okay, they have redesined the 20 dollar bill, and plan to again not too far in the future, all well and good, harder to copy, but does that matter any? can’t people just counterfit the old ones?
Eventually, the old ones will be phased out. So if someone pops up with a buttload of “old” 20s, it would (or should) raise a big red flag.
Main Entry: 2counterfeit
Function: verb
Date: 14th century
transitive senses : to imitate or feign especially with intent to deceive; also : to make a fraudulent replica of <counterfeiting $20 bills>
Bills don’t last very long - a few years is the typical lifespan of a bill. Once you introduce a bill, the old ones go away pretty quickly.
In fact, that’s why most countries have abandoned small notes for coins. Coins last much, much longer.
The point of anti-counterfeiting measures is to prevent counterfeiting, durr. 
Yes, the criminal technology improves with time, it’s just a race to stay ahead. The next step (in the US) is colored money, I’m told. I’m all for it, ours is boring - and now it’s ugly, too.
Exactly what do you mean by “phased out”? There’s a BIG difference between “they’re not making any old ones, so eventually they’ll be harder to find” and “they’ll be declared invalid, so you have to exchange them for new ones before the deadline”.
The US Govt has made it very clear that they have NO plans to invalidate the old bills. For the entire foreseeable future, anyone with an old-style bill will be able to use it and spend it, totally legally. And anyone with a counterfeit old-style bill will probably get away with it.
I wish they would invalidate them, and I think that was the point of the OP. Yes, BlueSky, using the old ones might raise a red flag. Or it might not. And even if it does, what is the average person going to do about it? Nothing! But if they’d make them illegal to spend, then all the existing counterfeits would get invalidated too.
But then again, the old bills wear out and stop circulating. If they no longer produce the original style, they will eventually disappear from the circulation altogether. If they invalidated them, they’d have to replace them/compensate people who have them, wouldn’t they?
The big trouble with counterfeiting is not just producing the fake bills, but passing them. Sure, you can pay for all your food, clothes, gas, hookers, drugs, and incidentals with cash. But if you walk into a car dealership with thousands of dollars worth of cash, they are probably going to do a quick test to make sure the bills are authentic. Especially if they are all old-style 20s and 100s, all with the same serial number. Same thing if you try to do that at a bank, or if you try to pay your rent, or any other large transaction. Most companies aren’t set up to take large amounts of cash, and if they do get large amounts of cash they check it out. If you are trying to pass fake bills you’ll be caught, especially for transactions that require you to leave a paper trail, like bank accounts, rent, or real property.
Although people use cash a lot, the vast majority of transactions in the US are checks or credit cards, and the bigger the purchase the less likely cash is. Trying to pay for something in cash when cash isn’t a common way to pay for that something sets off red flags. You could probably get away with passing loads and loads of counterfeit money, but every time you try you run a risk of getting busted.
Big time drug dealers have a similar problem, except they have to deal with mountains and mountains of real cash. Some of it gets spent as cash, but there is only so much you can do with cash. They have to somehow get that cash into more usable electronic forms, or to smuggle the cash out of the country if they are based in Columbia or some such. It could be that the cash weighs as much or more than the drugs it was exchanged for. Paying for everything with cash and only dealing with people who take cash is fine for the small-timer or even a mid-level person, but if you are going to have expensive villas, private jets, and hot and cold running senators cash just won’t do.
Eventually, all the old design bills will be old. Passing old design bills that look new will be more likely to arouse suspicion.
so if i am law abiding (mostly) citizen and have a roll of tweenties i deserve to lose them? part of the reason american money is so valueable is becouse the goverment has to honor it.
netscape 6- I think invalidating old twenties would not involve making them worthless, but rather making them not valid for most deposits. You would then have to go to one of a limited number of banks in order to exchange your old-style twenties for current ones, which merchants would be able to accept.
As I understand it, that’s what’s happening with Lira, francs, Deutchmarks, and so forth now that Euros are the official currency.
So if you find a trunkfull of millions in old Lira notes, you can’t buy cappucino with them, but can still take them to a central bank and get your 2 1/2 Euro in return.
OK, I’ll play difficult here. Why, exactly, is counterfeiting illegal?
