(Professional coin & currency nerd here)
Fun fact about these — when the treasury first issued these, many people decided to cut them into odd off-center pieces and sell the resulting notes as miscut errors.
Once that started happening, the treasury (BEP to be specific) very quickly changed the serial numbers so they’re all very recognizable as having come from an uncut sheet. I didn’t check the latest for all denominations, but I know for $1 bills they all start with 99.
So if you see a “miscut dollar error” for sale on eBay or the like, always check the serial. If it starts with 99 then it’s just someone who had some fun with a pair of scissors and it’s not a real error.
For example, to wit:
Aside: Can you report items like these? eBay doesn't seem to have a report category for "description is a lie".
I'm shocked someone would pay $500 for an erroneously cut $1 bill.
People will pay extra for currency that has zero errors, and only an interesting serial number.
To wit: the Mint will also sell you in line with Chinese numerology collectible bills with “777”s or “888”s in their SNs with a decorative envelope. Bless the marketing exec who’s finding nontraditional markets for collectible currency.
> the Mint will also sell you in line with Chinese numerology collectible bills with “777”s or “888”s in their SNs
For Chinese numerology, you'd want 666.
Sevens are a massive number in Chinese numerology: The 7 parts (yin/yang/metals), the 7 steps, 7 captures, etc.
Eights are symbols of prosperity, wealth, generosity, good fortune in business, etc.
Six is a kinda useless number for money -- Smoothness and whatnot are less for money and more for one's tongue. You'd name a wine after a six (I've seen "Dice Wine" referring to 6-sided dice) but not look for it in bills
Well, https://hsbc.banklocationmaps.com/en/chn/shanghai only lists one branch at a street address of 666, and that one is really just sharing the address of the commercial center where it's located, but that still seems like enough for this point.
8 is heavily represented. 6 is a runner-up. 7 doesn't appear to be significant in this context.
Consider the branch phone numbers:
3888 3888
3888 8468
3888 8900
3888 1200
6279 8582
3888 3111
3888 1318
3888 1188
3888 6455
3888 8618
3888 8688
3888 1218
3888 6388
There is technically one 7 in there, but it seems clear that the bank would have preferred not to have it. Counting only the second halves, 8 is overwhelmingly popular, so is 1 (for reasons I don't know), 6 is only barely ahead of what's typical, but still in third place, and 7 doesn't even exist.
For those who are interested: the Chinese character for 8 is a pair of downward lines, close together at the top, far apart at the bottom. Looks a bit like / \. The idea behind it, as far as I know, is that it represents things growing larger, which is why it is of interest where wealth is concerned.
> Looks a bit like / \
You can just display the character, 八.
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Just because it's listed at $500, doesn't mean someone will pay that.
The sold listings for "miscut dollar bill" would beg to differ.
I am _always_ and _continually_ surprised at what people will pay for things. Literally _nobody_ scaled back their consumption or purchasing during post-COVID inflation. Home prices are sky-high but it's still a sellers market because buyers are scared that prices will jump again and instead of simply being a difficult purchase, maybe next year it will be an impossible one. Must be easy money being a realtor right now.
Every time I have sold something on Craigslist or FB Marketplace in the last few years, I list it 25% higher than what I'd actually pay if I were buying it myself and expect to be negotiated down to something sensible. So far, excluding the low-effort moronic "what's your lowest price" texts, exactly ZERO buyers have tried to negotiate down.
I have come to the conclusion that most people simply have no upper limit to what they will pay for something they want. A few will scoff and turn away. Some will complain about it on the Internet, but most will buy it anyway. I don't run a business but if I did, this would be my golden rule of pricing.
I think people have an upper limit. Sure, $7 eggs might be below the limit but if you want into a grocery store because you wanted to make french toast and the eggs are $25 are you buying them or just eating something else?
I would agree that the upper limit is above what the common price is though. This should really be a good thing because you want people to consume goods; that makes the economy go in a circle. For necessities like food and gas (energy) the government goes out of its way to subsidize them.
I just think most people don't feel like putting in the work to figure out what a clearing price for an action would be when selling not-auctioned items. This is where things like RealPage get dangerous because it will find the best price and that best price is not what the median people can afford.
I have a realtor friend and it's feast or famine.
Sure, housing prices are high, but matching and buyer and a seller is a logistical nightmare right now.
You underestimate what people pay for. I fall into the same trap though.
People have such a fascination with anything "rare". It's such a meme on ebay how often the word "RARE" is used.
kinda off topic but since you're an expert here: what do people do with these uncut sheets? Is it mainly for collectors?
also, my favorite form of getting currency is $2 bills in a 100 stack (so $200) from the bank. I used to use these for gift money on holidays :) but unfortunately my credit union doesn't order new stacks anymore, just jumbled up old $2 bills now.
Woz pays a print shop to perforate them so that he can troll people by tearing perforated bills off a sheet and handing them out. If anyone asks where he got them, he says "Oh I have some friends at a print shop that do these up for me" and leaves out the part where they started as uncut sheets of legal currency.
https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n36a40.html
I wouldn't advise doing this. Story goes he's been pulled into a room by the secret service for questioning.
Shame the link in the article to read the rest of the story doesn’t work
Edit: full story: https://web.archive.org/web/20180311084811/http://archive.wo...
Could just watch Mr woz explain it directly: https://youtu.be/LJ1TIYxm1vM?si=o2GHQaFirc9_alwe
I will point out since this site is full of professional pedants, Woz plainly enjoys the art and craft of exaggerating stories and not correcting interviewers :)
A great question - it's something the BEP offers to collectors basically for the cool factor. People frame them, give them as gifts, etc. It's just kind of fun to see real money as it comes off the press (and, thankfully, it inspires lots of collectors!)
$2 bills are SUPER fun. 99.9% are not worth more than $2, but they still bring a smile to peoples' faces when you leave them as tips, etc. I always keep a stack in my cash box at coin shows to give out as change to kids, tips to the pages, etc.
I’m visiting Vietnam for Tet, and one cultural quirk of theirs that I’ve learned is that $2 bills are considered lucky money. So much so that kids there will hold onto those $2 bills as keepsakes (though they could spend them). And thus I made my first ever trip to the bank to special order a bunch of $2s.
Something I wonder is if an uncut sheet of $2 bills would be considered extraordinarily lucky, because it’s a bunch of $2s in nearly mint condition. Or if it would be considered incredibly unlucky because those kids would have no easy way of cutting them perfectly.
Why do people smile about $2 notes?
(In Europe no one would bat an eye about any € coin. Only the now-discontinued but still legal 500€ notes have this effect)
They are fairly rare. They are the least printed bill [1] and aren't included in a typical cash register, so just randomly stumbling upon one in the wild is a pretty rare. Sometimes people think they are fake because they've never seen one before. The only reliable way to get them is to specially request them from a bank or order them from the government. Also, because of the novelty, people tend to collect them, at least informally, so they don't tend to circulate much either.
[1] https://www.bep.gov/currency/production-figures/annual-produ...
When I worked fast food, a customer paid with a few $2 bills. It wasn't strange to me. But when I tried to hand them as change to another customer, they looked at me like I was an idiot and demanded that I pay them in real money.
Before then, I was cashing my paycheck at a bank. I'd occasionally ask them for $50 of it in $2 bills. The bank had them approximately half the time, and it was fun to pay for things with them.
They’re popular at strip clubs because it means a bigger tip rate for the dancers.
How do people know that they are rare? I don't even know what bills exist in my country but I know they keep changing them now and then. I wouldn't be able to tell whether it was rare or just a new bill I haven't seen before.
The US has a small set of valid bank notes. It's not like other countries that have multiple issuers, each with their own schedules for when to update designs.
On top of that, this isn't just a design that a person hasn't seen often, it's a denomination. Think of the 500 EUR notes, they were unfamiliar to many people.
There are collectable 0 Euro notes. I think they're fun.
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Is there a market to buy 2 dollar bills for less than two? You say they’re worth less so maybe it’s an arbitrage opportunity
> You say they’re worth less
They said they're (mostly) not worth more than $2.
They aren't worth less than $2 either. They are worth $2.
$2 bills are somewhat rare and are considered lucky. We could use math to prove that on average $2 dollar bill is worth more than $2. 1 - There exist collectable $2 dollar bills which are worth significantly more than $2. 2 - there are no $2 dollar bills which are worth less than $2 due to being legal tender. From 1 and 2 - average value of all $2 bills is above $2.
Counterpoint: there are places in the world where people will not accept a $2 bill due to unfamiliarity - it may as well be a $7 bill. Therefore, there exists a $2 that's worth nothing as legal tender.
All it takes is a cooperating bank teller, $200, and some patience and you can order a strap of $2's. Chances are large that 100 uncirculated $2 bills in sequential order will be ready for you to pick up in a few days.
I don't expect there's much more value than $200 in there, but if you disagree, you're welcome to figure out what your local bank's limit on currency ordering is :P
The San Diego zoo used to make a point of stocking all their cashiers with $2 bills, as a subtle "this is how much we bring to the local economy" indicator.
It's not a bad idea for a small business, either, until everyone starts doing it.
There's a strip club in Portland that only gives out $2 bills in change, as the minimum you should toss on stage at any one time.
What's really funny is, if you walk into any other bar in Portland and tip with them, there's a good chance the bartender will ask if you've just been to that stripclub.
I bought a sheet of $2 bills and tried to cut them myself with scissors first. My wife took one look at my handiwork and said "Well, you're going to jail."
Steve Wozniak famously would get a bunch of $2 uncut sheets, and have them perforated and bound into a tear-off book. Then, he would dramatically produce the book and tear out a sheet of them to pay for things, as a sort of gag. I think it got him investigated by the Secret Service at one point.
> I think it got him investigated by the Secret Service at one point.
Is it illegal?
It is discouraged to well actually I didn't technically say that they were counterfeit although someone who is not as very smart as me may have incorrectly concluded that from my ambiguous statements.
No but the Secret Service is basically required to investigate if someone sends them a tip that they suspect they’ve seen more than four (five?) counterfeit notes at a time.
* With $1 bills wrap a gift with them as "wrapping paper" you bought at the mall. Generates lots of confusion because it's freaky how real they look (because they are in fact real dollars). Recipient can keep as a novelty or cut up and use.
* If you are giving a gift to someone you know is into crafting and has a precision paper trimmer you can wrap a gift with some higher value items ($100 or $200 total) so the wrapping paper is the gift. Or crumple and use as padding inside the box. I find this annoying personally.
* Talk about money and how they make money with your kids - the novelty is a plus here.
Wallpaper?
nice touch that the ruler is inscribed "do unto others..." :D
Maybe that's a way to recoup paying $86 for $50?
Isn't messing with money (destroying it, melting coins, etc) really punished by most countries?
If so, why is money one can cut a thing?
There are primarily two things that those laws are concerned with: preventing fraud and preventing a shortage.
Shortages aren't much of an issue anymore, as so many transactions are digital, and fabric / paper currency doesn't have any precious metal. The actual value isn't lost, and is easily replaced.
Defacing currency to pretend a bill or coin is one of higher value is pretty hard to do simply by cutting. Most businesses won't take such heavily damaged currency, and banks won't exchange notes with less than half of the original present. Collectors hoping for rarity ("mistake" bills) are, like any speculator, on their own for verifying authenticity (ensuring serial numbers are right, usually).
More to your point, you've answered your own question. Non-fabric currency can also easily be damaged. The convenience and cost of printed fabric / paper versus stamped metal outweighs the risk posed by weakness to damage, and replacing a certain amount of loss each year is generally expected.
Is it illegal to purposefully cut it that way?
If I recall correctly, as long as it has more than half of one bill in one piece, it's okay. Good luck trying to pay for stuff though.
People do the same with uncut sheets of MTG cards, but I doubt these will sell for high enough to be worthwhile
...and now that Ebay listing says "477 viewed in the last 24 hours!"
Hahah up to 721 now. That guy must think he hit the jackpot! :)
It said 1800 now for me. :)
2200 now! New business idea -- use eBay listings for HN post analytics.
I'm....not sure....how any of that would work. But hey! Business!
Use HN to inflate eBay listing views. Make your wares seem more in demand.
Twitter might do better, though ))
Steve Wozniak (the Apple cofounder) famously bought sheets of $2 bills, and had a printer perforate and gum them into pads.
So he could literally tear off $2 bills, in front of people who might not even know it was real currency, to pay them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180311084811/http://archive.wo...
I once found a pad of tear off $2 on the ground of the departures drop off at O’hare airport. I thought it was a novelty initially but after closer inspection found the bills to be real. It’s been a 20 year mystery to me how that came to be since I’ve never seen anything like it since. Now I’m wondering if I found Woz’s pad.
That would be quite interesting because when I was very young I crank called him after finding his number online. He collects phone numbers with repeating digits and mine has 6 repeated numbers. I guess he found my number peculiar and picked up! In my young and starstruck state I panicked and hung up. How coincidental to have potentially two obscure path crossings with the Woz.
Chances seem small that it was his, but chances also seem small of another quirky guy making tear-off $2 pads.
6 repeating digits is quite impressive: maybe you could call again and ask if he was in Chicago around a certain date.
