From: Charlie Root <root@pizzabox.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 94 16:01:09 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: no money woe
Message-ID: <9403112307.AA04098@pizzabox.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


: From: Mark Hittinger <bugs@netsys.com>

: 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.

Erm... if this is the quality of reporting that's getting as far as the
US, I guess I'd better pass on the straight dope as told in our press;
these 'Superbills' are not just flooding Europe, they're going down heavily
in the US too, and they're so good, they're actually being accepted by
the feds.  They appear to be coming from one of the gulf states - Iraq
has been mentioned, though that could just be the US's habit of blaming
everything on Iraq at the moment, though it could as likely be correct -
and they're of the quality that suggests they weren't done by hack forgers
but by a state banking institution with full highly-expensive technical
resources behind it.

My suspicion is 1) the reason the usual places in the US haven't been
told to watch for them is that they're so good there's *nothing* a bank
teller or shopkeeper can do to detect them; and 2) this is not a commercial
scam (though there's no doubt an element of that - Iraq's coffers must
be pretty low just now, for example) but one of the first waves of what
will be the 21st Century's standard means of warfare - economic warfare.

If I'm correct, then the work we're doing here on digital cash and
mathematically guaranteed unforgeability is going to be taken on board
by society *much much* sooner than any of us dream.

G