New US $100 bill to debut Tuesday
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
But changing bills every several years can also produce unintended consequences. If new bills are constantly arriving while multiple generations of older bills remain in circulation, it's hard to know what exactly what we should be looking for with each bill.
For counterfeiters, the best time to start generating old bills is probably right after the introduction of new ones. I'd like to think the government took this into account…
The world quickly devolves when the ROC on this benchmark goes flat and the social world heads for chaos when it goes negative.
This eliminates confusion over someone holding a real new $100 and a fake new $100 and wondering which is which.
I also seem to recall that a lot of each new version gets shipped overseas right away. People there hold onto US dollars as protection against their weak government/banks, but they're used to having their old currency being declared null & void and having to exchange them (with government imposed exchange limits and poor exchange rates). So they want to have the newest bills even though the old ones are still valid currency.
Thus, holding onto the old bills would create unnecessary friction. You'd have to take the cash to the United States to be guaranteed to exchange them for face value. But cash exceeding $10,000 has to be declared to the customs agent -- which is even more frightening.
Better to exchange it right away, so you know you can use it wherever you go.
Even the older Benjis are still very hard to counterfeit - all of these new changes are targeted almost exclusively at North Korea's advanced counterfeiting program.
So decades ahead.
The North Korean (supposed) counterfeiting operation is pretty fascinating all around.
Also, I think we're a lot more guilty of changing our money's 'look' lol. USD looks quite old in comparison.
The hundreds smell like maple syrup - and that's not a joke.
Everything else smelled like maple syrup, though. So it wasn't a total loss.
Haven't met a single person yet who doesn't smell maple on a fresh stack of hundreds.
Speaking of rubbish, you do know that cloth notes aren't damaged by water, right?
The polymer bills are a cost saving measure, and they're inferior (in term of resilience) to their cloth counterparts.
They may not be damaged by water but they do get wet which is a pain.
1) We had the same bills from my grandpas age till mine, and suddenly over the past 20 years we're up to revision 4.0 or so. Confusing the endusers to no end. Although the API has remained constant what you get per bill has dropped quite a bit over those 20 years. Maybe the new 4.0 version should get me more groceries for my $100 rather than less each revision.
2) Same spokesman for each revision confuses upgraders. You got Franklin? Yeah I'm using Franklin. No dude thats the old version of Franklin, has some security bugs, you gotta upgrade before the economy gets powned. Can't they put something contemporary on it, like the Miley Cyrus bill or the 'Bama Bill? Or embed the year, like I got me an "2013 buck" because it has 2013 written in big ole automotive style letters?
3) They're doing a great job at rollout of focusing on the new features, but ignoring the old features. I need to know the API to verify the new bills are legit. A smart counterfeiter would focus solely on the new features and just print on toilet paper or something, half the public would probably buy it. A REALLY smart counterfeiter would start producing a run on version 5.0 $20 bills and most of the public would assume its actually upstream's product, seeing as upstream ships a new version about as often as Detroit ships a new model car now.
4) I'm not kidding around here, why do they use sequential serial numbers when a pub-key crypto signed serial number with a VERY private key would let us look at a bill and verify its a genuine signed serial number? Maybe not prove the bill is legit and uncopied, but at least you'd know its a copy of a good signed bill. They could publish a list of destroyed currency and rotate aggressively such that counterfeits would only circulate for awhile.. Unless of course the destroyed currency was the counterfeit and the cancelled one in your hand is the legit one... maybe thats why they don't do this.
5) As far as .coms go this startup needs a new art director. I'm not asking for kittens but lose the eye in the pyramid and flowery decorations and inkwells and eagles and try a QR code in one corner for vending machines (hey when the 70s stagflation hits and you want to buy a condom for $100 from the local vending machine, you'll be sorry...).
6) This seems to be the only branch that hasn't sold out naming rights. I halfway expect to see "Larry Ellison Bucks" and "HP 20s" at some point in my life. The "3com three dollar bill". As a startup they're leaving money on the table by not selling naming rights. At the bankruptcy Oracle will probably pick up the product for pennies on the dollar and freak out the GPL linux guys who'll fork into a bitcoin implementation on mariadb.
