I have personally spent a good deal of effort trying to find out how to create convincing, counterfeit currency. I am reasonably sure that I have the major poin

I have personally spent a good deal of effort trying to find out how to create convincing, counterfeit currency. I am reasonably sure that I have the major points nailed down: you have to create your own paper (preferably after chemical and visual analysis of the banknotes in question) and then get hold of some ferromagnetic and fluorescent inkjet inks. Intaglio plates and watermarks can probably be created through a photolitographic process. Color-changing inks are the most tricky part..they obviously use some application of interference, but I haven't quite figured it out. Holograms, for the currencies that require it, can be created with an incredibly expensive hologram machine, which is probably impractical. You'd be surprised at how little of this information is available to the public; most of the information I've gathered I've had to figure out by myself from looking at the officially available information on the security features of paper money. A more paranoid individual would suspect a cover-up. Perhaps there are laws against discussing things like this. If someone has ever read a good book on the history of counterfeit money, I would be glad to hear it. To me it seems as if there is an information desert on this subject - which just sparks my curiosity furher. Counterfeiting is a fascinating engineering discipline, even more so in regions where the economic loss is handled by vast entities (counterfeit money, if not discovered, is paid for through the resulting inflation, counterfeit gold, if done properly, would end up at the balance sheet of a central bank and hence the taxpayers of the country in question, etc.)