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How Feasible is a Cash-Less Society?
"Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?
And what about this: how is it that the people who depend upon cash are usually in the middle of the financial spectrum, neither the poorest nor the richest? In most extreme poverty situations, transactions are based on barter. For most middle class people and above, transactions involve checks, credit, and electronic fund transfers. For the working poor, most transactions are done in cash. How does all of this add up to the trend toward a cash-less society, where money is nothing more than numbers in a computer transferred from one account to another, to another? How far off is that future?"
Those bastards at Steak-n-Shake will never switch to accepting non-cash methods of payment.
I like cash. I also like paper. I'll bet i'm not the only one.
When it comes right down to it - there are a lot of intangibles that using cash provides - plus, is it really faster to swipe, enter a PIN and wait for authorization, than it is to get $2.15 change from a 5?
Me thinks not.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
It's called "post-secondary education". They take all your money for tuition, and you live cash-less for many years. It's not as great as you make it out to be!
When the lower class sorts (you know, Joe Sixpack and friends) amuse themselves, cash often plays a part. You can't stick a dollar bill in a stripper's thong with a debit card, you can't buy marijuana with a credit card, pool games take quarters, and most bars only take cash.
Remember, just becuase you live online and buy porn online doesn't mean Joe Sixpack does.
When I need to go to a movie theater or to a fast food restaurant, and in amusment parks and the like. On one hand it is very convenient, but on the other, if you have a check card or credit card, a lot more is at stake if it gets stolen. I like the ATM/Debit approach, you need a pin to make purchases. It's practially useless though, for most places that would just take Check Card or credit card, and of course there is no secure way to do this sort of thing on line. I have been wondering for a while how the problem of on-line shopping security could be handled. Throw away numbers used for one purchase only each comes to mind. Anyone have experience with this?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The only time I use my debit/ATM card for actual purchases is when buying on-line.
For all other purposes I withdraw cash - from as many random ATM's as I can manage.
I'll continue to do so until I receive an absolute guarantee from my bank that my purchasing habits are completly private.
And, of course, there are some things that plastic just can't buy...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
We have to remember that money as we know it sort of evolved. It went from physical gold and other backing, to gold (and other backing) stored in banks with bank notes holding them, to paper whose only value is defined by the government issuing it, with no backing. Modern debit cards and checks are just bank notes that represent money that doesn't really represent anything other than the fact that it is money. We already are cashless, people just seem to want this state to be computerized... Well, realistically it is... I mean, a lot of the stuff we buy we never phyiscally move money around to pay for. Actual cash is just another representation of this, why get rid of it? If people stop carrying around cash on their own, I'm sure that less will actually be issued, but why make a big deal of this transition, when it will just occur naturally (if it occurs at all).
> it's no less theft-proof...it just takes a theif of a different calibur to pull it off
That's like saying steel is no less melt-proof than butter; it just takes a different temperature to pull it off.
...please, continue to use your credit cards and cheques.
I like cash because I don't care to receive any more spam in my snail-mail inbox than I already do. I particularly like cash for black market purchases...kinda difficult with credit cards. Also, if you like avoiding all the troubling paperwork of paying income taxes on that $20 that you got for mowing the neigbor's lawn, cash is good.
Can any of you imagine having to set up a paypal account when you are 13 years old just so you can get paid by the guy down the street for mowing his lawn?
Cash ain't goin nowhere...
"Money will always be paper...but gold will always be gold..." -- Hudson Hawk...Mayflower...
"Reality" in financial terms is a 1:1 trade of value. X number of pigs for Y pounds of grain, for example. Barter.
Barter became unwieldy, so there came to be used "valuable" pieces of metal that represented the value of physical objects.
Then valuable metal became scarce, so we came to use pieces of paper that represented metal stored in a fort somewhere.
After a while, the paper was valuable just for the idea, and there was no longer a need to back it with gold.
Then, because the pieces of paper were unwieldy, we came to create bank accounts where we could write one piece of paper (a check) to represent several of the formerly gold-backed pieces of paper.
Then people got tired of carrying around pieces of paper, so they replaced it with single pieces of plastic that could be used multiple times.
But pieces of plastic had to be used in person, so when people wanted to buy something from Amazon.com, all they needed to use was the number.
Our entire financial lives can be reduced to a meaningless string of numbers. That's a far cry from bringing your pigs or cheese or grains or whatever to the market.
Got Rhinos?
The thing i worry about in a cashless society is that once you have the centralized system to deal with clearing the transaction, people are going to extract marketing data. The government is going to look at your purchasing habits and decide that some people have similar purchasing habits too far to one or the other side of the political spectrum, and are too much of a threat to middle class suburban normalcy and should be liquidated.
Also that means that if they _suspect_ you of selling/using drugs, they can freeze your finances completely. It gives _way_ too much control to somebody else, based on politics, purchasing habits, etc... It makes my skin crawl.
P.S.
I don't think many (any?) major economic powers even _pretend_ to back their currency with anything real anymore, let alone gold.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
The only thing that I use cash for is vending machines.
With any luck, future vending machines will take visa...
I like having a monthly summary of how much I've spent,
where I spent it, and when I spent it. It makes planning
easier and more realistic.
*sigh* back to work...
When McDonalds starts accepting credit/debit, I think we'll pretty much be there. I eat at McD's maybe twice a year, so it's no big deal to me anyway.
Fast food and race registrations (where I didn't pre-register) are the only places I ever use cash any more. Even my small-town pizza joint accepts credit now. Personally I don't even own a credit card. Just a checking account card with a mastercard logo on it.
In a Jack Vance story, one world had no use for money. They traded goods based on a person's strakh, roughly similar to personality, prestige, karma, etc. The way to improving one's strakh was to excel in one's craft or trade, and by wisely choosing who received the product of one's labors.
Good trades, that is providing excellent products to "customers" of high strakh, would increase both parties' prestige.
Naturally, to an outsider, this gift economy had rules that were nearly incomprehensible. And breaking those rules, even accidentally, could lead to grave personal danger.
Anyway, the name of the story is "Moon Moth".
A dingo ate my sig...
Over the last six months I have made an effort to pay for as much as a can with cash. For groceries, gas, books, and gear, I whip out my wallet and throw down as many twenties as I need. Its has a few nice benefits.
1) I stay in my budget. I take out cash when I get paid, and know exactly how much I have to spend until my next pay check.
2) I get less junk mail. No more grocery store fliers, no more technical junk, jut good ol' mail. Coincidence? I think not.
3) People who provide services for me (yoga, karate, acupuncture, housing, servers, etc) get instant payment, and can do what they want with it, including not reporting taxes. This makes them happy.
I only use credit cards when I absolutely need to, and am much happier for it.
The middle mind speaks!
moreover, some people rely on cash to survive, like beggars and very poor people : these people would not be allowed to get a credit card or check books, mostly because they have no address.
Finally, there has to be a way to be able to pay for something anonymously. It is necessary in a free society.
Keep cash alive ! :-)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
caliber
n.
1.Abbr. cal.
a.The diameter of the inside of a round cylinder, such as a tube.
b.The diameter of the bore of a firearm, usually shown in hundredths or thousandths of an inch and expressed in writing or print in terms of a decimal
fraction:.45 caliber.
c.The diameter of a large projectile, such as an artillery shell, measured in millimeters or in inches.
2.Degree of worth; quality: a school of high caliber; an executive of low caliber.
