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Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

One dollar in 1943 is worth about $19 today's dollars.

He started in 1938 and was arrested in 1948:

    1938 23.42
    1943 19.09
    1948 13.70

Enough to buy some supplies, but how did he pay the rent? Perhaps he owned his apartment.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1948?amount=1

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> Juettner began working as a maintenance man and building superintendent in New York's Upper East Side. His job allowed him and his family to live rent free in the basement of the building where he worked.

Yes, but he was forced to counterfeit when that job ended.

I think it's a fairly reasonable assumption that he retired (he was 60 in the 1930s) but the article could have made that part explicit.

On my first read I thought he had become a junk collector out of depression for the death of his wife.

If $1 is $19 I am suprised more people didnt check that their $1 notes are legit back then. Story makes it sound like $1 was chump change.

Do you check the $20 bills the ATM spits out, or just stuff them in your wallet and spend them?

people compare them to the $20 bill it spat out last time

Do they? I certainly don't - it's just a wad of notes. I'd probably notice if the one on top didn't have a "20" on it, and that's about it. When I spend it I'm also just looking to see if it has a "20" on it.

I hate speding dollars. All the bill sizes being g the same, and the colors similar. Too easy to make mistakes. I feel for the blind...how do they cope?

I really don't know. Even as a seeing person you need to have your wits about you, and I think most people sort notes by value in their wallet. Most other countries have notes whose size and color differs by value, so it's much harder to make mistakes.

In the US, IIRC they have a trusted person sort the bills by denomination for them -- like a friend or a bank teller -- and then they fold them into different orientations so they know what they've handed to a checkout clerk. No way for them to prevent being shortchanged, unfortunately.

I guess technology could help though - this would be a great application for smart glasses.

Some countries chose different physical sizes and/or embosed bumps in the corners.

If I were a shopkeeper I might check $20 notes handed to me. To some extent.

Mmm I don't even check the 100$ ones from the ATM why wouldn't you trust the bank?

I know someone personally that received a fake $100 bill from a USBank ATM.

My guess is that almost everyone was paying with cash, so a $1 bill was not uncommon.

I don't remember the last time I paid $20 in cash. [That's like AR$30K here in Argentina. For that ammount, we mostly use credit card, debit card or one of the apps with QR.]

A shabby NYC apartment in the 1940s could be rented for $30/month. So producing just 1 bill a day would be enough to meet the rent.

Since they were silver certificates he could have redeemed them for a 26.73g coin composed of 90% silver and 10% copper. In 2026, the value of the silver has fluctuated between about $46 and $94 (and the value of the copper content has stayed a little over 3 cents).

If you swap them in stores, maybe. But taking counterfeit bills to the national bank is just stupid, even if very well made.

Any quarters and dimes he would have received in change would have been about 90 per cent silver.

Those stopped being redeemable for silver in 1968, so their value is no longer defined by the metal prices of 2026.

Would owning his apartment disqualify him from being a folk hero? If he was a renter, does he deserve to be a hero? Just wondering. If he'd gotten rich from printing fake currency and become a right wing dictator would you think the same as if he was just a broke tenant? Why or why not?

The hell are you talking about?

I'm talking about the vague implications the parent poster was making - the purposes of which weren't very clear, but which I interpreted as: "A) Money is worth less than it was, (so printing fake money is justified) B) But on the other hand maybe he was part of the propertied class (in which case it wouldn't be)". I was asking whether they had a moral compass.

I think you're reading way too much into that comment. Sometimes questions are just questions out of curiosity, not accusations of the opposite.

I'm surprised people have such a knee-jerk reaction to my question.

Maybe because it sounds like a question on a 10th grade exam. It’s demanding and didactic, both in framing the question and the form of the expected answer.

Yes, it's asking for an essay. Oh well.

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