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Comment by sillyfluke | Hacker News Reader

> All my money is electronic

Yes, one positive aspect of these types of events is that the hazing against the cash-first minority worldwide has ebbed slightly. Sweden seems to be backtracking from their cashless push due to the threat of Russian cyberattacks as well.

In related news, high-speed trains appear to have been sabotaged in Spain today, causing transportation chaos again. This happened while they have not been able to conclusively determine the cause of the blackout.

The plot thickens...or gets sidetracked, depending on what the truth turns out to be.

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> hazing against the cash-first minority

That's...a pretty strong opinion.

Otherwise cash will still have it's issue during a blackout. For instance I'm not sure most shops would operate their POS during a blackout or without any connectivity, at least if there is any hope of resuming normal operations within days, it would screw the ledgers. ATMs of course are dead. Vending machines are also probably not ready for that (Japan has emergency ready ones, I can't imagine other countries doing that)

We're already in a world where cash is second class citizen, and it won't just get back to the "good old days" because of a temporary outage.

And it will also be a different story altogether if power/internet never comes back. Having cash stashed somewhere might not help you that much.

>That's...a pretty strong opinion.

I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives.

In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and simple.

Denmark is often cited as an example of a society that's advanced for electronic payments, and it is — but there's a law here that means, in most circumstances, a business must accept cash.

The official advice was changed from "keep some cash for emergencies" to "keep some cash in small banknotes for emergencies" to "pay in cash at least sometimes, to keep the systems that deal with it functioning".

> That's...a pretty strong opinion.

If you're a person who uses cash a lot, the comments you hear do start to feel a bit like hazing. You very often hear jokes like "who uses cash anymore?" both directed at you and not, like you're a crazy person for preferring not to support Visa's advertising empire with a ~1-3% tithe on every purchase.

I think there's the disconnect between the US perspective and the other countries which makes the discussions difficult.

The EU caps the credit card rate at 0.2-0.3%, so the moral argument for not using card payments is a lot weaker, and most countries have also widely used non credit card electronic payment.

SEA countries are mostly in the same boat, with higher credit card fees but more competition.

No one reputable cares about cash anymore. The people clinging to paper money are analog conspiracy nutters, the kind of people who hoard pennies in mason jars and refuse convenient contactless payments. I'm pleased to see them awkwardly counting out wrinkled bills while the rest of us tap and go at the spaces I inhabit.

It's interesting and informative to watch how different places handle power failures (which where I am in the USA are not common but not entirely rare, either).

Most of the bars keep serving to cash customers, and use paper to make notes for future bookkeeping. Some even start using paper tabs.

Big companies switch to backup generators (Walmart) or immediately cease business (also Walmart, because the card communication failed).

Some smaller ones had no lights to continue to be safe inside, so chased everyone out.

Other ones had enough windows and kept selling on a cash basis, making notes by hand. Some of these could open the cash drawer others couldn't, but made do with what they could.

Which IMO highlights what the money is. It’s a trust bond, nothing more and nothing else.

Paper money isn’t guaranteed to be always accepted. It only takes most governments a one day to say something like “because of <big crisis> we’re no longer accepting <currency> as they’re subject to <something bad>”. Paper money becomes fireplace material in an instant. (Or dystopian scenario - dictator decides that currency transactions can be done only by citizens, all other transactions are void).

What is really weird is this dualism in trust. On one side there’s distrust to government controlled organizations about online money, and on the other there’s trust that government (own or foreign) won’t regulate it into oblivion for some silly reason.

If we get to apocalypse level crisis one is much better off on stocking cigarettes, coffee and chocolate anyway…

It's even more amusing to realize that multiple times in history, paper money has continued to "have value" and be used in exchange even after the government devalued it completely - usually by ceasing to exist.

It is not at all certain that there was any sabotage. Supposedly it was sabotage because important wires were stolen, but wire has been stolen by criminals for decades to sell for the materials. And for the last few years there has been an increase of delays, breakdowns and failures in the whole railway network. It is far more likely that common theft on a decaying system caused the problems, but that would pin the blame on the government for this decay. As such they prefer to blame anyone else, including shadowy enemies sabotaging the country.

The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. See https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916893181876326868?t=32a... A high level engineer in a Spanish generation plant confirmed this to me.

Nobody knows the cause at the moment. All that we have are guesses and FUD. Even "high level engineers" don't know for sure what happened.

> The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics.

But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia to compensate the frequency drop caused by a single fault anywhere in the grid, the system operator will either order photovoltaics and wind turbines to reduce their generation to a safer level, or order traditional rotating generators to operate as synchronous condensers (which adds inertia without adding generation).

Which means that either there was a double fault (two faults close enough in time that there wasn't enough time to reconfigure the system to a safer state before the second fault), or that the modeling of how the photovoltaics and wind turbines would react to a single fault was incorrect (for instance, expecting them to stay connected for longer on that level of frequency drop). My personal guess is that we're going to see a repeat of what happened here in Brazil in 2023, as I explained in another comment on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821801), where a single fault was enough to destabilize the system because the inverters in wind and solar power plants disconnected earlier than expected.

According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Nuclear plants were offline and there was nothing to absorb the freq drop at that moment.

> According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand.

Wouldn't a supply surplus cause a frequency increase, not a frequency drop?

In the case of the rotating generators, yes. In the case of the solar panels, I do not know: I guess it depends on the inverters characterists? Spanish is not my native language, so I may have mixed it up when talking to him.

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