania we also have polymer banknotes since 1999 (lower value notes are printed on a cheaper support compared to higher value ones). First editions were manufactured in Australia.

The ATMs don't seem to have any problems with them (but most ATMs were installed after 1999 anyway). The notes seem to be much more resistant compared to the paper ones, and when they get damaged beyond repair, they are pulled out of circulation and recycled into plastic items like garbage bins.

Feedback here. It sucks!

There are 300 pieces of equipment with bill acceptance devices that have to be upgraded where I work but I've been transferred to a different section at work, my current job plus the out in the field, where there are 7000 more devices which have to be upgraded. That's just the hardware.

When the $100 polymer banknote is physically made the Bank of Canada sends the data to device vendors who use the data to create firmware to send to their clients, but they can only make the firmware once the Bank of Canada sends them the specs of each new poly banknote.

After the $100 note the least used by the general public then will be $50 the next least used. Then the last three which I would say will be released also from least to most used so: $10, $5 then finally the most commonly used is $20 bill.

Each time the notes are releases the device vendors get it first and make the firmware so that means five different firmware changes spread out over two years.

Add to that some bill acceptor devices have limited memory which means they may be able to hold data for one or two types of banknotes, different series version of the same denomination, other may be able to retain ten of each note.

It sucks but it's expected and it will improve security, I hear bill acceptance devices for Australia's poly money has nearly 100% acceptance rate of valid banknotes (100% rejection of fake notes).

I'm guessing since the notes are not paper there will be less bacteria (especially impetigo) contamination and shedding of paper dust which is a big problem if you work with currency.

Two recommendations - first, manufacturers of bill acceptance devices need to optimize their Firmware Upgrade process, while I realize not everything can be OTA (Over the air), no bill acceptance device manufacturer, can, with a straight face, make the claim that they didn't know that there would be new currency formats coming out.

Second, they should separate the core functionality of their devices (Scanning, pulling in the bills) from the identification process (Which Bill is this?) - LUA is a pretty traditional implementation language to do this.

Funny you should mention OTA I was speaking with a vendor just last Monday after some testing and he said there are plans to have our central system be able to push new firmware directly to the device, no humans involved. It's still in development from what I could tell more OAW (over-a-wire) than OTA. But as I said a lot of devices are old with limited memory and a lot still use EPROMs for storage rather than flash so the EPROM has to be removed to be flashed using a EPROM read/write tool.

But still the Bank of Canada or any bank or institution which makes a country's currency has to give the physical currency to someone to scan and input the data into an application which all takes time.

The vendors are certainly aware of new formats (series) but as I said they can't do anything until the actual bill is in their hands, I don't know the exact process but I know the vendors of the bill acceptance devices have to wait like everyone else. I'm sure a lot of it is due to security, giving some company a $100 bill and risking it being counterfeited.

The vending/casino business is not known to play nice so I don't think LUA or any sort of cooperation would go over well, I'm surprised IGT even allowed SAS to be licensed but I guess money was made.

I think you need to clarify your thinking which is why you got downvoted. You start out with 'it sucks' and finish with what's great about it. The product isn't what you're complaining about, it's the roll-out plan of the Canadian gov't.

Probably, I just didn't want to write a novel ;)

It's more tedious than anything and we the end user are stuck waiting for government (Bank of Canada) to release the new series banknotes to the vendor so they can create the firmware which then has to be approved by my company's head office testing lab/GLI and then we get it eventually.

Meanwhile while all that is going on the bills may actually be in public circulation and customers are after us for having equipment that won't accept new series bills.

Sounds like it'd be bitch to counterfeit, but I think this just throws in the gauntlet for those interested in the challenge. Interested in what the processes they used to build the different features mentioned, at scale.

That's a good point, but I think it's a similar issue to computer security. Yeah, changing your SSH port to a custom one isn't going to keep out someone who scans your ports, but it will keep out the millions of losers who are looking for easy prey and not bothering with a portscan. With each security measure that is potentially crackable, but harder, the pool of crackers that are going to put in the effort gets smaller.

It's a change for Australia to export something that hasn't simply been fed grass or dug out of the ground. Hopefully we'll make lots of money making money :-) And btw, the notes work really well, can't imagine using tatty bits of green paper after 20 years with the new technology.

Secure. Durable. Innovative.

Sounds like a bad powerpoint presentation.

Well, the Reserve Bank of Australia's subsidiary used to just offer hookers, coke, and offshore bank accounts to their clients; but was told it wasn't an appropriate sales technique for a government owned entity.

Duckduckgo "RBA corruption".

I'm Canadian. So embarrassing. The graphics. The copy. The tone of his voice. How he kept repeating "look at the detail" as if identifying counterfeit bills compared to real ones that we've never seen is self-evident.

... for something more akin to condoms than dollars.

The bills have one more security feature that /you/ can check

And how many more that I can't check?

My first job was in a plastics plant and one thing I noticed was that when you deform clear plastic, it tends to become cloudy. I wonder how these will fight that, seeing as almost every one will be folded at some time in it's lifecycle.

Australian currency, which is made of the same polymer and has transparent windows as well, seems to handle it just fine. No matter how strongly I bend and abuse it at the window, it doesn't lose transparency.

I wonder what is costs to produce each one.

.19c vs .10c for the old one but they will last 2.5 times longer. And the polymer and is from Australia. source http://calgary.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110620/boc-...

Because I had to check the link myself... The costs are 19c and 10c respectively, or $0.19 and $0.10. 0.10c would be pretty cheap.

This things are damn durable. As far as i know, if you fold them they get back to their original shape.

[Most] People don't use cash these days anyway.

are you from Canada? I do notice and almost half of transactions at bars, restaurants, buses, coffee shops, bakeries etc. are made with cash

I am in Korea, people almost always use credit cards.

Are you from Canada? I am, and the only time I ever have a need to carry cash is when I'm in the US. Debit transactions are ubiquitous here; I really miss that when I'm in the US.

It pretty much depends on the country. In Italy for example, people love to use cash (it's cultural) whereas in France people tend to use Credit Cards mostly now (it's a recent trend). In most less developed countries, Cash is still the king too even when there is good access to reliable Banks and a stable currency (Thailand for example).

There's an 'eye in the pyramid' in the building under the large transparent window.

It's a conspiracy, isn't it?

I wonder if using DNA markers in currency might be interesting.

Do these physical notes contain chemical tracers?

these new bills will be quite similar to the bills in Hong Kong.

I want one dozen.

The new $100 bill... which costs $105 to make! jk ;P

Never fear! It costs $105 in US dollars - by next week, that'll be about 15 cents anywhere else.

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