"Dave" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi,

As an interim step to total electronicization of money I believe that
2D barcodes on banknotes should uniquely sign the note, so any imaging
network device could tell if the bit of paper was a duplicate, and help
tracking. A non-networked device should be able to check the
signature, but not do real-time tracking. If your money was stolen you
should be able to receive your stolen property when it was handed into
a bank. (Or is ownership of banknotes lost upon theft? - uk.legal)


In principle, there is nothing to stop you writing down the serial nos of
all your bank notes in case they are stolen. Nobody does, though. Whilst
bar codes would make it easier, I am sure that OCR technology can easily
cope with reading existing serial nos.

There are good reasons for not confiscating money from an innocent end user
simply because the serial no is on a list of stolen notes. There are still
nearly 30 million pounds of stolen notes missing from the big robbery in
Essex a few months go, and that's just one robbery. The grand total must be
much higher. Commerce would grind to a halt if everybody had to check each
note against a database of stolen ones.