page_title: Money burning
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Money burning / Legality / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: A receipt from the Albany, New York Comproller’s Office certifying that $5,000 from the Bank of Whitestown had been legally destroyed by burning.
context_page_description: Money burning or burning money is the purposeful act of destroying money. In the prototypical example, banknotes are destroyed by literally setting them on fire. Burning money decreases the wealth of the owner without directly enriching any particular party.
  Money is usually burned to communicate a message, either for artistic effect, as a form of protest, or as a signal. In some games, a player can sometimes benefit from the ability to burn money. Burning money is illegal in some jurisdictions.
context_section_description: In the United States, burning banknotes is prohibited under 18 U.S.C. § 333: Mutilation of national bank obligations, which includes "any other thing" that renders a note "unfit to be reissued". In an amicus brief for Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, Solicitor General Seth Waxman writes that arresting an individual who removes the corner dollar values "may expose a counterfeiting operation". It is unclear if the statute has ever been applied in response to the complete destruction of a bill. Certainly people have publicly burned small amounts of money for political protests that were picked up by the media — Living Things at South by Southwest, Larry Kudlow on The Call, both in 2009 — without apparent consequence.
  The question of legality has been compared to the much more politically charged issue of flag desecration. It can be argued that the desecration of the flag is comparable to the desecration of a photograph of Legal Tender (provided it was modified as to not violate counterfeiting laws). In 1989, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Flag Protection Act, William Barr testified that any regulation protecting something purely for its symbolic value would be struck down as unconstitutional. The Senate report recommending passage of the Act argued that Barr's theory would render 18 U.S.C. § 333 unconstitutional as well. In a dissent in Smith v. Goguen, Justice Rehnquist counted 18 U.S.C. § 333 in a group of statutes in which the Government protects its interest in some private property which is "not a traditional property interest". On the other hand, the Government's interest in protecting circulating currency might not be purely symbolic; it costs the Bureau of Engraving and Printing approximately 5 cents to replace a note.
  Legal Tender, a 1996 telerobotic art installment by Ken Goldberg, Eric Paulos, Judith Donath, and Mark Pauline, was an experiment to see if the law could instill a sense of physical risk in online interactions. After participants were advised that 18 U.S.C. § 333 threatened them with up to six months in jail, they were given the option of remotely defacing small portions of a pair of "purportedly authentic" $100 bills over the web. A crime may be occurring — but "only if the bills are real, the web site is authentic, and the experiment actually performed." In fact, one bill was real and the other counterfeit. Almost all of the participants reported that they believed the experiment and the bills to be faked.
  The destruction of money is also bound by the same laws that govern the destruction of other personal property. In particular, one cannot empower the executor of one's estate to burn one's money after one dies.
caption: A receipt from the Albany, New York Comptroller's Office certifying that $5,000 from the Bank of Whitestown had been legally destroyed by burning on 15 November 1842.
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