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New US $100 bill to debut Tuesday
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI would have never have thought $100 bills would be more common than $20 bills.
- ajb 13y agoThey are not more common in general use. They're more common in suitcases full of notes.
- hclee 13y agoIt can contain much more dollar value at same sized locker.
- mixmastamyk 13y agoThe dollar is worth so much less these days, hundreds are necessary to deliver any significant amount.
- ucha 13y agoMaybe a silly question... but what prevents counterfeiters from making false copies of the old bill if the new bill is harder to counterfeit?
- kryptiskt 13y agoPresumably the old one will be withdrawn from circulation at a later date when most old bills has been vacuumed up. The Swedish Central Bank will stop accepting a couple of older bills at the end of this year, for example.
- ars 13y agoNo. Old US bills are valid forever.
- freehunter 13y agoYes, they can be spent forever. But when the reach the bank and get sent to the federal reserve, they can be withdrawn and replaced with newer bills. You'll be able to keep spending the old ones you have forever, but once you've spent them and they hit the Fed, they'll be removed from circulation.
- PeterisP 13y agoAfter some cut-off time all the moneyhandlers will send those old bills to Fed to be shredded and exchanged for new ones, instead of releasing them back in circulation - exactly how it's happening right now with the pre-1996 bills.
- ars 13y agoAt first nothing. After some time old bills will be rarely seen so anyone using them will get extra scrutiny. Banks will always accept old bills, but stores (and private parties) won't.
- mcpherrinm 13y agoPresumably the old one will be taken out of circulation as they go through banks, so in a few years anyone with a large quantity of "old" bills will be heavily scrutinized for fakes. Canada's old bills had a pretty big forgery problem, and nobody will accept old 50s/100s.
- _delirium 13y agoThis is particularly true outside the US. In much of Asia, banks (and anyone else who might accept dollars) strongly prefer crisp, new US bills, and heavily scrutinize or reject old bills.
- nerfhammer 13y agoUh, hi, I'd like to deposit $850,000. Cash. Yes, they're almost all pre-1996 $100 bills.... No, it's no problem, I can wait..
- fsckin 13y agoMaybe in 20 more years we can switch to polymer banknotes with unique sizes for each denomination.
- minikites 13y agoWe can't even get rid of the penny and the nickel, people would lose their mind if money changed size.
- cclogg 13y agoWe got rid of the penny in Canada. Seemed pretty painless lol. Everything is rounded to 5 cents now. Also, I think we're a lot more guilty of changing our money's 'look' lol. USD looks quite old in comparison.
- Pxtl 13y agoThe transparent part of the new $20 weirds me out to no end.
- MartinCron 13y agoI visited Canada a few weeks ago and was extremely impressed by both the lack of pennies and the polymer notes. Keep up the good work, neighbors!
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThe polymer bills can melt in the dryer, or so I've been told. The hundreds smell like maple syrup - and that's not a joke.
- MartinCron 13y agoI heard the rumors about the $100 notes but I didn't 't get to try them out. Going into a bank and and changing bills just so I could sniff them would out me as the worst kind of American tourist. Everything else smelled like maple syrup, though. So it wasn't a total loss.
- dkuntz2 13y agoIt looks like they threw everything they could think of onto the bill. It looks terrible...
- skue 13y agoIt absolutely makes sense for the Treasury to generate new bills with technology/features that stays ahead of counterfeiters. But changing bills every several years can also produce unintended consequences. If new bills are constantly arriving while multiple generations of older bills remain in circulation, it's hard to know what exactly what we should be looking for with each bill. For counterfeiters, the best time to start generating old bills is probably right after the introduction of new ones. I'd like to think the government took this into account…
- nwzpaperman 13y agoIt's just marketing...how many people do you know that keep a single Benjamin laying around much less 10+? The fact is that most of what everyone uses as money is "inside money" that banks conjure up and charge interest on in perpetuity. The world quickly devolves when the ROC on this benchmark goes flat and the social world heads for chaos when it goes negative. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDO http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDO
- VLM 13y agobest plan is generate new bills in a different denomination. Hmm these new $20s look kinda like the $100s but not as good, well, yeah they're only worth 1/5 as much whaddya expect? This eliminates confusion over someone holding a real new $100 and a fake new $100 and wondering which is which.
- chiph 13y agoYour #2 -- every so often there's a news story about some fast food worker that calls the cops on a customer that tries to pay with either a $2 bill, or one of the old 20's that has the small portrait. Hilarity ensues. I also seem to recall that a lot of each new version gets shipped overseas right away. People there hold onto US dollars as protection against their weak government/banks, but they're used to having their old currency being declared null & void and having to exchange them (with government imposed exchange limits and poor exchange rates). So they want to have the newest bills even though the old ones are still valid currency.
