The central bank on Friday said it would auction New Taiwan dollar notes with special serial numbers starting on June 30 to boost government revenues.
Taiwanese tend to favor banknotes with special serial numbers and are willing to pay large sums for them, as evidenced by seven similar central bank auctions in the past four years.
Among the most coveted notes are those with serial numbers with one or more eights, such as “000008,” because the number eight sounds like the word for “making a fortune” in Mandarin.
State-owned Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行), the country’s largest lender, is to conduct the online auction, which is to start at 10am on June 30 and run through 10am on July 5.
The proceeds from the auction are to be handed over to the central government.
Central bank Issuance Department Director-General Shih Tsuen-hua (施遵驊) said four groups of special serial numbers would be auctioned off.
Shih said other bills to be put up for auction would have a serial number composed of consecutive numbers, such as 123456 or 654321, or one with the same numbers, such as 111111 or 222222.
The other group is to feature bills where the first digit in the serial number is a number and the other digits are zeros, such as “100000” and “200000,” Shih said.
Taking into account the two English letters ahead of the serial numbers and two more after the serial number, a total of 6,417 banknotes are to be auctioned, Shih said.
The banknotes would be divided into 127 sub-groups for the auction.
Based on the composition of each sub-group of banknotes and face value, the floor prices in the auction are expected to range between NT$1,000 and NT$56,000. The total floor price is expected to be NT$4.24 million (US$130,924).
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