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Comment by skue | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely makes sense for the Treasury to generate new bills with technology/features that stays ahead of counterfeiters.

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…

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Your #2 -- every so often there's a news story about some fast food worker that calls the cops on a customer that tries to pay with either a $2 bill, or one of the old 20's that has the small portrait. Hilarity ensues.

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.

Many foreign banks will only take the latest iteration of US 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.

I've always wondered what incentive counterfeiters even have for trying to copy these new bills. I have several $100 bills from around 20 years ago that I keep in a safe as an emergency reserve and they're still legal tender as far as I know. Why wouldn't counterfeiters just continue to counterfeit the older bills?

Most one hundred dollar bills are used overseas, where your old ones wouldn't be accepted in most places but a careful bank. Even in the USA, merchants will refuse bills that they aren't comfortable verifying.

I think that the anti counterfeiters are planning decades ahead with each revision.

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.

Are you referring to the Superdollar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

Yep! :)

The North Korean (supposed) counterfeiting operation is pretty fascinating all around.

best plan is generate new bills in a different denomination. Hmm these new $20s look kinda like the $100s but not as good, well, yeah they're only worth 1/5 as much whaddya expect?

This eliminates confusion over someone holding a real new $100 and a fake new $100 and wondering which is which.

It's just marketing...how many people do you know that keep a single Benjamin laying around much less 10+? The fact is that most of what everyone uses as money is "inside money" that banks conjure up and charge interest on in perpetuity.

The world quickly devolves when the ROC on this benchmark goes flat and the social world heads for chaos when it goes negative.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDO

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