The Luddite's Guide to Defending Cash (2023)
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If I were a coffee shop I'd take cash just as an operational hedge against that kind of thing, let alone "the government has banned coffee shops" tail risk.
The real backup seems to be having two card readers on different networks.
What? I haven't had to go publicly shame my neighbors for not being revolutionary enough, at least that I remember.
OH did you play by the rules, well then you get "cash back" on your purchase. Oh you didn't play by the rules, well the 3 percent markup that is on everything purchased with credit is going in the pocket of someone else. You should do better and we will give you some of that money back. Thanks for playing and do remember dont be poor.
Im a very pro capitalism type of person, but our credit, and credit card/transaction system is fucked up on a lot of levels.
Oddly this is actually NOT true: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2024.2...
For the Chinese, and their recent introduction to capitalism the social credit score is a way of enforcing some Chinese cultural things and a lot of "communist" things (ala "little pinks").
In America social stratification and fiscal stratification are linked. Poor people don't get to go to an ivy without brains, rich kids don't really end up at community colleges do they? If you don't think merchants giving %3 to cc companies and not being able to pass that cost on to customers isn't a bite on everyone who isn't using credit I don't know what to tell you.
We don’t have anything like a Chinese social credit system yet.
https://www.investopedia.com/what-to-know-and-do-if-you-re-l...
This is just like how many people in major news outlets now claim people are hijacking others and stealing their cars because of the high price of automobile and they need to steal the cars to get to their jobs and to the bread store. It’s a leftist caricature but now how the world actually is.
If you are happy with the idea that there doesn't need to be any other form of money than centrally administered digital money, then by definition the piece was not for you. It said so right to you right at the start.
The arguments are unlikely to be convincing to you, or else you already wouldn't need any convincing. To me the arguments are self-evident and obvious, and sort of makes no sense to try to explain them except to a child. It's like asking why one should want to eat food or avoid getting burned by fire.
According to the articles own opening statement of purpose, it wasn't written for someone like you to read and be convinced of something they didn't already think. It was written for someone like me to read so that I can better articulate arguments when conversing with someone like you.
But I rarely ever bother to do that for the reason I just gave.
If someone doesn't recognize the problem, nothing anyone else says will change that, because they were already aware of all the same facts, and the reasoning that proceeds from those facts is too simple to not grasp.
So if given the same facts, someone doesn't think there's a problem, it's because they simply don't agree about the importance or imacts or implications of some of the facts.
That's essentially just feeling and opinion, and that can't be argued with.
So I usually only say "Go forth and enjoy your terribly_unwise_thing".
In this case, go forth and enjoy your all-digital life.
By the numbers, it will likely go fine for you.
By which I mean because that's the way all things work no matter how bad or wrong.
If a harm affects everyone, then it's either indirect and deniable (in other words hidden), or it's mild enough on an individual scale that each individual just tolerates it. Collectively someone is getting away with murder, but individually you just tolerate some small theft or technical injustice because that is the path of least resistance, and a lot of people equate that with "rational".
Or if a harm is significant, then it doesn't affect most people and so most people don't care about the propblem only a few people face who aren't them.
IE, by the numbers, both you and I will probably never suffer any obvious problem from money being all digital, and all centralized in orgsnizations we can't audit or control.
The difference is when I see a single instance of someone's life being destroyed or even merely controlled by the abuse or even mere mismanagement of the power granted by digital assets and digital ID, I recognize that there is no special difference between myself and that unlucky person, and the mechanism that provides that power should probably simply not exist.
The problem is not that some power isn't administered well enough, the problem is that the means exist at all.
I am not ok with relying on essentially a lottery that I won't be abused, not where it's artificial and avoidable. We have to suffer all kinds of luck no matter what, but that in no way excuses voluntarily giving your life into someone else's hands and just hoping they treat to right, or excuses them for creating systems that grant themselves that much control and requiring you to trust them with that much control and veto power over every tiny aspect of your life. It doesn't matter if they mostly don't get in your way.
