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Zero Rupee Note
- tareqak 7y agoFor some reason, this joke/meme came to my mind immediately when I read the Wikipedia page: Me: I'd like a Coke please. Waiter/Waitress: Is Pepsi OK? Me: Is Monopoly money OK?
- aij 7y agoThat reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
- MichaelBurge 7y agoDid they ever deposit the check?
- vageli 7y agoWould a bank even accept it? Genuinely curious if it's even possible to register a null transaction like that.
- gowld 7y agoZero is not null!
- oasisbob 7y agoArguably it could be nullified if the payment isn't legal due to being for zero value. Under UCC §3-104, a check is only a negotiable instrument if it's an unconditional order. UCC §3-103 defines an order as "a written instruction to pay money signed by the person giving the instruction." So, to answer the original question - I don't think a zero-amount check is legally a check because it's not a written instruction to pay any money. http://www.ckfraud.org/UCC_provisions.html http://www.ckfraud.org/UCC_provisions.html
- firethief 7y agoHm. Is $0 not an amount of money?
- crankylinuxuser 7y agois "0" ~= NaN ~= [] ?
- vageli 7y agoWriting a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay. Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying.
- firethief 7y ago> Writing a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay. By describing it as a check you've already acknowledged it as an instruction to pay. > Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying. It's equivalent in terms of the final balance, but it's not the same thing in other respects. If I sent you a check for $0, you would wonder how I got your address. There are a variety of ways that it would be different from me not sending you a check for any amount of money at all.
- JasonFruit 7y agoIt is in Germany.
- denzil_correa 7y agoI once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due to eh 0$ check.
- test6554 7y ago>”However, it led to a computer systems crash.” Reminds me of Bobby Tables
- thomasahle 7y agoI'm having a hard me thinking of a case where you'd want to divide by an amount of money. What am I missing?
- Semaphor 7y agoI had a similar experience. I wanted to cancel my old credit card but couldn't find a way to do it online. As there were no fees I just ignored it. Well, it turned out that my VPN still had it as the payment method and so I got a bill to please pay my negative balance (they require at least 10% to be paid off after a month). Of course, I paid. But it turns out that I need to contact them to unlock the card after I had a negative balance. I kept postponing it and kept getting 0€ bills every month. After 3 months they told me they are sorry to see me go but they'd have to cancel my account because of a balance of -0€. It was kinda funny but worked out well :D
- yitchelle 7y agoNot sure if this would actually occur but would it be a negative mark against your credit score if they had to close your account due to non-payment of a -0€?
- namdnay 7y agoCredit scores are an American construct :)
- yitchelle 7y agoThe Germans have their own version - Schufa [0]. :-( Most of other countries also have versions too. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa
- Semaphor 7y agoWhile we have Schufa, you should not (and I did not) get an entry for 0€ debt. Schufa is far simpler than the US credit score.
- superqwert 7y agoI've tried to cancel a credit card and told I needed to withdraw all money first (I had +£5). I withdrew it, and asked them to cancel it again. They started processing, but by the time they had got anywhere, I'd acquired interest (1p) and they refused to cancel the card.
- dsl 7y agoOr you might be remembering this story from an email your mom forwarded to your MSN account in the mid '90s? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sense/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sens...
- wazoox 7y agoHowever I often had bills and reminders of amounts that hover around postage price. The latest one was a 6.22 euros hospital bill.
- dTal 7y agoThere's a golden age sci-fi short for everything: http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson%2C%20Gordon%20R/Dickson%2C%20Gordon%20R%20-%20Computers%20Don%27t%20Argue.txt http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson... (Computers Don't Argue, Gordon Dickson, 1965)
- ankit219 7y agoAWS once sent me reminders to clear pending dues and pay the bills else service will be terminated. The bill was of $0.01.
- jvsg 7y agoyep. Me too. In my case, my bank was unable to process that amount of payment so they eventually had to strike it off my bill.
- justinator 7y agoWorked with a guy that was fed up with the phone company, so he kept like a $0.11 balance due in his account, knowing that sending him the letters asking for him to pay the bill would cost the phone company more than the total was worth.
- Ntrails 7y agoI kept a bank account open with £1 for a decade or so as a similar passive aggressive protest
- u801e 7y agoIn the US, keeping a balance that low will result in a bnak service fee that will, after a period of time, result in a negative balance (which then leads to other fees which further lower your balance).
- l0b0 7y agoSounds like misspelling "139" as "-1E9" could be profitable...
- aflag 7y agoI kept not paying my debts and just accumulating more and more. One day my debts got so large that it caused an overflow. I now have a couple billion to spare. I'll be forever in debt with whoever did my bank's decimal type implementation.
