Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

elwell

Here's a hi res image of a ten dollar bill. It's pretty cool: http://i.imgur.com/XInY8HI.jpg

View on HN

You wouldn't download a ten dollar bill.

I would download a car, a handbag, a television and a ten dollar bill if I could.

edit: just kidding - I'd probably download a parking lot worth of cars

And RAM.

I download ram all the time: http://downloadmoreram.com/

I'd download all the rest, but not money. The reason being that the money will exchange for things of greater value than the work you spent on manufacturing the banknotes; while, when it's possible to download and manufacture a car at home, the car will have the same value as the work you spent on making it. In short, making your own money screws the economy; making your own cars doesn't.

If we could download cars, handbags, and televisions like we can pictures of ten dollar bills, we might not need any more ten dollar bills...

Technically, I just did.

Technically, only half of it.

Hi res images of a 50 bucks euro bill: https://lucb1e.com/rp/randomupload/euro/

If you zoom in, you can see 50 written in many places in a really tiny font, barely visible if you look at it with the naked eye. In number 1, the yellow dots are clearly visible (if I remember correctly these are what Photoshop looks for).

Those yellow dots are the EURion constellation, which the article says is not what Photoshop looks for.

I'm not an expert by any means, but to me that looks too low-res to be useful for printing money. Still cool though.

It depends on what you want to use it for. Australia currently has polymer currency that means we've basically forgotten about counterfeiting, but before that we had a $100 note that was greyscale with a bare whiff of colour. Not the best design. You'd occasionally hear stories of people who'd simply photocopy the bill on standard paper, scrunch it up to look used, then find a sleepy clerk at a late night convenience store. Buy a couple of bucks worth of stuff, leave with >$95 real change. You'd have to be pretty inattentive to be fooled by it, but, well, humans have foibles...

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpo...

It's an arms race that will not end.

Counterfeiting is unfortunately still a thing in Australia. A friend who runs a cafe makes his staff subtly attempt to tear any $50 note they take due to counterfeiting in the past.

They were caught out by scammers (or unknowing people with scammed notes) several times last year and the bank rejected the notes (and of course wouldn't hand them back)

Apparently the counterfeit notes are sometimes on a plastic too, but not sturdy enough to withstand a quick tear. I'm not sure how long that will hold true though.

I stand corrected. I knew there was still a little out there, but it sounds like more than I thought. I remember doing retail in my mother's shop in the paper note days and having to be moderately vigilant, and I've not seen retail staff doing any routine sort of note-checking since the start of the polymer days.

People are often successful at passing very, very low quality counterfeit bills.

Absolutely. +jpeg.

Now to find a ragpaper laptop screen...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com