Good Thinking

New US$100-bill to enter circulation, tackle counterfeiting

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The new $100 bill will enter circulation on Tuesday
The new $100 bill will enter circulation on Tuesday
The new $100 bill will enter circulation on Tuesday

The Federal Reserve of the United States will begin circulating a new $100 bill on Tuesday. The redesigned bank note, which has been delayed by more than 2 and a half years, includes a number of measures designed to make it more difficult to counterfeit, including a 3D security ribbon and a new "bell in the inkwell."

Though the new note will still feature the familiar portrait of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, alongside this will be a new vertical blue ribbon woven into the paper. The fine 3D nature of the ribbon creates a number of visual effects as the note is viewed or manipulated in various ways. Little bells that appear in the ribbon change to 100s as the angle of view is altered, and the pattern can be made to move either up and down or side to side by tilting the note in various directions.

Also on the front of the note is a copper-colored inkwell. This also includes a bell, which changes in appearance from copper to green as the note is tilted, with the effect that the bell seems to disappear and reappear. The large copper 100 in the lower-right corner of the front also color-shifts to green when tilted.

Other measures designed to make the note harder to reproduce are raised printing (used, among other places, on Franklin's shoulder), watermarks, serial numbers, and the microprinting of tiny characters on Franklin's collar, along the bill's quill, and around its borders. Such features have been used previously with other bill denominations. Other changes are designed to make the note easier to distinguish.

If you think this story is only of interested to our American readers, think again. Federal Reserve estimates put the proportion of exported $100 bills at between a half and two-thirds of the total. The $100 bill is the most counterfeited US bill outside of the country, and so, according to the New York Times, the Federal Reserve has taken the time to translate its newmoney.gov website into 23 languages.

The New York Times reports that the bill has been delayed from a launch in February of 2011 due to errors in the printing process. Gizmag originally reported on the redesigned bill in April, 2010.

For the time being, older $100 bills remain legal tender.

Sources: Federal Reserve, New York Times

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5 comments
Excellency Neckbeard
I don't understand why counterfeiting is illegal. How is an American citizen printing bills at home any worse than what the FED is doing? The FED is deflating our currency by printing billions a day. Counterfeiters I'm sure even en masse are not nearly as (counter)productive.
Marcus Carr
I'm surprised that they didn't go for plastic notes as we've had in Australia for decades. Not only are they extremely difficult to forge, they've very durable and cleaner than paper.
Uber Lime
If it's that hard to counterfeit why are they writing "specimen" on it?
Also to check the validity of their claims i suggest they send every1 a free sample ,plz.
CaptD
I'm thinking that the we will see many more new US monetary notes released in short order very soon, since now would be the best time in history for the USA to devaluate the US$ say by a factor of 100 to 1, into the new Buck USN$.
Over a long weekend, perhaps enabled by the government shut down, our foreign debt would be reduced 100 fold... Sure Precious metals would zoom upward but all the Central Banks have been secretly stocking up, so "no harm no foul", except to the little people who really have no say in what is happening globally any longer.
mookins
@RhY Thornton: That money-printing is the 'quantitative easing' necessitated by the banksters' Great Fraud that crashed the economy in 2008. Wall Street, not the government, is to blame here.