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Cash is king.
- Thread starter steve98052
- Start date
Putting a unique RFID on each bill would be the handiest way to do it, data might not be "real time", but comprehensive and traceable. Some people wouldn't want their cash transactions to be traceable, I think many wouldn't care, and governments, esp ones as powerful as the Imperium, wouldn't care what people want. It would be very doable though, and another reason for the x-boats, constantly updating the network.
Usefulness from that perspective depends on what registers the RFID.
Ultimately, it's no different to a cash machine noting down the serial numbers of notes it issues you with (which would be doable if a bit of a faff with current technology), and 'paying in machines' and some 'tills' doing the same when they accept them.
Tracking it as it's handed over cash-to-desk in intervening businesses is probably not always practical (are you really going to insist on one-person market stalls having a 'smart till'?).
Still, seeing where a bill 're-enters' the system might still give you some useful data. If you're trying to track someone, then being able to trace (some) cash payments as well as just card transactions might provide some useful clues.
locarno24 said:Usefulness from that perspective depends on what registers the RFID.
Ultimately, it's no different to a cash machine noting down the serial numbers of notes it issues you with (which would be doable if a bit of a faff with current technology), and 'paying in machines' and some 'tills' doing the same when they accept them.
Exactly. Also the same for counterfeiting. No big leap forward.
locarno24 said:Usefulness from that perspective depends on what registers the RFID.
When thinking about it, I would say it registers on any available network like any other device, this is of course a higher tech solution than we have now (or maybe just the lengths we would go to). Think of the data you could collect watching each and every credit to where it goes; which would help greatly in managing supply. Though when suddenly a large amount of cash registers on the network ... somewhere it will be flagged to be checked out at least.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
The problem with RFID would also be the possibility of real time tracking, so if you just withdrew a wad of thousand cred wafers, you may have a reception party waiting for you.
Condottiere said:The problem with RFID would also be the possibility of real time tracking, so if you just withdrew a wad of thousand cred wafers, you may have a reception party waiting for you.
Already solved today with cheap wallets..
Condottiere said:The problem with RFID would also be the possibility of real time tracking, so if you just withdrew a wad of thousand cred wafers, you may have a reception party waiting for you.
See ATM cowboy laws; but for every measure there is a counter measure and so on.
steve98052
Mongoose
One way that RFID in currency might reduce counterfeiting is the possibility of a serial number collision. Obviously a potential counterfeiter must generate RFID codes that pass as real; that's not all that difficult, because to be useful the codes need a detectable pattern.
More difficult, a counterfeit bill also must not have a code that the code-matching system has observed in a real bill at a location so far away that the observation could reach a point but the bill itself could not have. If bills were always in free circulation, that would be unlikely; actual notes could plausibly travel on express merchant ships, racing yachts, etc. However, if a reserve bank somewhere was soaking up an excess of currency, it could tell the code-matching system the code numbers of bills that were being temporarily removed from active circulation. And if a bill was removed from circulation due to excess wear, its code would be deauthorized; although a counterfeit would pass the mathematical code pattern, it wouldn't pass a code test.
A failed test by an individual bill wouldn't be enough to catch a counterfeiter, because the note could have reached a bank in the code-matching system by way of someone who accepted it thinking it was good. However, it wouldn't take a lot of data mining to discover a pattern, and once a pattern was evident it wouldn't take long before treasury officers interviewed enough people who innocently accepted counterfeits to discover people who knowingly passed them. At that point, life would become very difficult for the counterfeiters.
One exception would be counterfeiters who passed bad bills only in small quantity; there wouldn't be enough fakes in circulation to nail down a pattern. That's a minor risk to the treasury because it's complicated (and thus presumably expensive) to produce credible counterfeits, which makes it unprofitable unless a substantial number of bills are spent by the counterfeiters' agents. Also, a few bad bills aren't going to disrupt the economy.
The more significant risk would be counterfeiters who produce fake currency not for profit, but with the intention of disrupting the economy. It's easier to release currency when one isn't trying to maximize the amount of real currency one receives in return.
More difficult, a counterfeit bill also must not have a code that the code-matching system has observed in a real bill at a location so far away that the observation could reach a point but the bill itself could not have. If bills were always in free circulation, that would be unlikely; actual notes could plausibly travel on express merchant ships, racing yachts, etc. However, if a reserve bank somewhere was soaking up an excess of currency, it could tell the code-matching system the code numbers of bills that were being temporarily removed from active circulation. And if a bill was removed from circulation due to excess wear, its code would be deauthorized; although a counterfeit would pass the mathematical code pattern, it wouldn't pass a code test.
A failed test by an individual bill wouldn't be enough to catch a counterfeiter, because the note could have reached a bank in the code-matching system by way of someone who accepted it thinking it was good. However, it wouldn't take a lot of data mining to discover a pattern, and once a pattern was evident it wouldn't take long before treasury officers interviewed enough people who innocently accepted counterfeits to discover people who knowingly passed them. At that point, life would become very difficult for the counterfeiters.
