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New High Tech $100 Bills Start To Circulate Today
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "New $100 bills made their debut today in the U.S. They include high tech features designed to make it easier for the public to authenticate but more difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. Those measures include a blue, 3-D security ribbon, as well as color-shifting ink that changes from copper to green when the note is tilted (PDF). That ink can be found on a large '100' on the back of the bill, on one of the '100's' on the front, and on a new image of an ink well that's also on the front. 'The $100 is the highest value denomination that we issue, and it circulates broadly around the world,' says Michael Lambert, assistant director for cash at the Federal Reserve Board. 'Therefore, we took the necessary time to develop advanced security features that are easy for the public to use in everyday transactions, but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate.' The bill was originally due to reach banks in 2011, but three years ago the Federal Reserve announced that a problem with the currency's new security measures was causing the bills to crease during printing, which left blank spaces on the bills. This led the Feds to shred more than 30 million of the bills in 2012. The image of Benjamin Franklin will be the same as on the current bill, but like all the other newly designed currencies, it will no longer be surrounded by an dark oval. Except for the $1 and $2 bill, all U.S. paper currency has been redesigned in the last 10 years to combat counterfeiting."
The new $100 bill looks similar to the euro bill. Who knows, pretty soon all of our currency will look the same and eventually become one currency, and we all know what that will bring...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
What a complete farce, the only people who are truly counterfeiting the currency are the government officials and their lapdog central bankers, and you can't prevent them from adding zeros to the electronic bank accounts by adding anti-counterfeit measures to the bills.
The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.
You can't handle the truth.
NT
The government is shut down!!!!11
are 2 dollar bills in circulation? just asking because I haven't seen any.
If the government is supposed to be shut down, how could anyone release this money?
And yet they can't do such basic things as, say, change the sizes of the notes so that vision impaired people can tell the difference between a one dollar and ten dollar bill just by checking its length. (Have a look at the Australian notes for an example: each note is seven millimeters longer than the preceding one by value.)
They'd also do well by dropping the one and two dollar bills, replacing them with coins; the currency has devalued so much, it's not worth keeping the low value notes as notes. You could also make a case for ditching the penny, to boot.
But hey, what would I know ...
So why would I bother trying to counterfeit the newer more difficult bills instead of just doing the older easier ones since they remain legal tender?
“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.”
All your money is belong to East German Stasi
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...the United States still has the world's fugliest currency.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
While various countries took care to regularly update their bill printing tech, for the longest time the country with the most bills in widest circulation did... nothing. As long as the counterfeits didn't leak back into the country, it wasn't a problem. Where else have we seen that attitude?
They rolled out similar plastic money in Canada and it was counterfeited within a year.
The big problem was the $20s, they already seemed fake and a lot of people reported them as such and so reports would get easily dismissed. Guess which denomination turned out to be a big problem
Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Most countries already use different colored bills to help distinguish one denomination from another (and to aid in quickly determining how much cash on hand you have by a quick glance). Only in the US do I have to manually count out every bill to make sure a $5 didn't sneak in with the $1s and so on.
Of course, perhaps it's time to go beyond linen/cotton/paper based bills and move to plastic (polymer) based ones...
Hey, wonder why they didn't incorporate the accidental blank spaces as an additional security feature? You know, like old school game disks used to have certain sectors purposefully corrupted as a method of copy protection, so if you copied the game to a new disk and the computer didn't see the bad sectors where it expected to, it would know it was a copy...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Theres no grace period to trade in your old bills. Sure they'll get taken out of circulation eventually but you can still find old-school 100s (the ones that look like the 1s do now) floating around and still pay with then
Bills have (or used to have) intentional mistakes that a hand engraver was likely to fix subconsciously, including in some cases typos in microprint and tiny jagged (as if by accident) straight lines.
Nowadays bills are copied using high-speed high-precision laser scanners so I do not know if those artifacts are still used as security devices.
Interests rates have been zero percent for years and will remain so indefinitely. Counterfeiting is passe when the federal reserve corporation prints unlimited money for it's member banks who then loan even more money out through fractional reserve banking. Anyone who is still counterfeiting is late to the game when unfathomable unencumbered money creation is legal.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
gains market share y00r own towel in
Darn, now that I can no longer counterfeit Ben Franklins with my printer, I'll have to go back to counterfeiting printer cartridges.
Uh, because anyone making a set of counterfeit plates would just make sure his plates had the same blank spaces? The idea is to put in features that the counterfeiters couldn't easily copy...
(and FYI - it took me about 20 minutes to slap together a simple TSR to provide the proper "bad" sectors where required for those stupid disks. Turns out that was trivially easy to get around too...)
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Seriously, I'm waiting a patent troll to step up to the plate and sue cuz the new currency uses something the troll patented.
$100 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the world. however, $20 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the US.
the new design is going to piss off North Korea because they counterfeit US $100 bills like crazy: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/1008/New-100-bill-why-North-Korea-won-t-be-very-happy-video
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
All those bells... very festive.
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
Nullius in verba
...the features the swiss money had since 1995: http://www.snb.ch/de/iabout/cash/history/id/cash_history_serie8
Iran has been circulating these new $100s since last week.
Norway cut their equivalent 1000kr bill three years ago, as a means to make large [criminal] money transfers harder.
Now that we have bitcoin, why is the US pouring resources into a new high tech bill that will never be used for anything good?