Make your own with padding cement. Put the stack of bills in a vice and coat one edge a few times with the cement. I did this for a nephew as a unique gift. Some people being paid with these are suspicious.
Nowhere near as suspicious as the tire shop in east LA late at night on Sunday when I needed a flat patched, and I only had credit cards on me - and a uncut roll of $2s in the trunk.
I pulled that out to cut some off and pay and they all started screaming about feds and told me to get the hell out of there, no need to pay.
The video where he is showcasing it..
reading the comments gave me a headache...
It's instagram.
Slight tangent: the YouTube comments used to be famous for being a vile cesspit. Then Google changed something, and now they are full of positivity. Often too full.
Idk YouTube comments are still a cesspit, but now there are lobotomized bots saying nice things.
I prefer it so much more. If you told me I would be a proponent of censorship in my 20s I would have laughed at you.
And for songs, often (fake?) testimonies to people's emotional attachments to the song.
moji moji moji who still bangin this in 2022? moji moji
The explanation I've heard for these is it's a low-effort bot comment that builds activity on the commenting account.
Whether that actually increases the value of an account or not, I'm not sure. But it's enough that spammers seem to think that having comments & replies on an account.
It may also be purchased comments to improve "engagement" metrics on videos for the creator.
My favorite ones are the comment threads for sentimental songs from the 80’s—you just get a flood of heartbreaking stories from older folks talking about their first loves, now passed on.
It's not just me / the music videos I look up then, is it? I can't help but wonder if it's some kind of YT hive mind, bots, or Google's own algorithms pushing those comments to the top.
Seems like they just put the comments with the most likes at the top... stands to reason that more likes = nicer comment.
First part of your comment is right, but your reasoning is wrong. A couple years ago, YouTube changed the visibility of negative comments, such that positive comments are prioritized (can’t like a comment if you don’t even see it).
This was also around the time they removed the thumbs up/down count.
This was to prevent creator burnout; imagine if every video you put out had some snarky diss against you in the comments.
I'm not sure. I would have assumed that this naive algorithm is what they had at first, and what gave us the cesspool?
I'm not convinced that the current trend of positivity is not caused by bots, but I wouldn't be surprised if the old system was just based on engagement. Meaning that upvotes and downvotes would both push the comment up. This is not intuitive, but would fit with what we've been seeing for the last decade or so.
Oh, some of the positivity is surely caused by bots.
And lots of the cesspool was not caused by bots.
>Often too full.
Eh. Yeah. I posted a comment on a urban design video questioning the cost they gave for car ownership and the fact that they did not value the extra time it takes to use transit. Bam. Comment removed. Apparently the channel is able to moderate comments that don't fit their mentality
It may have been the channel owner, or more likely it may have been YouTube itself.
There have been a few discussions over at level1techs where people thought they thought the channel was moderating them for some strange reason, only to turn out it’s YouTube: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/l1t-youtube-shadowban-shadow...
More than once I’ve made a comment, went to edit a spelling mistake, and got an error on save because my completely unobjectionable comment was removed 10 seconds after posting.
YouTube has a horrible comment automation wordfilter/AI that will silently steamroll comments in a way that makes Reddit and 4chan mods seem rational. The channel owners don’t even see the comments (and last I checked, they don’t show up in your comment history either)
YouTube comments are vapid, in part because anything high effort/quality is likely to get deleted.
Yes, you can confirm if this is the case by going to "Your data in Youtube" and seeing if your comment still shows up there. If you click the direct link there it'll even take you to the video and highlight your comment. But if you reload the video without the querystring part that identifies your comment, you won't see it. It's happened to a bunch of mine too on and off over the years, and it's not because of negativity or anything.
You can even see it happening to other people - if you see a comment tree that says it has N replies, but then you expand it and it shows less than N replies, the same thing happened to the people who posted those missing replies too.
The same thing happens with my Google Maps reviews too. Google is too lazy and high on their farts about letting automation do their moderation to care.
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Because they're doing what people do here so often - responding to the headline, not the 'article.' The headline and first sentence are outright lies. "...known for printing his own unique currency—$2 bills that he personally designs." Uh ... no? He doesn't print it, he didn't design it.
"He doesn’t actually print official U.S. currency, which would be illegal. Instead, [he] purchases uncut sheets of $2 bills from the U.S. Treasury..."
Well, yeah - that's why it makes sense. But you have to read past the outright fabrications to get to the truth of the matter.
You don't have to. You could be a sane, intelligent person and not look at Instagram at all.
I didn't say it had to be done on instagram.
"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak prints his own money" -- closed the window. Dunno what I expected, clicking an Instagram link. Turns out there's no way to report content for misinformation, as I've just discovered, so that's cool. Definitely reaffirms my aversion to the platform.
The original guy who famously did that was the publicity director for Palisades Park Amusement Park in New Jersey, some time in the 1950s and 1960s. He had a checkbook cover with a pad of bills he could tear off.
In the video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM he never demonstrates how he tears them apart after mentioning that they're perforated. To me, it all looks like a 4x1 sheet of $2 bills that you can buy off the US mint. The video interview all sounds like a joke, and he says at some point "No, no it's all a joke". Unless it's a deposition, it's all based on trusting his character and given his latest speaker appearances, I have doubts about his character.
The sheet on the mints site looks very flat, it doesn't look like it would fold in this manner, this looks like it's been perforated: https://www.instagram.com/starworldlab/p/C-vzStay1yx/?img_in...
Curious though, what speaking appearance are you talking about? He always just seems like a jolly old man to me who is a bit out of touch but quite sweet.
The one that irked me the most was his cameo for a dubious crypto startup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855645
He does a lot of public speaking the quality can be gauged by searching "Steve Wozniak conference", and his attendance can be bought https://www.aurumbureau.com/speaker/steve-wozniak/ What kind of message a person who is getting paid by the platform is going to have?
I'm overall not very trusting of his opinion on the current tech. Yes, he had cofounded Apple, and created the first machines but I don't see anything significant that he created after that. He did start a company in 2020 that was backed by the WOZX token (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/apple-co-founder-steve-wozni...).
Fair enough, I agree he's super out of touch, just wanted to make sure he wasn't speaking at something really really bad.
To save anyone else a google: he is indeed behind a crypto project properly it seems, and the token looks very much like a rug[1], and the cameo thing is real and it seems odd he's not savvy enough to do some background on it/know not to shill NFTs[2]. Speaking fee thing doesn't bother me personally, even I'm on one of those stupid things, they give pretty huge retainers and the money is great. Saw Woz is charging 100k an event, ha!
[1]https://www.coinbase.com/price/efforce [2]https://behindmlm.com/companies/hyperfund/steve-wozniak-2nd-...
Good for him—don’t think he got the big money aapl generated as he got out quite early.
Took me a while to connect your username to the IRC nick. Cheers!
You remember that from... 25 years ago? Impressive. Hi varjag, Cheers! <3
> Yes, he had cofounded Apple, and created the first machines but I don't see anything significant that he created after that.
That's kind of like saying "God made the world, but he hasn't really done anything else lately so he's overrated". Woz's big achievements might be in the past, but they are so big that he certainly commands respect even still.
My reaction to that video: Teasing restaurant employees like that, and letting it escalate, isn't my personal style, but... Not only is he a more accomplished hacker than I am, he's even a better talk show guest.
Per influencer rules, if you screws around neither someone's head for lolz, you should pay them combat wages for their time afterward.
"if you screws around neither someone's head for lolz" ... are you having a stroke right now? What is that supposed to mean?
Maybe someone screwsed around neither his head for lolz?
The talk show host demonstrates that you can tear them.
Wait, what? You have doubts about Steve Wozniak's character?
Anyone who knows Woz can assure you that he is quite a character!
and a laser safety officer
https://www.geekculture.com/mt2/archives/2018/02/wozs_laser_...
The eyepatch in his photo is a nice touch.
I replicated this 5-6 years back: got a sheet of $2 bills and perforated it myself.
Then I separated the large sheet into strips and gave them out as souvenirs to friends.
This is what a complete sheet folded up looked like: https://imgur.com/a/uCS5930
Some banks also do this. I’ve gotten a wad of $2 bills from a local branch of a major bank before.
In today's stupefied America, it wouldn't be safe because the police will be called and the police escalate things into unnecessary violence. In the 60's through 80's it would've been fine, but not now.
There wasn't any standardized data on police violence in the US in the 60s through 80s, but I doubt that it was any less significant.
Come on people, there was a civil rights movement in swing in the 60s in the US.
Richard Pryor in 1979 on policing:
> RP: Police got chokehold on you out here though, they choke n--- to death! I mean you be dead when they through! Did you know that?
> [Audience indistinctly yelling back "Yeah!"]
> RP: The n--- going "Yeah we know!," white people going "no, I had no idea!"
[dead]
I have too many family stories of the things police used to do to believe that it was better back then. My gut tells me things are better now but maybe I am just not in the know.
Wait, you think police are tougher now then in the past?
Steve Wozniak is white and soft looking.
Dude he gave a fake ID to a Secret Service agent? Dang.
Why is the US one of the few countries that can't keep a consistent design across their bills and still does not have a way for blind people to identify which note they have. They are all the same size and have no embossed markings.
To actually answer the question:
The redesigns were mainly about preventing counterfeiting. That's also the reason for continuing to change them periodically. In some places outside the US money shops and banks won't exchange the old style notes after a certain time. Changing the design resets counterfeit operations back to square one. Then they added the embedded strip. Color doubles or quadruples the number of printing plates and steps needed and truly large (or state-sponsored) operations may have to start over when that happens.
However someone in Congress got a bee in their bonnet about the changes and passed a law that prohibits Treasury from redesigning the $1 bill so it will continue to remain disjointed. That irks me tremendously. There never were any plans to redesign the $2 which also irks me.
As for bill size Treasury/Fed has this philosophy not to stray too far for the appearance of stability. The US doesn't demonetize currency unlike many governments so your grandma can redeem an ancient $20 for a modern one without question. The cotton rag paper, identical size, etc is part of that stability. Also why the color changes were so subtle. The secondary reason is the huge chaos it would create as millions of bill acceptors will not or even cannot take a firmware update and would need complete replacement to handle a new size.
You might not _agree_ with the reasons. They may not be _good_ reasons. But stability/tradition, Congress being idiots, and expense are the reasons the bills don't change much (or at all for $1/$2).
There's another reason - I suspect most blind people can see "well enough" to distinguish if they really need to. And they rarely do, because they likely pay for most everything with credit or phone these days.
Then all you have to do is make sure you only have one size of bill in your wallet and you've solved most of it.
Learn more about US politics, and how hard it is to change simple things. You can start by looking up how hard it is to discontinue the penny.
> I hoped to watch the birth of a new cohort of pennies in person, but a Mint press representative insisted to me that he and other Mint professionals had “no idea” when or where the Mint would ever be making pennies — that these people could not narrow it down by day, or even week, at either facility. Did this mean, I asked, that it was standard procedure at the largest coin-making operation on Earth (Philadelphia), which last year minted more than two billion pennies, to decide “day of” which of six possible denominations it was going to produce? “Yeah,” he said — though, to be fair, there is vanishingly little proof he was paying attention to what either of us was saying.
Dear me.
It is already big a deal to change the images on currency (no matter what country). Given the US dollar is viewed as somewhat of a standard, you can imagine that to change its size/shape would be quite difficult to generate enough political enthusiasm for.
The insistence on cotton paper money is part of the problem.
Canada’s banknotes are all the same size but because they’re polymer, have a brail punch in them.
Edit: not braille but a system of raised dots nonetheless: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/banknotes/audience-specific-reso...
I personally far prefer the cotton paper money over any polymer notes or coins and hope we keep using it despite any other potential changes to the sizes or designs or whatever.
Why?
I think it is a nice material that is highly robust, tolerates creases and heat significantly better, and feels much nicer. I don't really understand why anyone would prefer polymer notes.
Probably just the texture and feel.
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The last iteration of German paper money was cotton-based and had raised markers, so it's not an either-or. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mark#/media/File:5_Ma... (the : in the bottom left area, next to the 5)
These bills also had sizs that increased with their denomination.
I wish it was the reverse. I’d prefer to have the smallest denominations within easiest reach by being the biggest and the largest denoms tucked away and hard to get to.
But retailers would protest I’m sure: it’s not the psychology they want.
True, but is that unusual? I know that U.S. notes are same size, but that seems to be the exception to me?
I still keep a 5 DM coin in my wallet. DM was the best!
There is one private company that either directly manufactures or leases the machines out to produce every polymer banknote in the world. In theory Romania already has 80% of what they need to produce Australian bank notes and vice versa.
There isn't anything other than US bills you can use to get the raw materials for US currency.
>There isn't anything other than US bills you can use to get the raw materials for US currency.
You are very confident when you have no idea what you're talking about.
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/102/
All you need is the cotton blend of paper. There's no secret ingredient. Either find a paper pulp manufacturer who sells the blend like this guy from Quebec or build your own processes like North Korea. Many developing world currencies are more secure than the USD.
The Swiss company Orell Füssli prints the Swiss currency as well as currencies for 16 other central banks.
The US has last partially defaulted on its currency in 1971, surely a change of the design is possible too.
