I don't want cash to disappear. I just want dumb grubby pieces of paper and heavy grimy coins to go the way of the dodo. With all of the logistical and security costs they entail.
Just give me digital cash that can be stored on a card, that doesn't require a bank account and isn't tied to anyone's identity, and where any cell phone is capable of transferring value between cards (and between bank accounts and cards).
Digital cash needs to be implemented by the government with zero transaction fees.
This needs to be something run by the government, in the same way the government runs printing physical cash.
This has nothing whosoever to do with MC/Visa/etc.
Does this enable completely anonymous payments, or is this another step towards more surveillance?
Surveillance most definitely will be a feature. We are talking about the UK government here.
Might be MC, might be a bank, might be a startup backed by investors.
It doesn't really matter at all. But the point is that it doesn't matter if existing card providers like it or not.
Mind you, I am not sure I am right and you're wrong. I am just pointing some concerns I have. And on the other side, your proposal makes sense also in the point that the government always financed the cost of the whole coins and banknotes stuff from the general budget.
But who are we fooling here? The lobbying power from the payments industry is mind-boggling, maybe bigger than the one from the Defense Industry. They would never allow a government payments program that eliminated their role as middleman.
You don't get charged $0.05 per paper bill by the government every time you go to the ATM. Similarly, you don't get charged by the fire department if it puts out a blaze in your home. So:
> Wouldn't it be better to have this program directly funded by its users? wouldn't it be more transparent?
Absolutely not. This goes against the entire ethos of government, which is that we collectively pay taxes, progressively, for the services that benefit society as a whole.
And if supplying and managing cash isn't a core government service, then I don't know what is. Even the most extreme libertarians and anarchists are going to agree on that one.
Was there ever any attempt to do something similar in the US?
In theory correlating the card purchase with location or camera data would be possible, but even that's a win as it moves transaction surveillance from dragnet to bespoke.
This is a flaw of implementation, not of banknotes in and of themselves. Some countries moved to plastic banknotes[0] already many years ago: Australia, Romania, Vietnam, just to name a few. They don’t get grotty like e.g. American dollar notes. A cool feature is that if you are at the beach and have nowhere to leave your valuables, you can just go swimming with them inside your pocket.
Certainly, that cash isn’t going to get you sick. It also is unlikely to be covered in dirt/mud/some other substance that will visibly rub off onto you.
What ritual must it undergo to purge it of its ungodliness?
Cash is anonymous and (largely) untrackable by its fundamental nature. Once you introduce anything digital into the system, it becomes easy enough to add a tracking layer that I think it very unlikely any such system would remain free of one for long, no matter how it started out.
It's not like physical cash is untrackable either -- every bill has a unique serial number. Just like Bitcoin keeps a record of every transaction.
If you want it to be private and anonymous, that's up to you to make sure you don't tie anything about your identity when you acquire a particular physical card for use/storage. The exact same way you have to be careful when acquiring Bitcoin, for example.
It's not at all far-fetched to imagine a particular bill passing through dozens of hands in multiple states without any unique record of it being recorded anywhere.
A cash card, on the other hand, requires some kind of connection to a central authority to verify what it has on it—otherwise counterfeiting on a grand scale becomes all too easy. So every single transaction at least can be logged, whether or not it is by default—and there's no way for us as regular users of the technology to tell that it's not if the government says it's not. And given that it is a cash card, it will need to be loaded periodically if it is to remain useful—either that, or you'll just have to keep buying new ones with physical cash, which drastically decreases the convenience factor compared to either physical cash or a debit/credit card. It also drastically increases your risk footprint if you are attempting to remain below the radar.
So while anonymity is theoretically possible, untrackability is not—and the moment your identity is associated with even one use of the card (whether by a security camera, or correlation with cell phone location data, or loading it from a debit or credit card, or whatever else), the entire history of that card is at least potentially linkable to you.
You'd be surprised. The ATM knows the serial number of every bill it dispenses, and all those 20's spent at a retailer tend to go straight to the bank where serials are again scanned in.
But yeah, if you're trying to hide your activity from the government, you're going to need a complicated strategy of cards and transfers. This is no different from Bitcoin, or trying to spend cash you stole from a bank.
Digital cash is perfectly fine if you don't want to be tracked by algorithms trying to build profiles of everyone.
If you're trying to hide yourself from the police when they're trying to catch you personally... I mean, good luck. Even with paper currency.
I mean...frankly, I agree with you there. But there's a significant contingent—including around here—that seem to think that this is not only possible, but highly desirable. (Perhaps not necessarily "hide from the police when they're trying to catch you", but "avoid letting the government have even one iota more information on you than is strictly legally necessary", at the very least.)