American reacts to 'Secrets of the Euro'

Thank you for watching me, a humble American, react to Secrets of the Euro

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[Flipdonyk]

POV : you're a European and you lost your mind when he talked about having to redesign the Euro notes because of Elizabeth's death 🙄😭

[martinaklee-webster]

Ryan, Queen Elisabeth had nothing to do with the Euro, because GB never adopted it. Great Briton also voted to leave the E U in 2016. This year, Croatia adopted the Euro .

[Slgjgnz]

The weirdest thing about that video is that they represented travel from France to Italy with a plane rather than a train.

[sanderd]

He forgot to mention the features for the blind.

Every coin and every note has a different size, so it's easy to quickly feel the approximate value (also for non-blind people).

But the coins also have different texture on the side: 1c and 5c are smooth, 2c has a groove along the length, 10c and 50c have ribs, 20c has 7 indentations, €1 has fine grooves interrupted with smooth surfaces, and the €2 coin has fine grooves often with letters and stars engraved.

The notes have similar features. The stripes on the side of the notes are in a raised print, and thus tactical. The €5 and €50 have a continuous strip, the €10 and €100 have a single gap in the strip, and the €20 and €200 have two gaps.

[DenDave_]

4:42 Funnily enough, the Dutch city Spijkenisse, located near Rotterdam, has actually built all of the bridges depicted on the banknotes, including the €500 one. They're all on a small scale as they're mostly intended for pedestrians and cyclists, and they're even painted to match the colour of the bills. It's a pretty cool sight if youre in the area.

[martijnkeisers]

Haha, the death of queen Elizabeth has nothing to do with the new Euro bills 😂😂😂

[joelfrom]

The bridges all USED to be imaginary, until a Dutch architect built them all in the Netherlands

[AndreSomers]

Fun fact: the bridges *used* to be fictional. A Dutch town thought it was funny to actually build them 😂

[Tarff]

As someone living in an EU country- Euro has made our lives, business and holidays soooo much easier

[ellisnape]

Im from Germany and actually the odd stripes are not only a security feature, they are codet and different on every banknote so that blind people can feel the specific stripes so they know wich note they hold in their hand. It is simmilar to the different bumps on the edge of any coin can tell the value

[neuralwarp]

Europe : 54 countries
EU : 27 countries
Not the same thing.

[bazejlib]

In fact the size is also a small security feature. In U.S there was a counterfitting technique, where criminals take small denominations banknotes like 1$, chemically remove any paint, leaving them with clean note with watermark and so on, and then reprint big denomination like 100$. It was surprisingly effective. I don't know it this practice is still going on. Different note sizes was one of the ways to combat that.

[chaoss]

As a geography teacher I love asking my pupils to bring back Danish, Norwegian and British Euro for me, because I collect Euro. I promise them to raise their geography grading when they can give me one. The faces when they come back, realizing these countries don't use the Euro is priceless.

[alesolano]

Fun fact: In Spain many people called the 500€ bills "Bin Laden" as everyone had heard of them but they were difficult to find.

[tomtomb]

I was a cashier in my first job, and security training involved checking for fake bills ofc. The € has a lot of things that you can check.
However some tricks often avoid these checks, and we were made aware of some of these. Here is one (and completing it with a big bill causes a lot of damage, if the cashier is tricked):
The criminal in the shop wants to purchase something and pays with a large bill, say 500€ or 200€.
The cashier is extra careful and suspicious, but the bill is real, and passes all tests. The cashier hands out the difference in cash to the customer, normal payment process.
The trick is that the customer now finds something that is not to his liking and wants to retract the transaction. The item is the wrong one, or its somehow faulty or something.
The criminal does not really take the change into his wallet but it appears that the money stays on the desk. However with some distraction (maybe a partner in crime, a mum with a child interrupting the cashier, asking desperately for where the restrooms are or something), the criminal swaps the notes that he received from the cashier as change with fake ones with a sleight of hand, and demands his original 500€ note back.
A newbie cashier might give back the 500€ note. He felt nervous about it anyway, and takes the notes back that he handed out to the criminal as change without checking them. It´s the money that he just handed out after all, so it is legit, or so he thought.
We got taught a simple remedy against this: If the transaction is cancelled, and the customer is handed the money back, he gets "fresh" money from the cashier. So for example if the item costs 13€ and 50 cents, and you handed out 486€ and 50 cents as change, should the transaction be cancelled, you hand out another 13€ and 50 cents, you don´t hand out the 500€.

[SE]

Another fun fact: you can use the 2€ coin to check the tread depth on your car tires. As soon as the silver outer part becomes visible, you know the treads are down to the bare minimum and the tires need to be changed. And no, that wasn't the original idea behind the coin design, the edge just happens to be 4 millimeters wide ;)

[Stolens]

A small thing that video missed are the features for blind people. You already mentioned the different sizes and colors, but also the little strips at the end of the note (see 7:20) are different on each note and they are tactile (you can really feel them). So people with bad or no eye sight can immediately recognize the if something is a bank note and the value because they know the amount and pattern of the stripes. Although I don't need this feature, I love that people thought about that and that we care for blind people. I really love the Euro, it brought Europe so much more together although it has its financial-political problems.

[RR-dllw]

In Spain we used to call the 500 euro notes the bin Laden, because they existed but nobody knew where they were.

[Royal_ram_]

A fun fact about the bridges on the back of the bill is that, even though the bridges are fictional, the Netherlands has recreated all the bridges featured in real life.

[kennichdendenn]

The original missed the most interesting security feature in the new notes: the embedded plastic see-through window. Embedding that into the cotton note is very difficult to do properly. Canadians used to criticise the old ones for being cotton and easier to forge than their plastic money. Now its reversed - we have both 😁