As an IT guy I sometimes get funny looks from a customer when I avoid knowing their most important passwords. "Can't I trust you?" Absolutely. The way you know you can trust me is I never ask you to trust me.
Anyone who not only asks, but requires you to trust them with some significant power over you, is automatically in the wrong. Automatically. It's an indellible property of the very act itself.
Electronic payments depend on a long series of things working correctly, any one of which can block you.
Electricity and internet connectivity are two obvious ones, which do fail.
More subtle, both you and the recipient of the payment must be in good standing with whatever authority (or multiple ones) the payment is flowing through. If either one is blocked for whatever obscure reason, no payment can be made or received. So now you have the denial of service risk of a third party arbiter on whether the payment you're trying to make is fine with them, or risk being blocked.
Cash suffers from none of these problems! It is strictly peer to peer, requires absolutely nothing external to be functioning and has no dependency on any third parties. You have bills in your pocket, you can pay anyone at any time for whatever you want. Completely anonymously and it cannot be blocked. Aside from the small inconvenience of having to carry the bills, cash is the perfect payment mechanism.
Love the Big Brother, Big Bouncer and Big Butler distinctions.
Some more mundane reality from the streets... actual people who work in actual shops and people who actually buy stuff are on this week's Cybershow [0] saying just how much everyone hate this cashless and robotic rubbish. Everyone with a IQ above double figures can see it's one power outage away from food riots (resilience is my personal bugbear - and I sincerely think society is screwing itself with cashless ideology and that we ought to treat it as seriously as soil erosion, climate change and other threats to food and energy continuity of operation.)
Tell us more about this scenario. You’re positing a situation where due to an inability to accept cashless payments, supermarkets refuse to sell food to people for an extended period, leading to mass unrest? In the UK?
The UK power grid is remarkably resilient. To the extent that a half hour long power outage in London over 20 years ago is considered notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article [1]
An extended power outage affecting access to payment capabilities across a large region would be an emergency but it wouldn’t collapse civilization. There’s little reason to suspect people would not find some way to transact while power is restored.
The Bailey: ‘cashless payment is fragile and a single outage would lead to riots in the streets’
The Motte: ‘internet and power outages happen and are annoying’
Evidence for the easily defended motte position does not defend the outrageous Bailey.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/us/puerto-rico-shortages-...
Because those are not the facts I am looking at. We just made it through a winter where the UK government put a 30% probability on rolling brownouts due to gas instability and put additional blackout emergency plans into place for the first time since the 1970s "Winter of Discontent".
I've also been riding my motorcycle without a helmet for 50 years, and never had a problem with that yet.
In this scenario where people are desperate to do a food riot, a power outage has occurred for multiple consecutive days if not at least a week. In which case, something truly apocalyptic is happening, in which case I doubt people would be civilized enough to bargain for food for useless cash or shavings of gold, in that scenario resources are the only useful 'cash'. In this scenario, it's likely it'd be some sort of national emergency and I'd imagine most people have enough food in their pantries to tide them over until the government provides food or restores power.
Modern power infrastructure is incredibly resilient and outages are usually localized to regions and power is restored within hours. I understand the idea of using cash for privacy reasons or keeping few hundred just in case, but keeping with cash just in case a food riot happens is wholly unconvincing.
Like some bad weather? I'd argue that accurately describes swathes of Texas just a few years ago. Some areas lost power for days.
In this scenario, why would I trade the food which I need now for cash? I don't care about a potentially large payoff in the future when my immediate needs are not met.
Are you saying that you would not give anyone else food?
So you accept that no one else will give you food?
Basically all transactions should stop?
Or are you saying that transactions should not bother being counted. Everyone just takes what they say they need wherever they can find it?
What is the guiding argument or thesis here?