Sheesh.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Considering that most cashless transactions impose some sort of transaction charge, I patently refuse to accept a cash-only society until these sorts of electronic money services are free. Otherwise, you'd be paying some sort of X% tax on every 'cashless' transaction you make. I prefer cash, if only for this reason alone. (Nevermind that the tangible quality of real cash is an important part of appreciating your hard earned money.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
While it is worthwhile for the government to regulate the amount of money available through monetary instruments and fiscal policy, it seems pointless in our day and age for the government to continue to track the quality of trillions of pieces of paper.
Note that this is not simply a domestic issue - numerous other nations use the greenback for their currency, so this creates a huge bloated government apparatus that is completely unnecessary.
But utterly unlikely.
People here have pointed out the lack of the touted paperless office. I'd like to add this thought to that: People have been trying since the 70's (at least) to get rid the penny. Check your pockets for the success factor there.
People stop using things when they become useless. No amount of marketing by "eMoney" companies or wishful thinking by self-professed "geeks" will make it go away.
324006
With MS Money and Quicken, the use of checks is even invalid. I never write a check for my bills. You can setup Money & Quicken to pay all your normal bills automatically (whether that means pay online, or sending out a check). Its automatic, and I don't need to worry about the checks, just have to make sure the money is available, and as long as I put in all my deposits on time, the software can warn me the money isn't available and it won't send out the check. Paying bills has never been easier.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
At present (and a century ago, as well): not-too-bright criminals rob banks. Moronic criminals mug you when you walk out of the bank. Smart criminals go to work for the bank -- and the geniuses stay honest until they reach a high enough level to steal legally.
A cashless society will certainly slow down the first two types; they can still steal _goods_, but they have to lug them around, find a fence to buy them, not get caught by the police with them, and in general it's more work for less money, not to mention complicated enough to challenge their mentality. However, this provides increased opportunities for the smart criminals. And mainly, I would be concerned about the opportunities this gives to both corporations and governments for dishonest dealings.
Forty years ago, in any sort of sales business the motto was "the customer is always right". Nowadays, most corporate customer service depts run on the motto "the customer is always wrong". Do you really want to let them hold your money as bits in their computers, with no hard-copy proof of your account?
And then there are all the privacy aspects -- corporations tracking everything you purchase, g-men able to track your movements every time you stick a card in a machine, etc. I'll use cash, thank you. And if I become worried about muggers, CCW permits aren't that hard to get in Michigan... (A dead mugger is a non-recidivist.)
Nowadays, I never carry cash around. Before, I always used cash and ended up spending a lot more money, just because I happened to have it on me. With Debit/Credit, you pay exactly what the goods cost. With cash, you need to take out more than is necessary to cover the cost, and lets not forget the tons of change that (for me at least) ends up just gathering dust all over my apartment and in my car.
...on how much bigger you want the underground economy to grow. You cannot eliminate money and expect all the "shady" dealings will immediately switch to e-money. You would probably drive more of the economy underground because people generally don't want a record kept of many kinds of transactions for many reasons.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
On a similar subject, I would recommend everyone cut up those combo ATM cards that can be used as debit cards where credit cards can be used. They are bad, bad, bad. The reason? If a credit card is stolen, you can easily dispute the charges when they come in, and no cash comes out of your pocket. If a debit card is stolen, it comes directly out of your account. The banks typically promise that they'll credit back the money "really fast", but it still sucks when your checks bounce, and I wouldn't want to depend on how fast the bank acts.
Cut it up, and ask your bank for a regular ATM card that requires a PIN number.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
About a week ago, I saw for the first time a vending machine would will take student ID cards instead of cash. My university has a "snack" account plan on which you can charge some purchases made from the university on this account, all you need is your student ID card. Are these cashless machines common in any other areas? I hadn't ever seen one until recently.
Cash still has its uses... can't be tracked, flexible uses, won't blue-screen, etc ..... BUT it can be easily stolen.
Debit/credit transactions are getting more and more widespread everyday, BUT there are service fees on everything and while the money is more secure, it can still be stolen by determined (tech-savvy) criminals.
Cash will be around for a while yet ... at least as long as it takes for the banks to wake up and discover that people would use their cards more if they weren't being charged so much in service fees.
I recently had to make a frantic trip to my bank to request a credit card - I've been using debit cards exclusively for a while, but when booking a trip I learned that most (not all) car rental companies require a credit card, not a debit card, to rent a car.
Even more bizarrely, I was told that it doesn't matter if the debit card is backed by a $10k balance, while the credit card has a $1k limit (although I ended up getting a much higher limit). The "logic" was that debit cards usually have a daily limit, vs. credit cards to not. Again, this logic is rather odd since that debit card daily limit may still be higher than some credit card limits.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The single largest barrier to a cashless society (aside from the abuses by evil people) is service fees. Charge me a fee to use an ATM? Or even sometimes to slide my card at a store? Sorry, game over.
How to make your date think you are Mr. Big Shot while retaining your cheapo status:
1)withdraw $100 for your date from an ATM.
2)go into bank and exchange $40 for forty single dollar bills
3)wrap the remaining three twenties around the wad of singles and put in pocket
4)when paying for stuff on your date, make sure to always roll the twenties off the top
5)make sure your date does not cost more that $40 so you don't have to pull that last twenty dollar bill.
6)Say, "Fohgoet a'bout it" a lot. Chicks dig this.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
- Cash is really the only means that we have for anonymous/semiprivate transactions. Everything can and is tracked. Big brother is watching you.</paranoia>
- People with poor planning skills. To many many many people in this world (although perhaps the interection of slashdot readers and this particular group of people is not very large), money that you can't hold in your hand isn't really money: this means that it can and is spent on a whim with not "plan". This is why people get so down in credit card debt that they can't seem to pull themselves out of...
If people are allowed to spend "insubstantial" money that they can't feel slip through their fingers... then many people could have a problem with their personal finances...IOW, credit cards are not for everyone. :)
-Chris
That's because you don't live in Canada. Everybody here takes Interac; debit cards. We even have wireless units for taxis and deliverypersons.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Actually, most major currencies are not backed by gold and haven't been for some time. The United States, for instance, went off the gold standard during the Nixon Administration. Even before that there wasn't enough gold to come anywhere close to backing all of the currency in circulation. Instead the money could theoretically be exchanged for gold, but there were sharp limits on how much gold a person could actually posses, imports and exports were restricted, etc.
The reason that gold stopped being used as backing for currency is that the partial backing system just didn't work anymore. Real exchange rates between countries shifted because their economies grew at different rates and their central banks had different policies, but the nominal exchange rates weren't allowed to fluctuate. That meant that the real and nominal value of gold was skewed and smuggling became a serious problem- hence the restictions on gold ownership.
Today there simply isn't enough gold to come anywhere close to meeting the needs of even partially backing currencies (with all the problems that would entail) much less fully backing it. Instead money is backed by the faith and credit of the government that issues it. That's a big part of the reason that exchange rates fluctuate wildly in response to political instability. It seems less tangible that backing with gold, but in reality it's not as big a difference from the partial backing system as you might think.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The cash component of the M1 monetary supply, which represents actual money (rather than checks, travelers checks, stocks and the like where the instrument is like cash, but not represented with U.S. currency) is something like 500 billion. That is, there is something like 500 billion dollars in paper and coin money floating around there, and this represents a steady increase from the 1940's, when the Fed's information starts. (Source: http://www.stls.fed.org).
Electronic wire transfers between banks, wire transfers between people, paperless checks (which are just a request to a bank to transfer money electronically), letters of credit, credit instruments--all of these things have been around well before computers. Some of these devices are by definition an invasion of privacy: an overseas letter of credit is often used by small businesses to indicate to overseas trading partners that money is available--generally, the letter of credit and representation to the overseas partner is made by the bank, and not by the person who pulled the letter.
