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Comment by totallykvothe | Hacker News Reader

I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.

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Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35 years ago which we don't even use anymore.

But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher tech and more convenient, but it can have significant privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way, but sadly it's probably never happening.

Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking about food.

Does it? What about weather that stops the ATMs being refilled? Takes a lot of weather to bring down satellite internet...

I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.

It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.

We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.

Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.

Going to the US feels like going backwards in time in many ways. Banking, public transit, healthcare, education.

A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said “it feels half finished”

Yeah I had the weird experience in 2020 of using tap to pay at several places where the server had never seen it used before.

Haha, right. I was using tap to pay at the petrol pump in Botswana in 2016.

Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g. Andrew Jackson

let's wait a few years before rotating faces to avoid debating another blatantly illegal thing Dear Leader would propose (actually he already did but it was out of the news rather quickly)

You do know who would be the first person to rotate in, don't you.

It would obviously be someone as equally legendary as Washington or Jefferson; noted American Paul Bunyan. We can even call them Big Blue Bucks.

My politics and his don't line up but I'm not against this. It would be pretty interesting to see the impact on cash usage, and faces on money are pretty archeologically useful-- at least on coins.

Is that what cocaine smells like?

Cocaine and feces smells like freedom

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