Congress may be moving forward with traceable cash.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by Vasa Croe
Not only that, but the reader this guy would have to have used in an active active situation would also have to be able to disseminate between all signals that were coming back to be read. If the focus or subject had more than one RFID tag on their person or in their wallet the transmission would "activate" all tags to send a response back which would jumble the information making it impossible to read. The subject would have to ONLY have one RFID tag on their person. This would also require the software to decrypt the encryption and coding on the tag which all RFID manufacturers use these days for that purpose.

You can do that. Some tag designs allow for multiple tags in the field. You use an algorithm called ALOHA to sort through all the tags in the field until you find the one you want, or you can accumulate all the responses and end up with a table of what's in the interrogator's target field.

However, ALOHA, IIRC, takes a time to run proportional to the square of the number of tags in the field. Which is another issue I raised with that guy (I'll have to go find the article and my responses to it). If you have 10, or 20 tags in the field, no issue. If you're scanning six city blocks worth of cash, the response times mount to the minutes. That sort of thing gets you tags moving into and out of the field during the enumeration which makes the task monumentally more difficult.

And more to the point, I can jam any distance reader with a circuit I could put in a key fob.

Finally someone else here that actually knows about RFID. I was getting tired of being the only one. While I do know about the tech and have worked with it for a number of years, you seem to have a much more in depth knowledge of the capabilities. Thanks for the great posts. I hate it when people just assume certain things about tech they don't understand and won't listen when it is explained in layman's terms that what they are stating is not possible.

Originally posted by Vasa Croe
...you seem to have a much more in depth knowledge of the capabilities.

I've done design of and with RFID in combat environments. RFID is actually pretty straightforward, all the 'fun' is in the peripheral stuff like keeping your power consumption low and your chip area small. The actual functionality is less than a college senior in BSEE would be expected to know these days.

In fact, designing one would be a nice senior chip fab project, the bottom of the class should be able to pull off a simple one and your shiny students could do some really nice extras.

Originally posted by gladtobehere
Why? Well, the banks hate cash because they dont make money on transaction fees (credit and debit cards).

They do, in fact, make money on transaction fees such as cash deposits. They also make money on coin processing and the purchase of currency/coin to make change. And they make money from all those ATM fees whenever someone gets a fistful of twenties from out of a machine. (Remember that said machine, in addition to assessing a fee, will take a photograph of you and record your location at the time you make your withdrawal.)

The BEP couldn't even manufacture the new $100 without falling years behind schedule, and that's just a piece of paper with some shiny ink and a holographic stripe. I'm not too concerned about them deploying any kind of smart paper within my lifetime.