Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them?
I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money?
Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.
Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons.
People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.
Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue.
I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet.
I also agree it is not a binary thing.
Cashless is great as a convenience option, or when there are time sensitive factors.
But it is important that these fungible cryptocurrencies are as cash-like as possible. So, no global ledger.
Someone was arguing that we should reject a cashless society, and I was making an argument that it is impossible to do at this point.
The only solution is to have a digital currency as close to cash as possible.
Ethereum (on its own) does not meet this requirement. It is perfectly fungible, but still has a global ledger that can be used to track transactions. It is important that people move to standard L2s that don’t have a record of every transaction.
Bitcoin is actually not fungible in the first place. The Lightning network does provide transaction privacy, though.
By “no global ledger” I should have clarified: there might be a need for a global ledger, but it should be missing all consumer transactions.