7) I don't think they're getting the tech news buzz they need. They need to send out fat stack of free samples to hacker news readers like me to create buzz. They should send out so many free samples that I can freely share them with friends.
8) Open source the code to generate? Why can't I print some at home to pay my debts, just like .gov does? Information just wants to be free. Speaking of which it needs a license I'm guessing not BSD or GPL not some CC:SA variety?
9) Is the new API compatible with existing players like "wheresgeorge.com" (are they still around?)
Look up BLS inflation measures and the 'basket of goods'. You could spend years coming to an informed conclusion, and people have. Then look up the costs of patio furniture or computing equipment compared to 20 years ago. They decreased in price. It's an average, yo.
Also, if you don't trust broad consensus across economists, take a look at the free market. People are buying gov't treasuries. If they thought that inflation was higher than the interest rate, they wouldn't be buying them, right?
Energy and food prices are volatile, as they depend on exogenous factors. Try reading about droughts and wars. Your new car is more expensive in 2014 because it's safer, more fuel efficient and technologically superior in every way to your 1997 version.
Only the ignorant think the CPI reports are fake. Perhaps you should read up on the methodology of how it's calculated.
There is a whole world of finance that depends on a reasonable calculation of inflation rates. I suppose we are to believe the best financial minds on the planet are wrong in their bets, and you are right?
I've seen better arguments in the "bible says the earth is flat" threads.
But that would actually defeat point #8: you can print out bills but they won't be verified by the server at the gubment.
And I like the QR code too.
So try to buy a soda with a known shredded $1, the vending machine doesn't accept it, you'll have a strange conversation at the bank. Of course we're rapidly nearing the point where a smartphone could just hold the numbers in its memory, which is a strange form of digital cash but it could kinda work.
The old "light a bill on fire and then light your cigar on fire with the bill" thing isn't going to work well as well anymore.
Another local peculiarity is the locals (more or less correctly) don't trust the local plastics industries so we'd get all kinds of push back because the .gov is only trying to switch to plastic to get more BPA in our diet to control our minds and stuff.
TSA agents can't figure out how to make a deadly weapon out of a paper dollar bill, but if they figure out how to ban cash from flights, its going to be a mess. Presumably they'd be smart enough to use self-fire-extinguishing plastic. Despite the fact there's no way you'd confuse C4 with regular plastic, I guarantee you'll have an infinite number of stupid hollywood movie plots about plastic explosive counterfeit bills taking down airliners because they hate our freedumb or something equally idiotic yet politically powerful.
My examples above sound pretty dumb, because they are, yet they're also serious, which is sad. So thats why we're stuck with paper.
In hindsight, the only real currency change criticism in Australia that had substance was a coin change. We replaced our $1 and $2 notes with a heavy 'gold' coin, and there was a criticism from blind lobby groups that these coins didn't 'ring' when you dropped them. They still make a particular sound, but it's much less obvious if you're not looking for it. Every other criticism I've seen, while sounding momentous before the change, dies pretty quickly after introduction.
As an aside, I was buying a train ticket in LA in 2009. Handing over a $50 note, the cashier marked it with a felt-tip pen. At this stage, I'd been using polymer notes for nearly 20 years, so I was puzzled and asked what it was for. She explained the marker was to test for counterfeit notes - and I had to stop myself from inadvertently muttering 'oh, how quaint!'. The pro-to-con ratio for polymer notes is just so strong, it's hard to see how a government can seriously reject it... it genuinely seems backwards.
As another aside, before polymer notes were brought in here, we had the dumbest bank note possible. The Australian paper $100 note was black and white with subtle colour shading. You could (coarsely) counterfeit it with a photocopier - and you'd occasionally hear stories of people giving such a crumpled-up note to a sleep-deprived 7-11 employee and walking away with nearly $100 change...
The high durability of US "paper" money is another reason that switching low denominations to coins makes no sense in the US.
