I can't imagine we'll have banknotes and coins in 100 years from now. Cash is neither efficient nor environmentally friendly. The efforts around helping the marginalized groups should be focused on getting them a debit card not keeping cash around.
i.e. a dystopia
Once again, genuinely confused about why one of these approaches are being talked about a lot more on this thread. If I am missing something very obvious, I would appreciate a pointer.
Of course laws against abuse should be developed so that when you need the service you are protected - but the main thing is that the service is not forced on you.
It’s why private arms ownership (in the millions) and ability to use cash (also in the millions) IS one of the (only effective) checks and balances.
The idea of the state having effective state-based checks and balances to restrain the power of the state is nonsense. We tried that and got a military-industrial takeover of all 3 branches via universal communications surveillance of every single judge, congressperson, and chief executive/cabinet by unelected military spies. There are people in the USG who know the location tracklogs and call history, iMessage history, iCloud Photos, email contents, and fb/wa/ig DM contents of every single mistress, sex worker, bag man, and drug dealer that services every individual member of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as their entire personal and professional staff, and can threaten or blackmail any of them at will. In theory there are checks and balances over these spies, but in practice once they have that kind of power, they have enough power to keep abuses of same out of the newspaper.
It’s like the police stopping police crime; it is a nice idea in theory but does not happen in the real world.
To maintain a free society you must maintain the practical ability for millions to do things that are legal but that the state REALLY does not want them to do. Payments are #1 on that list as they enable publishing and organizing.
Also, the USG does call in missile strikes on US citizens (as well as their entire families) that they simply don't like, and checks and balances don't stop that at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
Once everything is public, and you have nothing to hide, it is very difficult to be blackmailed or coerced in the traditional ways govts have thought about this tactic.
Any governing body large enough to manage all of the affairs of a country of hundreds of millions or billions of people is going to comprise in the thousands of people, and there will be dirt for the finding on almost all of them. Remember, you don't need actual proof - you just need enough circumstantial evidence that the threat of cancellation/impeachment/resignation/etc is credible.
Yes because private arms ownership is all it takes to fight a government with access to tanks, missiles, drones, and unlimited resources.
The ways they have of making your life inconvenient escalate to making your life completely unlivable (e.g. unable to buy food/clothing/shelter, or ride a bus) in the absence of anonymous payment systems.
BSA/PATRIOT make it illegal to issue payment cards in the US that aren't strong identity-linked.
Cash isn't so much useful because it's cash, it's useful because it's not linked to identity. If anyone could buy prepaid payment cards that didn't require identity, then this would be much less of an issue (but would still link multiple transactions together in time and space, which is its own privacy issue).
So yes, right now they can "unperson" someone in a targeted fashion across a dozen (for now) unlinked channels working together in different ways, which we just see happening to people we consider undesirable, extreme, or hateful etc.
But they cannot do that in a serious and automated way at scale across all channels to a more average person (right now the more manual approach is too much effort). They are currently proposing+building APIs that enable it at scale.