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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.
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?
What's in my wallet is my business. If a storeowner, or anyone with the right equipment can read how much money I have in my pocket, that bugs me. Heck, for all I know a well-equipped hacker/mugger will be able to spot targets using them.
I wonder how they would survive spin, wash, dry, and iron cycles. or drying in a microwave oven.
Their has got to be a wide range of applications that would ruin the chips. I can see civil rights volunteers subotaging currency in the safety of their homes, a sort of grassroots thing.
the thousand lira notes in italy used to have a thin silver wire embedded in them. It was really easy to pull those out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Sure... I can think of a use. Knowing which 'ducks' are carrying lots of cash. Useful for..
a.) Street criminals
b.) Their brethren in Southern State Highway Patrols who rake in more money from non-trial seziure than from state budget allowances. Now we go from Driving While Black to Driving While Black with > $200.
Related News:
The European Federal Bank commented recently that a low-orbital nuclear explosion
would not only wreck all cash dispensers, computers and electric razors for 5000 miles around, it would also rob 300 million of europeans of their pocket change.
Cautious people are already storing water and food supplies.
Tom's Hardware ran a video showing a 50 euros note frying in flames due to massive overclocking ( up to 500 euros ) after the thermal dump was removed.
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
How many times do they need to find bills from your ATM withdrawl in the pot dealer's deposit bag before they knock on your door?
This idea was written up at DEC SRC years ago if I am not mistaken.
I noticed some people asking basic questions like if RFID is wireless. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is inherently wireless, it works on the same principal our AC power transformers use. There is a coil inside the bill that is a certain number of turns. It is energized by a high energy coil placed where the bill needs to be tracked. The high energy coil induces a current in the bill's coil and causes it to modulate a unique stream of bits on a preset frequency. It's pretty nifty technology, it never needs batteries and will work indefinitely.
This technology has existed in access control systems for years. It's important to note that they're not 'chips' in the common sense of the word... they're actually coils of copper etching.
The coil is 'read' by emmitting a radio signal and reading the reflected frequency from the coil. This makes the currency immune to all forms of defacing short of cutting the coil out of the currency or cutting it in half. If the bank was smart, the coil spans the entire currency so it's impossible to complete remove it. It can be read from up to twenty feet away. However, it's difficult to discern different signatures or how many signatures there are when the coils are in close proximity to each other.
And no, microwaves will only serve to ignite your currency. But hey, if you've got money to burn, go for it, honey.
Further testing by AMD showed that overclocking a 50 euro note to 100 euros and then removing the 1 euro coin (acting as the heat sink) would simply cause the 50 euro note to fail to respond, but it was not permanently damaged.
Meanwhile, a group from Norway has announced a Linux port to the 500 euro note. Slashdot trolls have announced they can not afford to make beowulf clusters of these notes.
John
John
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.
RFID is just one of the technologies being examined. It has advantages as well as a pile of disadvantages that other have noted here. Certainly whilst you may spend 1 Euro to protect a 500 Euro note, even that is pretty expensive.
Although in the US, people like to use non-cash methods for large but legal sums, say for a car or a house, in may parts of the EU, people will make major purchases in cash, yes even houses and these people have their cash legally too! Well, some of them. Certainly, there are a lot of quite legitimate users of high value bills here.
The problem here is that counterfeit money costs the issuer. It certainly costs the Fed for all those dud greenbacks. However, no central banker likes to tell how much counterfeit money is being picked up (I have asked). WHther it costs enough that it justifies RFID tags is another matter.
The EU certainly likes to support domestic technology, i.e. Siemens and Phillips, but there are limits.
See my journal, I write things there
say about 30 years? that way I can live the rest of my life out without having to worry about having a chip imprinted in my skin that can be tracked by anyone who wants to throw money at a receiver? or having my wallet surveyed by a potentiel mugger? Or have my cars speedometer turn me in for doing 80 down the turnpike???? Please folks, someone invent a time machine so I can live in 1971 and drive a friggin barracuda?
#include sig.h
Come on. I've read five notable comments in this thread and they all say in effect "How can I disable this protection to prevent the government from spying on me?"
Yes, I am concerned about my privacy. I find it really painful that so many people have my phone number, my email address, and my home address. People send me offensive ads every day which I wish I could refuse without inviting more.
This said, why are people instantly opposed to money with copy protection? I have no objection to this money unless something goes severely wrong, for example:
The money requires me to input my name and address after acquiring it.
The money breaks if I don't take good care of it.
Retailers refuse to accept it because the copy protection is so burdensome.
The wierd thing is that existing money often has these problems. When I go to the bank and withdraw cash from my account, they ask me for my name and address on the withdrawal form. If I leave a twenty in the wash a few too many times, it might fall apart - sometimes you can get people to still take it, but often not. And most inexplicably, the new US $100 bill that has so many copy protection features on it - I can't use it anywhere! People simply refuse it and say "there's too many forgeries around." Isn't that odd?
If the ECB puts a 1k data chip on their money, and the money still works like normal money, I will encourage it.
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!
I'm sure some of you already know about wheresgeorge.com... but if not, its a really fun thing to do. Get an account, and voluntarily track your own bills by entering the serial numbers. Each bill gets marked, and hopefully somebody else will see it and enter the serial numbers again. I've had a bit of fun with it, seeing my bills travel around the country.
But seriously though, one of the benefits of using paper currency is its anonymity. I buy my copy of 2600 every quarter with plain cash, just because I"m ultra paranoid. Hard currency is used in ways that will boggle the mind, so its somewhat hard to believe the problems that would arrise from money tracking here in the US.
Its probably unconstitutional anyway.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I'm not sure if i'd want to know how many strip joints my money has been in before it gets to me!
First of all: the Euro was not pushed by the banks. It was done by the governments.
Second: the European currencies have had fixed rates for a few years now and I still have to see any negative effect of that. The countries that are allowed to join in, have to have a very stable currency. Only fluctuation within a very small band was allowed. If a currency would fluctuate too much, the EMU would act upon by buying or selling the currency. It has been like this for many years now and so far this cooperation has only had benefits. In fact the system has even proven to work already waaay before we came up with the Euro. So why is a fixed currency not fair? If we decide we want to cooperate more, why not fix those rates? Or would you rather have a different currency in every state of the US? That would be more fair by your rules, wouldn't it.
Third: I don't see how the Euro allows any more control than the money we had before does. The cash is just the same, it only looks different and has a different value per unit. There is no additional tracking-system AT ALL. The banks don't get any additional control either, they only change Currency X into EURO and that's it. So what exactly are you talking about?
Next: in what way is the dollar any better than the Euro? Please give me some arguments before saying so. They're both just currencies. Money. Something to prevent us from having to trade cows for computers. It's nothing more than that. The ONLY reason why a currency would be any better, would be that it's value is more stable compared to the value of other currencies. Maybe the dollar is more stable (I don't believe it is, but I may be wrong). One thing I can tell you: the Euro is most certainly a lot more stable than 16 different independant currencies. So that would make the Euro better than all currencies we're using now here in the EU.
Last: What does the amount of civil rights organizations have to do with this? Are there really more of such organizations in the US (as compared to the EU)? Please give me some facts. And then think about why this could be....maybe they're simply needed more in the US?
0x or or snor perron?!
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
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?