> surely a change of the design is possible too
It's changed plenty of times [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_d...
The printed design has remained the same but the form factor has been pretty static for the last century or so. Things like bill readers are a big reason for that once they appeared it became a lot harder to swap around bill shapes.
I remember hearing that the Susan B Anthony dollar coin failed because there was no extra position in the coin drawer of cash registers to put it in. Can you image if every cash drawer now has to be redesigned to have different sized bills?
(I know, I know, it's not actually that big a deal. The drawers have removable inserts, but you get the point of it.)
(actually, on second though, automatic bill readers in vending machines, etc. would need a big retrofitting, that's probably much more a big deal).
The cash register issue I think could be papered over by just having the bills be smaller than the existing bills, ie $100s stay the same size and we cut off a bit of the bill for each denomination step downwards. That would keep them fitting in the drawer and be in line with the pattern of other countries who also make larger denominations physically larger.
1971 wasn't such a big deal. Between the 1930s and 1971 only foreign central banks could redeem their dollars in gold. So I would put the 'partial default' in 1933, if you care about gold.
But they had suspended convertibility of dollars into gold every so often before that. (And, of course, the dollar wasn't always about gold. They also experimented with silver and bimetalism.)
> But they had suspended convertibility of dollars into gold every so often before that.
They suspended redemptions of the certificated amount. You could not own gold until 1933 from 1974, but excluding of that, you can always convert your money into gold outside of the government if you want.
IMO the primary issue is that the US still has people on it.
In a democracy it should be the values of the country that should be represented not individuals.
Everyone from left to right should be able to agree on what the US stands for. How one gets there is what people argue about.
It’s a feature (or bug)of US democracy that one of its primary values, its reason for existing, is to support individuals and their freedom. Individuals are the values.
> the primary issue is that the US still has people on it
This is hardly unique.
> In a democracy it should be the values of the country that should be represented not individuals
The world's oldest (Britain, Iceland) and largest (India, America) democracies have people on their currencies.
Democracies are a human institution. It's dangerous to forget that.
And people seem to forget that the U.S. is not a pure democracy. It's a democratic republic that is becoming more and more republic-like than democratic-like.
More and more compared to when?
Since the founding we’ve changed to direct elections in the senate.
Many states have passed faithless elector laws for the electoral college and 17 states (or 209 electoral votes) have passed the national popular vote law.
The U.S. is controlled by an ever shrinking collection of people and institutions, namely corporations and extremist groups. That's how it's more and more republic-like.
Sure, you could even bring a national voting system, but it wouldn't make it any less of a republic because of the outsized influence that the sub one percent of people have.
The thing I cannot fathom is why quarters are so huge, considering they’re nearly valueless. Then you need whole stacks of $1 bills to pay anything relevant. I find both constantly cluttering up my wallet.
Quarters and dimes used to be made out of silver so a quarter had to be 2.5x the volume of a quarter so their metal values matched their face values ratios.
> I find both constantly cluttering up my wallet.
The majority of Americans do not have an ongoing problem of having too much cash in their wallet, even if you consider single dollars to be practically irrelevant. Most people would rather have their money in aggregate take up an inconvenient amount of space rather than having there be a risk of losing it because it's so physically small.
My favorite fun fact about dimes/quarters is that they both have a monetary density of $20/lb.
They weren't always valueless. That's the reason.
I think I’ve had the same $23 in my wallet for four years. Can’t remember the last time I carried a coin around.
This is one of those logic puzzles, about how many bills you can end up with in your wallet (you dump the coins in a dish at home each night, of course).
Because if you start with $1000 in fifties, say, the first time you buy something (not using hundreds because many places don't like them), you'll get smaller bills back in change, but the next thing you buy you can probably use some of the smaller bills, so you'll never end up with 50 ones.
I like to keep a balance of $5-10 in ones, and the rest in twenties, with $5/10 sometimes appearing.
I'm guessing you've never experienced a New York train ticket machine giving change for a $20 bill in $1 coins.
Annoying (a $2 coin would help) but at least feeding those coins back into the machine for tomorrow's ticket is reliable, unlike with paper bills.
$20 of quarters, and $20 of dimes, both weigh exactly one pound.
I mean, feel free to send me all your worthless dollars and quarters if they bother you that much.
The question is why are you using cash? Even my 82 year old dad is now using Apple Pay and both of my parents mostly use credit cards/debit cards.
The only time I keep cash is for tipping, my wife and I travel a lot.
> The question is why are you using cash?
I use cash because it contributes to the local neighborhood economy more than not using cash.
I use cash because I do not want to risk a banking app being broken by a non-banking app.
I use cash because I do not trust banking apps to keep to themselves instead of infecting the whole device with spyware to "verify who you are".
I use cash because not using cash charges extra (often-hidden) fees while using cash often comes with extra discounts.
I use cash because the modern economy is a give-business-money-for-nothing-because-fuck-you economy and I don't want to contribute to that.
There are many reasons to use cash. Pick one or many but stop thinking that cash is worse than a tech solution.
it's way easier (for some people) to go to the ATM once a month and then have a physical pile of money you're using, ams physically see how much you're spending and adjust habits. A digital card that looks the same all month when you pull it out of your wallet has no such quality and is a basically scam on certain kinds of people to get them to spend more money.
That is far too generalised for my taste. There are just as many people which tend to spend all the cash they have in their wallet because it isn ’t on their account anymore, so it’s ”spent already anyway“, and vastly prefer keeping the tabs on their banking app, which provides a proper overview of their finances—no calculations and counting necessary. Maybe it’s just an age thing?
Okay. I added "for some people" to my original comment. Hope that helps.
Taking the amount budgeted for petty cash means you only spend that much "that's spent already", which makes it easier to stick to a budget (because you can't spend cash you're not holding). if the problem is overspending, and there's a budget, there's not generally a problem with underspending that amount, so the idea that it forces more spending isn't a problem (for some people).
Given news reports that (some people in) GenZ has trouble after joining the workforce with computer skills later generations take for granted, and other reports on how much GenZ is unable to save, I doubt it's an age thing. Some people are just better with physical objects vs digital. (Some people do just deal with it just fine, mind you.)
> Given news reports that (some people in) GenZ has trouble after joining the workforce with computer skills later generations take for granted, and other reports on how much GenZ is unable to save, I doubt it's an age thing. Some people are just better with physical objects vs digital. (Some people do just deal with it just fine, mind you.)
My (step)son has had his own bank account - joint with myself and my wife since he was 9 years old. I transferred his allowance to it. Before he was 12, he had to ask us for his balance - which he did frequently - because he couldn’t get his own sign in.
Since then, he has had his own sign in. He is 22 now and we still have the same joint account with him.
It has overdraft protection to a savings account with $500 in it that we all use for overdraft protection.
I know he checks his account often because when it does slightly overdraft and things are pending. He transfers money from his own savings account that is separate from ours to catch it.
I taught him good money habits from the day that we became a family.
When you use a debit card, the amount is immediately deducted from your checking account and you can check to see how much you have left by logging into your account.
That's true, but totally dismissive of what works and doesn't work for some people. A number in some app (that I annoyingly have to 2fa into) which I have to check on a debit card balance isn't at all helpful if you don't actually check it. For the obsessive smartphone app checker, I'm sure it works, but ask all your (close) friends what their current credit card balance is. I bet no one is closer than $100 and some probably aren't even within $500.
By the time the card fails a transaction and is getting denied because the card, I'm already at the whatever store and have to give up the purchase in a hugely embarrassing way. A physical bit of cash that you have in your wallet and at home is, well, physically present and simply feels light when you're running low. A debit or credit card with a number in some app does not do that.
2fa is a large blocker here, and while it's understandable from a security practice (so I'm not any to turn that off), it's enough friction to not be convenient, and that's assuming you configure the banking app on your phone because you're not scared of attacks to your phone SMS (which you should be).
My 2FA is my face…
So the people who are too lazy to check their app are okay with going to an ATM?
If I start overspending, I get alerts both when my balance gets low and when money is deducted from my savings account used as overdraft.
I rarely get to that point and even when I do, I catch it before the offending transaction posts.
> My 2FA is my face…
You have your threat model and I have mine.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254303493?sortBy=rank
Not enabling biometrics in the banking app means adding FaceID isn't enough.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> So the people who are too lazy to check their app are okay with going to an ATM?
If we're at the point we're calling people names I'm not sure further discussion will be productive. The ATM is on the way to the subway (which has poor reception), and we're talking about once a month here. It also uses a different part of my brain because I physically walk past to jog my brain (and walking does it in a way that driving past the freeway exit does not).
Again, what's a number that's on a phone, even if it's being texted to you, going to do for physically altering the size and weight and feel of a debit/credit card? That's just another text that gets recieved and disappears from my brain until it's too late.
I'm glad you've got a system that works for you, but the only thing that works about debit/credit card money is I end up spending more money than I would with cash. Changing habits to spend less money works by using cash works in a way that I couldn't get to work with a debit/credit card. (There are some places that don't take cash so I need to use debit/credit, but, for now at least, that's not the norm.)
> You have your threat model and I have mine.
Apple mitigated that issue last year.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/120340
> The ATM is on the way to the subway (which has poor reception), and we're talking about once a month here.
And my phone is always on my person. You don’t need “reception” to use your debit card.
> Changing habits to spend less money works by using cash works in a way that I couldn't get to work with a debit/credit card
And yet my 80 year old mom can as far as debit cards and my 82 year old dad just started using Apple Pay. He had a really old Android before that couldn’t use Google Pay
> Apple mitigated that issue last year.
That much is useful, thanks!
Yes, but do you do this every time you take the card out?
I do this before most purchases. I have most of my money in a savings account, and only what I want to spend on the card itself – mostly so that if it’s stolen, I don’t lose a lot of money. Not sure if this helps me spend less, though!
I do this once per day. I have been doing it since the mid 90s before my bank had a website and you used a propriety money management program (forgot the name of it) that would dial into the bank and download posted transactions.
Back then, there was a two to three day delay.
> I use cash because it contributes to the local neighborhood economy more than not using cash.
The merchant gets all except for a 2% fee when you don’t use cash. Cash handling also has cost - theft both from employees and outside actors - too.
> I use cash because I do not want to risk a banking app being broken by a non-banking app.
When has Apple Pay or Google pay ever been “broken”? Do you not use a bank at all or not use any banking apps or websites?
> I use cash because not using cash charges extra (often-hidden) fees while using cash often comes with extra discounts.
There are very few places in the US that up charge for credit card transactions. Mostly gas stations and then mostly only for gas.
> I use cash because the modern economy is a give-business-money-for-nothing-because-fuck-you economy and I don't want to contribute to that.
You don’t think the merchant network does anything? Even if you are opposed to credit card transaction fees are you also opposed to debit transaction fees which are much lower and where there is a legsl cap?
I use cash because it doesn't require batteries, and because my cell phone won't let me use Google Pay, as it's running a custom OS (before that, was rooted) so I'm obviously untrustworthy.
I do use a credit card pretty often too, but I always have a little cash on me and I use it at least weekly.
> I use cash because it doesn't require batteries
> my cell phone ... running a custom OS
Both very good points. Thank you for speaking up :)
A credit card or debit card doesn’t require batteries either…
Imprint machines are dead; most of my cards don't have raised numbers, possibly none of them have them. Where I live, most of the terminals are either on batteries directly or via a UPS.
If someone is anti-battery, they shouldn't use credit cards here. Although, cash registers are usually on a UPS too.
I meant credit cards don’t require the user to have a charged device.
k
To pile on the battery issue, we had some very severe storms in my area that took down power for days and internet for weeks. Credit card processing was not possible for gas stations during that time period, but the pumps worked when the power came back on. The only way you could fill up at those stations was with cash. It doesn't happen every day, but it does happen, and perhaps more importantly could be made to happen.
Not that cash is necessarily a lot better. I can't remember what sci-fi character made the observation that "all currency is mutual delusion", but I observe the truth of that. I've thought it was in Hyperion, but have not been able to find it.
And during the severe thunderstorms in Florida when everyone was coming to Orlando, places ran out of gas. We had an EV and charged at home.
Are you going to get an EV too? Yes we keep some cash because we travel a lot and use cash for tips.
> And during the severe thunderstorms in Florida when everyone was coming to Orlando, places ran out of gas. We had an EV and charged at home.
Having an electric vehicle is NOT the benefit you think it is here.
You could just as easily have an internal combustion engine and spare fuel tanks. My car holds about 12 gallons of fuel and I have three 5-gallon fuel jugs ready to do. I use the fuel jugs for my lawnmower to keep the fuel fresh, but the jugs serve just as well during an emergency. And the benefit over an electric vehicle: I can put the fuel jugs into the tank or the trunk and just go.
If your EV is drained... good luck getting it charged when you're given an evacuation order.
Places running out of gas? That's a consequence of poor planning or a just-in-time economy (take your pick) on the gas stations, and a consequence of poor planning or a just-in-time economy on the people buying fuel from gas stations when they should have fueled up before the emergency.
Not everyone can buy fuel jugs. Good luck storing fuel jugs anywhere safe when you're living in an urban environment. It's the same for EV batteries too.
Operative word is “had” which fairly enough could be interpreted as the storm was in the past tense or the car was in the past tense. I meant the latter.
