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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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