Slovakia has got the bank notes of these values: 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 and 5000 crowns. The illustrator, Jozef Bubak, chose famous people from national history to front sides and places related to them to back sides of the notes. For example: on 20-crown note there's Pribina on the front side and Nitra City on the back side, on 50-crown note there are Cyril and Method on the front side and the village of Drazovce, on 100-crown note there's Madonna of Majster Pavol on the front and Levoca City on the back and so on.
At the beginning 5000 and 200-crown note didn't exist. 5000-crown note was given into circulation in 1994 and 200-crown note in 1995.

E-MONEY

What is e-money?

E-money is form of money that does not exist physically, but only as an information stored in a chip of smart card or on hard disk of your computer.

How it is possible?

E-money is possible due to the public-key cryptography and digital signatures. The basic principle is that both bank and customer have pair of keys (public and private). Public-keys are available to everyone and private-key is known only by its owner. What ever is encrypted by private key can be only decrypted by matching public key (and vice versa). Customer uses his private key to encrypt a request for specific amount o e-money and sent it to his bank. The bank uses customers public key to verify the sender of this request, subtract specified value from his account, and gives him “coin” signed by banks private-key. Customer gives this coin to merchant (who can verify the signed “coin” using the banks widely published public key). Merchant gives the “coin” back to the bank which pays him the specified sum and remembers the ID of the coin to prevent double (or triple or more) spending of the same money. This is only very simplified model, in praxis e-money is divided into identified (we know whose money it was originally) and unidentified money (this can be spent anonymously) and also many other sophisticated cryptographic methods are used.

What are the advantages of e-money?

1. The physical handling and transfer of hard cash represents up to 40% of banks' expenditures this would be eliminated by the use of e-money.
2. E-money eliminates the concept of change and allows micropayments (Transactions less than few tenths of crowns and purchases in units of hellers, their realisation fee would be actually higher than the amount of transaction.).
3. Paper money is easier to forge.