We only had it for six months (SixT month to month car subscription) while trying to decide what our next move was. We didn’t know whether we were going to stay in Florida all year or travel half the year and rent our place out and stay at home half the year or not.
We had just come off of a year of doing the digital nomad thing and flying one way across the country.
> Operative word is “had” which fairly enough could be interpreted as the storm was in the past tense or the car was in the past tense. I meant the latter.
OK fair enough
> There are very few places in the US that up charge for credit card transactions
I actually see it quite often here in the Twin Cities at small stores, bars, restaurants. A 1~3% discount for cash.
> The merchant gets all except for a 2% fee when you don’t use cash. Cash handling also has cost - theft both from employees and outside actors - too.
I've asked quite a few merchants that take both whether they have a preference for cash vs card. Most (~90%) say they don't care either way. The remainder all say they prefer cash. I've never had one reply they prefer a card to cash. Also, when making large (like four- or five-figure) transactions with people like home contractors, they all request payment via personal check, to avoid the card fees eating a huge chunk of the transaction.
I also dislike the idea of all transactions being trackable/identifiable. I think there's value in being able to perform anonymous transactions.
> I actually see it quite often here in the Twin Cities at small stores, bars, restaurants. A 1~3% discount for cash.
For reference, I have a card that gives me 3 points back for all restaurants and another card that gives me 2 points back for all other purchases.
Doing the simplest thing possible and transferring those points to Delta for flights nets me 1.3% for each point meaning I will at least get 2.6% back on general purchases or almost 4% back worse case on restaurants.
If they have to accept cash or credit cards, yes they will prefer cash. But there are reasons that some places don’t accept cash at all. It’s because of employee theft. But it’s harder to steal cash at restaurants and bars because everyone gets receipts.
The usual theft from bars come from bartenders pouring more expensive liquors and charging for cheaper liquor and then accepting larger tips.
People get benefits back from their cards because of the transaction fees. Thats where the money comes from, not from the bank accounts of Visa and Mastercard's CEOs.
Merchants are prevented by their contract from charging the transaction fee to the customer using the card. Therefore all customers pay the fees though increased merchant prices, even those using cash.
I resent paying for peoples credit card "benefits" - actually they're payoffs - every time I use cash.
> Merchants are prevented by their contract from charging the transaction fee to the customer using the card. Therefore all customers pay the fees though increased merchant prices, even those using cash.
This hasn’t been true for over a decade
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/surcharging...
> Can I add a surcharge to card transactions?
> As a result of a legal settlement to resolve claims brought by a group of U.S. merchants, merchants in the U.S. and U.S. territories may add a surcharge to certain credit card transactions, starting January 27, 2013. Merchants who choose to surcharge must follow
> I resent paying for peoples credit card "benefits" - actually they're payoffs - every time I use cash.
You really think retailers would reduce their prices by the amount of credit card fees if they didn’t pay them?
> You really think retailers would reduce their prices by the amount of credit card fees if they didn’t pay them?
What kind of question is that? You were literally given an example, in this thread, about how some retailers do just that.
In aggregate, if all credit card fees were eliminated tomorrow, would all prices get 2% cheaper?
[flagged]
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/credit-cards/credit-cards...
People spend more money and tip higher when they use credit cards than cash….
> People spend more money and tip higher when they use credit cards than cash….
And you think that's a good thing?
I’m saying it doesn’t “hurt” the merchant
Indeed? I'm saying it likely does hurt the customer and in ways that the customer often doesn't realize. That doesn't make it bad per se, but it would be great if more people would realize and address the risks involved.
> Those credit card perks are directly subsidized by the handling fees they charge your local businesses
The “local business” more than makes up for credit card fees via increased spending. They know their margins and the minimum amount needed to make a credit card transaction worthwhile. That’s why many have minimum transaction amount to use a credit card.
> The “local business” more than makes up for credit card fees via increased spending.
Sure thing bud. Keep cherry-picking the business side of things.
This is literally the topic I was responding to “the business side of things”
> Those credit card perks are directly subsidized by the handling fees they charge your local businesses
Those points don't come from nowhere, they come from the business you're buying from. For local businesses, I'd rather I keep 1% and the business keeps 2%, than Visa takes 3% from the business and gives me 1.5% back.
And people spend more when using credit cards than paying cash…
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/credit-cards/credit-cards...
I'm not really sure what you're trying to do in this thread. You asked why people like to use cash, and we're answering your question. You don't have to agree with us, it's OK for people to have different opinions about stuff.
People are concerned with it hurting local businesses.
> they come from the business you're buying from. For local businesses
Which is not true.
And some of the reasons - like security and losing money - is tin foil hat territory.
> Which is not true.
Oh. Where does it come from then?
Retailers don’t “lose money” by accepting credit cards because on average consumers spend more when they use credit cards than they do when using cash.
So, you agree that the points do come from the transaction fees after all?
Yes, I’m saying that the merchants aren’t “losing money” by paying transaction fees if they make more by accepting credit cards than not accepting credit cards.
I don't think anyone suggested they should not accept credit cards. You asked why I like to use cash, and I answered that one reason is it gives more money to the vendor than if I used a card.
> When has Apple Pay or Google pay ever been “broken”?
Dunno, don't care. I'm not going to mix my banking stuff with my non-banking stuff.
Not being "broken" publicly doesn't mean it's bug-free. You and I both know that Apple Pay and Google Pay are both written with software and enabled via hardware. That doesn't mean it's bug-free. That doesn't mean it can't be broken.
Why risk it? It's not worth losing your livelihood over a very slight convenience.
Would you put a needle into your eye if everyone around you, except for your doctor, told you that you'll see better afterward? No of course not, you're not stupid. Would you put a needle into your eye if your doctor told you to? No, of course not, you are not trained for it. So why would you install a banking app which grants access to your finances, and which cannot be proven to be secure against other apps running on the same device? Of course that's your choice, and I choose to not put that risk in my life.
At least with cash or a debit/credit card, the risk is physically separated.
> Do you not use a bank at all or not use any banking apps or websites?
I wish that were the case. Alas, banks are practically a requirement even for local communities. You'd be stupid to put all of your cash under your mattress or in your home. You'd be stupid to walk around all day every day with a significant chunk of cash/change. Keep excess cash in the bank or investments keeps it separated from the risk that your house is broken into or burns down, and separated from the risk of being mugged.
Banks are regulated (in all countries I can think of) and federally insured in the US (I dunno about other countries' monetary insurances or policies). So if it's a separation of risk, then why undo all of that by walking around with all of your money in your phone? It's exactly the same problem but now in a brand-new electronic domain with little or no regulation at all. That's a stupid thing to do.
So no, I do not use banking apps. Just as I don't put work shit on my phone, I also do not put banking shit on my phone. My phone is where non-technical people talk to me, and is high risk for incoming malware. Your employer doesn't want that, your bank doesn't want that.
For the same reasons, I only open banking websites on a dedicated computer for the same reason.
> There are very few places in the US that up charge for credit card transactions
You already stated that "the merchant gets all except for a 2% fee". So (unless you want to argue that places take the fee at a loss) all places charge it, but many simply don't include that charge as a line-item on your receipt.
It is therefore "often-hidden", which you quoted but ignored.
> You don’t think the merchant network does anything?
I didn't say that at all. The merchant network does help prevent fraud and I use my CC for items that I worry could be fraudulent. I simply don't buy from Amazon because fraudulent activity is too high and it's not worth the hassle. But on the other hand: medical costs, computers, digital services, and even local vendors can be shady as fuck.
But there are plenty of places where you can build trust with your community. Your grocery store with perishable foods is in my experience much less likely to defraud you, specifically because you're able to look at and inspect items before purchase.
> are you also opposed to debit transaction fees which are much lower and where there is a legsl cap?
That's twice now that you're putting words in my message that weren't there. Maybe you should read my message again in a few hours after your next meal.
You're stuck thinking about fees. No, the fees themselves aren't what I'm worried about. I'm worried about shit companies like Amazon who have no moral qualms about mixing fraudulent items with authentic items. I'm hateful of companies like Google who have absolutely no interest in providing help or support to the real people that they harm. I'm resentful of "businesses" who steal your data and get you addicted to stupid shit, just so they can make a profit off of you. I'm distrustful of any "business" who only takes sales online, sends spam, steals or abuses data about you, uses dark patterns for "engagement" to get people to do what the business wants them to...
It's not all doom and gloom. I use a lot of cash, but I don't use exclusively cash. I have debit cards and credit cards and they definitely serve their purposes too. But cash is way more useful than some people on Hacker News want you to believe: if someone is talking against cash then there's a high likelihood that person either has an agenda that won't benefit you or is naive enough to advance someone else's agenda that won't benefit you.
> Dunno, don't care. I'm not going to mix my banking stuff with my non-banking stuff.
If you are really concerned with security, you should also be concerned with the security of your bank. Do you keep all of your money under your mattress?
> Why risk it? It's not worth losing your livelihood over a very slight convenience.
You realize that no one has ever lost money in an FDIC insured bank account because of either fraud or a bug in client software.
Do you also never use credit cards or debit cards? There have also been security issues with POS terminals and large retailers.
> Would you put a needle into your eye if your doctor told you to? No, of course not, you are not trained for it. So why would you install a banking app which grants access to your finances, and which cannot be proven to be secure against other apps running on the same device?
So do you fly when no one has proven with a 100% certainty that the plane won’t crash? Do you get in a car? Take medicines that haven’t proven not to have side effects? Would you go to the hospital knowing there is a chance you can get an infection that antibiotics can’t cure?
> If you are really concerned with security, you should also be concerned with the security of your bank.
Yes, of course. There are reasons I don't bank with every bank under the sun.
> Do you keep all of your money under your mattress?
No. Do you?
I'm starting to think you're not having this conversation in good faith.
> You realize that no one has ever lost money in an FDIC insured bank account because of either fraud or a bug in client software.
You can claim that all you want.
Meanwhile time is money and dealing with banking issues takes time out of my day. Meanwhile FDIC is insured via taxpayer money and so my taxes absolutely cover the fraud perpetuated by whoever.
Nice trolling in the thread.
> So do you...
I fly because flying is regulated.
I drive because driving is regulated.
I take medicines that are regulated.
I don't go to hospitals in the U.S. Fuck that noise.
I'm done talking to a troll.
> Yes, of course. There are reasons I don't bank with every bank under the sun.
But you have an issue with the security of Apple and Google but you don’t have an issue with the security of your bank?
You haven’t seen the quality of software developers at the typical bank have you?
> I'm starting to think you're not having this conversation in good faith.
Your threat model is not backed up by any evidence
> You can claim that all you want.
Is my claim false?
> Meanwhile time is money and dealing with banking issues takes time out of my day.
And which banking issues have you had to deal with because the supposed insecurity of Apple and Android with respect to the banking apps?
> Meanwhile FDIC is insured via taxpayer money and so my taxes absolutely cover the fraud perpetuated by whoever.
Your funds aren’t insured by taxpayer money. Banks pay into the system based on the deposits they have.
And if you trust the fraud protection of your bank? Why are you worried about supposedly insecure phones that would cause fraud even though that hasn’t happen since the modern phone?
> I fly because flying is regulated. >I drive because driving is regulated. > I take medicines that are regulated.
And banks aren’t regulated? What is the threat model you are guarding against?
> I don't go to hospitals in the U.S. Fuck that noise.
You mentioned the FDIC which only governs the US. If you are in a car accident or have an illness, you are going to get treated outside of the US?
> > > You realize that no one has ever lost money in an FDIC insured bank account because of either fraud or a bug in client software.
> > You can claim that all you want.
> Is my claim false?
Yes.
My family specifically have lost money due to fraud, non-recoverable from the bank.
Many people have lost money from bank bailouts which only occurred because certain banks were fraudulently packaging mortgages. That's happened more than once.
> But you have an issue with the security of Apple and Google but you don’t have an issue with the security of your bank?
Apple and Google are not regulated.
My bank is. Here, let me quote it:
> > Banks are regulated (in all countries I can think of) and federally insured in the US
-> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612390
> Your threat model is not backed up by any evidence
Isn't it? Let's see.
1. Spam is indistinguishable from spearphishing. It seems nobody understands this.
2. Working in high tech or finance results in higher amounts of targeted spearphishing.
3. Working with people in journalism or political activity results in higher risk of malware.
4. Having friends or family with criminal history or mental problems results in extreme loss of privacy.
5. Having ex-friends or ex-family (eg, divorce) with threats of physical harm results in a sensitivity to privacy. For example, having your name mentioned in court proceedings, even when you are not there, is publicly searchable and gives a reasonable estimate of your location. There's a reason that Witness Protection programs exist and it takes some extra levels of threats to make it into that.
6. "Security" software is often shady ([0], [1], [2], need I go on?)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVG_(software)#Controversy
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAfee#Controversies
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender#Criticisms
So with that in mind, consider the following threat model built upon those:
7. "Businesses" who don't have a way for a real person to resolve an issue, such as Google. Let me know what phone number to call when my Gmail account is suspended because someone else tried to hack their way in, would you?
