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There are only 38bn USD banknotes (not dollars, banknotes) in circulation. That's very few. https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircvolume.h
by tajen 10y ago
There are only 38bn USD banknotes (not dollars, banknotes) in circulation. That's very few. https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircvolume.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircv...
...and 15bn EUR banknotes. If you think about it, they all have a serial number and it's easy to track them with a mere bigdata database. Most banknotes change hands only once before being registered in a bank again. The others are all suspicious. Keeping your money for a few months? Not a crime by itself but in most situations it's linked with laundering. Withdrawing every week from your ATM and cashed by the same drug dealer? They probably won't scream it over the roofs, but the FBI probably already uses this technique to track criminals.
If you think it's hard to track patterns in banknotes, it's ok, but it's less hard than tracking every single CB transaction across the world.
- Retric 10y agoBanks don't track which sn they are handing out each time. So, on deposit you just know the starting bank. And that's only if the depositing bank tracks sn which is far less common than you might think. Banks are more than happy to put deposited money back into circulation without that overhead.
- m-i-l 10y agoAccording to the reference in [0]: "As at the end of June 2013, there are 197,800 ATMs in use on the [Chinese] mainland, of which 100,700 or 55.28% have been upgraded with the serial number enquiry function. According to schedule, by late 2015, the serial number of every Rmb100 note withdrawn from banks by members of the public can be traced." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948081