A service for checking whether money is genuine

I wonder how many fake hryv­nias, Ukraine’s ban­knotes, are in cir­cu­la­tion right now. Hardly anyone checks them…

I have a fan­tas­tic idea for con­trol­ling the cir­cu­la­tion of coun­ter­feit money. When the cur­rency is printed, an elec­tronic data­base of ban­knote serial num­bers is cre­ated, and anyone can check on the cen­tral bank’s web­site whether the note in front of them is gen­uine or a fake. You could also add this fea­ture to ban­knote coun­ters: they’d auto­mat­i­cally scan the serial num­bers and look them up in the database.

Update: Then again, if coun­ter­feit­ers copy the num­bers of legal ban­knotes, some­thing else will have to be invented for protection. So my idea doesn’t fly.

P.S. I also wonder how coun­ter­feit­ers affect inflation. They do increase the money supply, after all…