This new CYMK creation of American currency is being promoted by the Treasury Department’s U.S. Currency YouTube channel, which has wisely disabled comments, because having been online for entire hours, it would have already attracted claims of Obama using the $100 bill’s new security ribbon as a means to push his Socialist agenda, and the new inkwell and bell as a way for Obama to stain America by demolishing liberty for all. [via]
cash money
Baxter
Looks a little busy for my tastes. I guess that’s kind of the point, though.
AlwaysGay
The bill is becoming very cluttered. Aesthetically, I like the one that’s out right now.
delurker again
looks sexy. the quill is a nice touch.
Andy
What is this paper bill you speak of so fondly?
Plazaboy
If the point of updating bills is for the purpose of thwarting counterfeit, should there really be a government produced video of ALL THE NEW CHANGES?? I know the counterfeiters will still have to figure out how to produce the new changes but why are we giving them such a helping hand?!
julie
Does it still say ‘in god we trust’?
Hyhybt
@Plazaboy: Supposedly, there are also security features they *don’t* publicize. But if the point is to make it easier to spot counterfeit bills, then people need to know what to look for; otherwise, how will we know they’re fake? Besides, the closer to the source the bills are found, the easier it is to find their source. If you print one yourself and the person you give it to spots it and turns it in, they know where it came from. If, instead, they spend it, and it winds up in a drawer with other, real bills, and they’re then deposited at the bank, it’s that much harder. Taken further, if the banks don’t know either then it won’t be found until it gets sent back to the Federal Reserve, possibly months or years later.
B
No. 2 · AlwaysGay wrote, “The bill is becoming very cluttered. Aesthetically, I like the one that’s out right now.”
Aesthetics aside, one negative comment about our currency I heard from Canadian friends (before the recent changes) is that the bills were all the same color. It’s easier to catch mistakes if the colors for different values are different as you won’t mistake a 10 for a 1 when you can only see a portion of the bill. At a minimum, we should color code the boarders.
BTW, the reason they are publicizing the changes is so that people won’t assume the real ones are fakes.
Greenlee Gazette
What’s to stop counterfieters from producing copies of the OLDER bills?
Hyhybt
@Greenlee Gazette: Well, nothing that isn’t already in them, of course… at first. But older-style bills become uncommon surprisingly fast, and it doesn’t take that long for a NEW old bill to stand out enough that someone paying any kind of attention to that sort of thing will look at it more closely. (as an extreme example, the last time someone paid with a silver certificate, I couldn’t get my cashiers to believe it was real money. Wound up buying it so they’d have a ‘real’ bill to put in the drawer.) And of course it gets harder to find a good sample to duplicate.
You might, now, be able to make a convincing counterfeit of, say, a series 1991 $20, but you’d never get enough of them out to be worth bothering with before you’re caught because a single new-looking one is odd enough to draw attention; you certainly couldn’t pass off more than one in any one place. And if it gets to be a real problem they can always start pulling *all* the old designs as they come through, rather than only replacing the worn-out ones. Just so long as they don’t go the route other countries have by making money expire.