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I have to disagree. The potential downside for a flaw in the new bill could be rather catastrophic damage to the economy. The downside of a failure with the Mars rover is that the rover just doesn't work. Thus, it makes sense to be dramatically more conservative in designing a new currency.

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Alright, I was quick to judge and there is no way of knowing how many people worked on it or what technology is included. However, 10+ years is a heck of a long time to work on the bill and I'm not sure taking more time on something necessarily insures that it is the best. But I will concede on the grounds that this is one of those situations that you can't just iterate on. It works or it doesn't and the consequences of failure are incredibly high.

There are many definitions of "work on". Perhaps the first 5 years was just a couple of people spending a couple of hours a week keeping up with the latest state of the art since they knew that eventually they'd probably be replacing some bill in the next decade or so.

Indeed.

And it's not as if there is some urgent rush.

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