One exception would be counterfeiters who passed bad bills only in small quantity; there wouldn't be enough fakes in circulation to nail down a pattern. That's a minor risk to the treasury because it's complicated (and thus presumably expensive) to produce credible counterfeits, which makes it unprofitable unless a substantial number of bills are spent by the counterfeiters' agents. Also, a few bad bills aren't going to disrupt the economy.
The more significant risk would be counterfeiters who produce fake currency not for profit, but with the intention of disrupting the economy. It's easier to release currency when one isn't trying to maximize the amount of real currency one receives in return.
Counterfeiting like Prussia did to Poland, or as what has been put forth that Iran wants to do with the dollar; it is always back to the same issue, those ripped off will want blood. Then it is just a question of worth, as the Imperial navy will come in and nuke your world, something it has done before to enforce its rule.
Beyond that, it would be up to the computerized cash register to reject bills that by the percentage of probability were fake.
Beyond that, it would be up to the computerized cash register to reject bills that by the percentage of probability were fake.
steve98052 said:One way that RFID in currency might reduce counterfeiting is the possibility of a serial number collision. Obviously a potential counterfeiter must generate RFID codes that pass as real; that's not all that difficult, because to be useful the codes need a detectable pattern.
More difficult, a counterfeit bill also must not have a code that the code-matching system has observed in a real bill at a location so far away that the observation could reach a point but the bill itself could not have.
That system is unworkable. Bills are spread all over sectors. There's no way in hell that you could have a real time system that didn't cause havoc with false negatives. Toss that idea is the burn bin. As far as serial number collision. One would have to be dumber than a garden slug to not simply scan the bills being counterfeited and match the RFID response with a printed serial number.
steve98052
Mongoose
I finally got a chance to read that paper. It's really interesting stuff. Some of it would not apply to a high-tech society with slow communication, but quite a bit of it would -- particularly the delegation of authority that slow communication necessitates.simonh said:. . .
Incidentally, I came across this PDF paper on merchant banking in the medieval and early modern era. It's actually quite interesting stuff.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/Papers/99-05.pdf
Maybe we just use the terms differently, but my understanding is that Imperial law applies only in the starport proper; local law applies in the surrounding startown, though the economic incentive of not chasing off business might make law enforcement in the startown more tolerant of visitors (or at least visitors who are spending money).locarno24 said:They're out of reach of local manufacture. That's not quite the same thing, as you noted.The catch to "really, really, really good encryption" is that it's completely out of the reach of lower-technology worlds. . . .
The local branch of a multistellar bank will almost certainly be in startown (where it only has to deal with the relatively uniform and stable Imperial law, not the pronouncements of the local banana republic's latest loony-in-chief), and... well... if it's an interstellar company it's going to be using off-world tech if the local stuff isn't up to scratch.
To the point, however, it's true that businesses that want the stability of Imperial law would likely confine their operations to the starport -- though they'd likely have subsidiaries or associates in local-law territories.
If one were to visit a bank on a low-tech world outside the startown, one might be asked to wait while the bank sent a runner to the telegraph office, waited for the reply from someone at the starport office, and returned with the appropriate information.
Alternatively, one might be advised to exchange a few hundred Imperial Credits for several thousand local Dingbats (but don't get more Dingbats than you're going to spend, because you get a terrible rate if you want to exchange them back). Or you might find that locals are happy to accept Imperial Credits in payment, but you only get Dingbats as change.
Also, anything that requires technology beyond local capabilities is likely to be accepted less widely. Just about every human culture understands cash, but even a lot that also understand credit, debit, and stored-value cards might not have the ability to accept them outside major population centers.
As described in the article simonh shared, that's probably the case. Local banks simply did not do non-local business; if they needed to do that, they'd delegate that to a bank with correspondent offices.A TL15 computer running security/3 is what? KCr 25,000? Fairly small change in the scale of a decent size corporation.
Meanwhile, smaller companies and local banks....don't care. If they don't have a branch off-world, then they have no need to trust off-world letters of credit. They'll let a bank that does take the risk of issuing you currency against your credit account, then accept that.
It certainly makes sense that one might compare the RFID with the printed serial number, the printed sector of issue, and probably the year of issue. It might also compare against a bar-code or block-code, if we assume that those are printed on the bills too. Reading printed text is current technology, though I wouldn't call it reliable enough to use it as a way to authenticate currency.F33D said:That system is unworkable. Bills are spread all over sectors. There's no way in hell that you could have a real time system that didn't cause havoc with false negatives. Toss that idea is the burn bin. As far as serial number collision. One would have to be dumber than a garden slug to not simply scan the bills being counterfeited and match the RFID response with a printed serial number.steve98052 said:One way that RFID in currency might reduce counterfeiting is the possibility of a serial number collision. Obviously a potential counterfeiter must generate RFID codes that pass as real; that's not all that difficult, because to be useful the codes need a detectable pattern.
