Shower Thoughts on Currency Transfer in the Age of the Beast

• 27 Aug, 2018
• Paisley P. Peinforte
• Hits count 1639

So, as I was showering this morning, as it always happens, I had a thought. 

No, not one of those. That was my second thought. But I digress~

I had a thought about the quick transmission of American money and the destruction of paper cash society. Yay!

As I was drifting into consciousness, for whatever reason I was struck with the problem of easily and securely getting money from one person to another. And currently being in America, my idea sprang forth concerning getting money from one American to another. ( I suppose this is because I am spending and handling the stuff right now. It's so boring compared to everyone else's currency-- but again, I digress.)

It all started from the notion that every American paper bill (because they are obsessed with them and can't seem to eliminate them, even for the simple denominations) has a unique serial number associated with it.

In theory, every American also has a unique number associated to THEM-- a social security number. (This is a lie, they get re-used all the time. ) However, we can get around this because assuming they are not itinerant, they also have another unique and more granular number associated with them-- the ZIP+4 code (basically, their postal code, but the extra 4 digits allow for location precision down to the street level IIRC)

So, my solution would be something like this:

 The US Federal Reserve establishes a database of all their bills and serial numbers. They already have databases for the SSN and ZIP codes, probably handily contained in the Internal Revenue Service computers. Birth Name and Date of Birth could also probably be thrown in to further lock the result down to one person.

Users would be issued one more number, probably generated by a non-reversible salted cryptographic hash of these first four bits of data, which is their personal ID key. So:

[ Salted Code (probably time of key generation) + Birth Name + DOB + SSN + ZIP ] = Personal sending / receiving key.

Establish a secure portal (snicker-- remember this is a hypothetical here) where someone can log in, and uniquely identify themselves. (Their social security website could be leveraged for the back-end perhaps). Here a User establishes the usual password and security questions along with this key, then logs in. Users would need to associate a bank account with routing info.

Here, the sender would then input in their personal key and the serial number of their bill(s) maybe scanning multiples with OCR to make it efficient. Then they would input the receiver's key and hit send. Receiver gets X dollars deposited into their bank account, and sender can shred their bills because they are taken out of the Federal Database.

Benefits:

• Gets paper money out of the economy (probably not a benefit if you deal in cash only). Makes it simple to get money from your wallet to someone else.
• Could give everyone the capacity to take digital payments instantly.

Risks / Problems:

• Kills the underground economy. (Possibly a benefit depending on your views)
• What if the system fails to register the transaction but your bills are now "erased?"
• Hackers
• More centralised tracking by people's activity / balances by the government (but let's be real, Bentham's Panopticon is here already.)

• Probably a whole other set of things I haven't considered as this is literally a shower thought.

So there you have it-- my "Solution" for a "Problem" that probably doesn't need it, and which will probably cause a host more problems due to its implementation. In other words, a perfect government policy!

I should run for office.

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