GB wrote:
"Dave" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi,


In principle, there is nothing to stop you writing down the serial nos of
all your bank notes in case they are stolen. Nobody does, though. Whilst
bar codes would make it easier, I am sure that OCR technology can easily
cope with reading existing serial nos.
Making up a serial number is a whole load easier, as far as I know,
than forging a signed, encrypted barcode. The post is also about
forgery.

There are good reasons for not confiscating money from an innocent end user
simply because the serial no is on a list of stolen notes.
So if I got 5K in cash to buy a car at an auction, got the serial
numbers, and was robbed, if the money turned up at a bank 3 months
later I would have lost ownership? This doesn't seem right, but then
again case law is bad law IHMO. I thought that victims (or relatives
of victims) of the Nazis got their art works back after proving
ownership even if the work was bought in good faith.

Commerce would grind to a halt if everybody had to check each
note against a database of stolen ones.
This is done for many card transactions, even with a low transaction
value.