What is the cost of a cashless society?

This twitter thread might be a bit extreme, but it raises interesting points ( https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083?lang... ). Basically, if you are not allowed to spend money (transact) then you are really not able to exercise your other rights. And if everything was cashless there is an actual risk of Gov or BigBank having the power to stop you transacting completely. It has happened in 1st world countries like Canada already, and without a trial or anything as per thread. Granted, it was kind of an emergency situation, but while I'd love to go cashless (I really really want to), this kind of thing makes me steer back into supporting the opposite side of the argument.

The article is very superficial about cost. It's not just about money, it's about freedom and democracy.

A cashless society, like everything with computer, information control or centralize power, is fine when you are riding the happy path.

As soon as you are not inline with society, or that slthe system itself become no more adapted to it's context, it's a nightmare.

New Zealand has gone largely cashless (and entirely chequeless). Everyone is paid by direct credit to their account. You pay your bills via direct credit / debit. I don't think any bank is charging fees (for customers) for electronic transactions via card, or direct credits/debits. They don't even charge a fee for using another bank's ATM anymore.

I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. NZ retailers moved away from cheques in the 90s due to their massive fraudulent use case (back when cheques were common, so was chequebook theft). The last banks that would accept cheques stopped doing so in 2020, IIRC.

You can use cash, but few people do. Parking machines have tap n pay. I really only need cash when the kids are having a bake sale or disco at school.

But as part of that shift, the Government owned bank ensures that anyone can have a bank account with no fees, no matter how spotty your previous track record.

Works for us. But I don't think we'll ever go cashless, there's no real desire to do so from anyone other than the people who have to pay to make the cash.

My biggest fear is not cashless society, it's humanless payment processing.

If you think losing access to your Google account for unspecified terms violations is bad, what about a payment processing computer malfunctioning?

A few years ago my debit card refused checkout at a supermarket. After the cashier rebooted the card reader machine, it ate a hundred bucks from my account without confirming the purchase. When I called my bank they said it's all automated, couldn't do anything about it, and would fix itself in two weeks. If that hundred bucks would've been my last food money, I'd gone hungry for half a month while the entirely humanless, supportless, automated, blackbox financial system "sorts itself out".

Cashless over my dead body.

I am certainly not pro-cashless, but the points this article makes are lackluster at best.

In an entirely cashless society, the problem isn't that "not everyone is included", the problem is surveillance. You can solve inclusion easily enough... Replace cash with prepaid cards (an idea posed in the article), or issue small, purpose-built digital wallets (equivalent to a low-power smartphone, except only for managing your digital bank account), or any number of other solutions. An even better idea is to just legally require businesses to accept cash (although this goes directly against the concept of cashless).

Digital (non-"crypto") currencies could do a lot of good when applied properly. I just don't think any government or institution would apply it properly.

A bit of a rant. By January 2022 I hadn't used anything but Apple Pay for three years.

But then my home country starts a war (which is terrible), and since the war was not approved by countries controlling the cashless technologies, immediately all my cards stop working, I am not allowed to get a new one anywhere in the world, my foreign currency bank accounts and retirement savings on brokerage accounts get frozen indefinitely.

Make sure you keep enough cash and cryptos for a rainy day.

Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits:

Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier the ticketing fuss was to public transport but all of a sudden you start using it a lot more.

Small conveniences based on cashless payment start appearing everywhere. I've noticed cashless vending machines for really rare use cases have started to appear where i suspect they'd be too low value/high maintainance if they required cash. I'd put electric scooters/bikes here too. Some things wouldn't work or be as successful without cashless systems. Lot's of these examples but i don't need to list them all out.

Taxation. You may argue this is a negative. I think it's a positive that it's harder to cheat the system. I like fairness. You can argue that there should be lower tax but i won't support any argument that it's OK for some to skip tax while others pay.

Safety. The tea lady at the station is now 100% cashless so simply can't be robbed (well kids might steal snacks off the cart but that's minor).

No more wallets. Australia has phone based drivers licenses and with no cash It's normal to carry a phone and nothing else. One less thing to carry and worry about.

