The main intention of today's anti-counterfeiting technology is actually not to make the currency impossible to counterfeit but to make it *expensive* to counterfeit - after all, the people who design these measures know that whatever they come up with can be reverse engineered and copied. So, make the currency so that it costs a significant fraction of its face value to counterfeit and you reduce the attractiveness of counterfeiting. Add in punitive penalties for counterfeiting and an aggressive anti-counterfeiting programme and you further reduce the incentive.
I would imagine the 3I would do something similar. Make a 100cr note cost 80-ish cr (an estimate based on the well proven 'pull a number out of my anatomy' method) to counterfeit well enough to be indistinguishable from a genuine note and add a mandatory 25 year minimum sentence, possibly with loss of Imperial citizenship if such a thing exists IYTU, and make the anti-counterfeiting team a unit within the IN with powers to use any Imperial assets they need to hunt down and capture the counterfeiters and you're seriously reducing the size of the pool of criminals who might contemplate counterfeiting as a valid career choice.
As to the criminals being hard to track, they are most likely to be travelling at J-1-point-something on average (mainly J-1, some J-2, outside chance of a J-3 or two) while your intelligence on them will be travelling at J-3+. Sure, they'll get away with it for a while but, eventually, you *will* overtake them. And if the nearest available asset when you do just happens to be a Tigress...
David Shaw
>Well, largely the way we’re not faced with instant, massive counterfeiting, fraud and hyperinflation today. The bills are made with anti-counterfeiting measures in place. microscopic encrypted keys readable by a bill checker, akin to modern counterfeit detectors, etc.OK. I can buy a anti-counterfeiting technology handwave, even if it's a little hard to believe in a setting incredibly more diverse than the European Union is (where a monetary union combined with federalism and diversity of economies have led to substantial financial difficulties, albeit different than I presented).It is a little hard to believe partly because of the inevitable, hard-to-track-down criminals who would presumably have the capacity to kidnap an engineer or three and start taking verifiers apart, in order to reverse-engineer what an undetectable forgery is supposed to look like. Replacing compromised countermeasures sounds like a nightmare, because presumably all legit Crimps everywhere need to verify as legit - unless you have multiple valid standards... in which case security is poorer, but you could limit damage; but it would still be horrifically painful to reimplement verification measures. I'm not sure issuing a new currency would go a smoothly as our RL currency changes do, simply because of the vast amounts of time needed to get information across.>Heck, during WWII the Germans printed, essentially, real 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound notes, and it didn’t work <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard>.Reading that page makes me think it didn't work because it didn't have sufficient time to work - and not enough cooperation between right hand and left hand - before it was shut down.On 12 July 2016 at 18:30, Bruce Johnson <xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
On Jul 12, 2016, at 7:27 AM, Abu Dhabi <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
How does the Imperial Credit function? AFAIK, it is a paper (well - plastic) currency backed my the Imperial economy. How does this not lead to instant, massive counterfeiting, fraud and hyperinflation? The notes are supposedly proof against forgery, but I struggle to imagine how they could be.
Well, largely the way we’re not faced with instant, massive counterfeiting, fraud and hyperinflation today. The bills are made with anti-counterfeiting measures in place. microscopic encrypted keys readable by a bill checker, akin to modern counterfeit detectors, etc.
I’m sure it occurs, as it does here in the Real World, but it’s not a sufficiently large issue to cause problems. Heck, during WWII the Germans printed, essentially, real 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound notes, and it didn’t work <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard>.
Mechanisms exist today to manage anonymous but verifiable and uncounterfeitable currency: Bitcoin. It has it’s problems (primarily rooted in it’s inherent goldbuggery, but that leads to deflation, not inflation.) but the avenues for anonymous secure, and verifiable electronic transactions are there, and have been for quite some time: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/474/830. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm
We had a long long <strike>flamewar</strike> cordial, but spirited discussion of electronic cash transfers on the list sometime in the last couple of years.
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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