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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

How rapidly are cashless transactions spreading in China? When I was there back in 2011-2012 everything was exclusively cash-only. I'd be interested to learn the rate of change in recent years.

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I live in SF and go back to China about once a year, and every time I go back, I can always find tons of new stuff. For my hometown, the change from exclusively cash-only to cashless happened in less than 2 years.

Extremely fast. I agree with ~2011 being cash only, but the last time we were back (last year?), there was tons of wechat pay usage in restaurants, convenience stores, etc.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-mobile-payment-boom-chan...

What surprised me was the proliferation of Alipay in premium outlets near touristy areas in SF.

>How rapidly are cashless transactions spreading in China?

Basically overnight. Reason? 1. Alibaba and Tencent basically paying cash for people using their system; 2. POS terminal charges for them are near nil in comparison to rapacious rents Visa/MC processing banks were demanding just a year ago.

It seems reliance on electronic pay is a big vulnerability, whenever there's a hickup everything stops. You can make the systems work reasonably well but there will be an outage eventually. In any kind of cyber battle you'd think this would be a huge problem. In the US I noticed most young people also carry little cash, while I'm often paying with cash.

I know in China they also like ubiquitous tracking of people, and maybe the us govt would like that too.

I was in China around then too, and I have given up using that as a reference frame for China today.

Faster than square, stripe, and venmo did in the US. You can very nearly expect to be completely cashless, including Western credit/debot cards. You'll even see panhandlers with a qr code in front of them.

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