The importance of cash in a technological society
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It’s easy to go through several hundred dollars a week. But since the $100 is barely legal tender, if you want to carry that much money, it’s a stack of $20s.
And, it’s a big stack, it’s uncomfortable to carry, and ungainly to use. Maybe if I was a mobster, used to a roll and a rubber band, it would be different. But I’m not, and whipping it out to thumb through it, just not comfortable with.
So the other alternative is constantly hitting up ATMs to reload. Or, I guess, take home a large stack on the weekend and withdraw from that throughout the week.
Before this was less of a problem. Couple 20s and you were set.
Nowadays, it’s kind of a pain in the neck.
A quick peek at the Fed suggests there are more $100 bills in circulation than $1s: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircv...
And then on the customer's side, you're just back to carrying a bunch of 20's and 10's
- buy a pack of gum with a counterfeit $100, get 98 real dollars back
- even with legit currency, it can throw off the drawer. Business might have a policy for cashiers to never have more than, say, $200 in the drawer. Force half of that to be your $100, and now the cashier has crippled change-making ability. Business have this policy to make them less tempting to rob and limit the damage if they are.
It’s easy for a cart of groceries to come out to $200 these days; how do these businesses accept cash in the first place?
It was not uncommon for someone to show up with their paycheck to do their weekly shopping, handing it over to the cashier and taking the rest in change. The amount of cash that worked through a busy grocery store must have been pretty amazing.
I’m sure the exact policy adopted, if any, depends on a number of factors such as how often cash is used and typical purchase size.
Then paid with card. That was the first time for me a dollar total made sense to pay with a $100
Oddly now that I live in Germany instead of the US, cash is more common since systems are down more often and it's not considered all that weird.
I wasn't aware of payment systems being down often in Germany, but in any case that would only be a minor contributing factor. Germany's dependence on cash is mostly due to deeper cultural reasons.
But coins for $1, $2 and $5 is likely more convenient. In particular, coins last like 20+ years in practice while paper degrades in 1/10th the time
I still like $2 bills though
It is very hard to figure out how to adjust the CPI over time; some things in the basket decline in volume (more efficient cars need less fuel per mile driven, but then again have people also changed their driving patterns or not?) and of course products switch in and out (who buys ring binders any more but of course a smart phone is a pretty necessary purchase yet didn't even exist 20 years ago).
Also you want to record the influence of high frequency signals (volatile commodities) yet damp it so it doesn't cause noise (fluctuations) in the signal.
Any then there are wholesale service changes (people eat out a lot more; when I was a kid I hardly knew anyone who could afford to eat in a restaurant more than once or twice a year).
There's a similar problem with GDP but GDP is so stupid that I don't care about that. It was "designed" (actually just spontaneously thought up by Kusnets) as an interim way to get some idea of what the hell was going on in the economy using just pencil and paper until somehting "real" could be developed.
If I use my credit card everywhere, I can't be robbed. If someone rips me off, I have a giant bank that will get my money back. I never have to hit up an ATM for anything; I never have to deal with coins and change. I don't even need to have my physical wallet on me to make a transaction. I don’t need to talk to the cashier or wait in line to order and pay for lunch or coffee. Since you mentioned mobsters, if I pay for my lunch with a card, I know that the business owner can’t as easily evade taxes, stealing from coffers that fund the government services I rely upon.
What exactly would compel me to want to use cash for anything? What about my life would improve?
I would just like to see better data privacy protections surrounding cashless payments, disallowing my card issuer and merchants from abusing and selling information about my transaction history. I would also like to see a low limit placed on transaction fees.
Technically, those are really small problems to fix, if we can get some political will around it. Many other non-US countries have probably already fixed those problems.
You can buy things without a third party bank skimming a bit from your purchases.
You can buy things even when Chase and Visa outages occur.
You can give cash to people without credit cards.
Children can manage money without their parents knowing or being able to monitor their spending.
Same with people in abusive relationships; the abused party can hide cash under their bed (or somewhere else) more easily than they can hide their bank account from their abusive partner.
