New 20 dollar bill

[Spriggan]

The US treasurey deparment showed what the new $20 bill will look like.  I think the colors go well
http://www.msnbc.com/news/912826.asp

[Gargamel]

what is the change, their not green anymore and gray instead?

[Spriggan]

did you even look at the link?  There's like 5 colors now

[Gargamel]

mayby its my monitor thats not so good

[Mr_Pleasington]

Mmmmmmmmmm, sweet color!

Maybe they'll make a 3D bill next. Or Magic Eyes!

Seriously, I wonder how many of our tax dollars went into this.  I imagine more than we'd like.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

High priced GS 15 to sit on a committe 150,000 dollars

Design team 30 million dollars

Materials for production 120 million dollars

New Production line 1 billion dollars

Bribes to Congress 15 Billion Dollars

a 20 dollar bill thats worth less than a 20 euro bill......................... Priceless

[42]

$30 million for a desing team, I think we got ripped off.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I dont know if that was the actual amount but as someone who's forced to listen to Government budgets day in and out here in DC I wouldn't be that 0surprised.

Im sure they had to hold a competition and had to figure out how to introduce about a thousand other couterfitting foils onto a piece of paper the size of a ... well a 20 dollar bill.

Then there was project editing, redesigning, trial marketing, info groups and so on.

[Spriggan]

Well in theory it will save us money since the cost of haveing the secret service work on counterfitting probaly is more then the development of this.  And it's not like this is porkbarrel spending

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

yes and no, the old money from before the last 20 change is still in circulation and the old bills are still being counterfitted and aged. It will not be phazed out for a while since piles of it are in forigen banks and vaults.  Take into account that the most recent bills are also being counterfitted and wont be completely phazed out for another 10-15 years or so and you can see the huge problem on our hands. Because with the way technology is going its possible to make money from your laser printer soon.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Maybe this seems naive, but it seems to me that before approving a change such as this that both the house committee for such a thing as well as the treasury dept. would have thoroughly evaluated the relative expected cost/reward factors on those issues. As much as we like to hate our gov't, they really aren't made up of morons. At least, not mostly so. And no, I don't think you desktop laser printer will be capable of producing convincing counterfeits of official U.S. currancy any time soon. There are a lot of inticracies that take incredibly expensive equipment for that.

[Spriggan]

SE is right the watermarks and some of the colors were designed not to read by scanners.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

oh, I know they can't now....but give us about 3 years.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

3 years won't be enough. This is advanced stuff they do. equipment affordable for home or even general office use isn't even advanced enough to realistically counterfeit bills printed 50 years ago, and it's not likely they'll be able to do so for another 10 at least, at which point we'll have this new stuff widely distributed, which will take quite a bit longer to be able to reproduce. I think you either vastly over-estimate the power of a personal PC or you vastly under-estimate the complexity of a bill of U.S. currency.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I have to disagree with that having had members of the FBI tell me that money from as recently as eight years ago has been succesfully duplicated by home scanners and printers it looks very, very real and can only be discovered by advanced lab techniques...  the biggest obstacle to duplication is not the printing part of the process anyway... its the paper. The paper behind the bills is by far the hardest thing to duplicate because it has tons of little colored fibers inbedded in it.