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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I suspect that businesses are a big part of why banks still have the amount of retail footprint that they do.

ATM -> retailer -> back to the bank in the evening.

I once made a calculation of whether it is possible to track all banknotes by serial number. There are only 20bn EU banknotes! Fits snuggly in a Postgres DB.

With that, you could detect patterns: Does these guys always withdraws from this ATM and the money is cashed in that other neighborhood? Drug deal. A banknotes suddenly reappears after years? Black money stored in bulk, let’s see who withdrew it. Etc.

I thought about this too several years back before privacy erosion really got noticed. If you scanned all sn's, a db could keep track of roughly where the cash was located. if you counterfeited, you'd have to use a valid sn, clone a bunch, or pick random ones. you could have a semi-accurate signal on whether to double-check a bill if it was registered in X location but appeared in Y, and if the treasury participated, it could flag a bill immediately as counterfeit. If a criminal cloned a large number of the same sn, once one is flagged as counterfeit you could catch a _lot_ more with no effort. while it would increase friction substantially for counterfeiters, the cost would be privacy.

https://en.eurobilltracker.com/

There's this run by volunteers, but there's not mich going on.

Hmmm…Blockchain could be printed right on the bill, and they could just immediate transfer the value to their account and burn the paper…no need for money to go back to the bank anymore, and use as a disease vector is limited.

My idea for blockchain is to encrypt emails with the password stored on the chain. The mail receive client will reject messages that are unencrypted, and in order to access the key, the sender will need to send a micropayment, say $0.05, of a for-real, redeemable to fiat, coin. As the funds are claimed by the recipient, the key is revealed and the message is decrypted. After some configurable timeout after reading the message, the micropayment goes back to the sender. Unless the recipient clicks "this is spam". In that case the money is kept. This could potentially end spam as we know it, because suddenly if you want to send a million messages, now you need to put up $50,000.

The challenge here would be keeping the transaction costs as low as possible and using a stable coin. It would cost everyone a couple bucks to send messages, which is a nuisance, and some people might be tempted to steal nickels for various reasons. The crypto would be there to prove there is no way the recipient can possibly receive your message without putting up cash. Perhaps some very popular people could set their threshold higher to reduce noise. But even $0.01 would be highly effective.

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