I don't see the US switching, but not for Wolf's reason. Paper money is already becoming less and less common. I hardly carry any real cash on me anymore - especially since fast food places started accepting cards.

That may be true, but Federal appeals courts have a lot of weight to throw around. There are something like 60 days left to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, but odds are the Supes won't hear it, and after that, the Dept of Engraving and Printing will have to make some changes.

I deal exclusively in cash, and most of my customers in the pub do too, even though we accept cards.

Almost all the guys in there have big wads of cash, they're self employed taxi drivers, van drivers, builders etc.

You'd be surprised how much cash there still is in circulation, certainly in this country.

Do you think the "pretty" colors help stop counterfeiters? Seems like some of those would be pretty hard to duplicate.

The UK notes have a whole host of countercounterfitting gadgets. Metal strips, watermarks, microprinting, special paper (not as cottony as US bills), holograms.... see here for a full list for each note:


http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/bankn...security_5.htm

Well actually, our Australian money is not paper it's plastic, much easier and so much better, and they last so much longer. I don't know how many notes I lost many many years ago in the wash, at least with plastic notes the washing machine just gives it a good old cleaning and gets rid of all those horrible nasty germs that money tends to collect. I think from memory New Zealand and Australia were the first countries to have plastic money.:f9: :f138: :cheerldr:

here it would just get rid of all the cocaine molecules. Wonder if you could reclaim them? maybe gray water would become a valuable commodity?

We have different sized notes here and vending machines seem to manage them ok although with some vending machines they will only accept 5's or 10's for example.

A lot of them still just take coins though, but since our coins go all the way up to $2, usually anything you want from a vending machine is managed with that.

Cook Islands...

Didn't some local dumb ass drunk driver just kill the king of the Cook Islands while he was here on a visit?

Ha! I found a couple of $1 & $2 dollar Aussie bills the other week. I showed the 12 year old twins and their thirteen year old brother. They had no idea we ever had them in use. Their first question: didn't I have a trouble fitting them into the vending machines?

Seeing the green quid brought back a flood of memories from the last time I saw one - when I was 8.