That we have started being concerned with privacy issues and can now create paperless checks (that's what you're doing when you pay bills on-line from your checking account to a payee who can accept on-line payments) doesn't mean these things haven't been around since damned near the start of the Fed nearly a hundred years ago. The only things that are new is that it's faster and more convenient to do on your home computer, and we are now more concerned with the Internet about our personal information being sold to third parties so they can mail bomb our homes with junk mail.
For a second there I thought it said cache-less society. My system would run a lot slower without that large L1 cache!
The real question isn't whether it's feasible or not. The fact is that it may becoming inevitable. It won't be long before a $500 office printer can produce counterfeit currency that will fool anyone who doesn't have special equipment and at appear page cost that allows U$5 to be printed en mass.
The whole point of cash is that anyone can take a bill and know it's worth X amount. If high quality counterfeits become so prevalent that every other bill taken to the bank is a fake then it will mean a near collapse of the economy.
I.e. Rumors are still going around that using the government mint in one country to produce counterfeits that could then be dumped on an opposing state was considered as a possible military strategy in WW2. Too bad they all preferred TNT, C4 and Hydrogen bombs.
So as the cost and logistics of producing those counterfeits which fool the naked eye goes down the prevalence of cash alternatives will grow. Eventually businesses will start refusing to accept cash. I.e. In Jamaica most shops accept US, UK and Canadian money. However many will not take a US $500 bill because they don't know what a good one looks like.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
We're at about the midpoint of the transition, I'd say. There are about as many places that won't take your Visa card as won't take the $20 in your wallet (or at least will give you grief over it, like a friend got the other day at Best Buy). But there's still the impetus of "legal tender" to keep cash around.
I lived in a pure-cash economy for about 3 years. I was moving and changing jobs, and closed my bank account. Then as I was about to open a new one, the bank I was moving to got swallowed up by Wachovia, so I held off. By the time I got around to it again, I didn't feel like going through the bother. (I finally had to when the company I was working for got bought by EA and my paychecks started being drawn on Wells Fargo.)
My co-workers who have always had credit cards, checks and ATMs don't understand how one can live in the "cash economy" without sacrificing quality of life, but it can (mostly) be done.
The biggest hurdle is things that require a reservation. If you travel you're going to have to resign yourself to paying up-front for your airline ticket and playing Hotel-Motel Lotto when you arrive (unless you're staying with friends or family). Renting a car will also be off-limits to you unless you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare for the duration as a deposit.
Apart from that, you really don't notice much. Sending money through the mail (to pay bills, for example) will involve getting a money order from the post office, which is in the neighborhood of a dollar per MO -- and USPS money orders have the advantage that a receipt is presentable in court as prima facie proof of payment. Getting a loan can be a little trickier if you have no previous loan history, but you can use landlords as references. Also, your utility history will most likely show up on your credit history, especially if you have a cell phone. And speaking of utilities, you may have to give them deposits before they will start service, but these are usually payable in installments.
You won't be able to buy things instantly online, but most places will be happy to bill you or ship after receiving payment.
If you can forego instant gratification and avoid things like needing to rent a car, there's nothing preventing most Americans from living a pure cash lifestyle.
-- Old Man Kensey
I couldn't live in a cache-less society! Just think how long locatedb would take to index!
So, anonymity and need for authorization access seem to be the two problems with electronic money. These can both be dealt with by way of anonymous cash cards that are purchased with, say, a credit cart or an EFT, and can, by use of public-key encryption, be independently verified as being authentic without the need for access to a central 'money server'.
To make things more convenient, we can even get around the need for an electronic reader to verify the PGP signature and deduct small amounts froma card, by issuing cards in smaller denominations that can be mix and matched in a pinch, to create 'exact change.'
Even better, instead of using cryptography, we can simply assign each money card a unique, human-readable serial number, and incorporate anti-counterfeiting, authentication technologies that can be verified by a human without need for an electronic reader or landline.
In fact, we could make the entire system even more convenient by changing the format from a credit-sized card to a paper medium, allowing many 'bills' to be stored in a 'wallet' at one time. These could be distributed from 'teller machines' that can be accessed using traditional archaic money technologies such as debit and credit cards.
Woah. I can't wait. It all sounds so cool.
Kevin Fox
As of this year, Canadians use debit cards more often than cash. Add in the use of credit cards, and cash is a dying breed.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
60 minutes did a special report on that rumor, actually. The Nazis (non-Godwin Nazis) had secured printing plates and were printing flawless British notes. They used them to support the German war machine and were prepared to dump them en masse into the British economy. Unfortunately they lost the war before they had that chance.
I wish I could remember the name of the lake that they submerged all the funny money in. It was pretty neat how the researchers went down with manned subs and retrieved the papers.
While I to prefer cash and use it 95% of the time, it does not save me or the business any money.
1 - There is no such thing as a discount for cash. It just doesn't happen. There are a few places (like Steak N Shake, RaceTrak) that are cash only and offer prices that are 1-2% lower, but it's tough to find them.
2 - Cash costs money. It costs money to have a cash safe. It's a security risk to have a lot of cash on hand for change purposes. It costs money to have a security guard come pick up your cash and take it to a bank. There is no clear accounting trail to follow. Whether this is more or less than the 1.5-3% CC charge business, I have no idea. But don't think that cash costs less money.
Oh wait, that's because I'm in college.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
There have been several attempts to destabilize the economy of a country by flooding it with counterfeit notes - Laos in the 1960s comes to mind. Germany was planning to ruin the U.K. pound the same way in WW2 but never got around to it.
I live in a mainly cashless society now. In Canada we have a nationwide debit card system that all the banks and 99% of businesses participate in. We still have the option to pay cash for things, but with fewer businesses taking anything larger than a $20 bill (counterfeiting problems), this is an increasingly awkward option.
Yes, the banks take a cut. They always do. They view it as charging for a service, and, for now, I accept that. If I didn't have the option of using cash I'd have to reconsider.
...laura
This has been tested in Swansea, UK, and I believe it proved reasonably successful, at least with the vendors that used it.
As I see it, credit/debit cards will die off, over time. You can't keep spending ahead of yourself, and expect to make ends meet. The recession of the Thatcher/Reagan era was largely a product of free-spending on credit. The amount spent vastly exceeded the amount available, and the economic system was not able to cope.
Further, credit/debit cards DO need a third-party, which is inherently more expensive than having the electronics do all the transacting on-site. It's therefore much cheaper for banks to churn out a bunch of "smart cards", with suffcient processing power to handle decent public-key encryption, than to maintain a clearing-house for credit cards.
Since cheaper usually wins, in the end, a system involving distributed handling of transactions will always be preferable to a centralized one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
i'm no expert, and nyc banking has a decidedly police state flavor, but... my wife bounced the rent check more than once because the japanese do not really use checking, everything is done via fund transfers.
(she would deposit checks without understanding the bank could take over a week to credit the account)
so the (japanese) landlord demands cash every month. i think its common for many people to carry tens of thousands of yen (hundreds of dollars) *all the time* with *zero fear* of being robbed in japan, but here in manhattan it's a different story.
so the japanese carry more cash than typical americans, and seemingly use more automated money transactions as well... what about other cultures and money, anything to be learned?
E.g., every workday I walk down to the cafe on the first floor where the staff and I greet each other by name. I order my food, they give it to me, and I walk out. Money is never mentioned. At the end of each month, they snail-mail me a bill and I pay it.
Obviously this won't work for every cafe in the world, but the point is that no PDA's, debit cards, or passwords are involved. It's an old-fashioned tab and sometimes those old-fashioned things work quite well.
