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North Korea's High-Tech Counterfeit $100 Bills
ESRB writes "North Korea is apparently able to produce high-quality counterfeits of U.S. dollars — specifically $100 and $50 bills. It's suspected that they possess similar printing technologies as the U.S. and buy ink from the same Swedish firm. 'Since the superdollars were first detected about a decade ago, the regime has been pocketing an estimated $15 to $25 million a year from them. (Other estimates are much higher — up to several hundred million dollars' worth.)' The article also advocates a move to all-digital payment/transfers by pointing out both forms are only representations of value and noting it would cripple criminal operations such as drug cartels, human traffickers, and so forth."
We don't have to abandon paper money just because it is not possible to keep forgeries from being manufactured. The government just needs a private key and digitally sign each paper bill it produces (similar to the current serial numbers but with PKI powers) and then when you accept paper money for payment you will need a computer to read and verify the digital signature is valid. This would solve the problem (with the added expense of verifying bills) but the government won't propose such a simple solution because they would rather force people off paper currency to track them better.
We get the ink for our money from another country?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I don't want to pay the fees. My Visa cards adds 3% to the rate. I would not call that good either.
Retailers feel, and rightly so I would estimate, that the cost of not accepting credit cards is too high.
.... access to the money people want to give us. Funny how Visa costs more.
I agree with you on this point. Retailers do feel that way.
If it really was sucking retailers dry like that, wouldn't they just choose not to accept the card?
That is like the argument that if taxes are too high, then nobody will open a business, with the end result being that 100% of businesses would close. In the real world, businesses accept the federal/state/local tax, and accept the visa tax.
Consider this though- My company (retail sales) pays more money to Visa in card fees than we pay to the government in taxes. The government provides roads, education for employees, police & fire emergency responses, laws and just general positive effects by not having anarchy. Visa provides
Small retailers prefer cash. Big retailers prefer credit.
The difference is administrative costs. In a small business, the cash is largely handled post-transaction by one of a few people. It can be counted quickly and dropped off at the bank on the way home. This becomes quickly inefficient for a very large business.
Small business example: Used book store with a couple employees. Even if all of the transactions are cash, it's at most a couple thousand a day that needs to be counted and deposited. The owner spends so little time every day on that process, that he doesn't even allocate a cost to it in his mind. Basically, it costs him $0 to process the cash, but 3% to process credit cards. (This is an actual real-world example, btw.)
Large business example: A large Walmart SuperStore can do $80 million of sales in a year. That's over $200,000 a day. Imagine the cost of counting, securing and transporting that amount of cash every day. Esepcially since most of the people who would do that would be on hourly pay. So Walmart could pretty much exactly determine what most of those steps would cost. PLUS, Walmart gets a much better deal from the credit card company. Probably closer to 1%. So let's say Walmart could get rid of most of the cost of moving around $200,000 a day, and it only costs them something like $2,000. Quickly starts to make a whole lot of sense.