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Tiny Transistors Could Be Used To Track Cash
disco_tracy writes "Banks have long considered placing silicon transistors on currency for security purposes, but the technology was too chunky and intensive for paper bills. Now, tiny low-power organic transistors developed by German scientists could make it possible to really follow the money."
There goes one of the last mediums of semi-anonymous financial transactions.
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Why not just use "Where's George" stamps?
So is your currency invalid if you microwave it?
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Ah I love German scientists 3 Always coming up with great things!
What happens when I launder the bills in my pocket?
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
The found conclusively that It almost always ends up at strip clubs.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
Wow, you mean up until this point it simply wasn't feasible to track cash? And now science has provided a way? Thanks, amoral German scientists! This is the best gift you've given the world since mustard gas!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No? Too simple? Or can OCR software simply not read the serial numbers printed on the notes?
Ah wait. They want to be able to do it clandestinely... I see...
Deleted
Maybe.
How about if you microwave your head by accident?
Shouldn't it be more robust than your money?
Most of our coinage is already worth more than its denomination in raw materials.....so are we proposing to give (low denomination) paper money the same treatment? I can already see black market micro-transistor harvesting businesses. Either that, or hackers and DIYers are going to start modifying them to make the company whose job it is to track such money miserable. This could almost be fun! If it weren't so 1984-esque.... Oh wait, I forgot, we already have "Where's George?", the voluntary version of this...which is basically a toy, and has no real practical use.
Do you really think Congress would pass a law that would allow cash tracking?
Think of the mayhem such a law would create with the current "system" of campaign financing and "political contributions."
Get real. This will never happen.
and put the chip in people's right hand or forehead...
it might upset a few people though (mostly christians)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Didn't the Lone Gunmen demonstrate this in one episode?
I highly doubt political contributions and campaign financing are enacted via cash very often.
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linux ?
Nullius in verba
Plausible deniability: Foil lined wallet. Microwave your cash every night. Wear a floppy brimmed hat and stoop when you buy the newspaper with a $20 at 7-11. They may scan the bill, but the cameras can't see your face. Your change is off the map. Purchase items of value (guns, jewelry) from private sellers with this cash. Sell the same way. Money laundering is a continuum, from a Cayman Islands corporation to painting a friend's house for cash.
Oh I don't know. Surely there's some way to spin cash-tracking as stopping pedophiles.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
...could make it possible to really follow the money
Every day I find myself wanting a personal EMP generator more and more.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
what about old and beat up bills?
Somebody makes a modest advance in materials science, and it's hyped into an application. Again. The Discovery crowd is notorious for these.
The usual subjects for this class of hype are batteries, displays, and memory devices.
How about less than a decade ago, and in a modern democratic country by the Prime Minister
Or were you being sarcastic, and I missed it?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
You're going to see a lot of conspiracy theory nut jobs microwaving their money.
The web sight and voluntary tracking are no doubt a toy.
However it is a thought provoking toy. I bet all bills get scanned at the bank every time they are deposited. Adding OCR for serial numbers has been computationally trivial for at least a decade, standard fonts and all. There is even a valid reason as many batches of counterfeit cash share serial numbers.
Anybody want to bet the bill counting machines are network connected?
Who works at a bank? Clandestine traffic analysis? If they are tracking the bills it's got to generate a decent amount of traffic, especially by the standards of 10 or so years ago. I bet just looking for it is a fire-able offense. You'd need a reason to be looking at the traffic on the segment, then just forget to turn it off for a week or so.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide
most effective in the line for the free TSA prostate exam
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Manufactured with minute amounts of aluminum and gold using a special dry process, each flexible 250-nanometer-thick array only needs three volts to operate.
This is FED attempt at being funny, 'eh?
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
Before such tainted cash even hits the streets, you will be able to buy a shielded billfold, or an inexpensive device that fries the tracking chip.
That, or the smart ones among us will make a concerted effort to displace tainted cash with a new money system. Maybe something like the funny money some communities have started using for local businesses.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If you truly need to follow all significant money movements, simply stop printing paper money. Force everyone to use credit cards and checks. I mean really. We don't do that because it is an invasion of privacy. There is no need to come up with a NEW way to invade our privacy, we already have enough old ways.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Privacy problems aside: So basically these "tiny transistors" are RFID chips?
From TFA:
These low-voltage transistors could one day provide added security or tracking by transmitting information wirelessly to a scanner.
Security for whom btw? For the banks I assume?
Who did you think it belonged to? Do you think the world wants a personal unsecured IOU from you?
kill off all the old people.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Obviously you've never been to South Florida.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and how long will it take to roll this out? 10 years when there lot's of old bill with out this?
and what about install scanners all over the place?
the advantage of banknotes is their anonymity, the abstraction to the underlying transaction of real goods and services.
Do you really think Congress would pass a law that would allow cash tracking?
Think of the mayhem such a law would create with the current "system" of campaign financing and "political contributions."
Get real. This will never happen.
They'll just exempt themselves from the law by finding a "legitimate" need for such an exception.
Only terrorists use inoperable cash!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Don't all bills have a unique serial number? So they can already be tracked, just scan the number. What difference does it make if it is electronic or not? The only time it's going to be tracked is when it's scanned.