Miko O'Sullivan
Funny, I relocated to the SF area a couple years ago, and as an experiment, I didn't order any paper checks. I managed to get by the first year using only one of the temporary checks they gave me. I finally ordered paper ones, and I've used four of them, of which three were for goverment agencies (DMV, IRS, State tax). Nearly everything else is paid online... I use a credit card to buy gas and food, and pay that bill online weekly. I carry some cash (cigarettes and junk food account for most of that), but it's a small percentage of what goes through my bank account. So I'm nearly cashless.
Still, even though it's plausible to go without cash, in order to eliminate it, you'd have to get the sellers to stop accepting it. How would you do that? The only way would be if the government eliminated cash completely, for example, if they offered to redeem it for credit up to a certain date, and refused to back it thereafter.
For starters, the implications for personal privacy would be substantial, and there would likely be widespread public outcry. But more to the point, cash is a simple method of anonymous exchange that allows economic activity to take place at a very low level. Eliminating it would impact many transactions, as some have observed. Some are illegal, such as drug deals, but others are benign... flea markets and garage sales, poker games, tipping, lemonade stands, and a lot of everyday economic activity among poorer people.
So I just don't see how it's possible, no matter how close we come, to being able to eliminate cash entirely, nor should we want to. We will be pretty close, in fact, we already are pretty close... if we choose to, we can live with minimal cash. But I don't want to go without it completely, and I don't think many others will either. Anonymous paper cash is a pretty profound invention, and electronic transactions will only replace it for transactions that offer substantial improvement in convenience or that require some sort of accountability.
Wouldn't a cash less society put drug dealers out of business? One point of cash is that anonyminity of a transaction (legal or not), and also to provide a low transaction cost for a purchase (don't need to wait for approval, power to come back on etc.)
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Every time I get money from a bank machine, I get charged something between $1.50 and $3.00 for the privilege. Some banks (www.firstib.com) will reimburse fees. (up to $6/mo. in their case)
Even if you only get hit once in a while by fees, it's still more than the $0 transaction fee you get with a credit card you pay off.
Those little bits add up-- cash costs you more to use than a carefully managed credit card. Especially one with a monthly rebate like the previous poster mentioned.
That's probably true for the US, and probably the rest of the Western countries. But most of the rest of the world relies only on cash, so you will still need cash if you want to travel to Eastern Europe or some of the other places where stores don't accept credit cards.
How would an individual in a cashless society buy marijuana, pornography, stolen laptops or big bags of Doritos despite being on a low carb diet? Cash leaves no paper trail, is universally acceptable by people who aren't really a "business" in the IRS-tracks-our-every move sense and has a sort of a global backing. It is the only form of payment accepted in thousands of small shops, bars, clubs, and in many foreign countries, it's the only way to tip a bellhop who nabs you a box of condoms and doesn't tell your wife about the chick you met at Mac World and it's the only way to get out of an expensive speeding ticket without lying to a judge.
In short, a cashless society would be nice for following our finances, but it reduces a lot of our liberties -- mainly, the right to buy things without anybody (especially not our creditors) knowing what they are. Plus, it's so much fun to do that thing where you make Lincoln stand upside down after a couple joints and a brew-dog.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Some of my favorite places to eat, such as Penn Station, White Castle and Steak'n'Shake are cash-only. I don't like to consider a Slider-free society.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The real logic behind this is that the car rental company/hotel/whatever that requires the credit card can charge for damage at any time just with your credit card number and expiry date. A debit card always requires you to enter your PIN at a terminal so they'd have to get you to agree to pay them. Not surprisingly, they like the credit card better.
Is that like a hores of a different colur?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It is a sad, sad day when this story gets posted and none of the top responses as of this comment mention the very obvious and very old problems that everyone should know by now.
- Cash is mostly anonymous and private. I earnestly hope that it never goes away until some electronic form of money has similar qualities. Your credit cards, debit cards, store charge cards are all extremely un-private. Yes, this actually has significant negative consequences. It's such an obvious arguement that I'll simply say EFF. Almost all privacy policies are mis-named. Which leads to...
- Under our current system of credit/debit cards, identity theft becomes a easy and devastating attack. It's much more efficient to script an exploit to get credit card numbers than to rob a bank. Simply getting rid of cash will only exacerbate these problems. I wouldn't be surprised if a good third of the ecommerce sites on the internet got hit with one of various viruses/worms this summer alone.
I know the author was a victim of techno lust and meant well, but people should really be more informed. Civil liberties are too important to foresake for convenience or because of ignorance.
We need paper money!
How else are the Taliban and Osama "I need a skycraper up my wontan ass" bin Laden going to deliver their Superplague to the masses of consuming westerners, without paper bills in which to embed the Spores?[1] As of yesterday cropdusters are out, you know.
[1]c.f. The White Plague, by Frank Herbert
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I think the major problem with cash-less transactions is that they take much longer than cash transactions, and have an additional fee. That makes it problematic if a group of people at dinner want to split the bill without cash, or when you get food delivered. For transactions where there's something else going on (chatting with people, finishing desert, bagging the things you bought, etc), it's not too much of a problem, but it means that one quick transaction or a number of transactions at the same time are inconvenient.
> So does the establishment like cash..... What is backing US currency.
> Nothing execept the promis to tax you in the future for any debt created
> by it's printing.
Okay, I'll bite on this one. What's backing U.S. dollar is the U.S. economy. It's nominally the government, but when a government tries to buttress the value of its currency when the local economy doesn't support it, you end up with the situation they had in Russia near the end of the Soviet Union, where people don't want the local currency because it's not "hard".
> Its the largest conterfiet operation in existance.
This makes a nice sound bite, but since the amount of real cash in a society represents only a miniscule fraction of the value of M1 (the money supply), I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration.
Virg
BTW...
For those of you who have ever pondered what the point of the Check Card is vs the Debit Card? The bank/Credit union make money off of you when you use your Check Card. That is why it is pushed so hard.
When I worked for the Credit Union, one of our largest sources of revenue was from people who used Check Cards. That's why, when I use it, I always choose Debit and enter the Pin number. Why should I make the store pay a fee just so I can sign instead of punching in a PIN?
Random Musings
I haven't used a credit card or a check in two years.
When I buy something, I pay cash.
Fortunately, my bills come with a bar code. When I want to pay them, I can take them to any bank or post office or convenience store and pay them with cash. Believe me, this is even more convenient than paying online. (Since I do it as I am buying something else.)
I get no junk mail, other than fliers for pizza places or other handbills that come, not through the postal service, but by some guy stuffing them in my mailbox.
I just had a few months off, thanks to the dot-crash and guess what? I was fine because I didn't have to worry about credit card payments.
When I lived in the states, every semi-major purchase was followed by a slew of junk mail. Every move was watched.
Here in Japan, a good percentage of people buy new cars with cash. They go to the ATM, take out the money and take it to the dealership. End of story. (Here, the daily withdrawl limit at an ATM is around $25,000, as opposed to the $500 limits that are common in the states.)
The cars are cheaper because of this. If you tried that in the US, you'd have the FBI asking you questions, because only drug dealers try to buy new cars for cash.
I've never had cash stolen, have you? Are credit cards really that much safer? (egghead.com)
When I used credit cards, I had a lot more trouble. Now, I just go to a store and buy what I need. I'm not lacking in choices and you wouldn't be either. Plus, you are supporting some local person who pays taxes in your own community - In effect, an amount roughly equal to Visa's share of the purchase instead goes to your schools and roads. (And to the police who help insure that you live in a place where cash doesn't get stolen.)