That makes sense. Usually a travel expense paid by your company. Who cares if they charge you $18 for a day with internet access?
I remember the Westin Palace in Madrid charges $1 USD per night for charity.
After the queen saved Harper you'd think they'd have ditched her already.
The first one was far too easily mistaken for a quarter. No idea about the second one other than the only place I ever actually saw one was from a stamp vending machine.
I'll bet if they had just said no more $1 notes will be printed, it would have worked fine.
The Eisenhower dollar coin (still not even the "first" one) was waaaay too big to be mistaken for a quarter and once upon a time vending machines (and pinball machines!!) could recognize them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_dollar
The 1976 version with the Liberty bell and moon on the reverse was pretty cool for patriotic geeks.
I love the golden dollar coin. I just don't come across it enough. (Except at car washes.)
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?
FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Each bills won't last long, either from getting wet or ripped accidentally. Resulting in loss and having to print more and more and more. Would be about damn time for the US to rework it's whole currency while taking the old one off the market, like many other country did, like Canada.
Apparently, almost a year ago to the day, a "large amount" were stolen from a Philly airport. I couldn't find a follow-up (might be what I used for initial sources), but am I now to believe these theives can finally spend their cash? Or was the design tweaked since then? I suppose if it was, it would benefit the FBI investigation to not have that stated.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
As software and music producers know: a reasonable amount of illegitimately copied content helps in building a consistent craving for the product that will ultimately be covered by the real thing to some degree where the price can be afforded.
One reason the dollar bill is the universal currency because in times of urgent need it can be locally produced and marketed at a discount.
Now new bills lock out the universal availability of the dollar bill. The U.S. does its best to compensate by not actually offering anything useful in return in case you threaten to turn in a dollar from out of the country, but the resulting trade deficit bears its own problems.
The biggest folk that print money out of thin air - the FED - at a rate of $85 BILLIONS Dollar a month
There have been quite a lot of countries that actually had a gold (or other similar valuable metals, most notably silver, that could easily be exchanged for gold) storage that would back every single paper money bill in rotation. It called the "gold standard" and money issued when this was in effect could always be exchanged for a predetermined amount of gold, noted on the bills. This was especially true in Europe in the era just after Napoleon, since people distrusted "paper money" after the French government refused to exchange the money Napoleon introduced when he conquered their countries and took all their gold and silver. In the USA, history went another way and there have only been short periods when the government had a gold or silver standard. Gold standards have existed far into the 20th century and only when people trusted their government enough (or when they got greedy enough) governments have been abandoning this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I wish people would make more of an effort to circulate $2 bills. You basically have to order them yourself to use them, and something like 75% of the people you give them to for tips or purchases either look at them funny or call them fakes. Their rarity is self-sustaining - somebody gets one, goes 'huh that's weird' and stashes it. Then a few more people stash LOTS of them, because I dunno.
Fight the system! Use $2s! Hell, use cash more often - your waiter will thank you for sure.
A local bank told me years ago that if I wanted a $100 bill, it would have to be special ordered. They claim they haven't kept them on hand for many years.
Another bank told me they don't even handle them anymore.
So, if you wanted to give a family member a card and include a few 100s for a special occasion, you couldn't.
and doesnt sound like any of those security measures is any new ... heck, even the not-even-5€ lunch vouchers I get at work have color-shifting ink, watermarking and a "3d" surface ...
I feel sorry for North Korea - what are they going to do for hard currency now, unless can catch up with this?
Though saying that, the $100 is essentially an Asian currency as that's mostly where it circulates. Not a bad thing for the US - they get $100 for printing each one, the bills disappear overseas forever and so never contribute to US inflation.
.. more long-lived, but they're also quite impractical in everyday use.
Look, for example, to the EU, which has â1/â2 coins and not notes, and ask the people how they like 'em. (Hint: they're nearly-universally loathed.)
So, the obvious solution is to counterfeit $1 bills.
Let's see if I can educate the Slashdot crowd today, be sure to Google my headline "Mr. 880".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I want to be very clear to anybody that goes out and buys Silver and Gold.
Places will try to see you "American Eagle" for more than other brands. This is nothing but the physical shape of the coins. It has no more value than any other coin of the same purity; but dealers sell it for slightly more because it reflects America, but it really has no more value than the others. If it's all melted down, its the same value, and after an economic collapse, those fancy names won't mean anything in way of integritty.
Besides replacing the $1 and $2 bills with coins and ditching the penny, Canada is also gradually replacing paper bills with bills made from polymer; which is supposed to be more durable than paper bills. Here’s what Canada’s new $5 and $10 polymer bills look like.
Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?
FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.
Really? Because I seem to remember being able to batch-print form letters, envelope addresses, etc. using different names and addresses from an (admittedly dinky and annoying to set up) database in Word in the 90's, maybe (?) I think it was called Mail Merge or something like that (obviously haven't needed to use it in quite some time...)
Seems to me that they should be able to print sequential serial numbers on the fly pretty easy, unless they are still stamp-pressing the currency notes (which it sounds like they are, as are all other world currencies...hmm)...and even if they are, what prevents them from adding an encrypted version of the serial number at the same time that they're adding the human-readable version? I'm not sure how well this would actually work, but at least it would up the ante on the quality of machines needed to produce undetectable copies...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant