Revenant

What set are you trying to put it in? Are the points listed as a "0," or are they just blank?

I don't really consider myself a note / currency collector. I just have my one, very narrow and targeted, area of interest in notes and beyond that I'm about the coins. But, even in my narrow focus, it seems like prices have generally declined since 2015 / 2016. I'd mostly chalked this up to a drop in interest as we gained more distance in time and people forgot about the Zimbabwe hyperinflation. I still think that's probably a big factor in that series but it's interesting to hear that prices are down mostly across the board. But I'm no currency expert.

Yup. I see your point. I'm definitely not in love with the signature sets on this side of things. My view counts are stuck at zero even though I know people look at them, Every time I make even the slightest change to the slot name or comments my pictures disappear. Every time I try to add a new slot that doesn't go to the end of the set most of my pictures and some of my comments get blanked. I back-up all my writing in a word file on my dropbox to stop losses... I've brought most of this up with them but they haven't fixed it yet. I suspect the issues will be fixed when they just release a new format and change everything. I can't really blame them if they take that approach. When something is a mess and you're replacing it anyway, why invest time in fixing what you're just going to kill soon?

In a note related to the topic of my last entry, the more time goes on the more I that opinions on what constitutes a "complete" set of Zimbabwe notes seems to vary widely. I was on reddit recently and a user said they had a complete set of the Zimbabwe notes. I was curious so I asked them what they were considering complete. It turned out that the poster had a full set of the 27-note 3rd dollar banknotes series - but nothing beyond that. For a long time there, BanknoteWorld - while they were publishing those books - as well as other merchants seemed to define "complete" to include the 2nd dollar bearer checks and agro checks in addition to the 3rd dollar bank notes - about 59 notes and checks. Another vender I deal with often encourages people to try to build a complete set from P-1 to P-98, but this still excludes the newer bond notes (P-99 and P-100) and includes the 1st dollar traveler's checks and Standard Chartered bearer checks P-13 through P-20 and P-24 through P-27), when seemingly few others do. I think ultimately I'll have to arrive at my own definition of complete for this set / project, which may end up being whenever I just decide I'm satisfied or I'm done.

I think the stuff about the date in the serial number is kind of nonsense. The note itself has nothing to do with the boy scouts and it doesn't link to the boy scouts in any way. While 1961 is a year that Kennedy was president, it's not like 2/6/61 is the date of his inauguration or anything. I don't see anyone with an affinity for boy scouts stuff sharing your interpretation for the serial number. You're just reaching too far.

Not fancy. Just a bill. A very circulated bill.

Nah. Not fancy. Not valuable based on that and condition.

Close but no cigar on the serial. That wouldn't count as fancy. If it was solid 8s or 87888878 you might have had something.

Those are not fancy serial numbers. I don't know much about Canadian currency. Chances are you probably won't increase the value much by grading them but I wouldn't be surprised if they do have some collector's value based on age and condition - but it probably won't be huge if I had to guess.

I wouldn't consider that to be a fancy serial number. So it probably isn't worth much.

Ever since I found out about them I've been scratching my head thinking about what to do - if anything - about the bank issued bearer checks and traveler's checks. They have pick numbers assigned to them (P-13 through P-20 and P-24 through P-27). In that sense, it feels like you can't completely ignore them and like they should be part of the collection. At the same time, they were issued by banks, not the RBZ, they could only be used / redeemed once, by the person they had been issued to, and they had to be cancelled - so they weren't really currency or banknotes in any way. They were checks. PMG, while they graded a few of these back in the day, says they probably wouldn't grade them currently. So, unless you can get someone to sell you one they have previously graded (and they may not come up for sale), you can't even get graded examples of these, even though there are competitive set categories for them (with no sets because the people that own those graded examples don't list them in the registry). It also isn't lost on me that the poster I showed in my last post shows P-28 through P-32, the later bearer checks, but doesn't show the bank-issued checks. So obviously the dealer that made that poster doesn't really think of them or market them as being part of that larger set either. The other major dealer I go through for most of my Zimbabwe notes also doesn't deal in these bank-issued notes at all from what I can see. So far I've included blank slots in my signature set with notes on the comments, just to acknowledge each group / set of notes with a slot to acknowledge the pick numbers, but I increasingly wonder if I just need to cut them out / allow myself to ignore them. In the context of the larger set, they're just odd. It just feels like they both do and don't belong in the larger set / collection.

I got this poster in the mail a while ago. It came in a poster tube on its own. I'm guessing it was a marketing thing and a "thank you for being a customer" type thing. I do like it though. I think I might have to get this framed one of these days to go with my note set. I like the fact that it includes the 1st dollars and the 1980s era coins. I wish it included the 4th dollars and the bond notes - but I guess nothing can be perfect. There's still just too much emphasis on the 3rd dollars (the "Trillions Series") and the 100 Trillion dollar note..

When I first started collecting the Zimbabwean 3rd dollars I thought they were all about the same size regardless of denomination. When I expanded my set to include more of the first dollars I started to notice that this wasn't the case with them. I was shocked the first time I held a P-1 note. Compared to the higher denominations in the series it is tiny. The shot below shows the $2 note over the $20. Then I finally got some low denomination 3rd dollars - P-65 and P-66 - and I realized that this wasn't exclusive to the 1st dollars. The ZWR had it too, I think the picture below was the $1 note and the $100 note. This was a really cool feature / realization for me. I'd read years ago that some people were pushing to make the different denominations in the US different sizes - it's an access issue for the blind. The argument was that the current bills deny adequate access to the blind and that making the notes different sizes would allow the blind to tell the difference between them without help. After reading that years ago, seeing this was just really neat. I don't really see any difference between the sizes of anything after about $500 or $1000. I can only assume this was because they either couldn't make the notes any bigger (They are quite big), or because they chose to standardize around a size to make it easier to keep cranking out higher denomination notes.

Looks like, while I've been distracted by the birth of my 2nd son, the government of Zimbabwe and the RBZ have been busy. The announcement came on 2/19/2019, one week after my son was born. On 2/20/2019 the “Zollar” “quasi-currency,” pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, represented by the bond coins released in 2014 and bond notes released from 2016-2018, became the official currency of Zimbabwe – called the RTGS dollar. It consisted of the bond notes and electronic money. The Bond Notes and electronic money would be converted or merged into the new currency with a 1:1 parity and then they would float against the dollar. The name of the currency would come from the country’s interbank online payment platform – "Real Time Gross Settlement," RTGS. In the days leading up to the announcement the government and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) were actively denying claims that they were looking to introduce a new currency. Some local economists called the move a “bold and progressive” step. Others saw the move as a sophisticated plan to take control of the US dollar savings held by the population. Shakespear Hamauswa, a businessman and lecturer, sued the government and called the RTGS a “ponzi currency,” used to “monetize the theft” of the US$ balances of the people accumulated in the last 10 years. Nelson Chamisa, the leader of the major opposition group, said, “The monetary policy statement is a disaster that will erode livelihoods, plunge the nation into darkness and uncertainty.” It’s worth noting that, while the bond notes and RTGS were officially pegged to the US dollar, in the parallel / black market the “real” exchange rate was more like 4 or 5 to one. Almost immediately after the RTGS was introduced the official exchange rate fell to 2.5RTGS:US$1. The “real” exchange rate at that time was closer to 5.75RTGS:US$1.

I guess we're outliers together in that it also drives me up a tree. I just try to ignore it as much as possible. This issue is one of the reasons why, when I make images for the registry, instead of imaging the whole holder and label like some do I crop down to only show the note and I'll use Photoshop to rotate the image a few degrees as needed to get the note as straight / level as possible.