A cool kind of trinary serial number

Currency hunting is a fun, low-cost hobby with very little downside.

I liken it to playing a lottery where you always at least break even. If you look a dollar bill over and there's nothing special about it, you still have a dollar bill that you can spend! It's a no-lose situation.

My Cool Serial Facebook Group just crossed 22,000 members so I recorded another pricing video for a special kind of trinary serial number. More about that below.

Table of Contents

Trinary serial numbers are not super easy to find

Trinary serial numbers have three distinct digits. An example of this is 13441433.

About six bills out of a thousand are trinary bills. If you had $100-$200 in ones and looked through all of them, you might find one trinary.

So they're not impossibly difficult to find, but they're not particularly easy to find, either.

Here's a pricing video on trinary serial numbers:

“True” trinaries are like true binaries

Let's talk briefly about binary serial numbers.

Binary serial numbers have two unique digits, like 48848448. They're a bit harder to find than trinaries, only about 0.011% of bills are binaries.

True binaries have 0 and 1 as their two digits (as in it's a true binary number like computer code).

Some collectors will use the terms “non-traditional binary” and “binary” to describe non-0-1 binaries and 0-1 binaries, respectively, and that's fine.

The analogous “true trinary,” then, has 0,1, and 2 as the three digits.

The header image is an example of this kind of bill from my collection.

Here's a pricing video for these kinds of bills:

How much will a trinary serial number sell for?

Trinary bills sell occasionally on eBay for a few bucks if “that's all the bill has going for it” — in other words, the rarest feature of the serial number is that it has three unique digits. It's not a guarantee that they will sell at all, but then again nothing is guaranteed.

Trinaries will, of course, sell for more if they are a repeater, a radar, or some other kind of harder-to-find fancy serial number.

A few dollars isn't much, so if you want to try to sell a bill that you find, please make sure you price it appropriately so that you don't lose money.

Should I buy a trinary serial number bill?

I'll again talk to trinary bills where “that's all the bill has going for it.” So this would be something like 46747674, just a non-descript ordering of three digits and not something fancier like 12333321.

Whether you buy these kinds of bills or not is totally up to you. If you want to buy them because you like them, I nor anyone else should object. If you have a particular set of digits that are sentimental for you and you're building a collection of them for your own enjoyment, then why not? No reason not to spend money on what you enjoy!

Now … if you are buying them in hopes of selling them for more later on, then I'd ask you to calculate how much you would have to sell your bill for, including all of the costs, to break even. This post has resources for doing this. Following that, I would ask you to go to eBay, and check sold auctions for the kind of bill you have. That should give a good indication whether or not these bills have investment potential.

If these kinds of bills don't have investment potential, let's just say I wouldn't be surprised.

Is it scammy to sell trinary serial numbers?

Now for a bit of a different question. Given that a lot of the trinary serial numbers offered for sale don't have investment potential, is it therefore scammy to sell them at all?

One commenter on YouTube has been grinding this axe on my videos and calling me out for perpetuating scams. I responded there the first time he did it, but I'm done discussing it there. I'll instead address my viewpoint here.

I don't see selling trinaries as being scammy for the following reasons:

A scammy listing in my estimation needs to involve false claims. If I claim that a serial of 46747674 has investment potential because it's a trinary, then I'd consider that scammy because, in general, it's not. However, if I offer 46747674 for sale and describe it as a trinary serial number or that it has three distinct digits, where's the false claim there? Nowhere that I can see.
It's up to buyers to research what they buy. This applies to anything, not just currency. I overpaid for a riding lawn mower at auction because I neglected to see that there was no mowing deck. Should it have been the auctioneer's job to inform me that there was no mowing deck and that I should factor that into my bid? Of course not! I always could have passed the opportunity by.
It also shouldn't be up to buyers to pay a fair price. This isn't a direct argument but is related to the above one. If I sell a solid serial number for $20, buyers have every right to part me and my bill, and run away laughing. Solid serial numbers are easily worth many times that because they're so rare. It's up to me as a seller to know a reasonable price for what I'm selling, and not sell it for a song. Selling a dollar bill with 46747674 for $4.99 is me pricing it appropriately so that I make money on it. I may not sell it at that price, but at least I won't leave any money on the table selling it.
Willing buyers should be able to buy from willing sellers selling. I'm a strong believer in allowing commerce to take place. I should be able to buy (or not buy) what someone is offering at some agreed-upon price. Likewise, I should be able to sell (or not sell) at some price. If a seller doesn't feel right selling trinary bills for whatever reason (usually because their peers will call them out for doing so), then that's fine, but that doesn't mean that selling should be prohibited for everyone.