We’re talking about all of the FRNs her… although “a” dollar of course refers to the one with a picture of George Washington and the words “One Dollar”.

So far as I can tell, such a piece of paper “is” not a dollar. It “is” a promise to PAY a dollar, sort of… but it’s not actually a “dollar” itself. Maybe it doesn’t even have a legal requirement to be traded for a “real dollar”, although it seems that it would have.

First, in legal terms (my understanding, anyway), a “note” is a promise to pay. The question is, to pay WHAT? And to WHOM?

If you research the history of paper money, and particularly paper money in the US, you will find that - at least in the last hundred years, there have been two main types of paper money: the FRN and the US Treasury Note. The latter carried a promise to pay in silver, to the bearer. The former merely states that it is “legal tender”.

Ultimately the answer to the subject line’s question depends on what the FRN promises to pay, to whom, and how… and assuming the answer to the “what” part of that question is “a dollar”, an additional question arises: what’s a dollar?

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