They are just green pieces of paper, after all. What makes the governments paper “special”, but any reproduction from my Lexmark “bad” and warrant a visit from the SS?
At one time, they issued $20 gold-pieces. Now, if I were to have minted my own $20 gold-pieces back then, using 90 per cent pure gold and 10 per cent copper as per the originals, and had high quality dies… Lets say my coins were indistinquishable from the US mint product in weight and content. Nobody would care, right?
My point is, the seriousness with which the government views counterfeiting is actually tacit acknowledgement, in my view, that fiat money is a scam.
Actually, forged currency would still annoy people, because unless the currency was actually worth the exact economic value of the constituent components, you’d be creating wealth for yourself at the expense of the rest of the economy.
To wit, you’d be getting richer, and everyone would be experiencing inflation, all due to you.
Tedster,
Money is no longer on the gold standard or any other standard, but that doesn’t mean that the money supply should not be strictly controlled. The reason why counterfeiting is bad is because it impacts the money supply, and undermines the basic idea that money has worth. Controlling the money supply is important on a macroeconomic scale, and the idea that money has worth is important on both macroeconomic and microeconomic scales.
The money supply is strictly controlled because it has an impact on inflation. Of course, they don’t control the money supply by controlling how much cash is in circulation, they control it electronically through the banking system. But if counterfeiting was rampant, it would make it difficult to control the money supply. Essentially, every counterfeit bill is money that is stolen from the government, because the person who passes the fake bill decides how the new supply enters the economy instead of the government.
On a smaller scale, counterfeiting has to be illegal because of basic fairness. You have heard of the phrase “hard earned cash?” How does it feel if you work 40 hours a week at the steel mill to bring home $400 and your next door neighbor works for three hours in his basement to make $4000? There is something basically wrong with that – money is supposed to represent value. What value is there in a guy tinkering with a printing press? The guy who works at the steel mill sees his neighbor doing this, and then he starts creating social problems because it makes him unhappy.
A Federal Reserve Note is a NOTE – a contract, a promise to pay. Passing counterfeit money is extraction of goods by a fraudulent promise to pay – you, when you produce a counterfeit note, are making a claim in the name of the Federal Reserve. You ain’t the Federal Reserve; hell, you ain’t even Alan Greenspan.
Fiat money is exactly as valid as the promissor’s intentions and ability; something that can’t be said for “fiat logic.”
They keep saying the larger portrait is somehow going to make it harder to copy, but I think that’s just wrong. Copies are made by photography or on computers, not done by sketch artists, so what difference is the size?
The difference is detail. On a large image, the reduction of detail caused by copying is more apparent. Also, look at the microtext around the image, copiers can’t currently reproduce that.
As I understand it, “phasing out” old-style money consists of banks, when they just so happen to find old-style bills entering their possession, sending them over by the truckload to the nearest mint for official destruction in exchange for an equal amount of new-style bills.
The process in no way involves the average person, and requires no deadline for rounding up all those old twenties you may have lying around.
In theory, after a certain amount of time, the vast majority of the old bills will have been destroyed in this manner. It won’t wipe out one hundred percent of the old bills, but it will remove a large enough proportion of them that, in time, there will be so few ‘old’ bills in circulation that subjecting each of them to counterfeit-detection measures won’t be a problem. It’s not as if the old measures will stop working, and it means that fewer counterfeiters will be attempting to evade such measures, as their greatest interest will be in counterfeiting the new bills.
It may be that they’ll eventually decide to say, when statistically 99.some-nines percent of the old bills have been destroyed, that you can’t use them anymore. Some countries do, but in the United States, it’s unlikely – you can still spend a $2 bill, after all.
Reserve Notes are valuable because the government says by law that if I owe someone money they have to take the bills (assuming they are not counterfeit) i offer them to pay off or down the debt.
FWIW, the old 5’s, 20’s, 50’s, and 100’s might just as well have been phased out, at least where I live (L.A.). I haven’t seen an old-style note in any of those denominations for at least a year. It makes me wonder if the Federal Reserve is pulling the old notes and replacing them with new ones, without telling us. After all, when your bank contacts their local FRB branch and says they need $50,000 in twenties, I’m sure they aren’t able to say whether they want old-style or new-style bills, and just take whatever the Fed gives them.