What Is a Cashless Society?
youtube.com
youtube.com
Yeah, you get a record of every donut and coffee but so does everybody else on the network who cares. And members of such a society damn near disappear when there’s an issue with their account(s).
This is one of the very serious issues that isn't really on our radar, and is not well addressed in the documentary.
Disclaimer: I am interviewed in this short film, which is why I submitted it (not really appropriate for a Show HN post). It's a pop piece so they only used a couple of bites. However, the interview was over an hour and we went into technical depth on several topics.
Other than the "convenience" being a con for consumers and traders alike - its main benefit serves the banks profit and the Visa/Mastercard duopoly will hike transaction fees brutally, far beyond the costs of any cash - the most serious social issue is neither privacy nor inclusion but that a "cashless" economy is a resilience and stability anti-pattern.
The economic stabilising function of a pool of liquid currency (capacity) in circulation is literally the difference between gracefully weathering technical crises and all-out civil disorder with people shooting each other over a loaf of bread. Visa's declared "war on cash" is criminally irresponsible and naked sabotage of essential civil technologies honed over centuries to support social harmony.
I was disappointed the editor chose the words "misinformation" rather than "disinformation" because I think the campaigns being run by banks are dishonest and corrosive propaganda. Their message belongs in the same category as malinfluence by hostile nation states.