I have personally spent a good deal of effort trying to find out how to create convincing, counterfeit currency. I am reasonably sure that I have the major points nailed down: you have to create your own paper (preferably after chemical and visual analysis of the banknotes in question) and then get hold of some ferromagnetic and fluorescent inkjet inks. Intaglio plates and watermarks can probably be created through a photolitographic process. Color-changing inks are the most tricky part..they obviously use some application of interference, but I haven't quite figured it out. Holograms, for the currencies that require it, can be created with an incredibly expensive hologram machine, which is probably impractical.
You'd be surprised at how little of this information is available to the public; most of the information I've gathered I've had to figure out by myself from looking at the officially available information on the security features of paper money. A more paranoid individual would suspect a cover-up. Perhaps there are laws against discussing things like this.
If someone has ever read a good book on the history of counterfeit money, I would be glad to hear it. To me it seems as if there is an information desert on this subject - which just sparks my curiosity furher. Counterfeiting is a fascinating engineering discipline, even more so in regions where the economic loss is handled by vast entities (counterfeit money, if not discovered, is paid for through the resulting inflation, counterfeit gold, if done properly, would end up at the balance sheet of a central bank and hence the taxpayers of the country in question, etc.)
I suspect there is a fair amount of anti-counterfeiting government effort that we never hear about. There are already mechanisms in place in some photocopiers and image editing programs to prevent the reproduction of currency images:
Yeah, but that technique is obsolete now. Most modern currencies print notes on paper of different sizes. I seem to recall that it was used to create US dollar bills of a higher denomination.
Gold is heavy. Reminds me of the movies like Indiana Jones where average-build actors lift up gold bricks that should weight 80-100 lbs. each like they were boxes of business cards
At Gold Reef City in Johannesburg, South Africa, a theme park built on a defunct gold mine, they do a presentation on gold mining and live pouring of a bar of gold. At the end, you're invited to walk out with a gold bar if you can pick it up by its sides with one (bare) hand. Last time I was there, nobody had managed to do it yet...
This reminds me of my least-favorite scene in my all-time favorite movie. In The Godfather, Part II, there's a scene in Cuba where they pass around a 'solid-gold phone', and the actors have to pretend that it's heavy. Alas, it's clear from the way they handle it that the damn thing is just plastic, and very, very light.
Apparently they should have made it with tungsten. I hope they'll remember that if they ever make The Godfather, Part III. Wait... D'oh!
As far as the theft of gold from the Ethiopian bank, an inside replacement job is probably the only possibility. There is no way that all of the bank officials, assayers/chemists, and so on could work together on that kind of conspiracy.
Interesting article - however I am more interested in how to make real gold bars generally speaking. Although I suppose the first step is making the fake bars...
If you could somehow create a cheap and powerful particle accelerator, gold could concievably be produced in macroscopic amounts by irradiating mercury-198 (10% by mass in naturally occuring mercury) with 6.8MeV gamma rays. There are other ways of doing it, but economics and practicality needs to be considered. It is probably easier to build a badass particle accelerator than a nuclear reactor. I am reasonably sure that most modern accelerator laboratories have done this experiment, but it is probably not economical with today's accelerators. (And imagine the capital costs!)
This seems a very lucrative target for aspiring physicists. At a point in time this will probably become practical, but there will only be a small window in which it is economical to do so: once it becomes possible to perform large-scale nuclear gold transmutation, gold prices will plummet due to excessive supply.
once it becomes possible to perform large-scale nuclear gold transmutation, gold prices will plummet due to excessive supply.
I suppose it depends on the economics and politics as much as the science. I notice that diamonds are still expensive, even though we can readily synthesize them.
I suppose it would be legal to fake one's own gold bars? Maybe that would be a good idea. If shit really hits the fan, maybe you need the full fake gold bar and are desperate enough to not care about the legal issues.
You'd be surprised at how little of this information is available to the public; most of the information I've gathered I've had to figure out by myself from looking at the officially available information on the security features of paper money. A more paranoid individual would suspect a cover-up. Perhaps there are laws against discussing things like this.
If someone has ever read a good book on the history of counterfeit money, I would be glad to hear it. To me it seems as if there is an information desert on this subject - which just sparks my curiosity furher. Counterfeiting is a fascinating engineering discipline, even more so in regions where the economic loss is handled by vast entities (counterfeit money, if not discovered, is paid for through the resulting inflation, counterfeit gold, if done properly, would end up at the balance sheet of a central bank and hence the taxpayers of the country in question, etc.)