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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

Yet we trust our daily money system to be based on printed colorful paper that no one can reproduce.

Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...

How do they track counterfeiting of digital currency? Most of the money supply is not physical but digital.

There counterfeiting is not the issue; it’s unauthorized transfers or alterations to the account ledger. In both cases there are many layers of backup record keeping and procedures to investigate and correct errors.

You sound sarcastic but it's true. Unless you have government-level resources, you can't make a perfect $20 bill. They don't use paper--water would destroy it--they use a special fabric with a single supplier that only sells to the government. They don't print; they stamp. There are watermarks, security strips, and other features that can't easily be reproduced. Doing it right would be a massive investment, at the risk of being caught and losing everything.

Doesn't matter as long as the real money is not disappearing from my wallet

But, assuming you are like the vast majority of people, most of you money is virtual in bank accounts and such. There doesn not exist enough physical currency to back all the virtual money in the accounts.

It's very very very very hard to forge money convincingly enough to fool central banks. It's basically impossible for anyone but nation-state actors, and the only known cases date back decades. Today, it's even harder, because even if central banks were unable to identify forgeries, duplicate serial numbers or ones that have never been issued would be detected very quickly.

Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.

It's very hard to steal a lot of physical currency.. Even with the biggest bills, it becomes unmanageable. Digitally it obviously doesn't matter if your transferring 1 Bitcoin or 10K

There are two important differences:

1) We have a legal system which (not perfectly) can reverse or fix issues which arise, with crypto money, it's just gone.

2) Someone who can produce fake colourful paper will typically only be able to produce a fairly small amount and not destabilize the whole currency. In the rare occurrences where someone found a significant hack in a crypto-currency, it's just done.

Yes, you are getting it.

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