I get that a cashless society would be worse under a totalitarian dictatorship than a cash based society under a totalitarian dictatorship. I'd rather work to avoid the totalitarian dictatorship part than the cashless part though.

This morning, I had a very new looking 10,000 yen bill at the conbini auto-register that wouldn't go into the register. Looked at it, didn't seem to be folded or missing a corner, which often causes bill insertion into machines to fail. Tried again, wouldn't go in. Had to use another bill.

<Commercial> If only we went cashless and installed the app, I wouldn't have to deal with bill and coin recognition failing anymore! What a wonderful, convenient world! </Commercial>

Just kidding. There'd be all the familiar glitches, errors, holdups and overreaches of excessive bureaucracy + automation and the malice and incompetence behind it.

Edit: decided to look up "Malice and Incompetence" to see if anyone else has struck on the idea that Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which overfits us towards thinking malice and incompetence are mutually exclusive. Giving credit to this blogger for coining this word "malcompetence: incompetence magnified by malevolent intent."

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/07/malice_incompet...

I use only cash IRL so my purchasing history and locations I frequent are not logged and sold. I detest that industry. A secondary reason is because some of those of us that do not -have- to use cash must do it anyway to justify stores continuing to accept it.

You get used to it. People actually give me discounts for cash frequently, particularly small businesses or individuals. Saves them up to 5% fees on stripe/square.

It has major benefits when dealing with service workers. You tip well in cash on the first drink and they prioritize your table all night even when places are slammed because you are not a tip gamble like everyone else, and they likely get away with not reporting most of it to management.

I do carry visa gift cards purchased with cash for the rare vendors that refuse cash directly in captive venues where no other choice exists like concerts.

Another thing to consider in that credit and debit card processing fees, which in the US are substantial, especially for small merchants that can't use large volume to negotiate a discount. This amounts to a ~3% hidden "tax" on all transactions, the bulk of which goes to one of four enormous corporations.

Because privatization of essential services has gone just so well in other areas of life, why not extend it to 100% of financial transactions.

I think a cashless society can work perfectly well. There's a single place that I still use cash with because they don't take card (probably avoiding tax) so every time I go there, I come back with change to tip to delivery people when I order food. Everything from my rent to my grocery shopping is done digitally and I honestly think it's great.

However, that's probably because I live in a debit-based country. Debit cards without overdraft capabilities should be readily available even to people with no financial skills because you can't use them to spend more than you earn, making the risk to the banks themselves minimal. The small fee paid for banking services is the only thing at risk and even that won't have much of an impact on the bank in general.

Some countries, most importantly probably the USA, almost exclusively operate on credit cards for digital money, which are practically quick instant loans that you don't want to think about. There's very little in there to limit your credit card spending to your actual income and some people are foolish or desperate enough to borrow money to pay off loans, with credit cards being one of the easiest options. People with poor or no financial skills will run up a debt and quickly stop qualifying for credit, and the end result is that they're dependent on cash or even something as archaic as cheques to transfer money in stores. The extreme impact credit scores can have in the States is mind boggling but it almost looks like people accept some shady third party evaluating their entire life for fraud risk as a normal thing.

If your standard modus operandi is spending money that you'll have to pay back later, I don't think your society can be cashless. Normalise debit cards as standard payment systems and almost everyone can qualify. Frauds will find themselves struggling to get an affordable bank account, but in a modern banking system there are plenty of alternatives available.

Based on this article, Canada clearly needs a banking overhaul for any cashless ambitions to stick without dire consequences.

> There’s no question printed or minted currency is grubby and kind of gross (paper banknotes, studies demonstrate, can be covered in everything from E. coli to fecal matter).

What's with this compulsive obsession with hygiene? Our own bodies contain about 3 times more microbes than human cells [1]. The air we breath is full of microbes, pollen and spores (not to mention the chemical pollutants nobody seems to care about). Any surface we touch - door handles, pieces of paper, keyboard keys, sofas, etc. - is full of microbes. Just saying...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome

I think this article just really highlights how badly the Canadian banking system needs to be modernized. Is it really that bad? I think I saw my parents use cheques a few times. That was in the nineteen eighties. Banks stopped accepting them in much of Europe decades ago. The cost of processing those became just prohibitively expensive and they offered no benefit whatsoever. There's no logical reason to be doing anything with cheques in 2022. That's just bureaucratic inertia and stupidity.

