I think something like this is unfortunately doomed to fail, as whilst there might ideally be approximately 138 banknotes worth of mass in there, it seems likely that the shreds are from thousands of different banknotes, and the container holds only a fraction of each whole note. Therefore no matter how good your reconstruction is, you simply won’t have the right pieces to work with.
Why not incinerating, dissolving in acid, grinding into a fine powder, or something like that?
My pet theory is big companies first shred and after send to be burned (or recycled).
Plus a shredding machine us safer than a fire device.
But yes, paper that's shredded by a specialist paper-shredding company is then typically baled up and sent for recycling.
And whenever I need to dispose of something I can’t compost, like an old drivers license, I cut it into pieces and drip feed the pieces into the garbage over the course of a few months.
Call me paranoid but I think there will be a cottage industry in sifting through garbage once this tech gets mature enough!
You're being very, very excessively paranoid doing anything more than just cutting it into a piece or two across the ID number.
That seems like both more effort, and potentially less effective, than just burning them?
Having sensitive data compromised would make me extremely sad.
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/10/world/7-years-after-embas...
>Among the most interesting papers are shredded secret documents pieced back together by the militants that detail attempts of the Central Intelligence Agency to recruit high-level Iranian officials, ayatollahs and exiles, foreign journalists and diplomats either as paid or ''unwitting'' agents in the months after the revolution in February 1979.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#/media/File:Shr...
It doesn't look like the embassy was even using a cross-cut shredder.
According to https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/pages/paper-shredders-secur... it was already up to p6-7, at least for everything I saw.
There would always be signs posted warning against wearing a tie while using the shredder.
Could probably be improved by doing 50-100 variations on each bill to give a general idea of the patterns possible within a zone. Such as: This area has 8 possible characters, with 36 possible entries /[a-zA-Z0-9]/. It has a fixed border with some constant pattern nearby. Show all the possible combos and then dice up the area a bunch of different ways.
On the partial constructions topic:
You have 350 of 1000 pieces of an image with some known general shape.
How much of the image can you reconstruct while still missing 2/3 of the pieces?
At the least has applications for image guessing. Also, agree on the false bank note contents, and how many people at the note shredding office are just stuffing their pockets with bank notes and then filling the cylinders with rocks? Great scam that probably almost nobody actually checks.
Even if only, I don't know, 1/4 of the pieces are there, the potential to turn $13 into $4.5k isn't bad at all.
The trick, then, is to collude with other souvenir purchasers, similar to McDonald's Monopoly, so you can quickly swap your own duplicate pieces to others who need them. But unlike Mcdonald's Monopoly, there's probably no rare Park Place that virtually guarantees an instant win to whoever holds it.
The bank could do something like that. They could cut all the bills in two, and incinerate the left 60% of every single bill, so the souvenirs only contain shreds of the right 40%, thus guaranteeing that nobody can ever reconstruct 51% of a bill no matter how many souvenirs they have. But there seems to be no evidence that they're doing this.