Is it possible to perfectly counterfeit money

So, once again imagine that our artist creates the piece of paper that is visually, chemically, and in every other physical way indistinguishable from a real dollar bill. Call this Stage 1. Now, after admiring his work for a while, imagine that the artist then pulls eight genuine, mint-condition dollar bills out of his wallet, throws them on the table, and then places the forgery he created into the pile, shuffling and mixing until he can no longer identify which of the pieces of paper is the one he created, and which are the ones created by the Mint.

How do Stage 1 and Stage 2 differ? At Stage 1 we do not, strictly speaking, have a case of a perfect forgery. Although the piece of paper the artist created is physically indistinguishable from a dollar bill, the artist can nevertheless know it is not a dollar bill because he knows that he created this particular object. In other words, at Stage 1 he can tell that the forgery is a forgery because he knows the history, and in particular the origin, of the object in question.

Stage 2 is different, however. So in some sense we know that the fake dollar in the pile is a perfect forgery. In other words, in Stage 2 the following is true:. And it is this latter sort of claim — that we know, of a particular object, that it is a perfect forgery — that leads to the contradiction.

He is also an associate fellow at the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and a research fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. You can read his previous blog post on untrustworthiness. Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.

We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. Prof: Check the bills in your wallet. You will see some of them have scribbles on them. The scribbles do not detract from the intrinsic worth off a bill yet they can identify a particular bill and mark it as distinct from all the others.

Banksy scribbles his signature on the bill but can still use his perfect forgery to buy popcorn and pharmaceuticals at CVS. Another example — imagine that all proper dollar bills lie within a certain range they cannot be identical. I make multiple dollar bills that are exactly identical digital signature. When I mix the two, I can separate out all the forgeries because they are all identical, whereas the real ones are all slightly different. He then takes a real dollar and places it into the other envelope.

He is then hit by a bus. Bourassa insists it was all his operation but would not say whether there is still more counterfeit money hidden away or how much he profited from his operation. Tryon of the Secret Service said that the American public should "rest assured that only one hundredth of one percent of currency that is in circulation is even perceived to be counterfeit.

The Secret Service says there were more than 3, arrests by American law enforcement last year of people attempting to counterfeit U. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Top Stories. Follow our live coverage for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. Your lobster might be off, or your pineapple rotten to the core — don't be surprised.

There are plenty of counterfeit notes out there. The Reserve Bank — responsible for production of the legitimate currency and charged with maintaining its integrity — said it typically receives around 30, counterfeits a year. Although this is small relative to the total amount of banknotes in circulation — around 1. The RBA points out receiving a counterfeit can have severe consequences for people with low incomes and businesses with small profit margins.

The RBA's latest survey of counterfeiting, published in its March Bulletin, found counterfeiting is on the decline, having peaked in The RBA's forensic approach is to measure the number of counterfeits per million genuine banknotes in circulation as parts per million, or ppm.

It has since declined to an estimated 15 ppm in , as police operations disrupted several large counterfeiting outfits. The switch to a polymer notes or substrate as the RBA calls it in the early s may have made it trickier for the forgers, but it didn't put them out of business. It took them five years to come up with the first forged polymer note.

That was back in , but it wasn't until that it became an industrial process. The RBA keeps upgrading their notes and the top-level crooks keep upgrading their technology to keep pace.

Anything less than a polymer counterfeit is amateur hour. The quality of counterfeits is on the rise again. Around 40 per cent are considered good to excellent quality. The RBA suspects this is being driven by a small number of well organised operators. Depending on your perspective, Australia sits at the lower end of the big counterfeiting nations, or in the upper reaches of the middle-of-the-pack.

The United Kingdom has a much higher concentration of toxic notes at ppm, followed by Brazil — where it appears not every real is real — and Mexico. New Zealand has a very pure currency, with counterfeiting rates of less than 1 ppm.