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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."
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?
If the government is supposed to be shut down, how could anyone release this money?
The federal reserve is not part of the government, it never was, it never will be.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
...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
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.
Care to place a wager on that?
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
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...
There are something like 3 million of them in circulation, and new ones are still being printed periodically. But many people, like yourself, have never actually encountered one.
(I've heard anecdotes of people trying to spend one being accused of counterfeiting, because the cashier had never seen one and assumed that it was a fraud).
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
According to our friend Wikipedia, new ones have been printed as recently as last year...
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
The banks that don't have them in stock will almost always be willing to include a brick of $2 bills in their next currency order to the Fed if you agree to take all 1000 of them. It takes me about a year to go through a brick just using them for small cash purchases.
What's gold and silver backed by? Oh yeah, that's right nothing but our imagination.
Money is like a strapless evening dress on a 70 year old: It's held up by the collective belief that anything is better than having to see it drop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It was never backed by gold. It was always backed only by promises. There was not enough gold to pay back if every dollar was brought in for a gold payout.
Learn to love Alaska
So we now make our money safe by implementing security means they had in their money for a decade now, because we know they don't have access to that kind of sophisticated technology. Uhhuh.
Makes about as much sense as anything coming out of capitol hill lately.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
that's mostly because people go, "oooo, a crisp $2 bill! hardly ever see those!" and then they stash it somewhere at home
2 dollar bills would actually be what I'd forge if I were to. Think about it, it's legal tender, it's an amount where most businesses won't start to make a fuss over and nobody really knows what they should look like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
no, the Federal Funds Rate is currently 0.25% and for overnight loans. very short term so does not have the explosive inflationary effect you seem to imagine.
Which is kind of sad, because the back of the $2 bill has been pretty awesome since 1976.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The only stuff in the universe that cannot be counterfeited is energy.
I propose a new currency based on the kWh. Instead of slips of paper or plastic credit cards, people will use rechargeable batteries and actually transfer units of work between each other.
At first there will be extremely rapid inflation as people set up solar collectors and other such stuff, but eventually nearly every inch of the earth will be dedicated to collecting energy. Things like tax credits and welfare can be eliminated as every man, woman, and child will be able to collect or generate at least some energy (the government could give out stationary bikes that collect energy), which will act as a base negative tax rate.
With so much energy then available, what would our standard of living be?
$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.
The Bank of Canada is wholly Canadian owned. Legally, it is a crown corporation, belonging to the federal government. Ultimately, the Bank of Canada is owned by the people of Canada.
R.R. Donnelly runs the Canadian Bank Note Company, which prints bank notes for Canada, but this has always been a private company (before 1920, it was a subdivision of the American Bank Note Company in New York). The Canadian Bank Note Company is not to be confused with the Royal Canadian Mint, which is another crown corporation, and is also wholly owned by the Government of Canada. CBN also prints passports, driver's licences, and assorted other documents that are government-issued.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The gold is gone, where's the gold?
And the gold was backed by...?
It's awesomely shiny, and it has a small number of specialty scientific and industrial uses, but gold as gold isn't all that intrinsically valuable as a mineral; it's just rather rare and something that a number of societies historically used as one convenient medium of exchange.
You can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't shoot someone with it. You can't get other people to do stuff in exchange for it unless there is a stable enough society that the recipients anticipate being able to trade it in turn.
Its market value is significantly more variable and volatile than that of the major fiat currencies. The price of gold backed with pure gold isn't stable or reliable from year to year, I can't imagine why we would expect a currency backed with it to be magically better.
~Idarubicin
He didn't specify the gender of the 70-year old. Any misogyny here is your own.
"It has had value since humans placed value on things."
Correction: it has been GIVEN value since humans placed value on things. You can't eat gold, right? you can't shelter with gold, right?
Now, think of it. Gold has value because people gave it value. This means that other things can have value as long as people gives value to them. Pretty papers with a portrait of a famous dead guy, for instance.
No, you could go to any Federally Charted bank and get Silver Dollars (which at that time were in fact silver).
You didn't need a truckload, you could do it bill by bill. Only after 1968 did they abrogate the promise
of silver. This was preceded by a years notice, and was sort of a big deal at the time.
I distinctly remember many people gathering silver certificates and turning them in for silver granules.
This they thought was a hedge against inflation. Shortly after 1968, the price of silver crashed, and many sold at a loss.
By 78, silver had doubled from its 68 price, and by 88, it had risen ten fold.
It was only the bills marked Hawaii and North Africa that cold be canceled upon invasion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And the gold was backed by...?
"Backed" is the wrong word, but the factor that has made gold a trustworthy currency for millenia, one people are eager to receive and reluctant to part with, is scarcity.
