I'd mention ukraine, but even in peace time, there can be huge power outages in relatively large areas (as in US, more than one in the recent years), where point of sale terminals stop working, there is no internet connection to process the transaction, but exchanging a few bills, for whatever you need always works, even in the dark.
Also privacy... Want to buy a huge buttplug from a "Huge buttplug store ltd.", but your government could collapse in a few years and the new one might not like people (especially guys) using huge buttplugs? With cash, there's nothing to trace... with cards, the government can get a list of names in few seconds.
NFC secure area base locally stored accounts are a pretty good compromise for instance. The account is locally encrypted, anonymous, with a ceiling on the max charge. You’ll pay for bread with no latency, and will only hit the network at charge time and/or if you need to for backup.
I'm from an ex-USSR country. You can't stop an authoritarian government with physical cash in your mattress.
Yes and no. I'm in Canada, so maybe the protests in Ottawa, which were mentioned above, are a good example to use.
It actually is much simpler for the Canadian federal government to just lock your bank account, than it is to raid a person's home and confiscate their cash. Entry to a person's home, or detaining them, invokes the entire set of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure and arrest. (And for complex, mostly stupid IMO reasons, your bank account does not.)
We do still have due process, judicial review, etc. If you were targeted during the protests without reason, and got a lawyer, you'd probably ultimately get the controls on your bank account lifted. But... you'd need to speak to a lawyer. And that requires some travel or an active phone plan. And that's where cash might actually help a lot.
There's also the question of scale. It costs a lot more, takes a lot more effort, to physically search for cash than to simply flip a bit in a database. Bank freezing can be done and applied at scale automatically, in a way that physical detention cannot. I do agree it is basically tending in an authoritarian direction. I'm worried about it and I'm not sure how we can and should fix it.
Nobody can confiscate what they dont know you have. You are making a case not to put all your eggs in your home.
Removing cash at least would have one or two elections between the ban and it taking effect.
My point is also that "revoking all bills" is a bigger step than "disable a card", even though both or possible. Having cash is a bigger buffer against politicians up to no good.
Also you can't target an individual by revoking bills, so the threshold is way higher.
Most Western states are a few bills away of turning full China. They now it, and will surf on any perceived or real crisis to get to that point somedays. In the meantime, they do it step by step.
Vs
> handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government
Seems like the second one enables the crime of disenfranchisement, except that no one will be able to label it a crime and no one will ever be punished because it's the government doing it.
See the recent example of the Canadian government cutting off protesters bank access without trial. Whatever you think of the protests, that's a terrible thing for a government to be able to do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...