Dates On Banknotes?

From my observations, I would say that most countries don't put the actual date of printing or issue on the banknotes.

Some countries don't put any kind of date on their notes at all. You need to look up the type and signatures in a catalogue to get a rough idea of the date.

Some countries - particularly Central and South America - put the date the law was passed authorizing the banknote issue. In a similar vein, some countries put the copyright date of their note designs on them. These dates are often long before the actual date the note was printed or issued.

Some countries - such as the United States - put a "series date" on the notes, which allows you to calculate an approximate time period the note might have been issued but not (in most cases) a specific year.

Some countries encode the date in the serial letters or numbers, or elsewhere in the design. Australia started doing that in the mid-1990's.

Dates on coins serve as a crude traditional type of quality control, and they allow a government to easily withdraw coins dating from a certain time period. Apart from that, their only function is to give coin collectors something to collect.

On banknotes, the serial number serves much the same purpose as far as quality control and withdrawl is concerned. And countries were not particularly concerned with appealing to banknote collectors because, until relatively recently, there were so few of them around that they weren't worth the trouble. Now that banknote collecting is becoming popular, more and more countries are starting to put dates on their notes.

So to my mind, the real question is not, "why aren't more notes dated", but "why aren't fewer coins dated". From a practical point of view, coins don't need to be dated anymore, and the few examples of countries that have either stopped using dates or "froze" the date for several years have demonstrated this. Dates on coins are an anachronism, kept only because of tradition and because governments know those crazy coin collectors are out there saving up coins by date (and therefore making a little bit of profit for the government).

Hehe, yeah Sap is really fast when it comes to answer questions here, and it's long and good answers every time!

My thinking was that they notes are more fragile and have a need to be replaced more often, and therefore it's no use of dating them. And it's interesting when you say that they date coins mostly for collectors? Then it should be more common with dated notes too.

Personally I like the Japanese coins, because then you need yo know which emperor it is and which year or reign the coin are issued. Notes are harder, because they aren't so different from each other year to year (in some countries). I mean, a note from -'64 can have the exact same appearance as a note from -'95 with the same value. Voins are more often changed in some ways (like a newer photograph of the king/queen/president.

It was an very interesting answer Sap, thanks alot!
And you too thai-vic!