USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010901.0652 (On Screen): The greenback had become the laughingstock of international currency experts. Not the money it represented, but the bills themselves. The US $100 bill had become the most counterfeited paper currency on earth; its combination of uninspired ink colors and reliance on relatively unsophisticated printing techniques had made it just too easy to duplicate. So the US Mint put a few years into study and came out with a new class of bills, starting with the $100 and the $20 (the second most counterfeited major bill on earth). They incorporated new printing techniques. They used new inks. They added a water mark. They put a plastic stripe in the bill. They incorporated other kinds of changes, as well, and then they proudly announced that it was now un-counterfeitable.

I got told in Vegas that counterfeit versions of the new bills appeared within months. Not ones which would fool someone with the right kind of equipment to do a check, mind, but ones which could fool casual examination -- which is all that's needed. In particular, the counterfeiters figured out how to duplicate the new iridescent green ink used in one place on the bill, which had been expected to be the most difficult thing of all. Of course, the problem the US Mint had was that it couldn't change the bill too radically; it still had to be green and black; it still had to look something like the old bill, because if it didn't then normal people might not accept it; that tied their hands.

The EU is just about to issue a completely new currency. The bills and coins are being moved around in armored cars right now; they'll go into general circulation very soon. They're not tied to the past; the new bills don't have to look like anything that's ever existed. They have the lessons of history, and know what kinds of bills have been easy to counterfeit and which ones have been more difficult. So they'll have done their best. Anyone want to bet how many (few) months it will be before the first counterfeit €100 notes appear? Is it even possible anymore to create a paper currency which cannot be counterfeited, without incorporating active circuitry in each bill? I don't think it is. Paper currency was possible because extremely high quality printing used to require extremely expensive equipment. That's no longer the case. And it wasn't ever a problem anyway when one country decided to take on another country's currency, as happened when the Germans printed huge numbers of British ₤5 notes during WWII. It's conjectured that the world's largest counterfeiter of $100 bills used to be the government of Iran, for instance.

The big problem is the so-called "crumple test". It has to be possible for the bill to be crammed into a small space and survive, and that destroys such things as embedded holograms and conceivably also embedded active electronics. I think that if the Mints of the world want to create a truly secure paper currency, they're going to have to abandon this criterion. (discussion in progress)