Looks like the hundred dollar bill is getting a facelift to match its less valuable siblings. Overall, it looks like American currency is getting tweaked a lot lately. The designs on paper money get overhauled about every five to ten years now, and the coins get redone all the time. On the rare occasion I get coins in my hand, if they're newer ones, I just look at them curiously and assume they're the real McCoy. Why would anyone counterfeit a quarter?
On that, the only reason I can think of for redesigning the bills every few
years is this: the counterfeiters are getting better. And that just makes
sense. You can get very high quality scanning and printing equipment for lower
and lower cost, and it's trivial to duplicate anything that's on paper. Sure, I
don't think you could pop into Kinko's and print off a thousand copies of a
hundred dollar bill, but on the other hand, it's not hard to find other ways to
do it. In fact, I think somebody could probably duplicate a federal reserve
note from fifteen years ago, one of the "original" designs (from within my
lifetime, anyway), and have a good chance of passing it off as the real thing.
The new hundred looks similar to the "old new" style hundred but has a bunch of new security measures built into it (more evidence the counterfeiters are getting better). It's got some kind of magic color-changing ink, a metal strip that weaves in and out of the bill, and if you look at it just right under a microscope, there's a picture of Nicholas Cage brandishing the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin has lots of secrets, you see... in addition to his five and dime franchise.
All kidding aside, if I was handed one of the new hundreds, I'd probably give it a curious glance just like the redesigned coins, shrug, and assume it was legit. It kind of looks like money, and it feels like money, so... yeah, I guess it's real. Now if it were a two hundred dollar bill, or a million, I'd be a tiny bit more skeptical since they aren't real. Come to think of it, I really don't see hundred dollar bills very often, having migrated into a brave new world where money is almost entirely conceptual... digital... numbers on a screen or bits flying through the ether. So if it looks different than the last hundred I saw, it's going to involve a leap of faith anyway.
I guess there's a leap of faith involved in assuming any money has the value it says, but that's a whole other topic.