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Uncut Currency

usmint.gov

391–400 of 421 posts

Re: Uncut Currency

#391
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#392
post #154

(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 denomi…

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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#393
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#394
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 th…

They’re popular at strip clubs because it means a bigger tip rate for the dancers.

Re: Uncut Currency

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#396
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ))

Re: Uncut Currency

#397
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aggr…

My favorite fun fact about dimes/quarters is that they both have a monetary density of $20/lb.

Re: Uncut Currency

#398
post #388
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 other…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Uncut Currency

#400
post #398
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

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.

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