You can buy things from the black market without being traced. For example, you can set up a lemonade stand without a permit with cash (this is illegal in many US states). You might argue "oh, but that should just be legal; that's not a problem with going cashless inherently." But there will always be stupid laws and regulations like this, and cash is a good way to shield yourself from them.
Except for your card, your PIN, and your $1000 phone. Mugging is still a thing these days. You can also get skimmed, or otherwise defrauded using payment cards.
People still get robbed all the time (not the least of which by the payment processors).
I absolutely can't stand this financial tracking. Nobody should. Cash sure is inconvenient, but at least try paying with gift cards or crypto like Monero, so many services support them.
If you're anti-tax more power to you, corrupt governments who launder EU funds don't deserve any more money.
I've heard several horror stories here about people getting deported and couldn't pay for education because their banks blocked them.
The credit card score system is absolutely dystopian and a foreign concept at least in my part of the EU. You increase your chances of getting doxxed by just having a credit card because all the credit score reporting is done publicly and exposes an enormous amount of data.
Never in my life have I ever walked into a store that doesn't accept cash.
Keep hearing talk about restricting cash payments. Never in my life will I or anyone I know comply with such a dystopian control of money.
The only way you "don't comply" with such a thing is by leaving the party you just spent $1000 (oh, you can't buy plane tickets for cash) to fly to to see all your friends, because you literally can't buy a bottle of water without a card.
Also recall that many people are literally unable to obtain payment cards, as they are blacklisted by banks or lack the requisite documents to open an account. The banks maintain their financial equivalent of a no-fly list (also with no recourse to figure out why you're on it, or a way of getting off).
AFAIK in Canada, secondhand sales are still subjected to the sales tax, which is 13% in Ontario. I noticed this because thrift stores like Goodwill still charge the 13% HST, despite the fact that they're selling secondhand goods that other people have donated for free which have already had their HST paid on their initial purchase.
In fact, you re-donate the item over and over again, and each time a sales tax will have to be paid. The government is totally double-, triple-, and n-dipping on sales tax despite the fact that no new goods have been manufactured.
Another thing to notice is that this disadvantages used goods compared to new goods. If used goods didn't carry the sales tax, they would be cheaper, thus consumers would be more incentivized to save money and do the right thing from an environmental perspective. But because sales tax apply to both cases equally, there is a bigger incentive to buy the new goods.
Is the any evidence that barter economies existed in large scale? I know this is a complicated question. But I think the author is not quite right. Most probably, people did not exchange pigs for wheat and then wheat for leather as its just too complicated. I think it's more likely that there was a common good that acted as a means of exchange (salt, cigarettes, gold, etc.).
> I should be able to pay you $150 (or whatever price we both agree on) without anyone taking a chunk off that transaction, or even knowing it happened. Note that your father already paid his taxes for the transaction when he purchased the Gameboy, 30 years ago.
I accept your opinion here. But I it's not more than an opinion and other people and governments might think different about this. Legal systems and hence tax systems are socially constructed and so there's no inherent truth against which you can argue.
> Gold is a finite resource because we know that there is a limit to the amount of gold on the planet, therefore it’s valuable. Fiat currency, on the other hand, holds value just because a governing entity is endorsing it.
Gold and money require both a working government that endorses basic rights to own and exchange goods.
There's not need to bring forward all these myths just to let people know that you like privacy and are against data mining and use of AI in this case.
Phones could just pop-up the validated amount when you bring the bill close. Would be cheaper and better than coins. Heck why aren't we able to validate all bills like that?
Oh right this would require a microprocessor... oh well.
It's, of course, not physically possible to prevent double spending of an offline smart card (just as it's not physically possible to prevent duplicating a $20 bill), but I think it could be made difficult enough, just as is done with physical currency.
People would generally have one of these cards, and use them to make change in cash transactions, or make small purchases outright.
The size of a credit card means that this isn't much more of a money laundering concern than a physical $100 bill is, and if the protocols have tight latency requirements, then these cards can't be used remotely, either. Criminals could punch the chip out (just like a nano SIM), but that's still order of magnitude the same as physical currency.
p.s., I don't have any credit card.
This feels like it's just throwing money away though. Like, just an example - Banana Republic will give you a CC for 20% off purchases + 200 dollars off of purchases. There's no fees. So as long as you always pay the minimum, or don't spend on it, you just made 200 bucks + 20% back on anything you've spent.
