Every New Way to Pay Has Its Problems

And money’s design matters more than you think

Money depends on more than just what we say it’s worth. It also relies, rather crucially, on design.

Currency, after all, is a purely representative thing—a unit of exchange a society mutually agrees to respect as worth more than the scrap value of the materials used to make it. (You wouldn’t be happy if I offered to buy something from you using any old lump of plastic or metal, for example, but mint that same material with a recognizable, approved look and we just might make a deal.) Good design is what makes money useable, improves its quality and durability, and makes it trustworthy.

Here are just a few ways that currency design matters:

1. Coin clipping

This is the oldest example of how undesigned currency loses its value. The earliest coins were made very simply by hammering metal (usually silver or gold) into flat sheets of about equal thickness and cutting out circles. You’d get coins that weighed roughly as much as their face value claimed they were worth.

Basic production methods left extra metal around the edges, though, which could be “clipped” and melted down into new coins or used to clad a core of something cheaper like copper. An enterprising clipper could easily turn two coins into three, for example, and medieval and early modern Europe saw repeated “recoinages” as rulers were forced to recollect their currencies, en masse, and reforge the coins back to their correct sizes and weights.

When “milling” (using machines instead of human labor) began to spread around Europe in the 16th century, it introduced a degree of standardization that made spotting clipped coins easier. Even better was the process of “reeding,” or stamping ridges and letters around a coin’s edges. The more expensive the coin, the more elaborate the design additions became to make it obvious if it was smaller or lighter than it should have been.

We still mill and reed our coins today, though the processes aren’t ironclad. The United Kingdom’s pound coin, for example, was recently completely redesigned because something like one in 30 of those currently in circulation are fake. Still, the standardization does place a first, important hurdle in the way of counterfeiters.

2. Banknote forgery

While coins have been the most common kind of cash for most of human history, notes have been around for a while, too — at least since 7th-century China. They have an advantage over coins in that they don’t require precious metals to make: One piece of paper can stand in for a large (and heavy) pile of bullion. The disadvantage of notes, however, is that until relatively recently they were easy to forge for those with the correct skill.

The history of paper money is, to some extent, about a race between artisans — the people who learn to counterfeit the designs on paper currency and the people working to produce new designs that the forgers can’t (yet) copy. For much of that time it wasn’t just about design, either. It’s also involved shape, texture, and density of the paper (or cotton, or plastic) itself. If you look at a paper banknote under a microscope, you’ll find there are often extra flecks of dye and fabric added to it that create a unique kind of pulp fingerprint.

Since paper is used for bigger denominations than coins, forged notes devalue the currency more seriously. That makes counterfeiting a national security risk. The U.S. Secret Service was initially set up at the end of the Civil War as an anti-counterfeiting agency, since a third of U.S. currency in circulation at the time was thought to be fake.

As it turns out, dumping fakes into your enemy’s paper money supply is a popular tactic during wars. The British did it to the 13 colonies during their War of Independence, and the largest-scale counterfeiting program was Operation Bernhard during World War II. The Nazis tried to destroy the British Empire’s economy by conscripting talented Jewish prisoners from concentration camps to design what are considered to be some of the most impressive counterfeit banknotes ever made. Even the British authorities were often unable to detect the fake notes from the real ones.

The Counterfeiters was adapted from the memoirs of one of the forgers, Adolph Burger. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.

3. Polymer notes

So, how do we stop banknote fraud? Australia’s Reserve Bank had an ingenious answer to that question in the 1970s—in response to a rise in forgeries made using color photocopiers. It started making notes out of plastic.

The $10 note was the first to switch over in 1988, and every denomination had moved to the new material by 1996. While plastic notes can include many of the same things the most advanced paper and cotton fabric ones do — watermarks, hidden layers of other material (“security threads”), indented lettering — they also have transparent windows which refract light in unusual ways.

Plastic notes are supposedly far more durable (they’re completely waterproof), and the process of getting ahold of the raw polymer materials — and knowing how to turn them into currency — is considerably more difficult.

Thus far the number of countries switching to polymer notes is small but growing — Canada and Vietnam being two of the largest. The United Kingdom is making the change slowly. One nation that’s conspicuously absent in the polymer game is the United States, whose currency is notorious for …

4. Atrocious design

The U.S. dollar is the reserve currency for the world. It’s also extremely ugly.

This is not just an aesthetic issue but a moral one. Things that are badly designed are also difficult to use, and dollar bills exist to be used — that means they’re held and looked at. U.S. banknotes are all the same size, they’re all the same color, and they’re crammed full of tiny writing in different fonts and styles that keeps getting added without older parts of the design being removed. For anyone with limited vision, or blindness, spending U.S. currency can mean trusting the kindness of strangers to take the right bills out of your wallet and give you back the correct change.

This episode of the (always superb) 99% Invisible podcast, above, does a good job of explaining other ways that U.S. banknotes fail design-wise and how — largely by looking at the example of a country like Australia, with its plastic money — the currency could be fixed.

Of course, these are all examples of the importance of money’s physical design. Increasingly, the future of buying and selling is a digital one.

5. Cashless design

If you watch the news long enough, chances are you’ll see a story about “electronic pickpocketing.” The idea is simple enough — modern credit and debit cards now often hold radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, which are read in stores before purchase. Inserting the card for a scan can be quicker, safer, and easier than writing a signature or entering a pin.

However, it’s actually possible for hackers with handheld RFID readers to “skim” your credit card information from a distance of several feet away. Whether this is actually a widespread problem is hard to tell — it certainly exists, but it seems the related warnings outnumber the reports of people actually victimized by it. RFID-blocking wallets, lined with something like aluminum foil, sell well regardless.

This is one example of how new forms of “cashless” money come with design problems all their own. Here’s another — the subway system in London has its own credit card-sized, contactless payment card called Oyster. It works like this: You swipe it on a pad next to a turnstile, the turnstile opens, and then you swipe again at your destination. The fare deducted from your account is worked out based on the distance between the stations. All is well.

Except that in 2014 the subway upgraded its system to allow contactless bank cards to work as well. This introduced an exciting new problem: “card clash.” People with both contactless bank cards and Oysters in their wallets often tapped the whole thing on the turnstile pads instead of removing an individual card. That worked fine when it was just Oyster cards being read, but when there was a collection of two or more cards, the pad could read any one of them.

That, too, was OK until a passenger reached the other end of the network and the system read a different card on exit, noting two incomplete journeys and charging the maximum fare on both cards (assuming the most expensive routes for both). Up to 2,000 people a day were hit by this when the change was introduced.

For each individual card company, contactless makes sense — but for individual humans, thoughtful design can sometimes undermine itself. And this was just a simple logistical thing—it doesn’t even touch upon issues of privacy, which come into play when currency is more intimately tied into personal identity.

Who knows exactly what will happen with the money of our future, but it’s fair to say that even as we move toward more digitization, design issues will remain front and center. They likely won’t be as easy to solve as coin clipping either.