So many Americans have been convinced that using a credit card is a necessity for emergencies and convenience. Forget it - the house always wins - if you are using them, you are handing a *lot* to the credit card company - your money, your demographics and your privacy. (I won't even touch upon people who just pay the minimum each month...)
Using cash is in effect an anonymous proxy on your spending habits. Are you ready to give that freedom up?
Some poster proposed that the only necessary uses for cash were to pay strippers and buy marijuana.
That's sad. Do you REALLY want visa to know your every move? For a group that actually thinks about privacy issues, I am surprised by the number of people who willingly allow themselves to be logged on every purchase, every dinner, every stay in a motel and every phone bill?
Soon, I suspect, it won't be possible to buy an international plane ticket with cash. I guess that's the time I stop going back to the US...
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
IIRC, Moon Moth was about an interstellar cop trying to catch a criminal in a society where everyone worn face masks of different design depending of their mood and intent, and spoke in a complex mix of modes to match.
That is correct. And their economy (as it were) was based on strakh (karma/reputation). Why do you contradict me? (Your title is "Not Moon Moth, but some other").
A dingo ate my sig...
> even though IRS taxes are voluntary [arrowplastics.com]).
It's great to see other people finally learning the truth !
Here's a very interesting thoroughly researched document entitled The Great IRS Hoax. It has 1600+ (!!) pages documenting that the Income Tax is based on Voluntary Compliance.
~~
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history,
whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small
elite." - Thomas Jefferson
...for small purchases. For small purchases, especially those with tiny profit margins like fast food and vending, using ATM cards is not practical because the transaction fees charged by the banks/credit card companies are larger than the profit the proprieter would have made on the transaction.
There's a couple possible solutions to this. One is to change the pricing scheme of the fees charged by the banks/CC companies, but I'm not really sure what motivation they'd have to do is such a thing.
The other solution, and one that a lot of companies are trying (disclaimer: I work for one) is to offer their own cashless payment system with low/non-existant transaction fees, and gain profit through other means such as selling marketing data and/or making interest from the money stored in users' accounts.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
and I've been stuck behind british tourists trying to work out which U.S. note is which because they are not different colo(u)rs, don't ask me why,
.. but who cares)
Probably because the banknotes of every other country in the world are different colours. Most are also different sizes - this helps the blind and partial sighted distinguish notes. And probably because of lack of familiarity.
Different systems of bank note counting can also be confusing: when I was in Uzbekistan they had currency steps of 1 and 3 (so you get 1 cym notes, 3 cym notes, 10 cym notes, 30 cym notes and so on). This seems easy, but once I paid for a one cym beer (my first!) with a 10 cym note, and got three 3cym notes as change; I was just completely flummoxed - that part of my brain that did money just could not grasp the existance of a "three unit" note.
but stupity
That's "stupidity" - but I wonder if you get irony either.
(this isn't really the word to discribe people who aren't used to another currency or aren't used to ATMs
Uninformed is the word.
The informed.
The only time I've had to use cash was at Robins Donuts last week
You call yourself Canadian? Real Canadians get their donuts at Tim Hortons! Sheesh, eh?
Seriously, though, I'd like to see you try debit at McDonald's. Fortunately, Starbuck's takes debit, but there are a number of places that still do not. And yes, Timmy's is one of them too. So is my company's cafeteria (but at least they've got tabs, which IMO are better than debit).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Has anyone else noticed that it's actually hard to use cash in some situations? For the most part, I'm totally cashless. I have a central checking account and a debit card w/ the Visa logo. So rather than go to the ATM, withdraw some 20s, and spend them. I just go to a place of business and they withdraw the exact amount for me.
But what about the people that prefer to exclusively use cash?
I worked in a computer retail store for a while. And when people came in and bought a high-high-end PC or laptop with just cash, you'd better believe we noticed it. When someone peels 20-30 $100 bills off a stack, everyone in the store craned in for a better look. And we checked all that money verrry carefully.
A similar story was told to me by a friend who worked at a candy factory. The janitor at the place had just bought a brand-new car, but was complaining that the dealership almost wouldn't sell it to him. Why not? Because he had paid in CASH. $26,000 in cash. He actually brought the stacks of bills to the dealership in a briefcase, all ready to go. And, of course, the dealer was a little suspicious about someone carrying that much cash.
So you see my point? How is it that we have come to trust pieces of plastic or signed pieces of paper as opposed to cold, hard, cash? Somehow America has embraced a further level of abstraction from specie to the point of almost rejecting other forms of payment. It just seems like curious situation to me. I'm not sure if I like it or not, though. Like I said, I'm almost totally cashless. But I'd like to believe that if I wanted to switch to cash-only, I'd be able to use that money for whatever I want. Now I'm not so sure I could.
4-star general in a one-man army.
True 3 step is the one which mathematically gives the smallest number of notes in the largest number of transactions. Unfortunatly, we don't count too well in 3's, so the 1,3 stepping is a good compromise, still requiring less per transaction than the 1,5.
Okay, here is i far out proposal.
First some assuptions:
I assume that one should be able to calculate some ratio of how much new money is put into circulation to how much the government collects in combined income taxes that same year (or some subsquent year with a well defined delay).
now statistically i'll assume that the spending habits of the bulk public are fairly predictable, and that any one "dollar" will go through some predictable and estimable (on average) number of different people in a year.
Okay, so say there is a government imposed transaction cost on each smart card transaction (something small percentage-wise), but that money just _vanishes_ because there is no centralized clearing house or anything that gets any data back from the transactions.
Now the fun part. Instead of collecting money as income taxes, the value of the dollar has been raised by this slow drain on supply, and it's even a predictable amount of drain (within statistical limits), and so the government can "print" that much new money, as revenue for itself which if all the statistics have been balanced correctly should equal what it was taking in taxes before, but with one key difference. Now, there is no flow of information back to the government, and no need for central clearing, and plus the government wins because nobody is immune to taxes, and the people win because nobody is breathing down their necks about how much they spend, where, and when.
Now, as a libertarian, i don't like giving money to the government, because chances are 9 out of 10 they are going to waste it on large and inefficient beaurocracy or use it to abuse the people, so it's hard for me to say this, but if i don't trust them with my (or anybody's) money, i _certainly_ don't trust them with my information.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
...wrong guy...
You may ask, so what?
Think of all the drug dealers, international terrorists, and other ne'er-do-wells that deal in large quantities of cash, plus the people all over the world who stuff their mattresses with greenbacks because they don't trust their local currencies or banks. Every million dollars resting in someone's suitcase is a million-dollar interest-free loan to the United States government.
According to this US Treasury report (see Table 4), there are about $550 billion worth of US cash (not counting what's sitting inside bank vaults) floating around the economy. If everyone holding those dollars decided to exchange them for euros, it might put a bit of a dent in our economy.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
When ya all stop using cash, it's time for FightClub and project Mayhem...
September 11th 2001 was PopCorn compared to that ...
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Agreed. The British and Canadian notes are much nicer than the plain green notes in the US. It would be much easier to quickly find a certain denomination if they were at least different colors.
Oh, and FWIW, you should never enter you ATM PIN at a POS terminal. If your card has a Visa/MC logo, use it as a credit card instead.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
It certainly costs money to manage the supply of paper bills. This is factored into your taxes.
And if the US mint is profitable (I dispute the claim), then this profitability is as worthless as the USPS claim of profitability - ANY organization can make a profit when they can set prices at a whim. In private industry a profit demonstrates efficiency. For government agencies without competition it simply means they set prices unreasonably high - as would be the case for any organization that does not compete.
