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Greenbacks No More
Chacham writes "The Financial Times has an article about the US adding colors to some denominations of US currency. Apparently, with both size and color the same, foreigners have a hard time differenciating between the bills.I still haven't gotten used to the larger pictures. And now this? As Kermit the frog sang, It's not easy being green." The Federal Reserve has a press release. At least there's no mention of RFID tags.
The changes are not there to help people differentiate between the different denominations, they're there to make it harder to counterfeit the bills. They've even said that they're keeping the same look and feel, so the changes won't be that dramatic. They're even trying to make them backwards-compatible with vending machines.
Apparently, with both size and color the same, foreigners have a hard time differenciating between the bills.I still haven't gotten used to the larger pictures
As one of those "foreigners" who now lives in the US, I've often wondered how blind people operate here? All the bills are the same size. If you can't see what's written on the bill, how do you know if you've just offered a $1 bill or a $100 bill to the checkout clerk? How can you check your change?
Its not just the blind. Imagine being able to put your hand in your pocket and know how much cash you have just by feel. That's cool. No more standing on a dark street corner in the bad part of town counting through notes to know if you have enough for a beer/cab home/meal/whatever.
Virtually every other country has different sizes for notes of different amount. This seems like such an obvious and useful thing, I'm amazed that the US hasn't adopted it? Is this the ultimate Not Invented Here syndrome?
Sailing over the event horizon
"The anti-counterfeit measures are basically non-existant"...
... except for the watermarks, microprint, iridescent markings, micro engraved printing process, blue and red fibers embedded in the linen paper, and the micro-thin plastic strip embedded in each bill.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
US currency does not use phoenecian numerals. While the place system of our numbering system borrows heavily from the phoenecians, the numerals themselves look quite different. Perhaps you were thinking of arabic numerals?
See Proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in ISO/IEC 10646 for a visual depiction of what phoenecian numerals look like.
It is very common to find what are known as "raised notes", legitimate bills which have been modified to look like higher-denomination bills. If a clerk, customer or foreign tourist isn't paying attention, they may receive these types of bills. There is
a page on the Secret Service web page about these type of counterfeit bills. Switching to different sized and different color bills would eliminate this type of fraud.
My other first post is car post.
american currancy counting machines can tell what the note is, and do some counterfeit checking, on the fly. easiest way is the little metal strip (which fluoresces under blacklight) is in a different spot on 100s, 50s, 20s, 10s and 5s. Of course, there are a lot of less easy ways around too, since if that was all that got checked, banks would regularly get 2 inch stacks of $50s that only include $100 of real cash.
The Oz mint makes polymer currency, complete with a hologram encrusted window, for Australia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Kuwait, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Romania.
The polymer sheeting is made from in a huge complex where balloons with about the same volume as a WWII aircraft carrier, or something, are blown out from melted polymer in a huge complex. I read a good article on the process in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend section about a year ago.
Here's some links
Oz Dept of Foriegn Affairs 'n Trade
Note Printing Australia
ABC News (the US ABC that is)
Another ABC page
Oz Reserve Bank currency page
Securency PTY LTD
Currency 'how are they made?' page
RBA Polymer page