8. "Businesses" who use shady practices to steal data without consent. Let me know how to selectively share single data-points of contact information to a single app, would you? I want this app to have an email address, that app to have a phone number, the other app to have a different email address, blah blah. Good luck.
9. "Businesses" which abuse interstate or international policies to maximize profits. One state says it's illegal to hold data? No problem, hold that data in a different state!
10. "Businesses" which flagrantly disregard laws and fight tooth-and-nail to prevent loopholes from being closed. Every single billion-dollar "business" does this, including Apple. Just look at how much pushback Apple had against Europe enacting sane privacy laws.
11. "Businesses" which consider my work to be their work. Good luck getting paid for art when the art is stolen wholesale. Want to make a website with cool stuff? Good luck keeping bots from scraping it and putting advertisements up with no profit for you.
Don't presume that your threat model applies to everyone.
> And which banking issues have you had to deal with because the supposed insecurity of Apple and Android with respect to the banking apps?
None because I don't use them.
I have had banking issues, even without apps. So why add to the flavor?
One issue that I'm willing to share: create a technical-oriented business whose name reflects SQL injection. Something like `select * from \' -- or drop table systable;`. The local municipality was fine with that name. The local bank? Well suddenly their system crashed when trying to create the account for the business. That was a not-fun fun day.
Hell, another issue even unrelated to banking. Another regulated industry, telecom. I had an issue with T-Mobile wherein I could not log in to their website at all using Private Browsing in Firefox on Linux. I could log in with Firefox on Linux without Private Mode. T-Mobile's statement was that this is intentional. After over a year, T-Mobile quietly fixed the problem. There was literally no* technical reason whatsoever to be unable to log in. I had to call every month to make a payment, and also ask for a refund of the call-in-fee because I could not access the website. That's both a lot of time for anyone and also easily troublesome for someone without mental faculties to navigate the stupidity of T-Mobile bureaucracy.
> Your funds aren’t insured by taxpayer money. Banks pay into the system based on the deposits they have.
K. Wanna talk about bank bailouts? Too-big-to-fail?
> And if you trust the fraud protection of your bank?
No, I don't trust the fraud protection of my bank. I trust the fraud protection of the FDIC.
> And banks aren’t regulated?
I literally said that banks are regulated.
> If you are in a car accident or have an illness, you are going to get treated outside of the US?
If I can get outside of the US, sure. Otherwise I will surely die. That's the effect of capitalism's hyper-optimization for profit at the cost of real lives. Ever wonder why so many people are upset with insurance companies?
Outside of serious injury or illness then there are plenty, but fewer every year, non-hospital doctors offices around me who I can rely on to give me a sane price for normal health maintenance. Unfortunately, "normal health maintenance" is not private if you're coming with insurance.
Because you get to do promiscuous arithmetic with strangers.
Nah, you need a credit card to pay anything relevant, and have done so for decades.
The US is so weird about its currency. The repeated attempts to get rid of the dollar bill (dollar coins, two-dollar bill, etc.) have all "failed".
I put "failed" in quotes, because all it requires is for the government to do it. Take the one-dollar bills out of circulation, no discussion, done. At this point, take the two-dollar bills (no one will notice) and the penny as well.
The metal producers for those pennies cry foul at the US gov't taking away jobs!
> The US is so weird about its currency. The repeated attempts to get rid of the dollar bill (dollar coins, two-dollar bill, etc.) have all "failed".
> I put "failed" in quotes, because all it requires is for the government to do it. Take the one-dollar bills out of circulation, no discussion, done. At this point, take the two-dollar bills (no one will notice) and the penny as well.
The US electorate is no stranger to single issue voting. If one party spearheads the elimination of the dollar bill, expect them to lose the next several rounds of elections and the other party to reinstate dollar bills. If it's bipartisan, expect a dollar bill party to surface and reinstate dollar bills.
Also, I don't think the $2 bill has anything to do with trying to get rid of the $1 bill? They've been produced most years since 1862, just a 10 year hiatus between 1966 and 1976.
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> all it requires is for the government to do it. Take the one-dollar bills out of circulation, no discussion, done.
It turns out that democratically elected officials are compelled to be responsive to the voters, and don't want to anger them unnecessarily or waste time and political capital on low-value issues.
A lot of people rely on the bills. You are completely out of touch with the people with your attempt to sabotage the printed currency.
Rely on what that couldn't be better served by $1 coins?
Coins are simply worse than bills. They're too thick for something you'd be keeping mainly in your wallet or pocket.
Coins are easier to count than bills. They are thick enough that you never confuse two coins for one, even when they are stuck together. And they are also more convenient in your pocket, because you don't have to fold or otherwise organize them.
Dollar bills are usually in terrible condition. Folded corners, creases, dirt. Ten singles take up more space in my wallet than just about anything else I'd put in there.
I'd rather have ten coins. They'll easily fit in the bottom of my pocket, and when I pull out change there's likely to be a useful amount of money in it.
> Dollar bills are usually in terrible condition
Do you get yours from selling drugs? Mine are usually fine, very rarely in 'terrible' condition.
Unfortunately, yes. Drugs are well-known to be the only product for which cash is an acceptable form of payment. The utility of hard currency really took a hit when all the hookers moved to Venmo.
What in the world would a $1 coin be better than a bill for? Making a blackjack to ease the handover of $1 bills?
Coins last much longer in circulation than bills, a coin can last decades while a bill only lasts a few years so some estimates put the yearly savings at 500-700 million a year in printing, paper, etc costs saved. It's worked just fine in other places they just had the courage to phase out printing of paper bills to force the issue. People would adapt quickly given no option but the soft handed approach basically guarantees people won't encounter the new coins regularly.
US notes are much more durable than most other countries’, and last much longer in circulation.
The fed has calculated that the seignorage vs. printing costs of switching to coins about balance out for dollars.
Pennies however: we keep them just for nostalgia.
That was the savings estimates at the time from sources in the government iirc so I think they would have included the relative durability of the cotton bank note in the calculations. [0] Of course that's just the savings not the costs but a lot of those are one time as different coin op mechanisms get updated to accept dollar coins.
[0] The $1 notes also go through a lot more use in their life so they degrade much quicker iirc and a bit over 40% of the bills in circulation are $1 bills too so switching over to a coin that lasts decades instead of 6-7 years (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-the-life-spa...) would really cut down on printing costs.
Printing is just not very expensive, relative to the size of the US economy. People like the $1 note. I just don't think it's going to happen for another 2x-4x reduction in the value of the note.
Give it 15-40 years and we'll think about it again!
Of course, by then, so much of commerce will be electronic that I don't think anyone will care about what notes still circulate, other than the $100, which is used more outside the US than inside.
It's not _just_ printing though it's transport, storage and distribution then at the end of it's life span collection and destruction. In 2023 the US printed 2,397,104,000 in $1 bills alone. Doing anything at that scale is not cheap no matter how inexpensive a single unit of production is.
Well, about 25 years ago the EU issued 1 and 2 Euro coins (no bills for those denominations) and as far as I know still do. So it's working for them. When I lived over there (2005ish) I didn't care much for carrying a coin purse in addition to my wallet, but I think that's just a cultural/personal preference. Likely same as you.
A wallet sold in Europe would typically include a small pocket for coins.
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Three problems:
1. Switching costs. There are a ton of vending machines and other automated stuff that takes dollar bills but not coins. You can say “oh they’d switch”, and maybe, but they don’t want to because it’s expense and complexity for little/no benefit.
2. Critical mass. Similar problem: nobody will invest in supporting dollar coins as long as their customers don’t use dollar coins. Customers won’t use them because they won’t accept them from banks and stores. And they won’t accept them because they know lots of infra doesn’t support them.
3. US psychology sees coins as “change”, not money. If you see someone buying lunch with change, the assumption is they’re homeless or something. It’s irrational, but so what? And it would change… if we ever got over the hump.
Don’t think of the problem like a technocrat, where any 5% improvement is obviously worth it. Think of it like a marketer, where you have to change customer behavior, and that needs a 10x value prop.
Or I guess we can think like autocrats: we know what’s good for ‘em and they’ll just have to accept it.
For many classes of vending machines, dollar bill support is going away without government intervention. For a while it's been very common in the US to see vending machines that have bill, maybe coin, and card options. It's increasingly common to find machines that only have card options, no cash. Products are more expensive and people use less cash generally...how many customers actually carry enough $1 bills to buy themselves a $3.75 bottle of soda?
They're already switching because it allows them to charge higher prices with less friction. You'll likely grumble a bit while you're feeding the 4th dollar bill into the machine but a card swipe or tap is the same level of customer effort regardless of cost.
Vending machines will continue to move towards electronic payment as the preferred and eventually only widely available option, and will no longer have relevance to what a physical dollar looks like.
Yes, it is happening over the course of many decades, naturally, as machines are updated/replaced as a matter of normal business.
That's a very different thing in terms of switching costs than an immediate switch that demands replacement all at one time.
All the novelty $1 coins since the Sacagawea offer the potential for a gradual shift too. Modern multi-denomination coin mechs are likely to accept them, unlike the Susan B Anthony's that were too close to quarters [1]. Some of them even have a sticker near the coin slot advertising the feature. So if someone has given you a dollar coin in change (probably a government cashier or machine), you might be able to use it in a machine. I couldn't find a well reported number on dollar coin acceptance --- just an undated claim of 30% of machines accepting them according to Vending Market Watch but no link to an article or anything. I did see an article on VMW from 2011 about cash recyclers that allow a machine to take a larger bill and issue change with smaller bills rather than only coins, that featured a quote that resonates with me:
> "Customers have told me firsthand how thrilled they are to receive bills as change instead of dollar coins," said Mike Gallagher, service manager for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. "Sales on those machines have increased, and the technology has been extremely reliable." [2]
[1] I did see one coin mech in the wild that took Anthony dollars; but it was a spendy arcade game and had a dispenser next to it to get the dollar coins you needed from bills or quarters. And there were big signs about it, at the Disneyland StarCade in the 90s.
[2] https://www.vendingmarketwatch.com/technology/article/102518...
There was always a potential, but without a plurality of momentum, they're not going to replace their predecessors. The early 00s was the best chance for this, in the wake of the Susan B Anthony reissuance and the new Sacagawea dollar, when there was a decent amount of public interest, but as it turns out, anything less than 100% acceptance is just not as good as the 100% acceptance of quarters in coin machines, or dollar bills in bill readers. People won't use them if they aren't accepted, and retailers won't accept them if they aren't used.
With that mindset, you’re not going to accomplish anything at all. The same stagnation occurs with the switch from imperial units to metric.
If modernising things is so scary you better not do it, other people will force the change on you, for better or worse, but you’re out of the loop.
I wasn’t making a prescriptive moral point, I was describing the reality of the situation.
Sure, someone may force the change to dollar coins on those who oppose it because it costs them money and offers them no benefit.
Coins are horribly inconvenient compared to bills.
Do you have any experience in countries with large denomination coins? Anything smaller than a quarter is super annoying, even the quarter is borderline. It says something when a countries largest coin is too small to be useful. A 500 Yen (~$4) coin OTOH, is super nice.
I'm in the UK which has £1 and £2 coins and the smallest note is £5
I'd much rather have £1/£2 notes instead
> It says something when a countries largest coin is too small to be useful.
Specifically, it says "we haven't redenominated our currency in a while".
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That’s more of an issue with the US financial infrastructure. There are plenty of poorer countries where mobile payments are more the norm than in the US.
Great idea. We should endeavor to be a poorer country with even less ability to escape corporate surveillance. </s>
Yes, I’m really worried about what exactly? The places where cash are feasible to be used - in person transactions - aren’t the places where I would worry about government funding out what I’m doing.
Yes I know about regressive states and tracking women who might be pregnant to “protect the unborn”.
Denial is a common coping mechanism about the ever growing corporate surveillance state and all the ways its power may (and thus eventually will) be wielded to further economically disenfranchise most people.
So yes big corp is going to go out of its way to make it harder for people to give it money?
I have no idea what you're alluding to. Perhaps you need to increase the scope of your analysis?
> be wielded to further economically disenfranchise most people
Is Big Corp really going out of its way to “disenfranchise” consumers to make it harder to give them money?
First, yes companies make it directly harder for customers to give them money all the time with repeating high-discount sales, bespoke proprietary web/mobile store apps, captchas, loyalty/sunk cost programs, etc. These all frustrate market efficiency, so the company can then capture some of the surplus value accumulating due to friction. "Creating a moat" (aka market inefficiency) is like business school 101.
But the longer term disenfranchisement trend I see is making the numeric value of money itself ever more depreciated in favor of fine grained price discrimination. So it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
> it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
JCPenney has been doing that for decades. When Ron Johnson - the former CEO of Apple retail - came in as CEO and tried to get rid of the constant coupons and “sales” and implement everyday low prices, consumers rebelled and he was rapidly fired.
Even with cash, stores have loyalty programs that consumers gladly sign up for. In the mid 90s, I worked at Radio Shack which was infamous for tracking how often employees asked for names and addresses just to buy batteries
I don't see how that addresses what I said. Sure, similar dynamics have existed for a while. And sure, many consumers are happy with simulated achievement. That doesn't mean they aren't getting taken advantage of, or that the dynamic won't continue to get ever worse as the corporate surveillance machine gains more capabilities.
