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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

Its great being able to halt a whole country's economy by just attacking either the power network or the payment network. Its a huge hassle when it happens due to incompetence, so imagine how bad it will be if its caused by a bad (state) actor. That alone is reason enough to never drop cash.

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I am not convinced cash should be kept around for tail cases like this. If the power is out across a country, we have a lot bigger issues. If its just the payment network, well even if you kept cash in the system, who actually has it? If the payment network is down would the ATMs be down as well? I know even in America I am not carrying more than $100 in cash usually and often its $0.

Sitka lost their fiber optic link last summer. No internet, no cell phones, no texting, no credit cards. Lasted for days.

https://www.wrangellsentinel.com/story/2024/09/11/news/sitka... reports some of the consequences.

An upside of a cashless society is the lack of bags of cash being seen flowing through airports at election time. So in other ways, cashless makes a country more resilient.

It is an interesting point and I do wonder how much harder it makes money laundering?

Brazil instituted a cash-back system where any receipt that is created you can opt into putting your name/ID on it tying it to your person, even for cash transactions. You get around 0.5% cash-back if you do.

This is still important even for non-cash transactions because Brazil has quite strict financial secrecy laws (ie law enforcement can't see into your bank account without a warrant). So you have to opt-into giving the government this data.

I am not sure if it is good for money laundering (I assume it helps), but it massively reduced tax avoidance.

That is one of the reasons some governments have now stopped pushing the cashless society. In the Netherlands this realisation has set in, and the central bank now explicitly recommends people keep a sensible stash of cash for the inevitable (short term) crisis. Cash is a very useful tool when your digital infrastructure is being targetted.

Personally, while I will gladly pay with a contactless debit card, I refuse to shop at places which refuse cash. In the Netherlands, this is still rare though.

Besides, what about tourism? Even within Europe there is no guarantee my cards will just work in all places. Mostly? Yes. Always? Nope. Card fails? Just switch to cash. Going antiquing, or rifling through second hand book stalls at a book fair? Cash only is quite common there. It's not like I'll ever travel without cash.

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