[bruinbirdman]

Yes, that's Uncle Ho

The whole thing ain't $50.

yitbos

[decal]

Yeah, I remember the UK Top Gear episode where the guys were given shoeboxes full of money to buy vehicles that could get them from Saigon to Haiphong - turned out the stuff was worth maybe a couple of hundred $US and all they could afford were second-hand scooters.

[ThanhPhero]

The government could easily trade "đồng mới" new đong for old and knock some zeros off but one thing I noticed in Việt Nam is no one steals money, at least not Vietnamese money. Small children walk around with fistfuls of đồng and no one grabs it. Those 500thou(about $24) bills are not normally seen in trade. You get those when you want to swap in some $hundreds to buy a motorbike or something like that. You never see a worn one. That said I have a couple of 300 đồng and a 200 that I traded a kid a dollar bill for. They are very worn and fragile. Those haven't actually traded for a while. In 2007 the government reintroduced coins in 500 to 3000 đồng. Everyone had them. In 2011 I didn't see any. It is all fiat money with no value in itself and coins are less convenient. The women go to market carrying their money in their hands and coins won't do for that.

I do appreciate the little windows on the bills. It makes them far harder to counterfeit, but then why would anyone counterfeit the stuff?