- bifrost 7y agoWow, thats pretty cool, I had no idea. I am a bit shocked that it works though.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> I am a bit shocked that it works though It's a shaming mechanism. If an official is committed to collecting a bribe, it will be useless. But some corrupt officials might be responsive to a verbal dressing down. Handing over a zero-rupee note is less intimidating than delivering a lecture.
- DonHopkins 7y agoYou're daring them to bust you for it.
- travisjungroth 7y agoI think it’s also a strong statement of your position when it comes to bribes. A shakedown for a bribe is a negotiation. If a person is told “pay this $100 fee right now or I’ll have to take you in” and says “no”, the cop may lower the price, raise the price, threaten more, or follow through on the threat to try to get the person to pay up. But if you have a piece of paper that says “I am so against bribery that I carry around pieces of paper that say so” it makes the cop lose hope of getting the bribe. At that point, why bother with the work of arresting them?
- heavenlyblue 7y ago>> A shakedown for a bribe is a negotiation. It's only a negotiation if the official has any chance of being prosecuted for that bribe. >> But if you have a piece of paper that says “I am so against bribery that I carry around pieces of paper that say so” it makes the cop lose hope of getting the bribe. Or well, the cop simply arrests you and puts you in jail for a week during which you can't go to work to afford food for your children. >> If a person is told “pay this $100 fee right now or I’ll have to take you in” and says “no”, the cop may lower the price, raise the price, threaten more, or follow through on the threat to try to get the person to pay up. There was a thing in Russia about a decade ago for people driving cars with European plates: a cop stops you and says you're drunk. You argue with him, so he takes you to a doctor. Doctor says you're drunk. So the bribes went as $10 for the first time and then $100 at the doctor's. If you were smart you knew you could loose the license in Russia and then simply report it stolen in Europe because nobody shared databases.
- aaronharnly 7y agoZero-currency notes have been generated for most of the world: http://zerocurrency.org/ http://zerocurrency.org/
- aatharuv 7y agoThe website hasn't been updated for at least 2 years though. (Under America, it still lists Barack Obama as the President.
- ketralnis 7y agoThat doesn't seem like a problem unless you're trying to rely on their population figures or something
- Waterluvian 7y agoIt's a pretty great example of the wisdom of "doing one thing well." This site should just have a Wikipedia link to each country.
- acct1771 7y agoOr scrape/API, at most.
- DonHopkins 7y ago0 Billion Dollar Bills would be useful in the Trump era.
- smnrchrds 7y agoIt still has the pre-1979 revolution bank notes for Iran. Not only has it not been in circulation or considered legal tender for decades, but also because of the inflation, the value of the note depicted is laughably low—like less than half a cent.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xrisk 7y agoI've never seen this note in India and didn't know that something like this existed.
- unreal37 7y agoIt's not official currency.
- yokohummer7 7y ago> Only one side of the note is printed to resemble currency so as not to run afoul of counterfeiting laws. Doesn't it? To know for sure we need to take it to the court.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThis usually hinges on intent. The most common money-exchange scam is exactly this: the mark receives a stack of one-sided copies instead of actual currency, and the perp runs away before the mark notices. People have gone to prison for this.
- CoryG89 7y agoSomeone has gone to prison for trying to pass off one-sided copies of actual currency? Seems pretty unlikely to me. Would be interested in reading about an actual case of this happening.
- tantalor 7y ago> Seems pretty unlikely Why? The example from Piskvorrr is textbook violation of 18 U.S.C. 473: (paraphrasing here) Handing out fake money with the intent that it believed to be real is a crime. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/473 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/473
- CoryG89 7y agoLate reply here, but I was referring to the one-sided aspect. Just seems unlikely to me that someone would realistically intend for a one-sided copy of currency to be believed as real. Just seems like the threshold for printing both sides is so low that anyone who only printed one side must not really be intending for it to be taken as real, at least not for very long.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago"Not for very long" - that's exactly the point of the currency-exchange scam: - mark gets an offer of a great exchange rate from the con-man - mark hands over real money - gets a stack of something - the first few bills on the top and bottom are actual local currency, but most of it are one-sided counterfeits. - con-man counts the money in a way that doesn't give this away - this obviously requires sleight of hand and insufficient lighting - con-man disappears in crowd - mark eventually realizes that most of the stack is worthless The whole con takes a minute or two at most: that's not very long at all. The critical section "mark no longer has original currency but hasn't yet realized he has been swindled" is as short as a few seconds; this has even been done with plain paper in some particularly audacious cases.