The "cost" is that American Express knows that I'm buying certain items. I'm ok with that... I find it kinda weird that anyone wouldn't be - is it supposed to be a secret that I wear pants?
I get wanting to avoid using a CC for something sensitive, but what's the issue with putting groceries and clothing on a CC that pays you back? It can easily be thousands of dollars back to you.
Debit cards don't have nearly the chargeback protections credit does. They don't have any of the warranty protections. They don't have any of the card-member services. Look at two people, one who just has a wad of cash and a debit card, and one who has that plus 3 or 4 credit cards. They both travel to a different country and get their debit account frozen erroneously. One is in a world of hurt, the other is mildly inconvenienced.
If you have a credit card and then suddenly made redundant then what? They all good and fun when you have an income but as soon as you loose that, your screwed.
At least with debit it's real time and that if you need that extra in a pinch, setup an overdraft.
Credit cards are form of evil and I'll stand by that.
I never carry a larger balance than I can pay off in full with cash any time.
I’ll take my “form of evil”, have fun with your overdraft fees.
Yes, and as an adult or a responsible individual it a good trait to have. Learn to use money and other financial means wisely. Take that step and it will make a lot of difference.
Unable to understand this is more evil to yourself than what the CCs do to you.
You can call your CC provider and ask them to reduce your limit to what you can afford to pay at the end of the month. They will hesitate, but most will end up doing that for you.
With a CC, anything you spend is turned into debt first, and the CC companies often position their products in a way that encourages accumulating more debt than you can realistically pay off.
Actual payment, in the sense that you are being charged for the thing/service you bought, is delayed.
For people who actually have to pay attention to stay on a monthly budget, for example because they are not overly wealthy, this is a danger.
Sure I am ready to admit that money equals debt in the end. But that does not change anything about the difference between immediate spending of money and taking up debt to spend money.
I'm sorry that you're not capable of simply not using a credit card, but that sounds like a problem you should work on. For 99% of adults (and a lot of children, to be honest) they're capable of doing so and credit cards are a way to save money and have better control of your finances (which itself helps you save and make more money).
If my credit account is negative I owe money.
If my credit account is at zero, I neither own money nor owe money.
If my debit account is at zero, I neither own money nor owe money.
Out of those options, owning money is still more triumph than credit.
I don't need a credit card. It's a false vision that I'm missing out on anything. My expenditure is mine with a debit card and I owe no one anything to purchase the item to which I can afford.
Credit cards are only fine if you can pay off the full amount at each month. But for any items that you have not paid off in full. You owe, your in debt to whoever until you pay off the full amount. If your lose your job and you have no buffer, your screwed. They don't cuddle up and waive your bills because you lost your job. They become vicious demons demanding more because you can't pay off the debt you owe.
> For 99% of adults (and a lot of children, to be honest) they're capable of doing so and credit cards are a way to save money and have better control of your finances (which itself helps you save and make more money).
I'm sorry but that's total bullshit; provide source please if your going to make such claims. Because all I know is that we live in a world full of debt. People are struggling to pay ends meet including their credit card bills.
> I don't need a credit card.
All those statements are true as far as they go. And sure, you don't need a credit card. (There are some scenarios such as some car rentals, that are going to be difficult with a debit card, but if you don't need those things then you don't.)
> It's a false vision that I'm missing out on anything.
This, however, is not true. You are certainly missing on a number of benefits. Obviously it's a choice to make, but it is not true to state you're not missing on anything.
* Credit cards give you back some of the fees that you're going to pay regardless, so you're losing money by not getting the cash back from a credit card.
* Unused credit limit increases your credit score. If you don't have credit cards your credit score is lower than it could be, which means you lose out on better rates and deals.
* The credit card regulations are more pro-consumer than debit card regulations, so if you ever experience fraud this may become relevant to you. In tech terms, a debit card is an open port to your bank account, a credit card is a firewall between your bank account and charges.
Those are the big ones. There's other smaller but real benefits to some credit cards like extended warranties and misc perks. I wouldn't have a credit card just for these but occasionally they help.