[1] http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2012/04/pm-loonie-report.pd... (page 6) [2] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/polymer-to-replace-cott... [3] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-307
Hypothetically, it's possible to mint a one trillion dollar coin to get around the debt ceiling crisis[1]. It's an absurd idea anyway, but what if that coin was made and then lost. Someone says they've found it, but how do we know they're not lying and have just made a forgery?
Assuming that all details of the coin (its exact elemental composition, dimensions, etc.) are publicly known, I thought a possible solution would be to take an electron microscope and image the grain structure[2] of the coin in a specific region (e.g. the eye of the statue of liberty? if that were on the coin). Then hash that grain structure (in a similar way to how one "hashes" fingerprints), sign that hash with a very-private-key, and laser etch the signature onto the coin. Since it's not possible to recreate exact grain structures, it'd be impossible to forge your coin :)
Alternatively, you could probably introduce some specific radioactive isotope to definitively age the coin, such the time since the coin was minted could be definitively measured, and any attempt at forgery revealed, though I'm not sure how to make that work in practice. There are probably other solutions too, though I can't think of any off hand. There must be things people do already to authenticate high-value "natural" objects such as gemstones? Like a laser-etched serial number? I don't know...
An absurd scenario I know, but an interesting thought experiment.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_structure
Hey crypto card, if you actually know the correct private key, you can hash this HN article number "6511347" OH OK dude here is the signed hash "342351315215154" OK let me test that... holy cow it worked.
The real hack would probably be a legal one to embed some kind of national treasure into the coin to make it seized by .gov, so anyone that walks up with one can have it taken away or is counterfeiting. My guess is a little spec of moon dust in a glass capsule that can't be privately owned. Or a little piece chipped off the Washington Monument.
Then, hypothetically, why not have the "coin" be the cryptocard in the first place? and forgo this whole lump of metal thing. Probably because it's not robust in the long term. What happens when the RFID cryptocard, eventually, fails?
I like the moon dust idea though :)
According to my girlfriend the color changing tech comes from JDSU, a local bay area company. Here is some (fairly dry) info:
http://blogs.jdsu.com/perspectives/archive/tags/Anti-Counter... http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/Authentication-Solutions/markets/b... http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/advanced-optical-technologies/Page...
("ONE DIME" is kind of dumb, I'll give you that.)
Then I'm curious about these questions:
1. Is this the most cost efficient method to deal with it? It seems a bit silly, to me, as this is a game of cat and mouse, and those tend to be very expensive in the long run, if you want to win.
2. Would it be worth investing in a digital solution such that a bill could be copied, but only one copy of that bill can ever be recirculated, so you could "back up" your money, digitally, then re-print it somewhere else, but you could never spend it more than once, as a general solution to counterfeiting?
3. Would either of these actually save more money than just ignoring the problem?
4. 100% digital? Maybe not online as a requirement, but definitely tap your card to transfer funds to someone? Why do we still have paper bills anyway, with multiple demonstrated cryptographic protocols that could replace them entirely?
After some time old bills will be rarely seen so anyone using them will get extra scrutiny.
Banks will always accept old bills, but stores (and private parties) won't.
Meanwhile Mars rovers can be built in less than 5 years. Hilarity.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57606401/new-$100-bil...
And it's not as if there is some urgent rush.
That's a serious question. I think Franklin's legacy is clouded by some moral ambiguity: his innovations were incredible, he fought for abolition and yet he didn't walk the talk.
Is that a mistake we should overlook in remembering him?
When fundies tell me our highly religious founding fathers (LOL) would want bibles in our classrooms, I always suggest the Jefferson Bible which either confuses them or freaks them out if they actually know what I'm talking about.
Most of the "bad" people in history (e.g. Hitler, Pol Pot) acted worse than the standards of their time. Nobody's justifying them or their actions with this logic.
But I take issue with forgetting about this one aspect of Franklin's character because he was simply following the standards of his time.
The question is, standards for whom? Affluent white people? The standards certainly weren't acceptable to black Americans.
I know that I may sound nit-picky, but I think it's important to apply our current sense of morality to this period in American history. When we gloss over the uncomfortable details, we gloss over some of the lessons.