Wouldn’t it feel different than a normal bill?
A clever way to valorize the currency.
For whatever reason, counterfeiting is one of those things I’ve always found infinitely fascinating. And the range of techniques (from very high tech to very low tech) that have been used (and work!) is totally amazing.
This is the actual reason it’s illegal to deface currency - intent to defraud.
Maybe if American money wasn’t all green, this wouldn’t be a problem…
It’s a lot more colorful than it used to be—though some people seem convinced this change is part of a long-running joke inspired by Hasbro.
At any rate the $10 and $50 bills aren’t the same color anymore, though a person who wouldn’t pick up on Hamilton’s face probably wouldn’t know that either.
I wonder if they actually snipped the fifties from the corners of a real bill? That would be a pretty hard way to make money, I guess.
One word: volume.
Yeah, Americans are slow to accept change (har!) in their currency. You have to sneak it in edgewise.
I knew people back in the day who would clip one of the four corners off of every $20 bill they got, and then glue four assorted corners to a $1 bill. Then they’d pass the fakes in a stack of other bills.
This has been happening for decades, although it looks better now. When I worked retail people would pass $1 bills with 100 glued onto the corners. During the busy season they were surprisingly effective.
A few years ago I ran into what at the time we all thought was a good prank but now I suspect was the remains of a better counterfeiting job than this.
What we found was a $1 with the wrong president on it–but a careful examination showed it was actually a sticker, peeling it off revealed a correct $1 bill. We all thought it was simply someone having some fun as it was obviously just a $1 bill, but there was some discussion as to how much effort they must have put into the prank.
In hindsight I realize there were originally 5 stickers, the corner ones were gone by the time we saw it.
Elsewhere in the world, it’s not just the colour that’s different – the notes themselves get larger as their value increases. That makes it a lot more difficult to “increase” a note’s face value.
I remember a mystery novel (or TV show, or movie) once where the criminals would remove the ink from low-value dollar notes and reprint them with a higher value, so they would have the correct paper (fabric, really). Wouldn’t work in most other places, because, e.g., a 100-euro note is obviously larger than a 5-euro or 10-euro note.
@pesco the Amazon.com affiliate link is missing. I cannot find where to purchase these decals. 
Also hugely important if you’re blind, in fact I’m pretty sure that’s the reason for the different sized notes.
How does that work in the US? Fuck the disabled?
Yeah, we knew people too, back in the day who used to clip bills. scratches neck with four fingers But then WE got clipped and had to change our racket.
Euro notes, at least the new fives and tens, actually have a pattern of ridges along the short edges that identifies the value if you’re blind. Presumably when they replace the other notes they’ll introduce that feature there, too.