- emaster 7y agoInterestingly, the number zero was invented in India
- shanxS 7y agoYou mean the 'idea of' zero 'in recorded history'was invented in India. =)
- slang800 7y ago[citation needed]
- erklik 7y agoThe ancient Egyptians had a conception of zero, and used a herioglypical symbol for zero. China had a counting rod system, with an empty space being a zero and Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections had a round symbol being used for zero. Other authors were familiar with the concept of negative numbers. These are alll before Indian "invention" (probably be discovery) of zero.
- jogjayr 7y agoWhat the GP actually means is the "Arabic" numeral system was invented in India[1]. The "zero" is an essential part of this system. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...
- kamaal 7y agoIt ain't that hard to understand. Lets say you are a hunter gatherer, you hunted a pig in the forest. You and your fellow cave mates had a good meal. Another cave mate arrives an hour later. Asks how many pigs you hunted, your reply 1, asks how much is left, given you had everything, and nothing is left, what answer would you give? Congratulations you just invented zero in 100000 BC.
- naniid 7y agoWhat you are defining is zero as quantity. Thats not that difficult. What is brilliant is zero as a place holder which practically made counting to big numbers a breeze.
- xd_dino 7y agoHow much do I have to pay to get a Zero Rupee note?
- esnible3 7y agoIf you have the right paper you can download and print your own notes from https://5thpillar.org/programs/zero-rupee-note/ https://5thpillar.org/programs/zero-rupee-note/ I believe note will be historically important. I wanted an example for my currency collection. Although Fifth Pillar printed more than a million of these notes and has been distributing them for six years they have been scarcer than hen's teeth on the collectors' market. I had no luck contacting 5th Pillar. I tried repeatedly from 2009 to 2013 without success. In 2014 I was able to obtain samples from Joel's Coins website. They were selling for $2/note (but cheaper in quantity), far more than the face value of the 50 rupee note they imitate. Because I could find no examples with a provenance to 5th Pillar I am not 100% certain the examples sold to collectors in 2014 were produced by 5th Pillar.
- oconnor663 7y agoI wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much lower than they would otherwise be? If so, that creates a pretty tricky equilibrium problem. Even if I think bribery is ethically wrong, I don't want to be in a position where I'm asking someone else to accept less than their "fair"/expected/equilibrium wage. Higher wages might be a prerequisite for getting rid of a culture of bribery, but at the same time, raising wages per se probably doesn't do much to reduce bribery in the short term?
- vbezhenar 7y agoYes. Policemen are getting pretty low wages. But there are always a lot of people who want to work there, because they can get bribes. And they actually paying percentage of those bribes to their higher-ups and so on, so it's like a pyramid. And a lot of people want things to stay that way. Policemen are getting good income. Their masters are getting huge income. Ordinary people can pay much less to policeman, than they would pay in fines. It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy.
- geomark 7y agoThat's a very accurate description of how it is where I live. But at the end you call it a terrible win-win for everyone. If it's a win-win for everyone how can it also be terrible?
- Phrodo_00 7y agoBecause people are getting away with ignoring the law, and in turn that makes bad laws more transparent, which in turn give people even more incentives to bribe their way out of situations. Bribes are also tax-exempt.
- benatkin 7y agoReminds me of this quote from Billy Madison: "At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." Wonder if it feels as good to give zero rupees as it does to give zero points, or zero fucks.
- thtthings 7y agoI don't think people actually use the note though. I don't see anyone having guts to give that note to policemen or government officials in India. Everyone in India just like the US is scared of the Police and know not to mess with them.
- fourier_mode 7y agoYes, although the concept is good I am pretty sure after handing this note the official would demand for more. Nowadays I have seen threatening with audio/video footage using a smartphone work pretty well.
- swamy_g 7y agoPeople in US are scared of the police? I am from India and have been in US for a while now and have never been scared of the cops (unlike my time in India).
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIndian cops may take take bribes, but they're unlikely to shoot you at a traffic stop. (Unless you "encounter" them in the wrong place, that is.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_killings_by_police#In_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_killings_by_police#I...
- thtthings 7y agoWhat is while? I lived in the US for a decade and please say Sir to the cop when he stops you and don't mess with them. Even a small incident can send you to the hospital
- sswaner 7y agoIt is easy to see how this would be used in India. I have seen multiple instances of a police officer directing traffic walk up to a motorcycle stopped for cross traffic, reach out and turn off the motorcycle and take the key. When the driver hands over the money the officer hands back the keys. Quick transaction, likely too quick to realize the note was a 0 rupee note. Once saw this happen so close that the officer smiled at me as he took the money right outside my car window.