> Credit cards are only fine if you can pay off the full amount at each month.
Sure, exactly the same way how debit cards are only fine if you spend less than you make each month.
> If your lose your job and you have no buffer, your screwed.
If you lose your job and your account balance goes to zero, how are you paying anything with a debit card? You're not. Exactly equally screwed.
Hired a car in Canada just fine on my recent vacation to Canada. A whole trip, on debit. No Credit Card -- from Flights to AirBNB to arriving back home. Maybe back in the 90's, sure undeveloped nations probably; but that's a different scenario entirely.
> * Unused credit limit increases your credit score. If you don't have credit cards your credit score is lower than it could be, which means you lose out on better rates and deals.
No credit card and my score is high up there in the 90%'s. How do I know? I have a mortage where they do take scores in to account highly. If I had debt on my credit card I would too be losing points on my credit score if unpayments.
> * The credit card regulations are more pro-consumer than debit card regulations, so if you ever experience fraud this may become relevant to you. In tech terms, a debit card is an open port to your bank account, a credit card is a firewall between your bank account and charges.
Eh. Agree to Disagree.
> This, however, is not true. You are certainly missing on a number of benefits. Obviously it's a choice to make, but it is not true to state you're not missing on anything.
I still don't see what I'm missing. No one's named anything that is making me rush to get a credit card. $200 spending at Banana Republic? Yeah, no thanks.
It works for some, and for me it doesn't. I see it as an evil device that you need to keep a tight check upon. Telling everyone to get a credit card is bad advice.
It's a method of spending more money than what you really have and one with a both has advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantages way out more than advantages and as I said, if you can't pay, which is true to say for debit; your still better off on debit because with credit can take what you own regardless. Debit they can not.
From the Avis website:
Some Avis locations do not accept debit cards at the time of rental for any vehicle including locations in the Northern/Central NJ area, Philadelphia area, as well as other locations across the country.
> If I had debt on my credit card I would too be losing points on my credit score if unpayments.
But if you have lots of unused credit on your credit cards if increases your credit score. It's a silly game but it's what it is.
> > The credit card regulations are more pro-consumer than debit card regulations
> Eh. Agree to Disagree.
The regulations are written how they are, it's not a matter of opinion. You can choose not to care which is certainly your choice, but the regulations are what they are.
> I still don't see what I'm missing.
I guess you mean you choose not to care about the things you are missing, like leaving money on the table. Which is totally a choice, but surely you've now seen the benefits you're missing, even if you take the choice to opt out of them.
> Telling everyone to get a credit card is bad advice.
At least in the US, everything is biased towards making credit cards the optimal choice both to make and save money for all the reasons listed in this thread. For just about everyone, the best advice is to use credit cards.
“pro-consumer” is, inherently, a matter of opinion, not fact.
It was a random example. Lots of cards will just flat out give you hundreds of dollars. For example, I recall a card that would give $300 dollars to you if you spent some amount (maybe 2,000?) within 6 months. That's a free $300 bucks if you were going to spend that money anyways.
If yes, go ahead. If No, then why?
Because if you spend $2000 you don't have you then owe the repayment clause. Which makes the $300 $280 and then even less each month until you pay off the $2000.
From my post:
> if you were going to spend that money anyways.
Obviously if you weren't going to spend it anyways it's a waste.
If you don't have credit card and then suddenly made redundant then what?
The type of card you have or not have in your wallet is irrelevant in this scenario, the problem with unemployment is the lack of income.
> At least with debit it's real time and that if you need that extra in a pinch, setup an overdraft.
That is the worst advice ever. Overdraft fees are far worse then credit card interest. Why punish yourself like that?
So by not using a credit card, you’re not getting the 3% cash back (or rewards equivalent) and therefore paying more.
There are a handful of places that offer a discount if you pay with cash (or rather a fee if you pay with a card) in order to make these fees clear to the buyer, but it’s becoming rare. Usually gov websites like DMV or mom/pop shops.
