Bill Stewart writes:

Nick MacDonald's note on bar codes on Canadian money, and speculation about banks tracking what bills they give you, is something they're probably not doing now, but could if they wanted; USA Today had an article a while back about proposals to do that with US money. You really can't do a perfect tracking job, but a large amount of cash comes from banks, gets spent at stores, and goes back to banks, and could easily enough be tracked it it were bar-coded and banks were forced (or paid) to read it with bar-code scanners. Maybe you'd only track 50%, or 80%, but that could have a major impact on privacy, and a major "improvement" in the government's ability to keep tabs on us. It's really no tougher to print bar coded serial numbers than human-readable ones.

Sounds like it's a good time to get digicash out into the market, or stock up on rrolls of quarters :-)

There's a quick cure for those who are paranoid about spending bar coded money; make sure the bills you spend at stores were not given to you by a bank teller or ATM. Since "getting change" (ie: converting $20 bills to $10 bills at stores) is theoretically traceable if the store in question processes a "making change" transaction by barscanning the input bills and output bills and submitting the record of that transaction to some agency or clearinghouse operated by the government (U.S. Treasury Dept?) or banks (Federal Reserve). Don't tell me this is not possible, because it is, try purchasing a postal money order over $1500 at a U.S. Post office, and you'll see that they ask for valid ID before completing the transaction. We're getting closer to a Big Brother electronically monitored economy with each day. Bar coding money is just one more step in that direction, and certainly far more palateble to the American public than outlawing cash alltogether, which is why I think the Treasury Dept. might do it soon. Getting back to bar coded money, and how to avoid traceable transactions, I can see an underground business of "money changers", people who act sort of like cash shuffling agents. Here's how it would work: A person obtains some cash at an ATM from his acount. He'd like to spend the cash to buy liquor, but doesn't want his bank to see any of his bills coming back in the form of a deposit from a liquor store (such juicy info could be re-sold by the bank to a insurance company clearinghouse/database). So, instead the person goes to a money changer. The money changer takes the cash from the customer and gives him some new cash, charging a small transaction fee (1-5%?). The money changer works by deposits the customers bills into his own account, and withdrawing fresh bills from his own account via ATM, the fresh bills are to be given to other customers of the money changer. Thus, there will exist two types of cash in such an arrangement, "traceable" cash (cash withdrawn from a regular person's account), and "untraceable" cash (cash withdrawn from a money changer's account). The job of the money changer is to sell untraceable cash in exchangefor traceable cash. Such money changing businesses (if not made illegal by laws) could operate accross the street from major banks, and provide a valuable service (giving cash the anonymity it enjoys now). BTW, cash can be traced even without bar codes, since serial numbers can be read by OCR. I'm assuming banks *already* scan all incoming cash for serial numbers looking for money from unsolved bank heists, and alerting the FBI/SS when a customer deposits such bills, so that the FBI/SS can then interogate a chain of people leading up to the original spender of the bill, much in the way the SS catches counterfeiters. Thug

Eric Blossom writes:

Murdering Thug writes:

...

BTW, cash can be traced even without bar codes, since serial numbers can be read by OCR.

The few $50 and $100 bills I've looked at over the past year or so have had a light colored vertical stripe on them that was slightly raised above the surface of the paper and had *small* numbers on it.

Seems like it was designed to make counterfeiting harder and money easier to trace.

It used to be that just $50 and $100 bills had that vertical stripe, but now it has reached $10 and $20 bills as well. Also, notice the small text around the border of the portrait of the bill, this small text can't be copied too well with color copiers. However, what is printed on the stripe is not a serial number, but "USA TEN USA TEN..." on $10 bills, and similarly USA TWENTY for $20, USA FIFTY for $50... There are big time rumors about the vertical stripe embedded in the paper though. The government says it's for making counterfeiting more difficult, but how come they just didn't use a watermark like they do on the new postal money orders? A watermark is far more difficult to forge than an embedded stripe, although anyone who has knowledge of making his own paper knows that both are quite easy to do. A rumor however has it that the vertical stripe is a tracer material, and emits a distinguishing signal when exposed to radiation or certain RF signals. The use of such a stripe could be used to catch people who try to bring large amounts of cash past U.S. Customs without declaring it. Thus cash would show up on these detectors as easily as an Colt .45 does in an X-ray of your baggage. Thug