As for a "dollar being worth a dollar" - when has this not been the case? The value of the greenback is only relative to other currencies.
I think the main advantage of a cashless society is that it can reduce violence.
In the past, there were lots of situations where people needed to carry large amounts of cash. These people were then in danger of physical violence from people who wanted that money. Nowadays, the only people in danger are people around ATM's (and the people who fill them)
Also, a lot of break-ins and robberies probably don't occur anymore. Now lots of normal businesses don't need huge amounts of cash.
I wonder about supermakets that give cash-back on your atm card - I wonder if they break even or not?
Another facet to this is the insurance industry. I think having insurance has made other crimes less of a big deal. For instace, car theft. In the past, you were out of luck (In a lot of countries, you still are). But here if your car gets stolen, you're stunned, but a check comes in the mail and you get over it.
There is a distinct class of payments that I'm seeing ignored here: person to person. If I want to lend a friend of mine $5, get paid back for something I picked up for a friend, buy pizza for a bunch of people or simply leave a quick tip it isn't feasible to use some form of electronic money. In some cases it would merely be inconvenient (going to the bank to transfer funds assuming it can't be done online, but still having to wait a day to get the money) but in other cases it might not be possible (I can't run out and grab sodas for everyone if I'm broke and I can't sign on someone's card). In either case you lose something, be it privacy, security or convience that ruins the situation.
For example my school has a cash chip on all ID cards, but almost noone ever uses it. I don't personally for a variety of reasons: not all machines use it (sometimes some locations have a few card machines and a few cash, but not always), the chip itself is very easily damaged (I keep mine in my wallet and after 2 years of general use it's in very poor shape), it's not very convenient (you have to remember exactly how much you have on it and can't take it off if you want), but most importantly there isn't a universal system in place. Likely some people will only take Visa virtual money and some others AMEx or such... why put a few bucks on my cash card when I can use my cash bills anywhere I want? Similiar things occured at the '96 Olympics in Atlanta. I had a cash card from Coke (I was down on a comp. trip) for $20 and it was more or less impossible to ever use it.
In short a cashless society might be advantageous in some ways, but cash will still be very useful in a large number of transactions precluding a fully cashless society.
Where I'm living (New Zealand) it's a legal requirement for businesses to accept cash as payment if that is what the customer wants to pay with.
I'm not sure exactly how it's worked out, but I think it applies specifically if you accept bank deposits for something (which is the only other type of money by definition), you have to accept an equal amount of cash as an alternative. It probably doesn't apply with barter systems.
The main reason for this is partly what you've just talked about. People need the option to pay for something without the risk of being tracked.
The other reason is that by keeping cash money relevant the government can be aware of how much legitimate money is out there, since bank deposits are just an abstraction of real cash. Even though they can inflate it lots of times by being loaned and re-loaned, they can't exist without it.
> If the banks go under, they are insured, right? By whom? The US gov't. Who pays for the US gov't? Taxpayers. So we taxpayers are held responsible for bad business decisions of the country's financial institutions.
Um, you missed a step in your logic. See, the government insures the bank deposits, and taxpayers pay for government. But, the insured depositors are to a large extent those same taxpayers (you pay tax money to depositors if any bank fails, but if it's your bank that fails, the other taxpayers pay you). So, what we're really doing is participating in a mass insurance underwriting effort, albeit compulsory. The tradeoff is that banking policies have to be cleared with the SEC which ensures to some extent that bad business doesn't get so far out of hand that banks fail. Barring criminal activity, there hasn't been a major bank failure in quite a while, which is some indication that the system works.
> The Fed governs how much money is in circulation. As they add more "dollars" inflation grows because there is no real value behind it. The value is just spread through more pieces of paper, so each one is worth less.
This is a bit oversimple. The whole concept that printing more money causes inflation is an overextension of how monetary policy works. Since the actual paper money in the economy is only a very small part of the money supply, printing more bills isn't really going to have an effect on the economy. Some monetary policies can cause inflation of sorts, like decreasing the reserve rate, but mostly it's fiscal policy that causes inflation.
> This was what caused the Great Depression.
Not exactly. What caused the Great Depression was that the economy had gotten extremely built up in spite of there not being any good reason (much like the tech bubble that we just saw), and then in a very short time investor confidence in the market simply disappeared as people tried to get out before the fall really gained momentum. Virtually overnight, the value of the market dropped by half, and once the fall started, people rushed to get their investments out, which caused the market to fall even more, to the point where banks which had underwritten the pumped-up market didn't have enough liquid assets to satisfy all of the people bellying up to the teller windows for cash withdrawals. This caused those banks to have to shut down, preventing people from getting their money and started widespread panic that led to even more withdrawals. After this, for many years people were loathe to put their money at risk by depositing or investing it, so there was a shortage of lendable funds and so loans for economic expansion were all but nonexistent. It took WWII to convince people that investing was important (remember the war bond drives), and the rise in investment and employment jump-started the economy.
BTW, IAAE (I am an economist), so I can say with confidence that a cashless society will not be our downfall, because as soon as the demand for cash is created by a too-powerful government, cash (in some form, and probably not sanctioned by the government) will reappear. If you think of money as only greenbacks, consider online money like Ploids for an example of non-sanctioned money.
Virg
P.S. The economy is already backed by something of substantive value. That thing is the collective earning power of all of its members, and historically, that's been a very solid base for an economic model. I read through the Constitution Party's platform on money and banking, and in addition to the obvious question of why it's necessarily bad that the Federal Reserve Bank is privatized, I'm left to wonder why currency has to be backed by a precious metal to prevent the economy's falling apart. It seems not to have needed that particular crutch for the last 180 years.
Now.. I'm a cash advocate. I believe in cash. Completely.
Do I use credit cards, atm cards, cheques, etc? Of course> I LIKE them. They are convenient.. and I know I'm trading some privacy for convenience by using them. I have bank accounts. Same deal there.
But they are all services to HELP ME DEAL with my cash... and I still view it that way.
Fundamentally, I can still go the bank, withdraw all my cash, and go somewhere else and deposit it, anonymously.. and that's what it's all about.
I'm sure that if U.S. dollars were eliminated as legal tender, the drug dealers would find some other easily-transported and untraceable medium of exchange.
Just because they are criminals, does not automatically mean they are stupid.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
It's not uncommon for some jurisdictions (British Columbia, Canada, for one) to make it illegal to sell liquor (abusive, addictive substance) on credit.
Since my earnings are automatically transfered to bank accounts, I don't get pay "checks". So cash is expensive for me: bank fees, cash advance interest, etc. So are we moving to cashless society? I am, it's too expensive otherwise! :)
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
However, the more I think about it, I realize that with some careful consideration and common sense legislation, both could be a great boon to us.
If the government is able to receive real time, compleatly accurate consumer and business spending information (in the aggregate, of course), it suddenly has access up-to-the-second and 100% reliable data for forming economic indicators, which are at best currently formed quarterly.
At that point, the governments economists can catch onto economic trends quickly and react before any major problem begins to occur. From an economic standpoint, it would be wonderful.
The other issue surrounds marketers collecting information. I can't seem to understand the danger in this. I for one really want marketers to know what I'm interested in; We have a real chance to change the role of advertising from a broadbased attack on our senses to facilitate brand reconition for products and services we don't need or want (current) to a tool that educates us to the availibility of products and services we genuinanly would like to know about.
The only key to making this work is a continued diligance in making sure our lawmakers are very specific in the drafting of legislation so information does'nt belong in the wrong hands: For example, governments can only collect data in the aggregate and cannot submit individual information to law inforcement. Or Advertisers can only collect the most basic of demographic information (zip code, income range) about us.