*first purchase
Also, apart from your personal self-interest, every dollar you spend in cash is a vote for it to continue being accepted. This is important because there's a minority of people who are excluded from the financial system and depend on cash. For example: undocumented immigrants, sex workers, tax protesters, victims of identity theft, protesters who have had their bank accounts frozen [2], and people who, for inscrutable business reasons, are deemed too high-risk to have bank accounts [3]. If those were the only people who used cash, companies would probably not care to accept it anymore. But the more people continue to use cash on principle, the longer it will remain as an escape hatch for those who need it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/business/banks-accounts-c...
You're paying an additional 3% on all transactions, as that's the standard credit card processing fee.
You're also failing to build up your credit score, which is pretty important if you're ever looking to rent or buy a home.
OP needs to read some Graeber and stop perpetuating this myth.
> A second major argument of the book is that, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, debt is probably the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments.
Sure, bartering isn’t the oldest, but the book doesn’t seem to discount bartering entirely.
But, this statement: "Fiat currency, on the other hand, holds value just because a governing entity is endorsing it" just isn't true. I see it bandied about a lot by people who have a certain way of thinking. Consider modern "fiat" currencies of reasonably advance countries. What do they all have in common? Debt. Now, you may think that just makes the argument right there that they really are fiat, but what does that debt represent? It represents the endorsement of the currency by all the individuals and entities that hold that debt. Any government that doesn't want their fiat currency to collapse has to behave in a way that ensures those creditors that their confidence is well placed.
Incidentally, the same network effects apply to digital currencies, as does the expectation of future growth. But for the most part, the future growth of digital or physical currencies is based on the growth of the network effects, because currencies themselves don't generate revenue for "shareholders."
We can do material analysis. Observable reality matters, right?
All the Coop supermarkets closed for 3 days due to a cyberattack in the USA.
Maestro circuit went down for 1-2 days occasionally.
3 days with no food, if it happens in winter, are no joke.
Three days with no food will have no negative consequences of any kind. It isn't even possible that you'd be harmed by going without food for such a short period.
I just recovered from pneumonia; one of the symptoms was a loss of appetite. The disease was not a joke; the fact that I didn't eat for three days was meaningless.
(Lack of water can cause problems much more quickly than lack of food can.)
It's also not an argument in the context of maintaining payment systems. Who even needs to pay for anything, right? People survived just fine before there was money.
Going without food for three days has no negative consequences. There are no effects that will last beyond your next meal. And of the effects that occur before then, none are significant. You will not be stopped from doing anything you might otherwise have liked to do. You won't even be inconvenienced in the effort.
"No joke" is much stronger language than it's reasonable to use for that circumstance.
I can clearly tell that you've never been in Sweden during the winter.
The first and last of those combined to create severe problems related to dehydration, such as when I briefly passed out in the kitchen and had an uncontrolled fall into the furniture there.
So my advice tends to be focused on that problem: force yourself to drink as much as you can (I was given a target of two liters a day which proved to be less than would have been ideal, but it was about all I could do to drink that much in a day), stock water or, better, sports drinks close to your bed so that you don't have to get up before rehydrating, and ideally have some people around you who can check on you and bring you things.
When I did not appear to be getting any better after three days, and a splitting headache persisted through a fairly aggressive schedule of tylenol and ibuprofen, I visited an emergency room and was given antibiotics. That's when I learned I had pneumonia.
Medical advice on loss of appetite was: don't worry about it; whether you eat or not doesn't matter at all (assuming you and your appetite recover on a reasonable time frame).
Back on topic, this is true in general of formerly healthy people. Lack of food will not cause any problems in the present, because you were not suffering from it in the recent past. And unless it persists a long way into the future, it also won't cause any problems in the future, because you will regain access to food and start eating again.
Try not eating for three days when you're otherwise healthy, and observe what it does to your body and mind.
Only the first 18 hours or so are a problem (depending on your eating habits) day 3-5 are the best, because your mind is really clean and you don't feel any usual discomforts from eating late or eating something you shouldn't.
You do feel light and weak of course and I'd recommed avoding any hard work but otherwise 3-5 days without food is completely fine (assuming you don't have any conditions that require a stable intake of food).
That's the point here. It doesn't do anything to your body and mind. Both will continue functioning at the same level as before. Three days is not a significant period of time to go without food. This is like asking what happens to your car if you drive it for an hour without refueling. Nothing will happen unless it was already running on empty.
