New High Tech $100 Bills Start To Circulate Today 302
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "New $100 bills made their debut today in the U.S. They include high tech features designed to make it easier for the public to authenticate but more difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. Those measures include a blue, 3-D security ribbon, as well as color-shifting ink that changes from copper to green when the note is tilted (PDF). That ink can be found on a large '100' on the back of the bill, on one of the '100's' on the front, and on a new image of an ink well that's also on the front. 'The $100 is the highest value denomination that we issue, and it circulates broadly around the world,' says Michael Lambert, assistant director for cash at the Federal Reserve Board. 'Therefore, we took the necessary time to develop advanced security features that are easy for the public to use in everyday transactions, but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate.' The bill was originally due to reach banks in 2011, but three years ago the Federal Reserve announced that a problem with the currency's new security measures was causing the bills to crease during printing, which left blank spaces on the bills. This led the Feds to shred more than 30 million of the bills in 2012. The image of Benjamin Franklin will be the same as on the current bill, but like all the other newly designed currencies, it will no longer be surrounded by an dark oval. Except for the $1 and $2 bill, all U.S. paper currency has been redesigned in the last 10 years to combat counterfeiting."
All that, and yet ... (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet they can't do such basic things as, say, change the sizes of the notes so that vision impaired people can tell the difference between a one dollar and ten dollar bill just by checking its length. (Have a look at the Australian notes [wikipedia.org] for an example: each note is seven millimeters longer than the preceding one by value.)
They'd also do well by dropping the one and two dollar bills, replacing them with coins; the currency has devalued so much, it's not worth keeping the low value notes as notes. You could also make a case for ditching the penny, to boot.
But hey, what would I know ...
Re:What a farce (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.
Care to place a wager on that? [myfoxny.com]
Re:$2 bill? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are something like 3 million of them in circulation, and new ones are still being printed periodically. But many people, like yourself, have never actually encountered one.
(I've heard anecdotes of people trying to spend one being accused of counterfeiting, because the cashier had never seen one and assumed that it was a fraud).
Re:$2 bill? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not... green? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, all the bills except the $1 and $2 are slightly different colours now. The $5 is purple, the $10 is orange, the $20 is green, the $50 is pink, and the $100 is teal.
The ruling in American Council of the Blind v. Paulson required them to add accessibility features to the notes and the colours are one of those, in addition to some kind of tactile feature.
Re:What a farce (Score:5, Interesting)
The only stuff in the universe that cannot be counterfeited is energy.
I propose a new currency based on the kWh. Instead of slips of paper or plastic credit cards, people will use rechargeable batteries and actually transfer units of work between each other.
At first there will be extremely rapid inflation as people set up solar collectors and other such stuff, but eventually nearly every inch of the earth will be dedicated to collecting energy. Things like tax credits and welfare can be eliminated as every man, woman, and child will be able to collect or generate at least some energy (the government could give out stationary bikes that collect energy), which will act as a base negative tax rate.
With so much energy then available, what would our standard of living be?