Name: Why the $1 Bill Hasn’t Been Redesigned in Over 60 Years | WSJ Pro Perfected
Uploaded: 2025-04-14T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 8 min 33 s
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There's a secret pattern hidden on banknotes from around 30 countries around the world.

To prevent photocopiers from being able to reproduce money.

It's just one of the many hidden tricks used by banknote designers to try and prevent counterfeiting.

Because if somebody can figure out how to fake a note, there's little to stop them from printing millions.

And that can destabilize a country's economy.

It can undermine a government in general, saying we can't even trust the currency that you're issuing.

Why should we trust your economic system?

And with over 55 billion U.S. banknotes in circulation around the globe, protecting the world's number one traded currency is no easy task.

Which makes it all the more surprising that this note is one of America's least secure.

There are no features the public could use to authenticate it.

So just what does it take to stop counterfeiting?

There are three different tiers of protection that central banks use, each aimed at stopping counterfeiting at different levels, from unsophisticated casual counterfeiters right up to state-sponsored terrorists.

Sean Ferrari spent 16 years at the Federal Reserve working to help decide which features should end up in the U.S. dollar.

We looked at the processing of currency, the counterfeit features that we would put inside the currency.

The first level is designed to quickly stop low-level, relatively unsophisticated counterfeiters.

And one of the simplest features has been in your hands the whole time.

The feeling that you get as you're just handling it is actually the first security feature of any currency.

If you were to take a U.S. banknote, for instance, and feel it and listen to it, it has a particular sound.

Most of the time, honestly, you don't even look at it.

America's banknotes are made of a secret blend of cotton, linen, and paper.

And for counterfeiters, recreating that feel is half of the battle.

While some counterfeiters go to great lengths to fake the feel of the paper, others just use lower-denomination notes.

Counterfeiters were bleaching all of the ink off of the $5 note and then printing a higher denomination, like the $100, on top of the currency paper.

So to prevent this, many countries have switched to polymer banknotes, where the note is made of a more plasticky texture.

It's a plastic kind of bending sound rather than a crisp paper sound.

But although polymer notes may feel different, they still have a very similar aesthetic.

And that's because there's security built into how banknotes are printed, using printing presses.

See, most modern-day inkjet printers are precise, but with banknotes, accuracy and exactness can actually work against you.

There are unique things that happen to a piece of paper as ink is applied.

Things like ink feathering, where the ink bleeds in minuscule different directions when printed, creating a slightly fuzzy finish.

When you're a counterfeiter, if you're just making a copy of a single note, you're going to have that same feathering effect occur in all of your counterfeits, and that becomes a signature of that counterfeiter.

In 2024, police in Naples arrested a counterfeiter who they said had produced around 11 million euros in fake banknotes by managing to trace the notes back to the same producer.

To further secure notes, central banks deploy features like transparent windows, colour-shifting ink and holograms, which have been on notes since the 1980s.

As you move it, it rolls in colour, it kind of turns on and off.

But these aren't completely counterfeit-proof.

You can buy holograms, not the same holograms that are on the currency, and the movements might not be as crisp, but most of the public doesn't necessarily look and discriminate a note all that carefully.

Printing with UV ink or embedding UV fibres may also seem secure, but it can still easily be forged with the right skills.

You could use any fluorescent UV product that you could buy on the market and glue on the note.

So, in more recent years, banknote producers like Crane, who make the paper for all of America's money, have deployed a new technique, microlens printing.

You're literally putting tens of thousands of microlenses in a strip that are designed to have an image be three-dimensional.

The reason we don't see microlenses on banknotes around the world yet is because they're fairly new.

And cost is a key consideration when central banks choose which features to use.

While the print cost for banknotes tends to be lower than the value of the note itself, printing money can still be a costly exercise.

Swiss banknotes feature the majority of the latest security features, and their central bank says they cost an average of around 45 cents each to print.

Which adds up when, in 2024, the country issued 41.5 million new notes.

But there's one major flaw with all these systems.

They rely on humans to actually check for them, and sometimes that just doesn't happen.

Take these movie banknotes, which are printed legally and intended for use as props in film and television.

You would think anybody trying to use this note would immediately see, oh, that's not real.

In 2019, the US Secret Service said that of the over $100 million of counterfeit notes in circulation, some 12% were movie notes or similar.

And the risk escalates if you get a fake note to work in a vending machine.

You've found a source to be able to enter these notes and get value for them.

That's where level two security comes in, designed to stop advanced counterfeiters spoofing machines.

These are typically things like magnetics.

There's two types of ink that are used, magnetic ink and non-magnetic ink.

These inks are dispersed through the note and create a pattern that a magnetic sensor can read.

And to help keep things secure, central banks don't always tell manufacturers of note scanners what they're actually supposed to be looking for.

But even at level two, counterfeiters are able to cheat the system.

The machine's only looking for one specific thing.

And if you trick that one specific thing, in this case, magnetics, that's all you need.

It can literally be blank paper that tricks a sensor.

Updating security features at this level comes with additional challenges.

Because while changing a magnetic pattern might not be expensive.

What is significant is the cost of having to change bill validators to be able to identify a new feature.

And you might not think that it's a lot, but then as you think more and more, you kind of realise, oh wow, that is a lot.

But the biggest risk of all comes if nobody, not humans, machines or central banks, are able to tell that the note is fake.

And that's where level three, central bank level security, comes in.

Because without it, counterfeiting could be used to upend governments.

They produced 350 million counterfeit pounds.

Shortly after World War II, a team in Austria found a box of fake printing plates of UK currency made by Nazi Germany.

Hitler had them made during the war to undermine Britain's economy by flooding the country with counterfeit money.

More recently, in 2006, the US accused North Korea of putting $45 million worth of forged $100 bills into circulation, something North Korea denied.

The notes were so advanced, they became known as supernotes.

So to be able to identify their own banknotes, central banks include a hidden feature at a molecular level, the specifics of which they don't reveal.

It could be wavelength, it could be movement, it could be various ways that the chemicals of the note react to a light or a laser or something like that.

Nobody else knows how to make it, nobody else knows how to get it to react the way it needs to react.

That feature is kind of the ultimate failsafe.

So if counterfeiting is so much of a threat to economic security, why hasn't the one dollar bill been redesigned in over 60 years, especially given that there are 14.9 billion one dollar notes in circulation?

After all, many countries routinely redesign banknotes every 7-10 years, often choosing to retire old designs and stop them from being legal tender.

So why hasn't the US redesigned the dollar bill?

There's a lot of different reasons for that.

The first is that the value is so low compared to other banknotes that the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing says it is rarely counterfeited.

Replacing it with a potentially expensive new design just isn't worth the cost.

Secondly, the challenge of recalling and replacing nearly 15 billion banknotes, not just in America but around the globe, would be huge.

There's a whole slew of other countries that use the US currency as a store of value.

Additionally, designing, printing and distributing a new banknote is not a quick process.

When the Bureau of Engraving and Printing began a redesign of their notes in 2003, it took a decade for the new $100 bill to enter into circulation.