The Internet is generally stupid
> I like having a monthly summary of how much I've spent, where I spent it, and when I spent it. It makes planning easier and more realistic.
You then must consider whether you like others having a summary of how much you spent, where you spent it, and when you spent it. Then, when your insurance carrier finds out that you frequent the vending machines too often and raises your premiums, you'll wonder how it was you managed to give up so much for convenience.
Virg
Two thousand years ago, the last living Apostle of Christ, John, sat in permanent exile on the Island of Patmos, and was given a glimpse of the future of human history, which he committed to writing. It is our last book of the New Testament, called simply "Revelation".
At the time this was written, around AD 100, the "technological feasibility" of the prediction was simply inconceivable. Ironically, we are forced by the passage of time to instead consider the feasibility of predictive prophecy. And just as no one could imagine a worldwide cashless economy in AD 100, few can imagine that a prophetic vision of that economy could possibly be divinely inspired, now that we live in the enlightened year of AD 2001.
We now see ourselves living in an age where we are asking feasibility questions about a cashless society. But for the most part, we aren't asking those questions in the context of prophetic expectation. Only a whacko would, right?
The concepts of the "Mark of the Beast" and the Antichrist are well-known to most of us, but mostly as a pop-culture punchline. They were once concepts which inspired nothing short of terror in their consideration. They are now simply formulas leveraged for b-grade Hollywood horror films or are the basis for corny, "dangerous" deathmetal songs. As symbols and portents, they have been drained of their intrinsic terror and are now like Sartre's "Flies", which only have the power to torment those stupid enough to believe in their potency.
Vexingly, the Christian would counter that the symbols HAVE to be drained of their horror and emptied of biblical context before the world is ultimately confronted with them in the actual- otherwise, they would not succeed in being adopted by the masses... That this very thread itself is contributing in a tiny but necessary way to the further proliferation of the idea of a global cashless society, softening our resistance, removing it from its original prophetic context.
The non-believer is forced to laugh at the solipsism, the circular reasoning of the silly Christian who can not escape the bonds of dogma and should not be allow to infect others with their contagious Cassandra complex. So some old Jew-for-Jesus on an island made a lucky guess- is that any reason to become a paranoid, jabbering bible-thumper?
Slashdot frequently touches on subjects that avail themselves, directly or indirectly, to the mentioning of biblical prophecy. But given the scientific disposition of many on
I would normally in closing offer a specific conclusion, but it seems only proper in this instance to instead simply ask a question. If a cashless society ultimately comes about, and if mankind is ultimately required to subject their very person to some physical alteration (be they barcode tattoos or microchip implants or what have you) in order to participate in the system, who would resist it? On what basis would anyone who didn't believe in prophecy, Antichrists, Hell or God, even resist?
We have a high rate of adoption for EFT-POS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale), which means you can quite happily go for months without ever needing a note of any denomination.
My pay gets Direct-Credited into my bank account, and i usually carry no dollars in my wallet at all.
Parking in the city is an exception, at least where i live, since the only currency accepted is notes and coins at the boots and 'pay and display' vending machines.
Still, this is a relatively minor problem, as you can buy bus passes or a prepay parking card with EFT-POS
Practically all gas stations, supermarkets, retail shops, bars, cafes and anything else you can think of has EFT-POS available to make purchases, and it is extremely rare to find a shop you cannot use EFT-POS in, at least in the main cities.
If somebody wanted to bet me ten thousand bucks i could survive for 3 months without ever handling a note or coin, i would take that bet in a second.
You can even use EFT-POS to pay for pizza deliveries.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Last I checked, the Fed had issued >350 G$ in folding paper notes. Thats ~$1200 for every US resident. More than half of it is in hundreds.
To be sure, alot of it is overseas. About 1/3 if a comparison with Canada holds. The drug trade and other illegal activity also probably eats up a fair bit, although I'd imagine they launder it {convert to bank deposits] fairly quickly.
The question remains, and I haven't found any good answer in 10 years of looking -- who's holding [hoarding] the cash? $800/capita is more than I can believe. Around $100 would strike me as a reasonable number, even after taking all the till cash into account. Where is the rest? 200,000 people with 1 M$ each? 2M with 100k$?
I've done anayses over time and in different OECD countries. They're not much different.
Obviously it costs a great deal of money to manage a system of managing trillions of paper notes. These costs are amortized among taxpayers. Since the federal govt has no competition, there is no motivation to introduce a more cost effective and secure system.
what about other cultures and money, anything to be learned?
In the UK, the situation is somewhat similar to the US, but with a few differences: credit, but particularly debit card usage is on the increase for payment of small debts, whilst cheques are slowly going out of fashion for personal use. In the last two or three years, as internet banking has become widely available, direct fund transfer between bank accounts has become much more popular.
The situation that a lot of Americans cite for not using cards, that using them creates junk mail, simply does not happen in the UK thanks to the Data Protection Act - if a credit card company shares details of your transactions with anyone, even sister companies in the same group, then they are breaking the law and can be fined an unlimited amount, and the directors jailed. This doesn't apply to sharing the information with government agencies however, which is unfortunate, but at least that doesn't create junk mail :)
One interesting thing that I haven't seen in other countries (but may simply not have noticed) is the Direct Debit scheme, primarily used for paying regular bills like utilities - essentially you give your bank a signed mandate that a certain company may regularly take an amount of money specified by them from your bank account by direct fund transfer. Obviously, if not implemented properly, this is wide-open to abuse, so it's backed up by a set of guarantees, enforcable by law:
The creditor companies like the scheme because it means that they usually receive payment on time and do not have to keep sending you reminders and warnings. The banks like the scheme because it cuts down on the overhead of processing cheques, and because of this it's in their interests to make it easy, respectable and completely above-board. The end-users like the scheme because it means that once you've set up the mandate, there is no need to remember to pay bills on time, just to have a quick scan of the bill. The creditor companies also sometimes offer a small discount for paying by Direct Debit.
I use it myself quite a lot, and it works well - I've had a couple of billing mistakes on various bills since I started using it, one I caught before the debit and sorted out with the creditor company, one I didn't catch in time, but which the bank sorted out and reimbursed me for in 2 minutes flat.
For business to business use, however, cheques still rule, and I suspect will continue to do so for some time yet, although as with personal finances, I have seen a big increase in the use of direct fund transfer in the last few years.
I can't see cash really becoming obsolete here any time soon: for a start, as other people have pointed out, the paper cash is a lot easier to use than greenbacks - it comes in various colours and sizes depending on the denomination, and is much harder to forge too - the design of the notes changes about once a decade to keep up with whatever is state-of-the-art in repro technology, and our newest notes even have a hologram embedded in them.
Second, I think there's a rather larger 'black' economy here than in the US, which comes with the overall higher burden of taxation. That black economy will never be happy with money transfer that can be traced and logged. I think that whilst the government would love to make that economy disappear, the banks realise that it is in their own interests for that economy to stay healthy. Certainly I think the banks have a larger say in the running of the country than most other countries, not that surprising given London's status as the centre of the banking world.
Cash is private. I won't get new types of junk mail when I pay cash.
Cash is convenient. If I sell my CD's at a party or a gig, I don't have to bring a card-swiper with me just to process the transaction.
Cash is direct. I give the money to the person I want to have it, and I know that person will get it. I want the big tip to go to my waiter, who kept my coffee mug full for the past three hours while I was studying, without the money going into a pool that's shared with the guy who forgot half his table's order.
Cash is real. I can't spend cash I don't have.
Credit cards have great value for the obvious reasons. But they don't replace all of the functions paper notes and coins provide.
