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Europe Adding RFID Tags to Euro Currency
An EETimes article a few days ago reports that the European Central Bank is planning to add RFID tags to euro bank notes. This would allow each bill to be tracked whenever it is used, and if the chip includes writable memory, to even record its own history.
These bills must be expensive to print, though. One question remains: how does one read the chip? Wireless? Huh... Perhaps this could be used in tracking down counterfiters (sp?). Anyone else think of uses for this?
Everything is mainstream now.
It's interesting that they will actually be able to measure the velocity of money which is a key concept in some economic theory...
However I don't think that the government really needs to know where it's money has been... This seems a little intrusive into individuals lives.
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
Maybe zapping the bills with a tesla coil would help. Would a defective tranceiver still be accepted as legal tender?
people need to hide their vices. therefore they need (untraceable) cash.
once again, porn and drugs will withstand the onslaught of governmental interference.
If you want an insider's view of the origins of the European Central Bank, run, don't walk, to amazon.com and order a copy of this book.
Attempting to track the flow of currency is fully in line with your typical French bureaucrat's view that all good comes from the state, and that the state must be in charge of all aspects of life.
IMHO, the voters of the UK, Denmark, and Sweden are going to look very smart in the very near future.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
The face value of currency is already close to meaningless. Something about "The Gold Standard" not having been followed in quite some time.
Coins, if I am not mistaken, already cost more to mint than their value. Given inflation and the devaluation of the monetary units across the world over time, it should come as no surprise that the production cost of larger denominations of currency outpaces their face value.
The real trick is to look at how often a unit of currency changes hands, and how durable it is over time. This in combination with its face value will give some idea of the true cost and/or value of the physical currency note or coin.
If I could invent a paper bill that could withstand 50 years of travel, exchange, and (well, let's face it) abuse, that was incredibly rip, tear, and wear resistant, could withstand repeated exposure to water, moisture, solvents, and other environmental nasties, it might not matter as much if the production cost per unit were ten times as much as the face value.
I don't know if there is any metric on how much illegal commerce adds to a country's GDP, but I'm guessing they will find that it is significant if they can track illegal transactions. Of course, the definition of "illegal" may be pretty broad. If I give my brother a bill for a gift or I buy a jacket at a garage sale, someone should be counting the money I give them as income. Now that all those transactions can be tracked, I wonder if they would be considered "illegal" if they weren't reported as taxable income.
The US federal government is spending millions a year to have a certain warehouse guarded, and has been doing so for the last 27 years. The warehouse holds worthless gas rationning vouchers printed during the 1973 energy crisis.
Why are they guarded, even though they are worthless? Because they happen to have George W.'s face printed on them, and as such, they register as US $1.00 bills when read by bill readers...
Could 'disable' all of the money in a bank vault. Seriously, if somebody wanted to undermine the currency, all they would have to do is wait somewhere that large amounts of currency would be passing by and set off an EMF pulse that would fry any circuitry that is put on the cash. Do it to enough money, and nobody would trust it anymore.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
This post is almost too dumb and paranoid to address, but I'll do it because it was fun to find the holes. Let's look at some of them.
1.) The money doesn't "ping" or anything else. It's not self-powered at all. You need to pass it through an EM field to get it to respond. Developing an EM field of sufficient power to activate these chips such that they'd be able to return a signal more than ten feet would (A) destroy the chip and (B) kill all of your houseplants and (C) require a generator bigger than the patrol car.
2.) Drug money doesn't spend time "outside the legitimate banking system" at all. This is one of the main reasons why money laundering is so popular. Having boxes of cash is a nice thought, but most crime figures don't like having liquid assets like that because it's fragile, easy to steal (if Boss X has $100,000.00 in a safe it's right difficult to tell that his bodyguard is skimming C notes) and it draws attention.
3.) Having cash is not a warrantable offense. There are those who will tell you horror stories about being detained for having lots of cash, but if you ask all of them to leave except the ones who were detained on a warrant you'd be a lonely person. The police driving by the house would need a warrant to drive by and check (if it were possible; see number 1 above) as radio communications are protected from illegal search unless they're detectable to the general public.
4.) Assuming for a moment that 1, 2 and 3 above were by some miracle suspended, here's the rub. Radio waves don't generally pass through safes. So, you could put said cash in a safe, and it would be, well, safe. Hell, if you're really worried, you could put it in a bucket of water.
Remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're worth tracking.
Virg
Drugs are often used as a medium of exchange, particularly where street prostitution is involved. (e.g. pussy is sold for crack.)
Now, given that your typical john doesn't have the capacity to make crack, we still have a supply problem, namely, where does John get his crack? He gets it from his dealer. But if the dealer won't take cash (or John doesn't want his trackable cash found on the dealer), what does John do?
John uses legal, but heavily-taxed, drugs - alcohol and tobacco - as currency. Smugglers make a living by moving goods from low-tax to high-tax jurisdictions, providing supply to John through local merchants.
As long as the corner store is stocked with smokes or booze (whether smuggled or not - smuggled smokes/booze simply afford the mob an additional profit opportunity at the start of the supply chain), John can legally purchase all the "tobaccscrip" or "boozescrip" he needs.
If John's lucky, he's got a hooker who's an alcoholic nicotine freak. If John's not so lucky, she's a crackhead or pothead, and he'll have to exchange tobaccscrip and boozescrip for crack or pot at the local drug dealer, before purchasing any pussy.
If the local mobster controls the flow of legal-but-smuggled goods (cigarettes, liquor), illegal goods (illegal drugs), and the prostitution, he can have an entire economy set up and running in no time.
Finally, remember that in the underground economy, some currencies literally do grow on trees.
John could, for instance, cut out the middlemen (and greatly drop his cost of pussy) in his drugs-for-pussy transactions by taking the additional risk associated with growing a plant or two of "hempscrip" in his back yard. Alternately, John could supply an organized-crime warez group with 0-day warez, pre-release MP3z, or various types of pr0n (whether legal or not).
Currency as we know it evolved from barter. If barter is required to sustain the underground economy, the underground economy may become less efficient -- but that won't end the underground economy. It'll merely provide (like any inefficient market does) those in the market with more opportunities for profit.
It's understandable that 7-11 may not always have change for my $1.99 purchase that I pay for with a $100 bill, but as long as I'm willing to let them keep the change, it seems there is no legal way for them to refuse to accept my bill.
Or have I missed something?