- moneyrich4 13y agocan i get a code for beta access plz?
- VLM 13y agoJust download a torrent and use your own copies; I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that plan?
- teek 13y agoAnd maybe one day the we'll actually write the numbers on our coins so they can be friendlier to visitors...
- VLM 13y agoCritique it as a startup rollout: 1) We had the same bills from my grandpas age till mine, and suddenly over the past 20 years we're up to revision 4.0 or so. Confusing the endusers to no end. Although the API has remained constant what you get per bill has dropped quite a bit over those 20 years. Maybe the new 4.0 version should get me more groceries for my $100 rather than less each revision. 2) Same spokesman for each revision confuses upgraders. You got Franklin? Yeah I'm using Franklin. No dude thats the old version of Franklin, has some security bugs, you gotta upgrade before the economy gets powned. Can't they put something contemporary on it, like the Miley Cyrus bill or the 'Bama Bill? Or embed the year, like I got me an "2013 buck" because it has 2013 written in big ole automotive style letters? 3) They're doing a great job at rollout of focusing on the new features, but ignoring the old features. I need to know the API to verify the new bills are legit. A smart counterfeiter would focus solely on the new features and just print on toilet paper or something, half the public would probably buy it. A REALLY smart counterfeiter would start producing a run on version 5.0 $20 bills and most of the public would assume its actually upstream's product, seeing as upstream ships a new version about as often as Detroit ships a new model car now. 4) I'm not kidding around here, why do they use sequential serial numbers when a pub-key crypto signed serial number with a VERY private key would let us look at a bill and verify its a genuine signed serial number? Maybe not prove the bill is legit and uncopied, but at least you'd know its a copy of a good signed bill. They could publish a list of destroyed currency and rotate aggressively such that counterfeits would only circulate for awhile.. Unless of course the destroyed currency was the counterfeit and the cancelled one in your hand is the legit one... maybe thats why they don't do this. 5) As far as .coms go this startup needs a new art director. I'm not asking for kittens but lose the eye in the pyramid and flowery decorations and inkwells and eagles and try a QR code in one corner for vending machines (hey when the 70s stagflation hits and you want to buy a condom for $100 from the local vending machine, you'll be sorry...). 6) This seems to be the only branch that hasn't sold out naming rights. I halfway expect to see "Larry Ellison Bucks" and "HP 20s" at some point in my life. The "3com three dollar bill". As a startup they're leaving money on the table by not selling naming rights. At the bankruptcy Oracle will probably pick up the product for pennies on the dollar and freak out the GPL linux guys who'll fork into a bitcoin implementation on mariadb. 7) I don't think they're getting the tech news buzz they need. They need to send out fat stack of free samples to hacker news readers like me to create buzz. They should send out so many free samples that I can freely share them with friends. 8) Open source the code to generate? Why can't I print some at home to pay my debts, just like .gov does? Information just wants to be free. Speaking of which it needs a license I'm guessing not BSD or GPL not some CC:SA variety? 9) Is the new API compatible with existing players like "wheresgeorge.com" (are they still around?)
- adventured 13y agoI'm convinced that one of their goals is to discourage counterfeiting by making our bills as ugly as possible. /s
- hawkharris 13y agoThere's no denying that Franklin was a genius, but should our society honor a slave owner by putting his face on currency? That's a serious question. I think Franklin's legacy is clouded by some moral ambiguity: his innovations were incredible, he fought for abolition and yet he didn't walk the talk. Is that a mistake we should overlook in remembering him?
- VLM 13y agoThis is the same country that put "in god we trust" on a coin honoring Jefferson of all people, I don't think mere shame is sufficient to force logical thinking. When fundies tell me our highly religious founding fathers (LOL) would want bibles in our classrooms, I always suggest the Jefferson Bible which either confuses them or freaks them out if they actually know what I'm talking about.
- thurn 13y agoWe should be careful to avoid presentism, applying modern moral standards to somebody who lived over 200 years ago. By the standards of his time, Franklin was unquestionably a great man.
- hawkharris 13y agoYou can justify almost any instance of slavery or genocide by arguing that the perpetrators acted according to the standards of their time and communities.