How much “worse” can they get? Radio Shack for instance has your information about your sales patterns since the 1990s even when using cash.
Credit cards vs cash is the least of your problems and on a meta level, users have been willing to give their information to retailers and been doing couponimg for decades.
I'm still trying to work out whether you don't realize that Radio Shack closed like ten years back, or if you really think there is no difference between the information systems of now and thirty years ago.
> Is Big Corp really going out of its way to “disenfranchise” consumers to make it harder to give them money?
This happens all the time for various reasons.
Please explain the “various reasons” that companies want to make less money?
Do yourself a favour and search HN for people's stories about their BigCo accounts for paid services being closed for no apparent reason. Most of the time these are accompanied (by design) with no way to getting beyond automated denial bots.
The tired trope of capitalism ensuring that all customers will be served needs to die. Businesses always evaluate any additional revenue against the cost of getting that revenue.
There are a multitude of ways in which the cost can exceed the revenue. The mundane example is that it's more expensive for Google to maintain non automated support for 'non core' services. A more harmful example is the practice of 'redlining' after the great depression where largely due to non financial reasons, the 'cost' of providing mortgages to non whites was deemed larger than the expected revenue from those mortgages.
When was the last time the $1 bill changed meaningfully? You can't get more consistent than that.
The $20 changed significantly in 1998 and had a refresh in 2004. 20 years of consistent design since then though.
And all the bills are the same shape, size, and color, other than war issues. Can't get more consistent than that.
There's no need to go to the trouble of making these changes. Cash money has been illegal in the United States since before most here were even born. If they discover you have cash, it can be confiscated (and charged with a crime... not you, but the cash can be charged). If you deposit more than $10,000 at a bank, the banks are deputized to snitch on you. If you deposit exactly $10,000, they snitch on you. And, because some criminals might deposit less than $10,000 to try to avoid consequences, if you deposit less than $10,000. Not just banks, if you bought a new car (or new RV, or new tractor, etc) at a dealership with cash, they'd have to report that too. Social norms have been subtly manipulated to convince you that people who have cash or pay with cash are shady.
LOL. The lack of a consistent design is a core accessibility feature.
Most "blind" people have some amount of vision. So starting in 1997 they began adding the very large numerals on the back and visual inconsistencies to the front so you can tell them apart with limited sight. Have a look at the bills side by side and you can see how they vary the background gradients and layout for easier identification: https://www.uscurrency.gov/denominations/100
With the 2020s series refresh (Catalyst) all the denominations will get a tactile area to assist the completely blind.
The government also provides free of charge to any legally blind person a small device that reads special markings on the bill and will audibly announce or vibrate the denomination. They also funded iOS and Android apps that use the camera.
The accessibility of USD notes is notoriously poor. EUR, AUD or CHF banknotes have a consistent visual theme, but each denomination is a different size, has a bright and distinct predominant colour and they've had tactile features for decades. Sure, they look like monopoly money, but that's a good thing.
The US dollar notes are 7 different shades of nothing much, with a man's face in the middle, a near-identical fancy border, and a circular stamp on each side in black and dark green. The numbers are in a decorative font, and merged into the border.
On the reverse, there's a building and a similar decorative border.
Your link even describes the "subtle background colors"!
Only the $5 and $100 have a bold, contrasting number.
All the banknotes are the same size.
I challenge you to find a circulating currency with worse accessibility.
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But the US has some of the best disability friendly infrastructure. The whole ADA compliance is taken very seriously here.
I work in accessibility. The ADA is barely acknowledged. Every automatic door, curb cut, and accommodation is still a tough fight.
ADA compliance is always a struggle in the US, but if you travel around the world, the US is leaps and bounds ahead of many places that don't even have the equivalent of the ADA to fight for.
Does "other people do it worse" mean we do it well?
Because I only put forward the claim that the US does it poorly. Whether others do it worse seems to have no bearing on whether we should strive to improve or not...
If the US is the best at accommodating mobility impairments, that's got to count for something. Maybe it's not handling it well, but if it's the best than anywhere is doing, keep asking for better, but set reasonable expectations.
IMHO, there's a lot more room to improve accommodations for non-mobility impairments however, and there's examples of other countries doing better in some aspects to compare to. On-topic, accessibility of currency is clearly a US weakness, although the upcoming bill designs are supposed to address this, although we'll have to wait and feel if it works as announced.
Of course, disability rights and accessibility is a struggle for people all around the planet.
Absolutely no political party in the US is railing against the disabled. The ADA was championed by Bush - a Republican candidate.
Especially seeing how many people in “rural America” are claiming disability benefits that could work. But don’t have the necessary skills to get the jobs available are a willingness to move to where the jobs are.
Yes I realize that moving somewhere without the extended family support system is an issue and it’s failing of the government and job training services
https://projecte3.com/rural-americans/
Edit: I see I just got accused of being “ablist” in a now dead comment.
I have cerebral palsy
I'd argue neither political party is helping people with disabilities, and both are pretty strongly neglecting them. I don't think any of the current slate of politicians care at all. Bush I was a generation ago.
What exactly should the government be doing that it isn’t doing? I’m speaking as someone with a slight disability
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611326
More details, it’s more of an irritation for me than a life altering issue - my CP is such that I can only grab things with my left hand and I have a slight limp because of weakness in my left foot. But properly conditioned, I can run a 10 minute mile (not great. But not bad).
So this is an honest question, I (or my parents) really haven’t needed much government help even though I did go through various therapies until I was 12 when my “therapy” became lifting weights.
Read some of the items here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611374
> The ADA was championed by Bush - a Republican candidate.
No it fucking wasn't. What are you smoking?
>n 1986, the National Council on Disability had recommended the enactment of an Americans with Disabilities Act and drafted the first version of the bill which was introduced in the House and Senate in 1988.
It was signed into law in 1990.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-with-d...
> Despite pressure from some church groups, who felt the ADA unfairly burdened them, the bill passed the House by unanimous voice vote and the Senate 76-6, paving the way for its signing on July 26 by President Bush, who said, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”
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Please cite some examples of how the U.S. treats disabilities as personal failings, compared to specific other countries.
I made no claims about other countries. I forwarded only the claim that the U.S. treats disability as a failing.
Let's start with various cognitive disabilities -- depression, for instance, is heavily stigmatized. Seeking medication and therapy, and especially talking about medication and therapy, is considered awkward and uncomfortable in most circles.
Or ADHD, which causes a whole range of executive functioning failures - inability to focus, manage schedules, etc. Yet we make access to diagnosis and medication very difficult, and workplaces often fail to accommodate people.
On the physical disability front, one of the easiest and fastest things we can do is add alt text to images, yet even "progressive" places struggle to do this. In fact, a coffee company just sued for the right to not have to provide an accessible website, trying to undermine the ADA's protections of digital spaces.
But don't take my words for it, there are many resources online that are worth reading:
Disability and access to health care: https://fisafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Access...
People with disabilities experience higher rates of exclusion: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/four-ten-adults-d...
Countless examples of care being inadequate: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
Pre-existing conditions, which as far as I'm aware, is a US-only concept. I'm happy to be corrected for that, though.
> Pre-existing conditions, which as far as I'm aware, is a US-only concept
Most of the world's population has no concept of socialised heath insurance. Pre-existing or novel. Someone in a wheelchair, or who is blind or mute, is much better accomodated in America than in most of Europe. (In part because the former is richer.)
>Someone in a wheelchair, or who is blind or mute, is much better accomodated in America than in most of Europe. (In part because the former is richer.)
I guess it just depends on who you talk to and their particular values.
I love my country, but to give a bit of a counter point : I am paralyzed due to a cervical spine injury.
Medicare will pay 80% of the cost of a new chair after payment of deductible once every 5 years. They do not cover maintenance and repair in most cases.
A decent mid-range power-chair with posture and repositioning aids costs between 15k-25k. The air cushion for this chair to prevent pressure sores costs 400-800usd.
So, essentially, that means that a permanently disabled person making the high SSDI income of 18k a year is going to be asked to pay 4.5k USD out of pocket every 5 years just in order to take advantage of the offers from Medicare -- and this isn't including repair, wear and replacement of items, or the short 1-2 year life span of most air cushions. By the time the chair hits the next replacement window it will have gone through 2-3 500-800usd cushions and numerous other repairs.
To contrast : My friends with similar injuries who are insured under the British NHS receive a voucher for a new chair every 3-5 years. They receive vouchers for repair at local shops. Cushion replacement is deemed necessary during the repair process and they are replaced w/ vouchers as needed, not on a schedule.
It's all grass-is-always-greener thinking. The NHS has huge problems, too. But as a wheelchair user I can't wholly agree with the take that we're better accommodated over in the U.S. in any absolute sense.
If we're comparing the United States against third-world countries and not against their peers, then this isn't really a discussion worth having.
> Someone in a wheelchair, or who is blind or mute, is much better accomodated in America than in most of Europe.
I find that hard to believe given the lack of public transport, lack of funding for widespread public facilities, lack of empathy from insurers, lack of governmental social safety nets for those who come under unexpected hard times.
As a European, I can confirm that wheelchair accessibility is traditionally better in the US than in Europe.
I suspect it's a combination of getting relevant laws earlier (don't know that, just guessing), having less old infrastructure (building new with accessibility is easier than upgrading existing buildings), and having more space (so adding a wheelchair ramp is less of a deal).
Europe is generally catching up, but I'd say it's still behind the US. At least the places I know.
But of course, that's not the whole story, as another commenter illustrates with some concrete examples for the cost of wheelchairs and wheelchair maintenance.
Europe is a big place. Switzerland is pretty rich, Rumania is pretty poor.
But you are right that on average the US is richer than most of Europe.
The context “pre-existing conditions” is most commonly used in the USA used to be for underwriting health insurance, but since 2010, the Affordable Care Act prohibits health insurance businesses from using pre existing conditions to underwrite health insurance:
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
Everyone is eligible to purchase health insurance, and pricing can only be based on
1) age (loosely, old people are heavily subsidized by young because highest premium is capped at 3x lowest premium)
2) tobacco use (tobacco users didn’t have the political power to prevent this habit from being an underwriting factor, as opposed to alcohol and sugar and excess carbohydrate users)
3) location
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
Hence, health insurance premiums in the US are more akin to a tax than insurance.
This hasn’t been a problem since the ACA.
I was caught up in the pre ACA health care system trying to find insurance outside of working for a company.
I have very mild Cerebral Palsy and back then, I was in great shape - a part time fitness instructor, had just run two half marathons in an average time, I could pass any of the standard fitness tests for my age etc.
I had one surgery in my entire life - four surgery at 21 12 years prior. I could not get insurance at any price even though they could have given me any fitness test including running on a treadmill with flying colors.
I was making more than enough as a contractor to pay for it.
I looked on the open market last year when I briefly thought about going independent and I could have definitely made the numbers work.
You mean 'pre-existing conditions' in the context of buying health insurance?
That concept pretty well known in other parts of the world. See eg https://www.moh.gov.sg/managing-expenses/schemes-and-subsidi... for a random example. Or https://globmed.co.uk/blog/pre-existing-health-condition-exp... or just ask Google for more.
What research did you do before making your statement?
> What research did you do before making your statement?
I clearly stated "as far as I'm aware" and that I am happy to be corrected. I appreciate the extra information, but the tone here is not appreciated and is skirting close to breaching the HN guidelines.
I did not see anything with their tone.
There was nothing wrong with you making a statement qualified with "as far as I know". You're good.
Likewise, there was nothing wrong with another person asking for details regarding what effort went into "as far as I know". They're good.
Someone who is in any given field and has researched it for decades might have more related knowledge included in "as far as I know", than someone who didn't. So it's totally reasonable to ask them how they came to know 'as far as they know', because that information is critical for everyone else to judge how much credence to lend to that someone's posts.
Thanks!
Switzerland has them for supplementary health insurances.
In a nutshell, Switzerland has two types of health insurances. The basic one, which is mandatory, and whose coverage and price is set by the government. It covers more or less everything that endangers your health. Pretty close to ACA in the US if I'm not mistaken, but a lot more regulated.
And then you can add supplementary insurances, for stuff like dental, private rooms in hospitals, experimental treatments, ... It's common to be denied coverage there, especially as you get older.
What about pre-existing conditions? Like, for buying health insurance? That stopped being a thing like 15 years ago.
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Interesting to see US Mint site on the HN. Few interesting facts from someone who is collecting US currency for 20 years:
- these are great gift items for your rich friends or businessmen. The $1 sheet does come with only slight overcharge and everyone I gifted ended up hanging it in their office wall. Its a great conversation starter because majority of people do not know US dollars are produced in sheets nor that civilians can easily and legally purchase them off the US mint site.
- on the downside I almost missed my international flight because TSA agent could not comprehend that this is not fake home-printed sheet of $100. The new $100s have the famous security strip engraved and I would imagine putting large number thru airport security machine will tip it as attempt to smuggle large amount of US currency (you supposed to report anything over $10,000 in cash (whichever currency) when you enter or leave US border). So the TSA got warning on their screen and his eyes almost popped out when he unroll a sheet of 16 x $100 bills on one sheet of paper. Other travelers had fun seeing it too. Its only that his supervisor let me through quickly because he said a month ago there was some money summit in NYC and he got plenty of people going back and forth with these sheets.