See after I rob a bank I spend the next few weeks going from crap-shack to crap-shack buyin something cheap and loading anon visa cards with the larger bills. Pick carefully, dont pattern and don't be lazy. Easy if somewhat time consuming way to launder money.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
Don't these guys need money to buy candy to lure the kids?
It's quite obvious what we should do: ban candy!
I always though that the dollar bill, as opposed to just any money in the world, was made on purpose easy to counterfeit so that it would be used as the de facto worldwide currency.
Yeah, I'm sure the facts that the US economy is by far the largest economy of any single country in the world by a wide margin and the fact that most money is not printed plays no role at all in the dollar being the world's reserve currency. [/sarcasm] The US maintains about $800 billion in circulation at any given time. This amount while large is dwarfed by the amount of money in circulation that is not printed currency. The US GDP is somewhere around $14 Trillion by comparison.
I mean it's only 2 colors (green and black) and the security measures on it are ridiculous (some hair in the paper, are you serious?).
It's not two colors and hasn't been for a very long time if it ever was. Some of the security measures are easy to see so that people can easily weed out the bad quality counterfeits. Others are less obvious to weed out the better counterfeits. If you seriously believe what you are saying you have basically announced your ignorance to the world. There is no bill that can't be counterfeited. The dollar may be easier than some but it's not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It's estimated that there are about $70 million in counterfeit US bills in circulation at any given time. Compare $70 million with $800 billion.
it indeed dissolves if you forget it in your pants while using the washing mashine
You've never actually washed a dollar have you? They are remarkably durable and are designed to withstand washing. I've accidentally washed bills on numerous occasions and they have invariably come out just fine. A little beat up but fine.
O, I don't know. Seems like 12 seconds in the microwave, or under a steam iron, or maybe thru the delicate cycle in the washer would pretty much render these inoperable.
Terrific. And then when you try to pass these inoperable bills at Walmart they'll run them by a scanner to see if they are real and then refuse to accept them as valid currency. Congratulations! You just literally threw away perfectly good money in a fit of paranoia.
Don't all bills have a unique serial number?
Yes but that is relatively easy to copy and relatively difficult to read. It does get read but few organizations have the equipment to do so with any amount of efficiency. Furthermore a serial number is useless without a database to compare it too. A chip could carry actual data beyond simply a serial number.
So they can already be tracked, just scan the number.
Possible in theory but not really in practice for private enterprise. OCR systems are still quite complicated and expensive. Plus having a chip in the currency allows you to do other things besides simply track where the money is without having to have access to a centralized database.
What difference does it make if it is electronic or not?
Efficiency, plain and simple. The goal is to reduce the cost of tracking. Whether the tracking is a good thing or not is another matter..
Have gnu, will travel.
What stops me from cutting out a piece of the transistors. or simply cutting through them? From the picture in TFA looks like it could be easily cut without fucking the money up.
Do you really think Congress would pass a law that would allow cash tracking?
Yes, in a heartbeat.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wheres George? (www.wheresgeorge.com) is a game I play that revolves around user input of serial numbers (and denomination/date to form a unique key)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The technology is called OCR. You just optically read the serial number off the bill as it's processed. This is hardly a new thing.
I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that this is already done when bills go back to reserve banks for the purpose of detecting counterfeiting.
37 bills all with the same serial number would be a touch suspicious.
Microwave your money for 10 seconds and it's done.
Privacy is terrorism.
""All your currency are belong to us"
Sincerely,
Your government."
"I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."
Joe Stack
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You act like you're entitled by some "right" to store your wealth in foldable form ... You don't.
Actually, I do. And that seems to be the thing that folks like you forget these days. The Bill of Rights was not drafted as a piece of legal paperwork to delineate what rights we Americans have. It was drafted to delineate what rights the Federal government has the power to regulate. Anything not given to the Federal government is left to the States and citizens by default.
That means that I do have the right to carry some foldable form of wealth in my pocket unless it is written somewhere that I do not have that right. That means that I have that right and all other rights, left naturally to me by being a human being, unless they are restricted via a legal document somewhere else (like the right to operate a motor vehicle or practice medicine). So unless there is a law that says, "This and this authority are hereby granted the power to limit the types of wealth that can be carried by an individual, as well as which transactions can be carried out with that wealth..." I have they right to do exactly that which you claim I don't. That's why they are called natural human rights. They exist by default, and we contract with the government to limit them as is necessary to keep society functioning properly. That is all the power the government has.
Rights are naturally endowed at the creation of a human being. Oh, and one more thing:
You act like you're entitled by some "right"....
To quote a fellow 'dotter: Rights are not entitlements.
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I heard of this idea of attaching a unique hash value to each bill. This technology would use a suspended polymer with an affinity for cellulose. When applied to the bill this would allow unique tracking of the bill by altering its properties.
I heard of this idea of attaching a unique hash value to each bill. This technology would use a suspended polymer with an affinity for cellulose. When applied to the bill this would allow unique tracking of the bill by altering its optical properties. I don't see how this makes it any easier to track money than using ocr.