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> Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen.

This is a key point that needs to be emphasized.

For everyone posting about not using cash, consider the thought experiment of how your day/week/month will go if all your non-cash payment mechanisms are shut down.

What would be the alternative be? Keeping all your money as cash? Paying your bills by sending cash in an envelope to the companies?

There is a wide range between all and none.

I'd suggest keeping enough cash to live for however many months gives you peace of mind that you can sort out the problems in the worst case.

Banks can and do freeze your access, sometimes for a reason but often due to glitches but either way you're locked out and it'll take a while.

As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over. The majority of us already kept all our wealth in digital form. I continued to use 100% cash day to day many years after all my colleagues had switched to contactless (only switched when I got Monzo around 2017/2018). But I wasn't walking around with a wad of cash and I didn't keep my salary in a vault at home. It was in a current account and I took out at the very most £100 at a time. If someone had shut down all my non-cash payment mechanisms and froze my account I'd still only have enough money for a week.

I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.

The thing is, even if you don't save and hold lots of physical cash to maintain your needs, if you ever did get your digital money turned off, you could still work with your employer or friends to get cash and buy things.

In a cashless society, that option is completely off the table, and you will be forced to rely on the goodwill of others to buy things for you, and hope they don't also get turned off by sin of aiding you.

Right.

I feel like so many people seem to work within this rigid framework of like, "this is what some people do so it's the only way".

You see it all the time on here. e.g. "cryptocurrencies are easily traceable because exchanges". Ok, so hi, I'm me, I'll sell you a bitcoin.

Trivially disproved.

> As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over.

That's not what the term cashless society is usually used to convey though. If you really wanted, you could've been operating largely cashless ever since credit cards became widely accepted (1970s?). But even today (at least in the USA) you can still withdraw your whole paycheck in cash and pay everything that way, if you wanted to. So we're fortunately not a cashless society at all.

I also strongly agree with these two posts. Yet this appears to be a Northern European phenomena because I see large areas like Asia, with large population numbers, do it. Whatever the opinion, it is not going away. I used cash to buy groceries today.

It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.

> It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.

People trying to push an agenda (not you) love to create a sense of inevitability. Don't believe it.

Lots of people have no access to digital payments, and objectively, how are they more convenient than cash? Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?

> Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?

Yes. I get paid on my account like everybody else in this country and then I can immediately use it at any merchant in the country by using a credit card. No need to run to ATMs (where are they even and if it is not my banks I get charged extra), no need to figure out change etc.

I don't even carry a wallet anymore because I can just pay with my phone, so no need for a physical card.

> Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?

Good lord yes. Have you not ever been stuck behind someone struggling to count out exact change? Cash is a huge time wasting pain in the ass.

But it's also an important backup to the frailty of digital money.

> Have you not ever been stuck behind someone struggling to count out exact change?

For a few seconds? I just don't see it. The whole notion is bizarre, a non-problem. Why is it so important to people to exaggerate it?

A lot of us young people live far enough down the slippery slope that it doesn't seem like a practical concern. I wouldn't find it remotely tolerable to be cut off from online payments - no Steam, no Netflix, no Amazon? So rather than making sure there are good cash-only options, I want to make sure everyone has the right and ability to perform credit card payments or some kind of similar electronic transaction. (This is where a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasm comes from, and while I'm a skeptic in general I wholeheartedly endorse this motivation.)

I agree that we definitely need some harsh policy enacted to enshrine transact-ability as an inalienable right.

I personally see cryptocurrency as something akin to second amendment rights. You hold and support it as a citizen's check and balance to make government abuse of people harder to implement.

How is that the issue of the card payments though. Do people that support your argument, just keep massive amounts of cash at home?

I still keep my money at a bank, no matter if I pay with my card or if I use the ~100$ cash I have in my wallet.

"Massive" is your framing, it's abnormal to you but not to others.

You probably wouldn't say that I have a "massive" amount of clothes because I have enough for a couple of weeks without washing them.

I see having about the same in cash as being fairly normal.

My point was that I still need to rely on a bank to get new cash, and that bank still operates in digital ways, ... there is no point in just looking at the way you pay in a shop.

Like you are not really better of in the long term just because you have some cash in your wallet. You would need to keep all your money as cash, to have a systematic advantage.

No, but if you did find yourself in that situation, you could still request cash from your employer, friends, or family, without obviously implicating them in aiding you. Or you could do odd jobs or beg on the streets for the cash you need to survive.

If you're digitally blacklisted, and can't send or receive money, then the only option you have is hope that someone in your life is willing to risk helping you directly by buying you things with no guarantee you'll ever be able to pay them back.