- I think everyone should order a single $1 sheet to have on their wall as it is a great conversation starter.
TIL there are $100,000 bills and they are illegal to possess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-th...
Wikipedia claims that they are illegal to possess, but their source for that claim is an Investopedia article that doesn’t cite any law or other source. I’m skeptical.
(Professional coin & currency nerd here)
They’re illegal not because of a law but because they were never issued for public use. They were used (briefly) for internal treasury / fed transfers. (Sort of like the mythical trillion-dollar coin that gets talked about every time the debt ceiling conversation comes up).
Because they were never issued privately or meant for use outside of the treasury system, if an individual were to own one it’s because it was stolen or otherwise improperly taken from the treasury.
There are rumors that a few exist in private collections (and I’ve heard of one a single degree away from me), but I’ve never seen it or confirmed that it’s anything more than a rumor.
There is one in the Smithsonian national collection however, and if you get an appointment to view the collection you can see and hold it. Pretty cool.
Similarly, the Bank of England uses £100,000,000 notes internally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England_%C2%A3100,000,...
I wonder: if these are essentially just a “paper trail” for deposits made at the BoD by issuing banks, why bother with a physical banknote at all? In the case of an insolvency of a bank, the bank’s notes would still continue circulating, after all.
Somewhat vaguely related to this, not all bank notes in the UK are made equal. Good luck getting someone in England to accept an Ulster Bank, Danske bank, or Bank of Ireland note, despite them all being pound sterling notes issued in the UK worth the exact same amount.
Danske bank? Isn't that Danish?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterlin...
Looks as though it's just Ulster, Scotland and the Crown Dependencies nowadays
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_(Northern_Ireland) Danske bank is a Northern Irish bank (I had never heard of this)
Ulster Bank notes are some of the few notes in the world that are portrait in orientation, probably doesnt help with the acceptance of them elsewhere in the UK
That's not really them not being made equal, that's just people being ignorant of them
you have the same problem spending $2 bills in the US
Only illegal because they'd have to be stolen. Unlike the 500/1000/5000/10000 notes the $100,000 notes were never issued to the public. They were a relic of the days of physical currency transfer between banks.
Not that many 500/1000/5000/10000 notes were used in practice either. Less than a thousand of the big ones and a few hundred thousand of the "smaller" ones even exist. They're all in collections now as the Fed requires banks to return them for shredding if deposited. Collectors will pay a lot more than face value for them so you'd be nuts to try to spend one.
This reminded me of that classic Eric and Tim Show episode "Prices" [1]. "Fine European prices! Buy $35.50... for forty dollars."
Heck of a markup on these things. $2, eight-note sheet, that's $16 before shipping and whatever else. Add $20 ... because they're in demand? idk...
They’re not really sold as currency - they’re sold as souvenirs. If you visit the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in DC, they’re for sale at the gift shop. I’ve got a set of 32 $2 bills hanging on my wall right next to my set of hyperinflation Zimbabwean currency.
If you just want $2 bills, go to your bank. At my bank I need to order them $200 at a time. When I was flying every week they were great as the bartenders at the airport lounges would remember me as the “the Thursday $2 guy”.
Printing money costs money too.
But these notes stop the printing process early—the purchaser is on the hook to cut them out. So these should cost less than the fully printed and cut bills if we're going by pure cost of creation.
Do banks pay upwards of $1.50 on the dollar for new bills?
they only sell them as a novelty, and as a novelty they can charge a premium
Right, I think that's the actual answer.
No, but the US mint pays 3c to make each 1c coin, so there's that!
I've been looking to decorate with stock certificates but bill sheets are cool too.
Grab that 1960 American Express share certificate!
Up until 1965, it was an unlimited liability corporation.
They’d make awesome wallpaer.
Uncle was proud owner of his own printing business. When I visited he wanted to give my branch of the family a tour of his facility with some new $1M+ printing machine.
After showing us around, he drew in close and told us that he had been quietly doing some work for the U.S. Mint and to please keep it a bit quiet.
He removes a padlock from a cabinet and pulls out a maybe 2 inch thick stack of uncut $5 bills, 2 bills wide and maybe 6 bills tall, all shrink wrapped.
As anyone else would, I start trying to do the math in my head, wanting to crack a joke about fitting the printing machine back up for a “special run,” and so on.
After a moment my uncle admits that it’s all a gag, only the top sheet is actual money, specially ordered uncut, with the rest of the stack underneath just being regular blank paper.
In hindsight the locker was a super flimsy sheet metal cabinet.
I tip exclusively with $2 bills because bartenders/event staff/doormen/shuttle people then always remember me. I get them from the bank and they are invariably crisp and never been folded. They kind of stick together because of this, too.
Same! Nothing speaks louder than having a wallet that's barely able to fold because it's full of $2 bills, and being 'that person' who pays exclusively with them. It immediately gives you a unique flair.
Also, I've noticed that requesting $2 bills is an interesting test of your bank's ability to perform its job as a member bank of the Federal Reserve. I've had so many tellers tell me that $2 bills no longer exist, only to have their managers offer to call me when they arrive in about a week's time.
If you do this in Portland or Seattle, people just assume you were at a... gentlemens club that uses $2 bills for tips
interesting. I do this in Seattle all the time. Nothing like this seems to be assumed. I must tip in places that either hide their reaction well or do not assume that ;-\
I only wish they sold something practical like non-commemorative quarter rolls, even at a slight upcharge... banks are cracking down on who they allow to redeem cash for equivalently-valued quarter rolls.
Why?
It costs them money. Also, for years there was a problem with people who'd sift through quarters for rare 1964-and-earlier ones that had silver content, and then return most of the quarters to a bank. And some people would do this in high volume, using coin-sorting machinery, and traveling around the region, to hit many banks. So, a bank branch would lose money on providing the coins and/or lose even more on taking back all the non-silver ones.
After my condo building's laundry room vendor recently swapped out the card readers for some dodgy IoT app thing, I've started using quarters again, and finding quarters at all is difficult. Most store customer service counters and checkouts have a rule against trading quarters at all, though one did offer to trade up to $2 worth (like for parking meter). All the laundromats that still use quarters have threatening signs on their quarters changers, that it's only for customers. My bank branch limits to 4 rolls per customer (after verifying that you have an account there), and you can often sense that the counter person enjoys the transaction even less than some of the other money-losing services they provide.
It's been a very very long time since I've seen a silver quarter in circulation.
There were enough to make searching worthwhile. Then people switched to half-dollars. I assume the supply is cleaned out now, though.
I did get a silver quarter in circulation maybe a decade ago, in change at a pop-up farmer's market stand. I recognized it immediately: it's a whiter, more satiny look.
Their sound is also subtly different that you can pick up if you pay attention. I used to swap silver quarters out of the till when I worked a cash register and I could tell without even looking that someone was about to hand me a silver quarter or dime.
When was the last time you changed a $5 bill at a carwash?
I have a jar of quarters from throwing my change in it. No silver quarters, ever. And yah, I can spot a silver one immediately. The color and feel is different, and the edge of course is the dead giveaway.
I don't know what to tell you, the last 3 times I've changed a five at the car wash there's been at least 2 high silver count quarters in the pile, with a peak of 5.
Could be some elderly person in the area passed away, and a spouse/heir found all these hand-rolled quarters they'd saved in a desk drawer for decades, and didn't know they were saved because they were silver.
You must be a lucky man!
50 $1s for $86 - thats highway robbery
There was a time when the mint would sell coins and bills at face value. The problem is, people started using that for manufactured spending to rack up credit card points. They added a premium to prevent this.
That seems reasonable, but why would the US Mint care about manufactured spend for credit card companies?
Two reasons:
The specific US version was an attempt to bootstrap acceptance of the $1 coin-- if you could get a box of 500 shipped to your door, you'd spend them and eventually they'd displace $1 notes. When they went straight back to the bank, no circulation occurred, and they were burning merchant fees and shipping costs for nothing.
Some other countries used "selling coins at face value" as an explicit financial hack based on seignorage (the value of a coin in excess of its buillion content).
Canada used to sell commemorative $20 (and then on to $50, 100, and possibly $200) coins with modest silver content based on this model.
If someone pays $20 for $10 worth of silver, the government profits $10-- as long as the coin disappears into a collector's binder and never enters circulation.
So it worked fine as long as collectors bought them. When people bought them to generate card points, and immediately took them to the bank to exchange for more conventional currency, the plan fell apart, and Canada abandoned the programme.
The UK flavour had a particularly ugly endgame-- the mint basically told banks not to accept them as deposits (https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-3390519/I-b...) which did nothing positive for the programme's long-term survival.
It's a shame these programmes were sabotaged and died. The idea of "instead of stuffing a banknote or gift card in an envelope, I can give you a pretty collectible and feel confident that if one day you need the money bad enough, you can still spend it" was a nice idea while it lasted.
I believe in some cases there was no premium at all, not even shipping, so widespread manufactured spending was losing the Mint much more money than they were prepared for when they started the program.
I don't follow. Why would Manufactured Spend specifically cost the Mint money? It's not great for the credit card company, sure, but why the Mint? If the Mint was previously eating the interchange fees & shipping, ok, but that's not a manufactured spend specific issue.
I agree it's not specific to MS. But MS was probably inducing much more demand and thereby making them eat more fees than they planned to. (I don't have any inside information though.) Adding a premium would make it a little less attractive to MSers.
It's not free for the Mint. Also, credit card companies aggressively shut down manufactured spending when they notice it.
> credit card companies aggressively shut down manufactured spending when they notice it.
I'm familiar with the concept of manufactured spend, and why credit card companies would try to clamp down on it. What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies. The usual way to eliminate manufactured spend would be to add a credit card specific transaction fee that cancels out the spend points. By the Mint increasing the base price for everybody, this affects even people who might be paying with a debit card, or an ACH transaction (not sure if they're options, just positing).
> What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies.
Hard to say what their reasoning is. It could be pressure from the credit card companies. Or it could be that someone at the mint decided they don't like the idea of people gaming the system.
At the end of the day, it's not a positive-value economic activity. And if enough folks started buying coins for face value just to churn credit card points, there would be financial losses for the mint/and-or the credit card company.
> The usual way to eliminate manufactured spend would be to add a credit card specific transaction fee that cancels out the spend points.
Before 2013, this likely would have violated their credit card processing agreement.
And also, it would be illegal in some states.
That seems ... odd. I can pay my apartment rent with a debit card with a fixed transaction fee (eg, $999.99 and up to $1,999.99 the service fee is $4.95), while covering it with a credit card has a different fee structure of a flat 2.95%. This is with Rent Cafe in NYC, and from what I can tell, it's a very widespread platform across the country. The 2.95% fee specific to credit cards will wipe out the points earned for a credit card under almost all circumstances.
Platforms like RentCafe are highly configurable to support local laws, because the nature of landlord/tenant law is that it is highly variable by state.
Going though that same effort is a waste of time and implementation budget for something like selling novelty bills.
Fair enough - in which case the Mint just needs to pad the sale price a bit to cover interchange fees, and make a little extra on top, and shipping can be extra. 10% on top of the face value should be more than enough, and would have the side effect of sapping any would be manufactured spend. Yet the prices on the Mint are way above that - it looks like more than 50%. Sure, if the novelty or collector market values it at that premium, great. What I struggle to understand is that this is primarily to combat manufactured spend. I still don't see why manufactured spend is a problem for the Mint to solve, rather than the credit card companies.
> What I struggle to understand is that this is primarily to combat manufactured spend.
I agree with you, it is well known that these collector products are intended to generate revenue.
Also, they literally have their pricing rationale in their FAQs:
https://www.usmint.gov/help-center/most-popular-questions.ht...
> We cannot use any tax dollars to fund our numismatic operations.
> The United States Mint’s numismatic programs are self-sustaining and operate at no cost to the taxpayer. Any excess funds are returned to the Treasury General Fund to reduce the annual budget deficit of the federal government.
I calculated the "cost per dollar" of all of the offerings on the website at the moment.
The best "deal" is the most expensive – $100 x 16 for $1,860, at $1.16 per dollar. The worst deal is the cheapest – $1 x 5 for $18.50, at $3.70 per dollar.
Sheet here - corrections welcome:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb_WLW_WxOYSUS12fslf...
72% markup is quite reasonable for a novelty product. I worked in a small specialty store as a kid and our standard markup was 100%.
Wait till you find out what paintings cost and what paint coats.
Why do these sell for so much more than the value of the note?
If I recall correctly this is because someone found an infinite money glitch and used a credit card that had a big cash back. So he would buy the bills then deposit into his bank account and pay of his credit cards. So now they increased the price to more than the face value.
But that's just stupidity of the seller. You must account for credit card fees when you sell anything.
Here the issue is that they're several times more expensive than their printed value, hardly the same issue.
That was with the dollar coins
I miss Fatwallet
You cannot join multiple bank notes into a single sheet of paper, that's why it's valued more than separate bank notes.
