I was taking a gander at the new $20 bill, (I’m not very impressed) and wondered what was up with only using green and black all these years.
Anybody know?
I was taking a gander at the new $20 bill, (I’m not very impressed) and wondered what was up with only using green and black all these years.
Anybody know?
The CW was that Americans would never accept money with colors on it. I’m sure there’ll be lots of people deriding colorful money and dollars coins as some kind of New World Order conspiracy. Using only green and black ink has been viewed as a symbol of the strength of the American dollar – we don’t need to change it for nothing! If we started messing with colors, people would regard the dollar as some kind of monopoly money that wouldn’t warrant the confidence of the world.
Further, the updates to the dollar notes (until this one, that is) were supposed to have taken care of counterfeiting problems - what with the microprinting, use of cotton fibers, those nylon strips, etc. I guess someone at the Treasury Dept. finally decided that those countermeasures weren’t enough.
How did that wisdom come to be? Was there research done, or was it “because we’ve always made them green and black”.
As far as the counterfeiting, I would imagine physical countermeasures (nylon strip, cotton, etc) would be more difficult to overcome then printing countermeasures (color, micro).
Just how the hell do they get that nylon strip in there anyway? Have counterfeiters even replicated it yet?
Interesting stuff.
My Money:
Incoming: Direct Deposit or Checks.
Outgoing: ATM card, debit card, checks.
The real stuff, I hardly ever see it.
I’m the same way here with the direct deposit and use of the ATM/Debit card. I usually have less than $10 in my wallet, most commonly only 3 or 4 ones to cover any vending machine urges I might get while in the office. I look forward to the day of a cashless society, I don’t think we are too far from being able to do it.
They call that color? A few specks of pale gold and a bit of pale blue?
OK, the eagle looks kind of cool. But overall, I don’t see anything to get excited about. We are still going to have the most drab currency on the planet.
Is it just me, or does Andrew Jackson look all hunched up and imp-like?
It’s better. I was hoping it’d be a little more colorful, but it’s not bad. (Couldn’t be worse than the last update anyway.) But let’s be honest people, the big problem with the $20 is Andrew Jackson. He just doesn’t have the looks for a major bill. I think it’s time to replace his green, anemic ass with someone a little easier on the eyes. My vote goes to Samuel L. Jackson.
[Kent Brockman]
Because this is the just the first step in the gayification of our money. Soon, all our bills we be peach, lavender, and lilac. I, for one, welcome our new GLBT overlords. I remind them that I like It’s Rainin’ Men and am far more useful as a news announcer than a slave in the rainbow jewelry mines. To sum up-Big Brother is fabulous!
[/Kent Brockman]
Seems to me that a counterfeiter is rarely trying to fool a treasury agent or a bank teller; he’s trying to fool the ordinary person who typically accepts a twenty dollar bill: the grocery-store clerk, the gas-station attendant, the movie box-office drone, and so on. This is especially easy if it’s a fast-paced job in a dark place where they have neither the time nor the environment to examine the bill: bartender, taxi driver, stripper, etc.
In other words, while those fancy high-tech nylon strips may be pretty cool and nearly impossible for the counterfeiter to reproduce, how likely is it that your table-dancing mama will stop shakin’ her thang long enough to hold the bill up to the kliegs on stage to make sure you aren’t trying to pass a phony? In my opinion, the previous set of countermeasures put the emphasis in the wrong place, and the new approach seems to have more to do with real-world scenarios.
I think it evolved from the earlier attempts to introduce dollar coins and 86 the dollar bill. Most people don’t even want to get rid of the penny. There wasn’t a great outpouring of love when the $20 (and other bills) were redesigned a few years ago. Heck, Congress even writes in a prohibition into each year’s Treasury-Postal Appropriations bill forbidding a redesign of the $1 bill.
The strip is woven into the bill. I’m may be getting into UL territory, but I have a friend who insists that he can remove a strip with a pin and a lot of patience. But I’ve never seen it done.
Yeah, because it’s not microprinting, security threads, or watermarks that are serious barriers to the small-time counterfeiter…it’s color printing.
snicker
The strip is fairly easy to remove. A friend of mine could do it in about 45 seconds after a bit of practice.
The reason the $20 is being redesigned is that even after the new one was introduced it is still the bill that is most counterfeited.
Any cites available for these alleged “attempts”?
If they really wanted to get rid of the dollar bill, all they’d have to do is stop printing them, just like they’re gonna stop printing the plain black-and-green twenties.
And I wish they would. Save the gummint a whole buncha bucks, it would!
Cowards, cowards all of 'em.
They couldn’t get the dollar coin into popular circulation, they tried twice, but they were afraid that someone might complain. Heaven forbid that there’s someone who doesn’t like … um… change (heh.)
What do conterfeiters do with their funny money? As mentioned above, it is hard to pass funny money off in large quantities (you’d have to go to a bank). Do they really want to just have a stash for 20s for buying gas and fast food? Seems like the risk isn’t worth the small return. I’m assuming you could pass it off in the blackmarket in larger numbers, but there are markers you can use to help detect fake paper (no?). At least I’ve seen them used (what do they do??).
My only thought on using large amounts of funny money is to use it overseas: convert to foreign exchange, and move on to the next town and convert it back to US$. Or keep it as foreign molla.
I myself, back in the day, after many attempts was able to remove the strip in the money in a matter of seconds if I did it in an obvious way. For awhile, I collected them, I ha d abunch of 20’s, 50’s, and 100’s. You can just put in a slight tear and then yank it out with your teeth or scrunch the bill together so it kins splits and then yank iy out with a pin or some nice teeth.
But that was awhile ago before I realisezed that I was doing something stupid.
I read somewhere that what counterfeiters are doing now, is taking ones, bleaching the ink off of them, and then printing a higher denomination on the blank bill. This foils the counterfeit detecting pens.
I have a friend who is violently opposed to the introduction of the Ted Turner Twenty ;), I’ll have to send him the link. He’ll probably have a stroke.
Not a new idea. I recall an 80’s film that had a ring of counterfeiters doing this.
To me, the paper our currency is printed on has a distinctive feel. I assume that this by design. The easiest way to get blank paper that feels right has long been bleaching.