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Woz Buys $2 Bills in Sheets from the Treasury (hackaday.com)
25 points by mikek on Aug 5, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments


To be clear - he doesn't actually print these. He buys sheets of pre-printed bills and re-packages them into books instead of cutting them into individual bills.

A neat trick, but completely legal US cash money

(The US $2 bill is unusual, but legal)


I've got one of his bills, it is disconcerting to see a bill with a perforated edge.


Why does he mentioned owning his own dye-sub printer then? He's clearly printing some part of it, no?

Edit: thanks for the replies, didn't catch that.


He "has them printed" and also has a dye-sub printer. He never says he has them printed using his dye-sub printer.


In the linked article on woz.org he discusses making a fake ID with a high-end dye-sub printer.


This headline is very misleading.


I can't edit anymore, but I would like to point out that the headline has since been changed.


Perhaps it was written by woz. ;)


You can buy un-cut US currency here: http://www.moneyfactorystore.gov/uncutcurrency.aspx

The $2 is currently out of stock :-(


This article is very misleading, he doesn't print the money himself, that's all kinds of illegal. He buys the sheets (linked in comments) and has a printer (the occupation, not the device) perforate them and gum them into tear off pads. I know several people who have done this in the past (myself included) though none quite as notorious as Woz.

I've made tear-off pads of $1 bills before, if you get a strap of new bills from the bank they come in sequential order and the pads will turn some heads but the bills are completely legit.

Uncut currency sheets don't have sequential serial numbers because of the way the print runs work; for uncut sheets the serial numbers are usually spaced by 20,000 or 32,000.

As a general habit I spend $2 bills a lot personally (they make excellent tips because people are so tickled to see them... They're not overly rare, go to the bank and ask and most times you can get them).

I've been to a couple of trade shows in the past where your "pay" for sitting through a particularly boring sales presentation was an uncut sheet of bills and a large pair or scissors and the tiny thrill of cutting off your own $1 bill.

Trivia for you all: uncut sheets have special serial number ranges, so you can identify that they came from uncut sheets (for modern bills the serial numbers are 96000000 and higher). This prevents people from buying an uncut sheet, cutting the bills in a strange manner, and then selling them at a premium as rare misprinted bills (not that it stops anyone, look on eBay for misprinted currency and see how many of the bills have high serial numbers... Dead giveaway of a fraudster).

I love it when my dual geeky hobbies of technology and currency collecting collide. :-)


A friend of mine in college would buy 100 $2 bills from the bank (for $2), then paint the edge with adhesive, turning them into a tear-off notepad of $2 bills. At the time, turnpike tolls were $2, so it was very convenient -- this was before fastrak or ez-pass or other transponder based toll systems.


Well, Woz has a very interesting sense of "humor", that's for sure.




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