I mean thats how're they're printed as large sheets - these are just uncut.
yes, but the only place where to buy the sheets of $2 bills is at the US Mint so they can set any price. It's another form of Seignorage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage, where the government gets to keep the difference between the cost of producing these coins and/or notes and keeps the difference as this money is unlikely to be back in circulation. Same thing happened with the 50 states collectible 25c, it's estimated that the US got $6B because people remove them from circulation.
Btw, I wonder what strategy would lead to maximisation of Seignorage (in inflation adjusted terms).
Ignoring collectors items for a moment, I suspect keeping inflation low will lead to higher absolute monetary balance held by the public, more than making up for not raking in much in 'inflation tax'.
See eg how the Bank of Japan could pump out lots and lots of money to be held by the general public, when their inflation rates were low or negative.
I doubt that we have a huge paper notes mass being hoarded in the US, most of it should be circulating pretty constantly. I see it important for exports as the US gets to produce paper that we send over to other countries in exchange for goods. They store it and we never pay back as long as our economy, technological progress, science, higher education, cutting-edge healthcare, entertainment, army stay ahead of others then we never ever going to pay back. And Nixon shock where the US dollar stopped being pegged to gold showed that power to others since no one in the world would stop using the US dollar just because it's value now is measured how the US can dictate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock).
Most Americans shouldn't keep their money in savings and should invest into the stock market because it's a reflection of our collective economical input. And if you just keep it in Savings then it'll keep up with the interest rate which doesn't change the stored value, so what's the point? While in big indices there always going to be winners because that's just the nature of the game, so by betting on winners you are going to outrun the interest rate by capturing this additional value that is being created. And people working for these winning companies and startups are very interested in beating the interest rate, they're mostly shareholder aligned as they themselves are equity holders. If you don't have equity you're working in, it still makes sense to bet on winning companies since those people are vey much equity aligned and just want to capture the market share.
Pension funds, 401k are all tight to various investments, indices, etc. that are all reflection of the total economy. And I see it as my participation in the broader economy as I spend money that creates jobs and creates new economic exchanges further, and as a shareholder I capture that value back anyway. People should keep their spending at their social level if they want to keep the economy going smoothly.
> I doubt that we have a huge paper notes mass being hoarded in the US, most of it should be circulating pretty constantly.
I suspect most of the seigniorage these days ain't in the paper notes, but in database entries. Ie reserves that banks hold at the central bank. (Though Interest on Excess Reserves makes this topic more complicated than it used to be in the past.)
The rest of your comment seems to be about what is logical for an individual or perhaps for society. And that's useful, but not at all where I wanted to go with my comment. I was purely speculating on how to get the maximum seigniorage for the central bank.
> Pension funds, 401k are all tight to various investments, indices, etc. that are all reflection of the total economy. And I see it as my participation in the broader economy as I spend money that creates jobs and creates new economic exchanges further, and as a shareholder I capture that value back anyway. People should keep their spending at their social level if they want to keep the economy going smoothly.
People keeping their money as cash under the mattress implicitly also lend it out to the economy. An inflation targeting central bank will notice that (statistically) less spending is going on when the money is under the mattress, and print more money to compensate. When you start spending the mattress money, the central bank will remove money from circulation to compensate.
The net effect on the economy is pretty much the same as if you had stuck it directly into a bank account. (The main practical difference is in who's doing the asset allocation. But the amount of total spending is about the same: it's whatever the central banks decides it should be. No need for you to help smooth it out.)
You are right that with an inflationary currency, keeping money under the mattress is a losing proposition for the individual. But with eg a deflating currency, cash might be a decent investment. (And you can get into these kinds of regimes without crashing the economy, by eg central bank that targets a constant nominal GDP, or with the historic gold standard.)
That's why I was bringing up the example of Japan: when they had deflation, people were keeping lots of cash around.
Just for clarity: I wasn't even thinking so much about money under the mattress, but mostly about 'cash in your wallet'.
> how to get the maximum seigniorage for the central bank
If I were the state I wouldn't be targeting wins by removing the value from people's hands through small scale things like collectibles where there still production element involved. I'd try to push it further into completely virtual worlds. Bitcoin comes in mind as a perfect tool for long-term removal of value from potential materialization in the real world that would use resources of the planet.
I can see how the US state is involved in orchestrating bitcoin. Lots of value has been transferred into bits on the blockchain. The blockchain itself is slow which prevents people from moving coins around and pushing them further holding longer. It's also prone to mistakes which further destroys value. It was also a good way to teach people to check all details in the real world.
The US and others have full visibility into all movements of coins which is great for controlling money flows. Creation of new economic models allowed to capture bad elements of the society in the process. And the global construct of bitcoin pulled value out of the whole world creating another win for the US.
I would like for cryptocoins to keep increasing in prices so more people could lock the value they hold. As long as we maintain the idea that some control virtual worlds that value never has to materialize in the real world keeping the planet better for everyone. Of course, electricity was spent on it but relative to the $2T of value captured in a virtual world, it's amazing ROI. Plus we got infrastructure for AI just in time.
Most 'normal' dollars are already electronic. No need for a blockchain just for that.
Bitcoin (and all other blockchain currencies together) are small fry compared to the regular financial system, and eg banks' reserve accounts at the Fed. At least at the moment.
I'm not sure the US would be so hostile to bitcoin and crypto in general, if they wanted to move people to it? Here in Singapore our regulations are much more crypto friendly.
Btw, there's some technology in the works to make blockchain currencies much, much harder to trace. But people haven't really taken it up so far.
1) They're novelty collector's items.
2) Selling individual sheets has a lot more overhead per sheet/bill than selling fresh stacks of bills to banks.
Because its a novelty gift item.
Because that's what people are willing to pay for them.
Collectors.
Basically the mint found a way to make more money than they print.
- [deleted]
You can sign up to be on the waiting list for a lucky Panda $2 note, with a nice red envelope and a serial number starting with '888'.
I mean, it's a nice gesture, and maybe annoying the heck out of certain Presidents.
The price for this $2 note + red envelope is >$10.
$10 is taking advantage.
Yes, and? Fools and their money, etc. No one is forcing people to pay these rates. If someone wants to buy one that's their business.
Blowing $10 on entertainment hardly makes anyone a fool, though. It's $10 worth of novelty for $10.
I totally agree, but the person to whom I was replying probably does not.
Would it be legal to use a sheet like that as currency?
Quote from Woz:
"They meet the specs of the U.S. government, so by law, these are legal tender. I have been spending them. You can get arrested for them, you cannot get convicted because you're in the right."
It is probably not something you should do unless you are prepared to pay for a good lawyer, and don't mind the risk of getting arrested
>They meet the specs of the U.S. government, so by law, these are legal tender.
That's not how it works. North Korea is great at producing dollars that "meet the specs" but they are still counterfeit.
The US dollar is not an open standard. Valid US currency is only produced by the mint. If you do something to a valid US dollar, it might still stay a valid US dollar, but that's not because they still "meet the specs".
Meanwhile the law says
>“whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.” 18 U.S.C. § 333.
> That's not how it works. North Korea is great at producing dollars that "meet the specs" but they are still counterfeit
The quote from Steve Wozniak refers to an official sheet of dollar bills, purchased from the official source. I'm sure that he considers the source as part of the "specs", and is not referring to only the physical aspects.
>“whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months,
This doesn't apply here
https://www.usmint.gov/help-center/faqs/paper-currency-and-e...
"Can I cut uncut currency sheets? What happens if the notes on my sheet were cut apart?
Because the individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender, they may be cut apart and spent. Were you to do this, they would only be valued at their face value, even though you would have paid more than their cumulative value for the uncut currency sheet."
I don't think you need a good lawyer, because the case is pretty clear. But you do run the risk of annoying people and getting into some temporary legal trouble.
[dead]
It's not considered legal tender since it's not a note, it doesn't have to be accepted. The cut out notes don't have to be accepted either as it's difficult to determine the authenticity of the sheet itself.
Sellers are largely free to choose what form of payment to accept or refuse, regardless of "legal tender" laws. The concept is much more narrow than commonly assumed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
Yes, I wasn't sure about the exact legal code around it, hence I said "it doesn't have to be accepted" and provided a potential explanation that the counterparty can present.
In the cited Section 31 U.S.C. 5103 it says:
> Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks
What would be the legal definition of a note sheet? Is it a note or not? A collection of bank notes? The bank notes have pretty specific definitions down to the specific measurements up to a certain precision. Would a music note sheet fall under this definition as well? I don't see what the US mint sells as a legal tender given the strict definition of bank notes themselves.
US Mint FAQ at https://www.usmint.gov/help-center/faqs/paper-currency-and-e...
> Is uncut currency legal tender?
> Yes. The individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender.
> The individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender.
It doesn't say that the whole sheet would be considered as a collection of legal tender. So far I see that the individual notes are legal tender, it doesn't say what happens if you cut it. Everything it says is about uncut currency sheets.
> it doesn't say what happens if you cut it.
It does though?
> Can I cut uncut currency sheets? What happens if the notes on my sheet were cut apart?
> Because the individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender, they may be cut apart and spent. Were you to do this, they would only be valued at their face value, even though you would have paid more than their cumulative value for the uncut currency sheet.
Interesting up to what section they can be cut out, can it just be the two serial numbers and the denomination? Then the back of the notes becomes just "In God We Trust"
In the case of damaged bills, if you have over half of it it is generally still considered legal tender and banks will accept it as-is. However if over 50% of the bill is damaged or missing, it has to be turned into the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which is basically the paper money half of the US Mint, and investigated/examined to determine if it is valid for replacement or reimbursement.
So I would assume as long as you have over half after cutting it, it would still be good, although businesses and banks can turn it down if they are unsure of it's legality or legitimacy, and not having a full serial number would likely get it rejected nearly everywhere.
Is this an infinite paper glitch?
If banks have to accept if over 50% of the bill is missing, then you can keep the other paper and use it. Using it productively seems difficult but $1M in $1 bills (one bill is roughly 1 gram) would be 1000kg, 490kg of paper, let's say it would be considered residential papers then at $100 per ton, we're looking at $49 in yield out of air. 0.0049bbps + infinite time on doing the process.
They do not have to accept it. https://www.bep.gov/services/mutilated-currency-redemption
> Lawful holders of mutilated currency may receive a redemption at full value when: ...
> 1. Clearly more than 50% of a note identifiable as United States currency is present, along with sufficient remnants of any relevant security feature; or
> 2. 50% or less of a note identifiable as United States currency is present and the method of mutilation and supporting evidence demonstrate to the satisfaction of the [Bureau of Engraving & Printing] that the missing portions have been totally destroyed.
Legally speaking, yes. Practically, I'd reject someone handing me uncut currency as change.
I'd gladly accept a whole sheet of uncut currency, because they sell for more than face value.
Who are you going to resell it to? You've just become the sucker while they recouped some of the losses.
If you accept it at face value, how have they recouped their losses? And how are you a sucker?
> Who are you going to resell it to?
Ebay or so, if you have no better idea.
Seems like the sheet of 50 $1 bills would look pretty framed.
My uncle gave me an uncut sheet of dollar bills as an xmas present when I was maybe 9 or 10. Many years later, I still remember that feeling of astonishment -- ranks among one the great Christmas gifts of my childhood.
Gift-wrapping an otherwise empty box with one of these could make for a fun gift.
gotta be someone somewhere with more money than sense using these as wallpaper
I love the story that a French building recently (2010s, I think) renovated and discovered back rooms wallpapered in very early American money and plenty more stuffed inside various walls as essentially insulation. There was no surprise as to why that might be because most of the bills had the obvious signature of Benjamin Franklin and there was one notorious French bordello in his diplomat days that he had been alleged to spend a lot of self-invented money at. It was mostly only good for wallpaper and insulation, but being a diplomat he certainly implied it was good American currency at the time. There's something to weirdly admire about Ben Franklin paying for apparently a lot of French services with money he just kind of made up himself, and they mostly accepted it because it did make interesting wallpaper and decent building insulation.
I would love a source for this if you could find one. I tried searching and will search more in depth later. Any more keywords or information you remember about the story?
Maybe not a wallpaper, but I have been at an office that has a sheet that was framed and hung on the wall. You know, where people might have hung a painting or something else, this guy has a framed sheet of dollar bills.
It felt like a novelty at the time, but that feeling wore off quickly.
They should also make them in a small roll format...
Is there anyway to order new bills like this but cut? It doesn’t seem like banks are offering anything uncirculated nowadays.
Banks certainly receive packs of new notes (from the Fed) all the time, so try asking nicely, or ask them to order it if its something like $2 bills that they don't normally have. I've read comments on collector forums of others getting new notes from the bank like this.
When I get cash from the bank teller, as rare as that is nowadays, it is regularly brand new and uncirculated. I bet you could just withdraw cash and ask for uncirculated and they would oblige. They’re hard to count because they stick together.
Are you allowed to use bills for purchase that you cut yourself (like, from one of these sheets)?
Looking at the images and the price of eggs I can't help but think...
expensive toilet paper
I'll have to keep these in mind for wrapping presents next Christmas.
Same. And then the recipient, *by law*, must not damage the paper while unwrapping.
I was thinking of taking a large roll to the tailor…
Looks like they make a nice vig on it. Maybe 100% profit.
Oh! Nice wallpaper.
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