- throwmex 7y ago> One autorick-shaw driver was pulled over by a policeman in the middle of the night who said he could go if he was "taken care of". The driver gave him the note instead. The policeman was shocked but smiled and let him go. Too good to be true. On another note, what people usually do (when they are asked a bribe) is to notify the vigilance officer. The vigilance department provides marked original currency notes powdered with Phenolphthalein. Once the official accepts the bribe, the vigilance enters the office and arrests the official who took the bribe red handed (literally). But there are ways to circumvent this by depositing the bribe indirectly to the guy(proxy) who sells tea outside the govt. office from whom the govt official later collects it from.
- cryptozeus 7y agoIt is too good to be true, police would have smashed him just out of ego
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fellellor 7y agoOnly if you want to see the worst in people. The bribe accepting police is also, in many cases, not doing this out of malice. Police financing in India is pretty fucked up, and I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. Anyways if you are the police in that situation, it makes much more sense to let the "activist" sort of guy, who has gone to the trouble of procuring such notes, go away and just wait for the next sucker to show up. Creating a scene which will definitely get you attention, and fired/suspended is a more stupider course of action.
- pm90 7y ago> how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas. The answer is that we don't. If we did have better functioning police systems, you would see a lot more growth in a lot of Indian cities. The biggest cities escape the tyranny of local powers simply because people living in these cities accumulate vast financial resources to essentially circumvent Government services (e.g. you will see private guards everywhere, gangs running protection rackets that try to ensure that "Justice" is served etc.). This lack of basic government services and infrastructure can be crippling, especially to businesses and people looking to make long term investments.
- klyrs 7y agoSome weird and masochistic part of me wants to hand my passport to a US border guard with one of these tucked into it. Seems harmless but a dumb way to waste an afternoon
- jacquesm 7y agoAnd all the other afternoons that you spend in the future when you cross that border inbound.
- hirundo 7y agoCould negative currency be useful? For instance a fungible, negotiable debt instrument, registered on a blockchain so it can't be unilaterally destroyed. Put contractual language on it to the effect that "Registering acceptance of this note obligates you to pay $X to the U.S. treasury by date Y." Bob buys an apple from Alice but doesn't have the cash, so instead accepts/registers a -$1 note from Alice, who now has less of a tax obligation to the treasury. A portion of the negative purchase price is for insurance and interest, so the positive price of the apple is a lower absolute value. It could be a low friction mechanism for small loan transactions.
- franciscop 7y agoThat is what money represents/has represented historically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money
- quickthrower2 7y agoThis might work if there is some reputation attached to the borrower's crypto address. So if they don't pay back, no one will lend them money again.
- ajhurliman 7y agoLike a loan?
- daveFNbuck 7y agoHow would this be better than credit cards?
- isostatic 7y agoDid you miss the word “blockchain”?
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoIt's called an invoice. I'm not sure why the blockchain would need to be involved.
- 7y ago
- bayareanative 7y agoLmao. That's awesome. Just don't be surprised about people being disappeared down a dark alley.
- arcticgeek 7y agoZero bucks given.
- hornetblack 7y agoTrier made €0 notes with Karl Marx images on them to celebrate his 200th birthday... Which they sold for €3 each. https://www.thelocal.de/20180418/karl-marxs-birth-city-sells-zero-euro-bills-for-his-200th-birthday https://www.thelocal.de/20180418/karl-marxs-birth-city-sells...
- huhtenberg 7y agoIt's the zero-euro commemorative banknotes. Purely collectible items. I have a couple from France and Italy, and they were €1 each. https://eurocommemorative.com/en/13-0-banknote https://eurocommemorative.com/en/13-0-banknote
- jansan 7y agoWe got several, too. What I like about them is the really good quality, including watermark and other anti-counterfeiting features. It's a nice souvenir, relatively cheap and doesn't take up much space in your luggage.
- yalogin 7y agoI don't see how this is anything but a feel good idea. No one would even think of implementing it. Get pulled over by a corrupt cop and give him this note, he will make sure you pay him the bribe and then screw you over. Nothing but an intellectual exercise in optimism and hope.
- Nanocurrency 7y agoHopefully people actually have the guts to use these with public servants.
- manojlds 7y agoWell, we Indians did invent zero!
- kumarvvr 7y agoThe type of corruption that destroys societies, does not happen with notes changing hands.
- hi41 7y agoHow come most of the western countries have only little corruption? How come they did not catch the fever of corruption when previous generations practiced such crimes as slavery and colonialism? Does Judie-Christianity look down on corruption because it destroys ones own society while it is okay with slavery and colonialism because it destroys other societies?
- w0de0 7y agoThe correlation between Judeo-Christianity and lack of corruption is negligible. There are plenty of Christian countries with endemic corruption, and several non-Christian countries without (Japan comes to mind). The correlation between countries which do not pay their civil servants a living/middle-class wage and corruption is a much better direction for your suppositions.
- hi41 7y agoYes, I think that is a better way to understand it. Thank you.