You could turn this question around as well. What's the cost of cash? It's not zero. Cash logistics are expensive. Companies that hold cash need security, the cash needs transport, it needs to be printed and distributed, insured, etc. And there's the black economy which means losses in tax revenue. A lot of shops in e.g. the Netherlands went cashless so they make less of a target for armed robberies.

Bank accounts are really cheap these days. Some banks charge for them but that's just greed. The nominal cost of tracking a few million integers in a computer is pretty low. That's why there are so many online banks these days. Creating a few billion bank accounts is not a technical problem. Same with transaction cost. There's no logical reason to charge multiple percents on every transaction. That kind of scam only works if banks have a monopoly on their markets, which of course in some markets is very much a thing. In market with competition, that cost goes away pretty quickly.

If you actually want to only do business in cash, you're already going to have a very bad time. 95% of jobs (99.9% of decent paying or professional or large company jobs) won't pay you in cash. The same for any sort of loan or finance (who can you borrow money from without leaving an electronic trail?). What sort of landlord or mortgage company will accept actual cash? Can you pay the tax man with it (probably but good luck).

The truth is, you're already in a cashless society for the vast majority of your income and expenses.

The cost is that you cannot easily break the law. Despite the current state of the world and the continued apathy of lawmakers to anything but corporate pockets, people insist on furthering policy which only gives more trust and control to the government. America came to be out of a bloody rebellion against tyranny, and 200 years later people seem determined to recreate the British authoritatian system that our founders once destroyed.

When there are major power outages that take down networks how will cashless payments be made?

I've seen stores stay open in a power outage with clever uses of extension cords running out to vehicles, enough to power the cash register and a few led lights. These stores were able to easily sell groceries (before they perished) and non-perishable items via cash.

Cash works during a power outage, or as was recently experienced in Canada because Rogers f'ed up their network, service disruptions.

In China, even though the gov said that it is illegal to refuse using the cash. Most of the small shops stop receiving that. They do not have enough cash to give change.

As for me, the only problem is that when your phone is dead, you can barely purchase anything. So I always carry a credit card.

I do have some cash at home for emergencies. But it was already locked there for several years.

The only reason when you need cash would be that you want to "hide" the trade. The police has already cought a lot of drug dealers by tracing the payment records of their customers.

However, as most of pepole will not use cash. So it will be much more easier for police to trace the serial number of the cash. It is getting more difficult to "hide" payment these days.

Not only for drug dealers, also for the husbands who wnat to have some small private money. Especially when you want to buy some games or some new useless gadgets. You will miss the good old days with cash.

UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions using VPA (Virtual Payment Address) are free for now. Around 6 billion transactions are processed every month. But apparently the Indian govt is planning on adding a 50 paise (₹0.5; $1 ≈ ₹80) transaction fee in the future.

This is an issue I have experience and strong opinions about, and please take the following as one sample of the sentiment that is brewing in this country over policies that impact cashlessness, privacy, autonomy, freedom of movement and association, and lately, of speech. I just happen to be close to these issues from a tech and policy perspective, and am an expert at articulating these things, but regretably, this will be a bit political.

Framing the issue in terms of the "most vulnerable," ignores the effects of economic centralization on the majority. The current government is tremendously unpopular in a large segment of the population, and just this year it used our partial cashlessness to make the banks freeze the accounts of citizens who donated to an opposition activist cause that had constitutionally legitimate concerns. So much so that the government only avoided collapse from a loss of confidence by withdrawing its emergency powers legislation before it was about to be put down by our senate. It's polarized and getting bad fast.