Imagine the point at which my neighbour is willing to riot for food. That means his neighbour is also likely willing to riot for food and so on and so forth. This also means I'm likely willing to riot for food. I am not trading my last couple of meals of which I don't know when I'll get for a thousands or even hundreds of thousands dollars.
The point is if it gets bad enough that people immediate needs are not met, cash or money means very little. No matter how much of it you have, if you are at the point where you're rioting for food, there is likely not enough food for you or your neighbour who also doesn't know when they'll get their next meal.
Do you think there will exist a point at which a person would much prefer food in their hand than even larger sums of cash? My point is that when a food riot occurs is when cash becomes worth less than food.
Having cash means you'll be one of the people buying food that weekend, and not stuck in line at ATMs or simply unable to purchase food until the card system comes back online.
Maybe you need plywood and tarps and a few people to help. Maybe your workplace was flattened, but there's plenty to do - I'd rather get cash at the end of the day than a bunch of canned goods, unless I'm truly out of food and it's truly scarce.
I can use that cash for other things like fuel, or stuff that was lost because my house was flattened.
But in a scenario where people are desperate enough to riot for food, there will likely be shortages of other stuff, too. I'd assume it's more intuitive and fair to convert fuel-to-dollars and dollars-to-bread than fuel-to-bread, or days-wages-to-soup, which is the whole point of money anyway.
What odds would you give me of something like this happening over the course of next ten or even hundred of years? That scenario in which people are bartering for resources is a scenario in which power has been lost for multiple weeks in the United States? The odds you should be giving me is on the order of millions or tens of millions, at least.
A fender bender can mess up your day or weekend plans just as much as a 200-car pileup of flaming hazmat trailers - and the minor events occur far more frequently.
Well, 100% certainty since it has happened within the decade.
In reality you have personnel which shows a deep frown if the till says 42.52 and you give them 50 in bills, and 2.52 in coins, so they can give you an even 5 and 3 or 2 coins back. (adapt to your local currency and coinery)
You can hear their mental scream "Oh my gawd! Aye need to calculate! Ze horror!"
Fuel? With no electricity? Hand pumped? Somewhere far out in fly-over-county maybe.
But most places I've lived seem to have plenty of non-IoT cash registers, and it's not infrequently that something is wrong with their card system, EBT is down, etc. That the financial district Sweetgreen won't be able to take my money is a risk I'm willing to assume.
It's a much bigger deal when you're walking (or in rural America) and are faced with an hour+ trek to another store (or pay $3.75 to get $20 out, assuming the ATM works). I've also had unexpected overdrafts that affect only my account, and having a couple hundred to a thousand-some dollars of cash in my house has saved me numerous times.
Fuel options with no electricity do in fact involve talking to some guy named Jim Bob, Buddy, or Mack, who is gonna want cash or raccoon pelts, not more canned goods or bread (he has plenty already, and I'm all out of raccoon pelts).
Which brings me back to my original point: in any real catastrophic event, it's going to be other random people you're dealing with, not the IoT devices of faceless corporations. And most are not gonna want to negotiate raccoon pelts to fuel oil (or gold shavings, for that matter).
Because then you pay cash, to state the obvious.
Even here in silicon valley the local convenience stores every so often have a sign that they're only taking cash today because their network/computer/payment-processor is down right now.
No big deal, pay cash.
Next, it can't light the store. In mid-summer you can probably use the parts of the store with some natural light for most of the day, the rest of the store is too dark to allow customers, as is the behind the scenes re-stocking etc., they also can't open the delivery bays which are electrically shuttered, and they can't operate the doors, the escalators or the elevators.
Now, I live in a major port city, so obviously in reality the power isn't going to stay off here, not for days, at home I've had a handful of short (< 2 hour) outages and one serious (~4-8 hour) outages in maybe 30 years living in this city. Anywhere with multiple supplies or backups is going to have even less problems.
