It probably annoys shop keepers as it blows away all their change.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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When I was at Uni and working part time my boss told me it was because the £50 note was easier to forge so they would want us to check it and ideally not accept it. The explanation of which I accepted without question at the time. LOL I didn't give a shit.
But thinking about it more why would a large denomination be any easy or harder to forge than a lower one?
So I don't know actually.
FWIW, it's not about the note being harder for forge, but people are less familiar with handling them because they are so rarely used, therefore people are less likely to pick up on the clues that it's a fake. A point that's largely moot now considering how few people use cash for anything any more.
Good explanation and just to add, it's probably only slightly more expensive to produce a fake £50 than a fake fiver (materials, effort, etc) but it's worth 10 times as much. It's also the same risk of getting caught but 10 times the result each time
Why not do what other countries do and just make the denominations physically larger as the value increases? Now it’s harder to wash and reprint forgeries. Also if you use different color paper for each denomination you have another way to prevent forgeries of the washing and reprinting kind.
Ummmm....
Yes, downvote for asking why not fix your broken currency. That’ll encourage discussions.
He's saying "ummmm" because we actually already do that. Fun fact :).
And we use different colours for each note.
But BTW, why the hostility to our... currency? Are you like a very patriotic IRS agent or something? Our currency isn't any more broken or extra forgeable than any other country's. I think you've extrapolated too much from seeing people bring up the occurence of forgeries on this one post.
We don't even really have paper money any more, it's all polymer 🤷
Maybe say that instead of downvoting.
Same for you. Votes are public.
Votes are public (on your instance) but this isn't reddit, so I just downvote things to indicate when incorrect information or bad attitude is on them (and people do the same to me and that's fine). I suppose things are different on piefed, which has some psuedo-karma system, but that's the outlier.
A large benefit of lemmy in general is that we can vote without it being a kick in the balls to someone's experience on the site. Because no karma system.
All votes are public on all instances.
Lemvotes.org
If they weren’t public federation wouldn’t work.
£50 notes were for rich people to do crime with. If you weren't a rich person doing crime, you didn't need them.
Now rich people crime can be done online, they're even less necessary.
Because historically they were to high to be used much. So many retailers staff were less able to ID fakes. Hence fakes were created.
The. By the mid 2000s as prices got to the point hey were more useful. They were still high enough that card payments became common. So retailers rarely had the till cash to change them.
There’s actually also a few notes of huge denominations like £100,000,000, they’re kept in banks and never enter circulation. I recall it’s something to do with issuing Scottish and Northern Ireland notes, those ones that are still pounds but are issued by places other than the Bank of England.
It's real money, honest.