Policies like cashlessness just consolidate economic division and the inevitable effect is a permanent underclass that starts in the grey markets using alternative means of exchange, and spreads to creating poverty traps and a parallel and inescapable underground economy that is more violent and exploitative as a result of its official isolation than anything we have today. Just look at any country with official exchange rates for their debased or controlled currencies, and consider what their economic upsides are.

Cashlessness is a policy of economic polarization, not inclusion. It has become hard to believe that creating an underclass isn't the explicit agenda of the policy influencers behind it, because the middle class prosperity that characterizes Canadian society means that the status conferred on technocrats is too little to mollify their status anxiety. I know these people. I have worked with them in government, media, and tech for decades. I grew up with them and know their alumni. I have sat at their brunch tables. The thing they seethe most over is independent business owners whose way of life comes from providing value and the actual approval of the people who buy their products, and patronize their businesses. It is the inconsolable envy toward those whose contributions are actually desired by the people they live with - and not imposed in some social engineering scheme for fabricated constituencies of "the most vulnerable" that always seem to put the same people at the centre managing them. What this class hates is the basic natural dignity of people that comes from humble, competent achievement, and not the affectations of prestige. As though their impostor syndrome were our fault, because nobody recognizes them as elite outside their own circles. We owe them no deference, and this is unforgivable.

I would say what has changed in Canada over the last decade is that I see that people really openly hate each other, but that's not the whole picture. It's that the people actuated by their own hatred have graduated into our institutions and do not see themselves as accountable to the values of the society they grew up identifying as a victim of. We didn't care about what the Laurentian Consensus and the media class thought because we believed with distance, diversity, and different communities, we could co-exist peacefully. What is clear now is that this was naive.

The argument about locking activists bank accounts was, "but they were extremists," but when you compare them to the actual arsonists, looters, rioters, shooters, and knife criminals motivated by more fashionably acceptable causes like creating religious and racial conflict, it's like our government and chattering classes just humiliate themselves by parroting absurdities and lies, and then take out their shame on Canadians with even more self righteousness. It's a cycle of abuse that is winding up with ever more momentum. When you see the government ministers speaking television, it's something darker than smug. There's a relish for the impunity these actors have that people recognize as fundamentally anti-Canadian.

Advocates of cashlessness problematize the freedom of others instead of producing things anyone wants, because it's just easier. My prediction is we have less than 5 years before this country descends into a constitutional crisis more serious than the referendum on Quebec's separation in the early 90s. This isn't about the tech. I feel like we have a narrowing opportunity to stop antagonizing citizens with policies and utterly disconnected articles like these.

Norway has been mostly cashless for the better part of 2 decades. I've noticed one particular thing that gets much more difficult.

I have trouble teaching my kid about money, and quick addition/substraction. When money is much more abstract, it's difficult to explain how bank accounts aren't limitless, that it's not enough to put a piece of plastic close to a card reader.

The other part is that I get shocked at how slow kids seem to be at knowing how to do various "money changing calculations".

I think this is a good thing. It will prevent Terrorism, and keep us all from buying Porn, so no more onanism or Luciferian child abuse and cannibalism. Also will eliminate drugs.

Why is this framed like a hypothetical scenario when there's an abundance of countries that are already cashless and have been so for a long time? I haven't even seen a physical bill in many years. No idea how the coins look nowadays.

Cash is going away someday, thats for sure. Digital payments are just more comfortable to use and it allows to send money over vast distances in a few seconds, which is useful for buying stuff on the internet.

I'd just wish open source, decentralized, not-crypto-bro currencies like Monero (https://www.getmonero.org/), that are unlike Bitcoin actually anonymous, would be more commonly accepted outside of darknet markets.

About 3-5%

It doesn't matter what the cost is. Cashless is more efficient, so it's going to happen. Nobody has a say.

The article's first paragraph proposes that "we" didn't understand that respiratory illness spreads through water droplets in the air.

I honestly doubt that was ever the case; it certainly makes everything else posited seem a bit orwellian.

Everybody who talks about how they never use cash and love the convenience of never having to use cash, they all sound just like all the people who loved Google just before their account was terminated for undisclosed reasons.

3% per transaction

According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.