I can buy that things are different in rural areas, but it seems to me that mostly you need backups for other reasons anyway, and both electricity and IP are great in those terms because they're so fungible compared to conventional backups.
In the cash scenario, customers who have cash in hand can buy stuff; now the store is running low on goods, but they have a pile of money in a safe. So they need to take that money to a wholesaler to buy more goods to sell.
If they sell a bunch of goods for digital payments, the money’s all sitting in their online account. When they want to restock they can pay the wholesaler digitally and have stuff delivered.
It’s almost like there’s a reason we invented banks.
The problem for a society that worships efficiency and convenience is that security feels like a luxury too expensive to maintain. That becomes a rationalisation to say things like "that will never happen". Or psychological 'splitting' ; "If the power goes off we're all screwed anyway, so why even try to prevent needless massive loss of life as an interim posture"
> Modern power infrastructure is incredibly resilient and outages
I'm sorry but you've been exposed to wishful thinking. I've a masters degree on my desk from an MoD student who did a thesis on black start and lockout scenarios as part of national security research (sorry I am unable to share it but you can dig up the same stuff from any published civilian university these days). I don't wish to be alarmist but there is a great deal to be concerned about and a great amount our governments and engineers need to do to secure things here in the UK and in the US.
So what’s happening there? Reversion to a cash economy?
Not really.
> In 2023, most card-based transactions in Ukraine were cashless despite the full-scale war... cashless card-based transactions accounted for 65% of the total amount of card-based transactions last year, up from 61% in the pre-war year 2021.
https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi...
> In Ukraine, digital payments have become mainstream with 60% of payments with Mastercard cards being made digitally today, ... For five years running, Ukraine has ranked among the top 10 countries worldwide at Mastercard by the number of NFC payments using digital cards.
https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/202...
I'm wondering if they meant 'contactless'. That would fit with the other concept. As long as the infrastructure is up, they may prefer contactless or mobile pay, but what do they use when the infrastructure to accept ANY card is down?
I understand the European chip model is slightly more resilient in this regard-- the idea of not being able to get a live authorization is a little more baked in, and you can fall back to "we expect to settle the transactions a few hours or a day or two later" concerns. I suspect the standard practices go out the window for a long term siege.
Just get the Tories out and you can get an energy system where almost every bit has trivial black start capability, there's no technical reason why it'll be a problem in a renewable dominated system (and that's ESO's word, project Distributed ReStart).
Also, it's funny you say "greatest respect" when your opening was "you have to be mentally challenged to disagree".
Do you know what happens the first moment there's anything that resembles a disaster... All the water gets bought up, because no one bothers being prepared.
Your average gas station gets gas delivered once a day (or more). Gas delivery stops, were screwed pretty quick.
The point being, the world is far far more brittle than anyone understands.
Recently we had this: https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/ So a day for a grocery chain in Sweden and a gas station chain in New Zealand.
For me "There is a 3 out of 4 chance of a damaging earthquake in the Bay Area in the next 30 years." From: https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/blog/2020/san-francisco-... Is this a week of no power (so no cc's, no atm, no cell service).
A cornal mass ejection has 1 in 194 odds, is it bad enough that it's a grid killer? I don't know what the odds are for that (as in having EMP), and its gonna be fun if we see it coming to!
A major payment processor failing, or payment network failing for a few days is possible. What happens when a grocery chain is open and suddenly "cash only". It has happened before.
You dont need a big, or national event where social order is maintained but cash is essential to keeping things moving.
The point at which the only way of transacting is through cash during the duration of this outage.
We get one of these regionally ever decade or so. Go back another (few) decade and weeks of no power in upstate NY (dairy farmers working with the amish to hand milk cows... people are resourceful). As a kid 3-4 days without power post hurricane wasn't a big deal. If plastic can't pay for things, I think it's gonna get ugly pretty quick, keep some cash around the house is a good policy.
This comes across as a very sheltered view I have to say.