There is a very common belief that missing meals for a single-digit number of days will hurt you, but this is not based on reality.
Note that, if you assume that fasting has negative effects on your body and mind, the immediate implication is that eating is more important when you're sick (and need to be functioning well), not less important. The implication is false over the short-to-medium term, and this is possible because the premise is false.
The overarching question of freedom from surveillance is much more interesting. It sucks, but it seems for most of us the tedium of using cash is much more inconvenient than value of the perceived loss of freedom & privacy.
I don't see why we must pay fees to foreign companies and give them all of our data.
But the average swede doesn't care about privacy at all. We have a website where you can just look up the address of everyone.
I was in Sweden for 2 weeks in September btw. Using cash was a challenge.
The biggest pain was bill splitting at restaurants. That's so much easier with cash.
Lovely country, btw, recommended. California-ish prices. Get your SIM from 7-11, they're cheaper and also get the 7-day public transit pass, totally worth it.
> Using cash was a challenge.
Uh? Where did they not accept cash?
> 7-day public transit pass
This doesn't exist in every city. We don't have it for example.
When I was in Stockholm and Uppsala in 2019, all supermarkets I visited had signs posted saying that they do not accept cash. Around the same time I read an article from an American newspaper (New York Times?) about how, for example, even Swedes selling coffee at events could easily get payment terminals and no longer wanted to take cash.
People selling coffee and stuff will use swish, which no tourist ever will have.
Second to respond: "Uh? Where did they not accept cash?"
As a tourist I mostly went to restaurants, cafes, and museums. The grocery stores still took cash but the other places not so much. I had to make a decent effort to get rid of the remainder of what I had prior to my departure. Tourists and locals often don't have significant cross-overs, so that might be the difference in our experience.
I defer to you of course on the actual experience of cashlessness. I wish you the best.
Is HN read in El Salvador?
It would be interested to hear from someone living over there how it is going with lightning network adoption.
I don't expect this to be the case forever. The value proposition is just too strong. These things take time, especially in places where the people are very suspicious of government actions.
Your money will be the very last of your concerns then. You will need time and effort to repel the hordes wanting your food and water. You cannot eat cash.
Power and/or internet goes out semi-regularly (thanks PG&E) and most of the smaller shops around here go cash-only while offline.
Think of natural disasters like hurricanes where power and internet may be out for a few weeks. All those fancy internet-connected payments mechanisms are out and even simple credit card approvals are usually out. Cash is what you need then.
Same story repeating with financial systems/data right now. You will get your digital cash back faster than you will get physical cash back when it's stolen. As to privacy and control, don't kid yourself that the plebs have ever had it.
> By their nature, fiat currencies are manipulatable.
Like it's some kind of big revelation, when it's basic AP macroeconomics monetary policy.
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macr...
I'd go one step further: I would use my own, REAL, transactions, to see what GPT has to say about me!
I would be so curious to hear the results.
This might even become a service. Hiding / obfuscating transactions shouldn't be too difficult.
e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/08/29/...
(From a 30,000-foot view, it's kind of analogous to cryptocurrency. In a failed state, you don't accept cigarettes as payment because you want to smoke them—but because you know you can exchange them again to someone else, and to someone else, eventually reaching a smoker, who creates the demand sink. Similarly, people accept cryptocurrency units because they know at the end of the commerce chain, there will be drug dealers guaranteeing an intrinsic demand).
Also, how is tax stamp trafficking relevant to a grey-market barter system?
Tax stamp trafficking is used to cover for those fakes as it make them look real, and it is also used to avoid getting arrested for selling contraband.
An example: https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
Edit: tide, not ride.
We never, as a species, had any meaningful instance of barter economies. We've had the concept of debt since before we had currency. I imagine this is what we would try to "return" to if cash disappeared, and people needed to exchange goods and services without authorities and intermediaries. This would though require a community, a social fabric -- something that has been steadily eroding for a long, long time.
This could, just as easily, have been a story about an elderly person who was trying to withdraw a significant amount of cash to "help someone in need," where that someone is a predatory scammer.