- agwa 13y agoHe's not justifying Franklin's slaveholding, he's justifying Franklin as a person. It's silly to discount everything great Franklin did because he held a position on slavery that was no worse than the prevalent opinion of the time. Most of the "bad" people in history (e.g. Hitler, Pol Pot) acted worse than the standards of their time. Nobody's justifying them or their actions with this logic.
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- just2n 13y agoHow much money do counterfeiters cost us, anyway? Even if they have, to date, inserted only $70,000,000 of counterfeit bills, the impact to inflation is minimal, and really it only hurts a few individuals here and there who aren't able to circulate the bills. But how can you measure this impact, and, if we don't fight it, what would its projected potential impact be? Then I'm curious about these questions: 1. Is this the most cost efficient method to deal with it? It seems a bit silly, to me, as this is a game of cat and mouse, and those tend to be very expensive in the long run, if you want to win. 2. Would it be worth investing in a digital solution such that a bill could be copied, but only one copy of that bill can ever be recirculated, so you could "back up" your money, digitally, then re-print it somewhere else, but you could never spend it more than once, as a general solution to counterfeiting? 3. Would either of these actually save more money than just ignoring the problem? 4. 100% digital? Maybe not online as a requirement, but definitely tap your card to transfer funds to someone? Why do we still have paper bills anyway, with multiple demonstrated cryptographic protocols that could replace them entirely?
- gbhn 13y agoI don't understand why we still mint a $100. It's the prime counterfeiting target, is mostly used overseas, and is too big for real commercial value. It seems like just having the $20 be the largest bill would overcome all these problems.
- jmulho 13y agoThe article says: "The most recent statistics from the Fed show that as of Dec. 31, there were 10.3 billion $1 bills, in circulation, 8.6 billion $100 bills and 7.4 billion $20 bills, followed by $5's, $10's, $50's and $2's. A little more than 75% of the more than $1 trillion of currency in circulation is in $100 bills. Much of it is held outside the United States." If we switched to 20s, we'd need 43 billion more 20s.
- secabeen 13y ago$100s have plenty of commercial value. Any time you're exchanging physical things of high value, cash is key. Cashiers checks, etc., can and are forged. Also, gamblers regularly walk around with 10s of thousands of dollars on them.
- Amadou 13y agoObligatory stories of a Taco Bell employee refusing to accept a $2 bill and a Best Buy employee having a guy arrested for paying with $2 bills. (plus more currency anecdotes linked from the bottom of the article) http://www.snopes.com/business/money/tacobell.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/money/tacobell.asp
- mariusz79 13y agoIf the US defaults in 10 days, there may be only few of these bills in circulation. It may be a good investment :)
- viraj_shah 13y ago"The bills took more than a decade to develop.." I wonder if they had a dedicated team to work on this for 10+ years. Meanwhile Mars rovers can be built in less than 5 years. Hilarity. Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57606401/new-$100-bills-to-start-circulating-tomorrow/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57606401/new-$100-bil...
- lliiffee 13y agoI have to disagree. The potential downside for a flaw in the new bill could be rather catastrophic damage to the economy. The downside of a failure with the Mars rover is that the rover just doesn't work. Thus, it makes sense to be dramatically more conservative in designing a new currency.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoIndeed. And it's not as if there is some urgent rush.
- viraj_shah 13y agoAlright, I was quick to judge and there is no way of knowing how many people worked on it or what technology is included. However, 10+ years is a heck of a long time to work on the bill and I'm not sure taking more time on something necessarily insures that it is the best. But I will concede on the grounds that this is one of those situations that you can't just iterate on. It works or it doesn't and the consequences of failure are incredibly high.
- dagw 13y agoThere are many definitions of "work on". Perhaps the first 5 years was just a couple of people spending a couple of hours a week keeping up with the latest state of the art since they knew that eventually they'd probably be replacing some bill in the next decade or so.
- runamok 13y agoI thought this might be of interest to the HN crowd. According to my girlfriend the color changing tech comes from JDSU, a local bay area company. Here is some (fairly dry) info: http://blogs.jdsu.com/perspectives/archive/tags/Anti-Counterfeiting%20Technology/default.aspx http://blogs.jdsu.com/perspectives/archive/tags/Anti-Counter... http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/Authentication-Solutions/markets/banknotes/Pages/default.aspx http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/Authentication-Solutions/markets/b... http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/advanced-optical-technologies/Pages/default.aspx http://www.jdsu.com/en-us/advanced-optical-technologies/Page...
- elnate 13y agoAs someone who lives in a western nation outside the US, I never use non electronic currency. Why do you still carry around so much easy to steal paper money when a debit card is so much more secure?