Or the highest UK denomination note - £100,000,000 (“Titan”)? Assuming I got my hands on one - they aren’t in circulation. The obvious answer is “spend it, duh” - but where? If I hand this over in a Walmart I’m gonna get laughed out of town. If I try and deposit it in a bank the federales are likely to be called and the Secret Service will want a chat with me.
So what do I do with the damn thing?
Disclaimer: I don’t possess this note, don’t ever intend to, question is for entertainment purposes only, contact your doctor if symptoms continue.
Find a rich collector on the black market who values a rare curio more than following the law and get whatever you can get for it. Its obvious illegality (either would have been stolen from a central bank) means it’s not valuable as cash, but you’ll get something for it rather than the nothing (or even negative value) you’d get from trying to spend it.
I know you meant “any store”, but when you said “Walmart” you got me thinking. The clerks at our Walmart are so utterly devoid of cerebral function that I wonder if there’s a store somewhere that’d check you out with an assortment of big ticket items. I remember reading about a Best Buy that took a huge bill (handmade, perchance?), and had the manager scrambling… to find enough cash to give change.
btw, my dad showed me a $10,000 bill once. That’d be a tougher sell, due to the delay while people figure out who Salmon P. Chase is…
Interesting link, since one might infer a $10,000 bill may be worth more than my (hypothetical) $100K note; " For instance, a pristine $10,000 bill can command a price as high as $140,000 on the open market.2
Whereas any collector is gonna run into the same stumbling blocks I did with a $100,000 (they can’t exactly show it off without inviting awkward questions), so I suspect it would be worth less than its face value.
If you didn’t get it by illegal means, go ahead and deposit it. Sure the Feds and the FBI would take an interest. So what? It’s yours if you didn’t steal it or sell drugs to get it.
The $100,000 bill was never in general circulation. As implied in post #2, they were only used for official transactions between Federal Reserve banks, in a day before electronic funds transfer, and there isn’t a way you COULD have one legally.
The $10,000 was the largest denomination US bill that was in general circulation. You may speculate on the difficulty of actually spending one of those. As indicated, if genuine it would be worth far more as a collectors item.
Dale Sams: Oh, it’s a big pretty white bill with red stripes, curtains drawn in the security windows and wheels around the numbers and it looks like a big Tylenol!
Well just cause it wasn’t supposed to be in general circulation - doesn’t mean it would be impossible for you to keep it.
There is a fascinating history of the 1933 double gold eagle - none of which are supposed to exist. There were two cases that came forth - one involving a king who owned one - another involving the estate of a coin dealer who owned well more than that.
Both cases are complicated - but the single coin - the end owner ended up keeping half the proceeds (the other half going to the government) - total sale a little more than $7 million.
The other family - basically it was believed that the coins were stolen from the mint - I have read the entire case law on the case, but it’s been a while. It went to jury trial and the family lost.
Government property some times ends up in collectors hands. Most of the time the collectors lose - and when they don’t it is usually I think due to the government turning a blind eye.
I think there have been cases with property belonging to NASA that the astronauts thought were their own.
George W Bush owns Saddam Hussein’s pistol. Not exactly the same thing, but why does HE get to keep it - and not some museum.
According to Wiki there are still:
[ul]
[li]Over 160,000 $1000 notes known to exist[/li][li]Only 342 $5000 notes[/li][li]Only *three *$10,000 notes, all in govt archives[/li][li]Only *seven *$100,000[/li][/ul]
The biggest I ever saw for sale on eBay was a $5000 bill, and the bidding was over thirty grand…
[li]Only *three *$10,000 notes, all in govt archives[/li][/QUOTE]
The page actually talks about three $10,000 gold certificates. (“Photographic records show that at least three 1934 $10,000 Gold Certificates are still in existence (#s A00000001A, A00000537A, A00000540A) within government archives.”)
She and a friend were in stalls next to each other in a ladies’ room. Simultaneously, they discovered (too late) that there was no toilet paper in either one, and neither woman had any tissues. Tallulah asked, “Have you two fives for a ten?”
Your best bet would be to find some underground version of eBay and sell it on the black market (where you would probably get much more than $100,000 for it). How you’d go about that, I’m not sure, but there’s probably a wikihow for it.
There’s a Mark Twain short story, “The Million Pound Bank-Note”, about a bet made between two brothers on what would happen to a penniless man to whom they gave the eponymous note. He is able to live quite well during the month because no one is able to make change on the bill and they assume he is an eccentric millionaire. The story was made into a 1954 movie starring Gregory Peck and Trading Places was clearly based, in part, on the story.
