So the only way to break the circle is to purchase with cash... And now fewer and fewer people buy with cash, to the point some Nordics plan on doing away with cash as much as possible.
Cash is an anonymous payment system which cannot be traced and is widely accepted. It's something that would be impossible to bootstrap today if it didn't already exist. Hence, it's crucial to keep it alive.
I just wanted to point out the possibility of tracking serial numbers on bills. Obviously it's not going to be as reliable, at least not now, but it could be made more so; for instance, if there was a sudden movement to use more cash for privacy. Of course, that seems unlikely; most people like the convenience of plastic/digital payments, and there's a lot of market pressure pushing people toward those payment methods, so deploying the infrastructure for more reliable cash tracking probably isn't worth a whole lot. But I haven't exactly run the numbers, and there are other possible incentives, so who knows..
Ironically I started to appreciate it, after I received a fake bill from a different store.
Not really; bills are individually identifiable and can be tracked by either party to the transaction, and even if the payment medium isn't tracked, the transaction can even tracked by other means (e.g., cameras + facial recognition.)
It's only really untraceable if you assure privacy of the location of the transaction, and neither party to the transaction chooses to track it, and even then if the next party out on either side is tracking, a lot can be revealed.
Doesn't have to be a silver bullet. Just to be better off than without cash.
I was responding to “the only way to break the circle is to purchase with cash”, which just is not enough if your goal is to not end up in a database with your buying behaviour tabulated and analysed. Better? Clearly. But it is neither sufficient nor necessary to break the circle.
That means a safe way I and a lot of people prefer is to get a bunch of cash from a cashpoint and use that to buy stuff to not get profiled...
My main gripe with shopping in Germany is everyone is standing there at the cash-register trying to find the correct ammount of cash to pay. There is a large amount of different coins you have to sorth through and they all look similar to me. But everyone does it (even the young) because everyone cares about privacy.
I think the problem with long waiting queues at cash-registers isn't the amount of different coins but the people that 1) do not calculate what the need to pay 2) want to speak with the sellers because they have nobody else they can speak to
But that's all a thing of personal attitude: Do we always have to be fast at everything what we do? Do we always need to optimize everything and use every free minute? In my opinion the laxness comes with age and who knows if we will do the same things in some years that we are hating others for today?
Only a problem for non-Eurozone visitors really.
(b) it’s not necessarily about Trump – but considering the US has elected Trump, and considering how many freedoms Trump has tried to erase already, what’s if someone worse comes after Trump?
It's mostly older people using cash anymore.
For example, if you start having kids, and going into their sporting events or whatever, you'll find that any form of electronic payment is most likely not accepted in the pop-up cafeterias ran by parents. No cash? No coffee for you.
Cash is still a handy way to give your kid some money to spend. I know some people already get their second graders a debit card with a monthly allowance, though.
But yes, about 99.5% of the transaction volume in my household is electronic.
The primary use of cash is shopping in Christiania.