"Dave" wrote in message
oups.com...

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


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.
Making up a serial number is a whole load easier, as far as I know,
than forging a signed, encrypted barcode. The post is also about
forgery.

Oh, I'm sorry, I see what you mean now. Something like a 400 digit bar code,
with a digital signature. At standard bar code sizes, 400 digits would take
up the whole note, but I guess that could be got around.



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.
So if I got 5K in cash to buy a car at an auction, got the serial
numbers, and was robbed, if the money turned up at a bank 3 months
later I would have lost ownership? This doesn't seem right, but then
again case law is bad law IHMO. I thought that victims (or relatives
of victims) of the Nazis got their art works back after proving
ownership even if the work was bought in good faith.

I think that's the principle of the law at the moment. Unless the goods were
bought in 'market overt' they have to be returned to the true owner. So, in
principle, that should apply to bank notes too. I just think that with the
present system it would make life intolerable.

In principle, everyone could carry a little bank note scanner that checks
the serial numbers of every note they receive, but that's also a problem.



Commerce would grind to a halt if everybody had to check each
note against a database of stolen ones.
This is done for many card transactions, even with a low transaction
value.


There's a difference though. The card transaction has to involve a computer
operation anyway, so the cardholder's account can be debited. Checking
against a list of stolen cards does not increase the transaction time. If
you gave the bus driver a 5 pound note and he had to check that against his
database of stolen notes that would significantly add to the journey time. I
guess that's one reaon why they don't take credit cards at the moment.