In terms of "backing", Federal Reserve notes and gold are on the same footing. Neither is backed by anything else. The difference is that there is no practical limit to the number of FRNs in circulation, which means that if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It has had value since humans placed value on things.
Ah, good, at least you understand where value comes from (and thus fundamentally agree with the person you were responding to), rather than believing in magical fairy tales like "intrinsic value" or such nonsense...
At least it has intrinsic value...
...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Iran has been circulating these new $100s since last week.
Conveniently, it can be freely converted to bitcoin. Unfortunately, it can't be converted back.
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if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
This, right here, is the usual logical error that gold bugs typically make. While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed (we'll neglect the small amount of 'new' gold added to the economy through mining), the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation. Changes in supply and demand in turn significantly shift the perceived value of gold, leading to swings in its market price and in its effective purchasing power.
This has been illustrated quite graphically over the last few years. Fifteen years ago, gold was trading below $300 US per ounce. Ten years ago, it was pushing $400. Five years ago, it was around $900. A year ago, it was nudging $1800. Now it has slid back down to $1300, and shows no sign of slowing its decline. There was a similar spike around 1980. There wasn't a sudden reduction in the amount of gold in the world over the last decade or so, but for some reason the price of an ounce increased six-fold (before plummeting again). Either U.S. dollars really did lose five-sixths of their value between 1998 and 2012 - a conclusion not supported by their ability to buy pretty much any good, commodity, or foreign currency - or the 'intrinsic' value of gold generally accounts for only a relatively small portion of its market price, and the majority of its 'value' is just as imaginary as that of any fiat currency.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
The price of gold under the various iterations of the gold standard was stable not because of gold's intrinsic value, but because the currency (or currencies) pegged to it had a perceived stable value. In a very real and practical sense, the strength of the U.S. dollar was backing the price of gold for much of the 20th century, and not the other way around.
~Idarubicin
Speaking of old... I'm fairly sure if somebody pulled a Reagan era $100 note from a matress somewhere, it's still spendable. Anti-counterfeit measures are only good as the oldest version of currency still being accepted.
Here in Canada most stores won't take old large ($50-$100) bills so you have to take them to a bank. The bank tellers usually have enough experience to spot most counterfeits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips."
Yeah, and it was used to store and represent wealth because, you know, it's good to have some ounces of it in case you have to practice a suture. C'mon, man, C'mon.
I'll tell you exactly why it was chosen:
* First and foremost because humans are capable of abstraction and so, we can cognitate in terms of "look, this is gold, but let's pretend it is not gold but wealth". In other words, it has value because there is a common understandment that we'll give value to it.
* It's scarce enough that it takes considerable work to take it out of land, so it's no danger of a repent market flood, you want some stability on its meaning.
* It's soft and malleable, so you can fractionalize it with ease.
* It's dense, so you can agree to represent a good piece of wealth in low volume: you don't want to trade a day's worth of effort for the volume of a house.
* It's stable, so you can use it to store wealth. You don't want your wealth to vanish in short term all by itself.
* Hurr... looks purty so, why not?
You see, all its properties comes from an abstractions and its ability to sustain the meaning of that abstraction. And that's why, in the end, fiat money works exactly the same, because from the begining, it was a matter of puting value onto something, not that this something had a value on itself.
yes. by living in or traveling in the US you make an implicit agreement to accept the currency of the land. You can move your business elsewhere if you dont trust the dollar. It would require a lot of effort, but thats your problem if you view it as "backed by nothing". Using this currency also comes with rights of the land, so (independent of whether you want it or not) you get the protections and regulations that come along with it. This is a part of participating in a society where people are not altruistic and we require laws and order, whether or not you agree with all the laws and regulations as they are.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Yeah, but the issuing government is gone. Where's the issuing government?
Right now, Zimbabwe has a more functional government than the issuing government of the $100 bill.
I have a goldbug friend that pays a premium for his "insured" bar somewhere in Europe. He claims he can visit his gold anytime. But all he has is a piece of paper that says they should give him gold. If something bad enough happens that we abandon all currency and only trade metal, what are the chances that he'll be able to withdraw his supposed gold? What proof does he have that they haven't sold that one bar 100 times?
None. Same as all the other "backed" currency. It'd backed by faith alone.
Learn to love Alaska
That would only work if we had efficient storage methods to keep the energy from degrading practically at all.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Yes it does. IIRC about 2% of gold goes into these useful things. The rest goes into stockpiles or jewelry (which for many people is a stockpile.)
In fact we could shut down all gold mines today and use our stockpile of gold for the next thousand years. So in that sense gold is actually more plentiful then copper or iron.
So I don't think the value of gold is being driven on how useful it is in manufacturing. It is valuable because people deem it is valuable - much like fiat money. (but I will grant that fiat money is easier to debase then gold.)