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Banknotes would be more difficult to forge and generally good if
they had uses beyond just being bits of paper. With the advent of
various new materials, this is more plausible than in the past. I
propose the following, from lowest to highest denomination:
A: An edible face flannel containing
antimicrobial substances.
Can be used as a towel (in the Douglas Adams sense but smaller),
as a source of nutrition or as an antibiotic and antifungal. You can
eat it, use it to clear up spills, minor infections, athlete's foot,
blow your nose with it and even dry yourself off with it if it still
seems clean enough.
B: A timepiece. It contains thin, flexible digital electronics and a
digital display, is solar-powered, and can tell you the date and
time. Difficult to forge because the electronics are complex and
fiddly to make. From this note upwards, the whole surface of the
note is a display and solar-powered.
C: A calculator and currency convertor.
D: A mobile 'phone, radio and translator.
E: Unfolds into a rainhat which tessellates with others to form an
umbrella, raincoat or tent.
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Annotation:
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Useful banknote # F: "Don't press the alarm button and
hand over all the cash in your drawer." |
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I heard they can rolled up into expedient straws and used to finish of, for example, one's milkshake. |
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//even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough// |
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For those times when you don't have a square to spare. |
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I see a loss of fungibility leading to irritating arbitrage opportunities for irritating people with nothing better to do [-]. (Sorry, I'm irritable this evening). |
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This would cause your currency to be less resistant to inflation by making it more likely that the value of a banknote in monetary terms (i.e. the number printed on it) will fall below its intrinsic value (i.e. the value people place on, for example, a solar-powered radio). Once this point is reached banknotes will drop out of circulation, hindering trade and causing a sort of economic constipation. |
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I can see a problem with a half-eaten banknote, certainly, or
for that matter eating one covered in snot, but they could
be weighed and counted. Incidentally, the mobile 'phone
thing would require user profiles.
[Pertinax], yes, i can
see that would happen but economics does my head in.
Also, pound coins are clearly made of chocolate.
They
could be made perishable: the edible notes could go off,
the waterproof ones develop leaks and so on. |
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Re [hippo]'s point - I'm not so sure this would drive inflation - I'd have thought the opposite, since putting a unit of currency to 'use' exposes it to stresses and strains it might not otherwise experience, limiting its fungibility (love that word) over time - natural erosion of currency out in the wild causes interchangeable monetary supply to decrease, increasing the net overall value of the remaining cash. There would need to be strict rules on what was and what wasn't acceptable tender - which leads me to a question: If you tear a banknote in half, does that render it null and void should you later repair it using sticky tape? Or how about if you draw a line with permanent-marker through the identification number? Or dip it in red ink? At what point does a banknote lose its tradability? |
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And yes, perishable cash does have its advantages - at least for banks and other institutions who manage 'cash' in notional forms. |
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Lovely. I would like to see this happen if only so that I can witness the newsreaders discussing the spending slowdown in terms of hippo's //economic constipation//. Such an economic downturn could shoorly be rectified by means of the increased production of less gimmicky and therefore more "fibrous" currency - financial All-Bran, if you will, which will pass through each consumer/spender with greater ease and speed, leaving everyone much relieved. |
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F. Roll up into a tube and use to inhale powdered substances in order to alter one's mental state. |
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Bargain. A lesser man would have spread these five notes over five different ideas. |
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I've now decided that notes A, C and E should be triangular, note B should be square and note D should be pentagonal, so that when you've got twelve... |
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// F. Roll up into a tube and use to inhale powdered
substances in order to alter one's mental state. //
[neelandan] |
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That's baked or is it fried, as in "this is what your brain looks
like on coke." |
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Make them like on Futurama, with an OLED display. Put the $300 bill in the coffee machine, buy your expensive coffee, get the bill back, watch it become a $297 bill right before your eyes. |
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//newer, better, Australian technology//
Now there's a very irritating combination of words. |
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//Isle of Mann//sp. "Man" |
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