This could, also just as easily, be a story about someone trying to withdraw cash from an account known to be linked to human trafficking, where the "overblown bureaucracy" is attempting to skirt KYC/AML.
If you're running a business dealing with cash has a cost. You need a till, you need to keep track of what goes in and out, and at the end of the week you need to take the cash and deposit it in the bank. This is all overhead, and it's much more efficient when all of that is done automatically by Square or whatever POS system you choose.
High traffic services such as public transportation or supermarket shopping will bottleneck with cash. Can you imagine if everyone that wanted to use the Tube in London needed to pay in cash? You'd have a queue that starts in the Cotswolds. Alternatives (like in Berlin) are to make sure everyone buys their train ticket beforehand, and then use ticket inspectors to make sure people travelling have paid - this will lose the transport operator money and make it harder to optimise services based on real-time demand.
We aren't moving towards cashlessness because of some government conspiracy to track us everywhere (governments can do that easily enough via the Internet anyway), it's because it's cheaper, faster, and more convenient for everyone participating in the economy.
Finally, I don't think the dystopia painted in the article is realistic in western countries. The flow of money in the economy is primarily controlled by the private banking sector, with oversight from a central bank (which is public-private hybrid). Transactions can be handled directly from bank to bank, or via a payment processor like VISA or Mastercard. These are all for-profit corporations, and they comply with governments for requests for data, but governments do not have any direct intervention in individual transactions, nor are there rules that could be applied to block transactions on a granular level.
TL;DR we're going cashless because it's objectively better.
I looked into Canada's bank seizures, and at the hearings it came out that it was the banks not the government that was pushing for that. Canada's elites do act like the general population are more property than citizens... But I don't see how physical money can solve the problem of tyranny better than digital.
A tyranny can search and seize your physical assets just as much as your digital ones. They passed laws making it harder to store money anonymously, and storing digital assets anonymously might actually be easier in our day and age
That raises both cost and risk for the government.
Eg, people could still distribute cash at the protest for fuel and food. That would be impossible with digital money.
The fee of credit card companies are much higher than the cost of dealing with cash, it seems.
No, I think governments want electronic only payment specifically to raise tax revenue first, because they can get documentation on every little transaction and so can squeeze taxes out of them if they need to, as well as to keep the capital in a central location so as to be in control of it in the event of an emergency. Banks like it because every unit of currency in the economy constitutes their reserves. All in all this looks to me like the dictionary definition of fascism, that is, the marriage of government and corporate power.
Obviously the dynamics of this will be per-country, and in a country like Germany which is predominantly cash-based my argument is not true, in a country like Sweden or a city like London it is. I expect this economic pressure to spread to more countries and cities unless there is a strong resistance to it.
An analogy HN might understand: Asking banks and payment processors to report on transactions is like when the UK government tried to get ISPs to store customer's browsing histories. It puts a big maintenance and security burden on the ISP, creating a chilling effect in the economy that no government wants. The type of information that can be recorded is limited because TLS traffic won't contain the individual paths the user visited, it'll just record the IP address being connected to, the time, and the amount of data. Transaction data is at this level of fidelity - you can know that party A transferred $X to party B, but the details of the purchase are not known. For that you'd need to request the transaction details from the individual company, which would have records but is only legally obligated to keep them for 6 years.
I'll leave you with the UK's Payment Markets Summary for 2022, which includes a forecast for 2031 - https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2022-08/UKF%20Paym.... People are using these forms of payments because they're easier, faster, and empower them to keep track of their finances. There's a reason challenger banks have been successful - people want to be able to keep track of their spending, and that's really hard with cash.
Cash isn't going away in part because how else are MPs going to pay for cocaine and prostitutes, but I expect more and more businesses to not accept the cost of handling it, especially as it becomes a minority payment method.
What's the difference between these places? Is it cultural? Maybe a little bit. But it's largely due to governments constructing artificial incentives. And why do governments do that? Because they have an incentive to do so. Collect taxes, "stop crime" (which necessarily means tracking subjects), you can use the word "conspiracy" to dismiss it out of hand but this is happening because governments want it, it is not happening organically. Note I'm not talking about the appeal of electronic payment, I'm talking about going cashless.