A conspiracy theory about new currency designs and time travel
A good conspiracy theory for the ever-changing designs on American currency would be that the government has discovered that time travel is possible, and is worried that if this technology reaches the civilian sector, people will go back to when a penny was worth a hundred dollars and become instant (and undeserving) millionaires just by bringing a few inflated bucks from the future to the deflated past.
The government’s solution then is to make new crazy-looking currencies that would be instantly rejected in the past, lambasted as “monopoly money, pure and simple” and “exceptionally poor forgeries, I do say!”
Since old-style money is still valid in our times, a loophole is that someone from the past could theoretically travel to the future and spend it here. But of course the hammer of futuristic hyper-inflation would smash them into pauperdom the second they make their very first purchase, so that’s not as big an issue.
However, we could see “time immigrants”. People coming from the past and taking low-skill jobs that are extremely low-paid by modern standards, but pay a fortune by deflated currency standards of the past. They could work these future jobs for a while and go back in time again, or could stay in the future and send their inflated money back in time to their families, where the money is worth a lot more.
This scheme would be thwarted by currency design changes, but if the economy came to rely on such low-wage time immigrants, an exception might be made for them (despite the unpredictable effects they would have on history), and a limited stock of old-looking money could be printed just for them, if the proper permit and tax papers are signed and so on.
This conspiracy could also explain the abolition of the Franc and other European currencies in favor of The Euro. Thus this would be a global conspiracy, the most ominous and threatening kind.
I haven’t seen Back to the Future II in a while, but I think it deals with this issue to an extent. I seem to remember Doc Brown bringing a ton of money from the future back to the past, and an incident where Marty McFly was shocked to find that a Coke was $50 in the days to come.
That movie was made before all the new crazy looking dollars came out, or The Euro, and it didn’t have the cynicism to predict that our supposedly benevolent governments would conspire so fatally against innocent time traveling currency exchangers.
4 years ago