C Ya Reddit. Some US Currency Questions

My bad. Got carried away...

to the Community!

to CCF.

and so far, I have not seen any bad words..

Hopefully, some of our note experts will get to answering some of your questions.

That seems to be the consensus, yes.


This forum has a lot of swear-words you cannot use (most are in the automated swear-word filter so it's impossible to post them), but "counterfeit" is not one of them. Discussion of counterfeits, and how to detect, avoid or report them, is quite commonplace here. As for the more specific question here: yes. Any artifact made by clever humans, can be counterfeited by other humans that are determined and equally clever. And consider: someone with the skill and technology to make a passably good replica of an official government banknote, probably wont have too much trouble making a passably good counterfeit piece of plastic with a hologram in it.


The core problem with ebay is that it (currently) has an abysmal reputation in terms of refusing to take down listings of blatantly counterfeit items, simply because the Counterfeit Detection process has been handed over to an AI and AI is (currently) doing a horrible job of it.


Past auction results are perhaps a good indicator, but it would also do well to check the long-term results, to see if price trends are increasing or decreasing. This of course only works for items that are sufficiently abundant to provide enough data points to plot a price history graph.


Banknotes, in my observation, have been more vulnerable to price spikes and sudden collapses than coins. This, combined with their more ephemeral physical nature (they are, after all, only made of easily destructible paper rather than precious metal) makes me want to rate them as "poor investments".


The question seems to be asking what notes can be expected to hold their value. And for me, the answer would be similar to the answer for coins: items that are popular with actual collectors, rather than are high-priced due to an investor-driven hype-train, ought to do better. It's like the difference between blue-chip stocks and penny dreadfuls - good fundamnetals should protect from sudden or permanent price plunges. And banknotes with strong collector appeal are, generally, the ones that look nice, and/or have interesting history. The "Education" series of large size notes, for example; I'd also put Gold Certificates there.

Collecting for me was the incredible opportunity to hold history in my hands. Collected because you're genuinely interested and somewhat passionate about past times. I think of some of the beautiful large-size currency as art with a practical purpose. Knowledge is the key, buy the book before you buy the note.

It's just an expression - "first the book, then the coin" (or "note", in this case) is old-boys-in-the-coin-club advice and simply means "educate yourself before spending lots of money on numismatic items". In ages past, this did mean literally buying or borrowing books and reading them, but these days finding good reference websites for your material can work just as well.