More difficult, a counterfeit bill also must not have a code that the code-matching system has observed in a real bill at a location so far away that the observation could reach a point but the bill itself could not have.
However, I disagree that it would be impossible to create a real-time system to detect serial-number collisions. If we assume that there are about 91 trillion valid bills in circulation, a simple bit array indicating whether a bill was in circulation would take about 11 TB. (For comparison, the computer I'm using right now has about 9 TB of storage.) Fairly simple data compression could reduce that considerably (and would make the tests faster). A hand-held device might include only data for recent bills in the current sector, and query a server for old or distant bills, to save space.
It would take quite a bit more data (and processing) to test whether a bill in circulation is too far away from its point of last observation to be recognized as valid. It's possible for currency to travel almost as fast as records of it, assuming it's shipped on an express cargo ship. That would be extremely rare, so it couldn't prove counterfeiting, but such records would be useful as a tool for economists -- and they could detect suspicious patterns worth further investigation. (A single two-year-old Delphi Sector bill on Regina would be just an oddity, but hundreds would likely cause authorities to ask banks to deliver such bills to Imperial authorities for more advanced authenticity testing.)
A more authoritative test would be to check serial numbers against lists of bills that have been withdrawn from circulation permanently (due to being damaged beyond use, because they have a portrait of an Imperial noble who has fallen out of favor, because they were manufactured with technology that is no longer regarded as sufficiently secure, etc.). It would also be possible to test against lists of bills that are removed from circulation for an extended, predictable period of time, such as if Imperial economists decided that there's a surplus of a certain denomination in a certain subsector that is predicted likely to last for a year or more.
Would any of that be worth the trouble? I'm not sure. It doesn't require much more than present-day technology. The economic data available from tracking serial numbers would likely be useful enough that it would be done. And even if the Imperium only did it for economic data, it could certainly discourage counterfeiting by letting people think it does more than just track serial numbers.
steve98052 said:Would any of that be worth the trouble? I'm not sure. It doesn't require much more than present-day technology. The economic data available from tracking serial numbers would likely be useful enough that it would be done. And even if the Imperium only did it for economic data, it could certainly discourage counterfeiting by letting people think it does more than just track serial numbers.
Still wouldn't work. You didn't address the false negative problem. You also didn't address the problem of currency that isn't in the normal system and is thus, not recorded to be anywhere. The very fact that the data will ALWAYS be out of date due to communication lag defeats this system.
steve98052
Mongoose
There is no false negative problem; failing to detect a counterfeit is not a problem unless it happens so often that criminals cease to be deterred from trying to pass counterfeit money. A counterfeit-deterrence system doesn't need to detect every counterfeit; it only needs to detect enough that criminals believe they're likely to get caught if they try to pass enough counterfeits that it's worth the trouble.F33D said:Still wouldn't work. You didn't address the false negative problem. You also didn't address the problem of currency that isn't in the normal system and is thus, not recorded to be anywhere. The very fact that the data will ALWAYS be out of date due to communication lag defeats this system.
I'm not sure what you mean by currency that isn't in the normal system. If you mean currency that passes through many hands before it reaches a bank that scans serial numbers, several possibilities might apply. One, it's low-denomination currency circulating in a backwater region; counterfeiters aren't likely to bother faking small denominations, and even a fairly large amount of fakes aren't likely to disrupt the economy in a backwater. Two, it's large-denomination currency circulating well away from official eyes; in that case there's a fair chance that the people handling the money are criminals, and if smugglers get burned by fake money, it's not going to hurt the legal economy, and officials are not going to be sympathetic.
As for lag, the system only needs to catch some counterfeits to deter counterfeiting. If a bill is permanently retired, its serial number will show up as bad throughout the Imperium (and neighboring regions where Imperial currency is commonly used) in a year or two. If a bill is temporarily withdrawn from circulation by Imperial economists, its serial number can be placed in a list of bills withdrawn until the year it's scheduled to be released from whatever reserve bank vault will hold it.
Given the huge number of serial numbers possible (about 6×10^21), relative to the number of bills in circulation (I estimated 9×10^13), it would be very easy for Imperial authorities to have a secret random formula that makes it so that 99% of all serial numbers show up on the fake-list -- and unless a would-be counterfeiter had a long list of known-good serial numbers they'd be risking detection.
--
Finally, to bring the whole topic into game terms, none of the details truly matters unless a referee decides to run an adventure that either gives players access to counterfeit money (and they need to find a way to pass it without getting caught) or puts players into a position of trying to capture counterfeiters in service of an Imperial official.
Unless one of those circumstances comes into play, the simple answer is that the canon statement that Imperial currency is almost impossible to counterfeit means that players don't have to worry about why it's almost impossible to counterfeit, only that they're not going to need to deal with it.
