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

Then anonymous writes: On a slightly related topic, I know of an instance where the Secret Service located a stolen color copier with somewhat greater speed than one might have expected.

Is it possible that these machines either: (1) contain transponders or (2) hide a "signature" in their output ???

I was watching CNBC today and saw that some european banks were having trouble with counterfeit 100 dollar bills. They are calling them "super bills" because they only seemed to have three minor flaws that most experts would not detect. They said that a magnifying glass would not be enough to detect these flaws. Cut to your friendly secret service guy looking at two 100 dollar bills under a microscope. The SS said that they would figure out who was doing it and bust them. The guy actually had a smirk on his face. I suppose the quality of the work is so good; that alone narrows down the field of possibilities. The interpol was speculating that over 1 billion of these superbills were now in circulation. Wow. And I figured the US government was going to drive the dollar into oblivion all by itself! Perhaps they will have help along the way. Perhaps people may be driven to Sandy's (et al) digital cash simply because the technology to counterfeit paper cash is becoming more reliable and available with each passing day. It would be one of those weird things that happen if people were driven to bin-bucks not because of the desire for anonymity - but rather the desire to maintain money's store of value function. Gold coins are looking better every day. Superbills - gimme a break. --------- I'd like a 250 Mhz 128 bit hybrid processor with 64 meg of 8 way interleaved memory, a 10 megabyte per second i/o channel, two 3 gig hard disks, two dat drives with compression, and a large diet coke. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.3a mQCNAiz4FWMAAAEEALBCb7HZS7V4gbsp9yJ7Yty49jQ9wcgRhkLjNNgdyJbrJZCq 5/sv4Ljy/4AhVhjlJyZS8L3owS8l0ClZVzWw4/kO3KN7MPz4YPPR7+qIlPQVM0yv gWpJ43EZZ8b8cvAkE9HATCKWktY2ReRSX5DLnScDH/n5jivw+MD/UO8fURCVAAUR tCBNYXJrIEhpdHRpbmdlciA8YnVnc0BuZXRzeXMuY29tPg== =VbKi -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----