A cashless society is incompatible with a free society.
The state already has this, it's called prison.
In another situation, most on here will be familiar with FIFO and LIFO for buffers, and whilst most cash registers take a serialised bank note and hand it back out in a LIFO manner, sometimes the register operator will take bank notes and put them at the bottom of the pile.
This creates a new state, LILO as its gone to the bottom of the pile of bank notes. In addition why did the shop or business engage in that activity with some people and not others?
Is there something shady taking place or are they displaying knowledge to others?
How does that mess around with the banking systems ability to build payment networks what central banks would call the velocity of money?
A cashless society would make some crimes less possible like muggings, but could it also escalate the extremity of muggings? For example if fingerprints are required with a card or smartphone, would muggings evolve becoming more extreme with events like cutting off peoples fingers?
It also highlights the fact that's society is not configured/setup properly because such events like muggings are taking place.
I think coinage should be dropped (ie non serialised money) and banks should start displaying the serial numbers of bank notes much like the blockchain, so that people can track and trace where all the money is going.
For example, celebrities helping out less fortunate people with autographed products including things like NFT's could evolve, because a celebrity could hand out cash to someone which has its immediate utilitarian value as currency, but just like collectors demonstrate, that bank note could actually be worth more to a collector willing to pay x times more for that celebrity bank note which the less fortunate currently has in their possession.
Ergo could poverty be reduced with this method or would human behaviour change and less celebrity worshipping occur?
And would less celebrity worshipping be a bad thing or not?
I am comfortable with it, since by the time those bank notes come into the bank, they do not know how many times, and between whom, they have changed hands.
There is also plausible deniability: the suspect guy bringing cash into the bank with numbers I had might have gotten them from me spending them at the supermarket, or from me getting change at the restaurant, and the restaurant owner doing business with him.
There are many gaps in this argument.
On the point of they do not know, humans are creatures of habit, it is possible to know where money is being laundered and its not a single step process.
But a simpler example would be looking at the reCaptcha I'm not a robot process. So google dont know what these random images are when they present them to people in recaptcha. The user does not know who these images have been presented to previously if at all. Users treating it as a hurdle will click the right images, the malicious user trying to mess up the image recognition will deliberately tick the wrong image. Over time, google gets to find out what images are a bike or plane or traffic lights, helping to train their visual recognition AI models, or at least clean their streetview dataset, they also get to know who are the deliberate malicious users.
So with money going into a supermarket, periodically money is taken from tills and sent off outback for the bank. This is a snapshot of the serial bank notes during a period of time in the supermarket. The checkouts also know what amount of money was handed over. If money is being laundered as cash in a supermarket, or pub, its possible to identify who these people are from cctv, over repeat visits. You see not everyone will be making a monthly food shop, some are just buying lunch so might only hand over £10, someone laundering money will do a monthly shop handing over £200 or £300 pounds.
As these places tend to receive cash and hand out coinage, its possible for the banks to work out the cash trail of money from spending habits. Same goes when money laundering is taking place around an area, like weekend holidays paid with cash. What these money launderers dont know is how many other people from their base area are also on holiday in the same place like a weekend away a few hundred miles away?
There are so many ways to track cash but I dont think most people think about it. The fact people are using cash is a deliberate red flag for a start. Sure some jobs are best done using cash like taxi firms, fast food outlets and pubs, but these are also red flags for scrutiny as well. Arguably its just another form of intellectual surveillance.
The original concern was
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
You moved the goalposts to money-launderers, but let's assume only money-launderers, which I am not, because it is fun thinking about these things.
Your hypothesis only holds if at least some pubs, supermarkets, record serial numbers, or if we assume that "money launderers" always pay in 200 or 300 pounds and there is an active investigation of cctv cameras.
Now, going back to the original question:
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
This is not a concern at all, because the bank does not know who I hand my cash to. Cash that the bank recorded as given to me can travel many many times before the bank gets to see it again, thus proving nothing about who I handed to it.
Most people keep their money in banks, instead of cash. So if the government wants to target you they can already do it, no matter if you have a few 1000 in cash or not.
If your government freezes your bank account - you're fucked.
Of course in practice it probably is, but I appreciate the theory.
You can use enough cryptography to make blockchain transactions anonymous. But I think you can use the same cryptography to make non-blockchain electronic money anonymous, too.
Once you have access to Bitcoin on-chain and have other people willing to transact directly through Bitcoin, with no fiat intermediaries like exchanges... yeah, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the transaction from going through (eventually).
The end goal with Bitcoin is to bypass all the permissioned fiat rails eventually.
What's the volume of Bitcoin traded outside of exchanges? 0.0001%?
How could you ever know? A group of people could trade paper wallets with 1000s of Bitcoin trillions of times and no record of it would show up on chain.
(It requires trust, because how do you prevent double spending attacks? Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.
You need to move the funds to an address you control to be sure.)
It's always Bitcoin in any scenario we can think of since value never ever leaves the chain, only the person with control of the on-chain value changes.
>Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.
I used "paper wallet" as a simple place holder, many tamper resistant one time use solutions exist, like Opendime.
...from KYC exchanges. There's already tons of non-KYC darknet exchanges that will happily take your btc and give you xmr, at which point you're off to the races. Any attempt to extend requirements at KYC exchanges would spur further developments in non-KYC/decentralized swappers, as we've seen so far.
The world your proposing isn’t just about upending financial plumbing. It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation. That would send us back to the dark ages of finance. That’s not something I support.
> It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation.
Imo this is a positive, but that's a little besides the point - it is inevitable in the same way that encrypted communications are inevitable and don't care whether Australia decides its laws trump the laws of math. If you care about the ability to maintain taxation, etc, then riding the wave is vastly preferable to being crushed by it.