mo money woe

> G writes:
>But the fact is, people can strip a bill down and *look* at these things
>for themselves.  I seriously doubt any such technology would remain
>invisible to some lab hack who in an idle moment put it under his SEM
>for a quick peek.  (*any* school that fabs its own ICs could do it
>trivially in seconds.)

> Then anonymous writes:
> On a slightly related topic, I know of an instance where the
> Secret Service located a stolen color copier with somewhat 
> greater speed than one might have expected.
>
>Is it possible that these machines either:
>(1) contain transponders
>or
>(2) hide a "signature" in their output  ???

I was watching CNBC today and saw that some european banks were having
trouble with counterfeit 100 dollar bills.  They are calling them
"super bills" because they only seemed to have three minor flaws that
most experts would not detect.  They said that a magnifying glass would
not be enough to detect these flaws.  

Cut to your friendly secret service guy looking at two 100 dollar bills
under a microscope.  The SS said that they would figure out who was doing
it and bust them.  The guy actually had a smirk on his face.  I suppose
the quality of the work is so good;  that alone narrows down the field
of possibilities.

The interpol was speculating that over 1 billion of these superbills
were now in circulation.  Wow.

And I figured the US government was going to drive the dollar into
oblivion all by itself!  Perhaps they will have help along the way.

Perhaps people may be driven to Sandy's (et al) digital cash simply
because the technology to counterfeit paper cash is becoming more
reliable and available with each passing day.  It would be one of
those weird things that happen if people were driven to bin-bucks
not because of the desire for anonymity - but rather the desire to
maintain money's store of value function.

Gold coins are looking better every day.  Superbills - gimme a break.
---------
I'd like a 250 Mhz 128 bit hybrid processor with 64 meg of 8 way interleaved
memory, a 10 megabyte per second i/o channel, two 3 gig hard disks, two dat
drives with compression, and a large diet coke.
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> Perhaps people may be driven to Sandy's (et al) digital cash simply
> because the technology to counterfeit paper cash is becoming more
> reliable and available with each passing day.

Well, ordinary people won't be driven to digicash by this -- after
all, it doesn't much matter to the holder whether a given greenback
was printed by the Treasury or not, as long as it circulates.  And
it *will* circulate even if the printing isn't perfect, because
nobody but the SS actually looks at the fine details of bills.  (The
hard part would probably be the texture, weight, and thickness, but
I don't think I'd be allowed to do a study.)  The point of
anti-forgery features in bills is to restrict to the government
the power to debase the currency.  :-)

Forgery, however, may drive the *government* to digicash, and you
can bet it won't be the good kind of digicash.  Hmm, we've heard
that eliminating cash would hit "drug kingpins".  We've heard that
Syria(?) is printing large quantities of U.S. bills, so we have the
terrorism link.  I'm waiting from a story to break which ties
child pornography to conterfeiting...

   Eli   ebrandt@hmc.edu