Modern systems are very fragile, as they get ever more complicated combined with less and less appetite by utilities to spend on redundancy and disaster preparedness (cuts into profits).
> In this scenario where people are desperate to do a food riot, a power outage has occurred for multiple consecutive days if not at least a week.
In 2017 hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico without power for many weeks (in many areas) and multiple months (in some parts) (or even a few years in most remote areas). Society goes on, but you'll be well served to have cash.
While that was a major hurricane, electricity outages of like a week are quite common with smaller storms.
It is super classy to pre-emptively call everyone stupid who disagrees with you.
Your argument is really flimsy, and counts on your reader not knowing how Chicago works (or, for that matter, what a food desert is).
The number of serious policy proposals they’ve been able to accomplish is effectively zero.
He is not able to purchase such a gift card from the US site (gift cards are country specific). He is also not able to purchase such a gift card from the Mexico site (which demands a Mexican national ID to process the payment). He asks for my help. I try to use the same Mexican site, which refuses to take any of the 4 cards I try. I then use the website's option to "pay at OXXO" (a low tech system to pay for bills, in cash, through a large network of convenience stores owned by the local Coca Cola distributor).
Cash saves the day.
Next up he wants to pay me back. Cashapp/Venmo/Zelle are only for US residents. Local wires within the US are a pain. International wires are worse, and cost half of the amount he borrowed.
Solution? Pay me back in cash next time im in town.
The more suprising bit is that in this random anecdote cash ends up being superior to "cashless" even for one of its worse use cases (cross border transactions).
Electronic payments are by definition centralized and gated, because someone has to operate them. That someone(s) is the gate.
(Sure, blockchain.. I don't see that happening.)
Ironically, I'd be more comfortable with digital payments if they were implemented through the state than the current private-sector plays. The government has obligations to service all legal customers, so there's limited wiggle room for them to deplatform. Meanwhile, private banks and card networks can be bullied into making some industries off-limits.
Everything is cash-based. My dad got paid in cash. He spent in cash, in stores as well as freely transacting with friends and family. There were (hardly) any CCTV cameras anywhere and of course no smartphones.
The personal freedom and lack of surveillance might be hard to imagine for young people.
The government knows close to nothing about you. They know you exist and would know that you have a job. Nobody really knows how much money you have, what you spent it on, your whereabouts and the mentality very much was that this is nobody's business. The distributed nature of cash makes arbitrary seizure impractical.
Now the burden of proof is reversed. "Money as software" makes possible an unlimited number of disturbing scenarios.
Author should mention technical requirements for cashless society. Data around the globe, device for everyone and electricity to power those devices. Which is something that most people cannot afford. Also, this would require constitutional right for having those devices.
1) I am not the author
2) I agree with the ideas presented
3) I've written similar pieces on similar ideas, have researched
the topic and been interviewed as an expert for documentary
film and television.
Now obviously we each experience things we agree with differently than those we disagree with.
It does seem that ideas around cashless commerce are very polarising.
But what I am seeing in this this thread is some quite disappointing modes of argument, including your own comment which is really just fulminating against the style of writing and the author.
It would be much more interesting to know why you feel aggrieved by opposition to cashless technologies. Can you tell us that?
https://theblockchainsocialist.com/how-to-live-with-contradi...
Perfect accounting ? Keeping bank receipts? Videoing you whole waking life?
10,000 of thousands of euros later I don’t trust them strangely.
Having over €15.000 in the piggy bank or mattress does not seem exceptionally unreasonable.
But from what was stated earlier in the thread I guess that is illegal now. The state can take your piggy bank, just for living on physical cash.
I don't think you're talking about this, so maybe you can link to a government site with the relevant law you're discussing? It's pretty trivial to demonstrate it in most cases, and I think even a paper ledger is enough for most situations.
It may have been the cross border thing but borders are pretty small here and I don’t know you need to emmigrate
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/dea-seized-a-womans-bag-of-cash-...