So basically you suggest a cash-substitute so we can have a cashless society?
Your laser printer won't be much use as a conunterfeit press without the proper cotton rag paper (which requires $$ to produce due to the large rollers used to flatten it) and special ink.
Also, it has to get the moire pattern right and print finely enough to reproduce the state names on the back of the 5 dollar bill. ----> In theory.
In practice, how many store clerks, gasoline-pump jockeys and bar waitresses will check a bill that you hand them very closely? It's usually just "Thank you sir" and put it into the drawer. If a counterfeit ten (for example) is included in a stack of three or four genuine tens, what "normal person" is going to notice?
I think the difficulty of counterfeiting is overstated. A while ago there was a warning issued to our local Chamber of Commerce (I run a small business) about counterfeit $20 bills being passed in our community. They were detectable if you held them up to a light and checked them closely. I asked how many of the business people planned to tell their clerks to start holding all $20 bills up to the light to check them when they were handed in, and everyone(!) looked at me as though I was nuts. Silly question - the answer was "Nobody".
I suspect that in counterfeiting close-enough is good-enough, as it were.
Having said that, I have never (knowingly, anyway) seen a counterfeit bill so I don't know how obvious they really are....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
What 'online bill payments'?
I pay my bills by EFT-POS at a bank branch or post office.
There is no cheque-based transaction in this case, the funds are transferred electronically, after the barcode on the bill is scanned by the operator and payment accepted via my EFT-POS card.
Also, the idea that cheques are the same as cash is fallacious, a society based entirely on cheques or similar promisary notes would be exactly analogous to a 'cashless' society.
A cheque is not legal tender, and is as worthless as the paper it is written on should the person who wrote it not have the funds to clear it.
The concept of cash is firmly rooted in the idea that it is a nationally recognized representation of value, guaranteed by the government and compulsarily accepted by any commercial entity in the country.
No cash changes hands during most cheque transactions either, unless the person who banks the cheque specifically requests that. In this case, the information contained on the cheque in the mail might as well be the contents of a set of electronic packets travelling down a wire, instead of through the post written on bits of paper.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Since I own a bar that only takes cash, I think I'm qualified to tell you that you're wrong.
The reason most bars only take cash is because we make more money that way. Credit cards slow down the bartender a lot: not only do they have to ring it in, but they have to get a signature. Good bartenders will parallel-process to get around this, but it still takes time. The faster our bartenders, the more drinks we serve, and the more money we make. Plus, the credit card company charges a fee for using credit cards. If you run a tab, where you hold on to the customer's card until the end of the night, the situation is somewhat better, but still not as good as cash: there's a lot more to keep track of, and a lot more potential for fraud. Plus, people tip less when they are paying by credit card, so both the bar and the bartenders make less money.
We take cash only, and have an ATM inside, right next to the bar. People are welcome to get cash advances on their credit cards before giving us cash for the drinks.
tracking your purchases has elements of big brother...
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marketing folks will love the idea of knowing every little thing you purchase, and when
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phone records are sometimes used as evidence in court, your purchases may follow
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abuse will come, spouses tracking each other, watching those purchases of suspicious items, like perfume, fine dining on work nights etc
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lies, damn lies and statistics. could your unusual purchases get you listed as a suspect criminal?
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could insurance companies raise your life insurance premiums due to your recorded high caffiene intake?
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could your employer look up your history and decide you take more holidays than your co-workers?
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if it's all electronic, where's the security? if I could fake you being at the scene of a crime, or having purchased something illegal or dangerous
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blackmail... with any type of tracking, blackmail is always a danger, especially when things may be implied and not actually be true, but the implication is enough to ruin another's life...
Maybe none of this could or would happen, but when humans are involved, it's a risk.I live in Iceland (no, we don't live in igloos :) ) and here cash "is almost extinct".
:) :)
:) This might perhaps lead to fewer crimes because of more requirements....
:)
:)
:)
I, for example, never ever use cash, except when paying in parking meters and people here are already starting thinking of paying the parking meters through cell phones ( >80% of all Icelanders have cell phones).
Credit cards and Debit cards are accepted everywhere, even on some camping places "in the middle of f*** nowhere" and everybody uses the cards like crazy, most Icelanders rarely use money.
We have already almost eliminated checks and replaced them with debit cards (that took only about 2-3 years). And the cash is next.
There are already some experiments taking place here in Iceland
involving SmartCards as "coins cards"
- the service will be publicly available within 2 years.
(In some news from VISA in Iceland, all credit/debit cards in Iceland
(and perhaps in the rest of the world) will be SmartCards before 2005)
I personally like the idea of cashless society,
You are "never ever short of cash even if you are"
- I can't buy something for $25 if I only have a $20 bill
but that isn't a problem with debit/credit cards,
in worst case scenario, you always have the overdraw @ the bank
The cards take much less space than money, especially coins
and when the smart cards will be common, you will only have carry one card that acts as your
drivers licence, identifcation card, credit/debit/coin card, your discount member card, etc.
It is also easier for you to do your home-accounting, etc.
Although some tend to spend more....
Crimes in the CashLess society will of course change and criminals will require more knowledge and different kind of skills. But hey they need to involve like the rest of us, everything is knowledge-driven now days
Call us stupid or ignorant, but most Icelanders don't have any privacy issues against card usages
- we are such a small nation (the population is only about 280000)
that "almost everybody knows everything about everybody" already
No seriously, privacy issues aren't our biggest fears/concerns.
So far our privacy hasn't been exploited although almost everything we do is linked to us through our National ID (a bit similair to the US Social Security Id)
- e.g. you can't rent a movie on video without given your National ID!
Yes, even the video rentals have access to the central National Id database,
that stores our name, age, gender, residence and marital status.
But the users of the database aren't allowed to exploit that information and they don't!
We have laws about privacy and the laws don't allow two different data sources to be joined by using the National ID without our permission....
And in the case of video rentals, they aren't allowed to store rental data for more than few days after the movie has been returned. So the rentals can't analysis their data much and categorize people...
I'm not saying that because exploitation isn't allowed nobody would ever do it if they had the opportunity.
I know that some people commit crimes... but still that would never get them very far, because as everybody knows "crimes don't pay", at least not in the long run....
I don't think many people would base their business as a marketing firm on using illegal methods of exploiting privacy.... That firm wouldn't last long...
This is quote from a American women living in Iceland, making fun of our card-usages:
"...in order to finalize the transition into a cashless society, there will be a Kronur [Iceland's local currency] burning festival, where all country men shall shall bring their paper money, burry it in the ground, drenched in amonia, and later serve it to foreign tourist, explaining to them, that this is the national food and it would be highly offensive not to eat it."
As Kent Beck, the guy behind Extreme Programming says: "Embrace change"...
Embrace the cash less society - at least it can give us a continued dotcom-like conference-topics
Instead of using network based currency transfer systems that incur very large transaction overhead, why not use digital cash? You've got a public key of some finacial institution on the card and store digitally signed and encrypted dollars in the cards memory. To pay you stick the card in a reader/writer which verifies the integrity of the money and changes the amount of dollars you have on the card. The money is stored like an electronic cashier's drawer for summation at the end of a business day and later deposited into a bank by some physical means or even transfered over a dial-up or network connection. The banks can get each other's keys to verify the dollars depoited and transfered and those numbers eventually go back to actual serial numbers of what may have been at one point paper bills. There needs be no recordkept of who spent which dollar where, just that the dollars eventually match up to serial numbers on whatever country's national bank. You can eliminate a good portion of the clearing house infrastructure needed for current electronic fund transfer thus making transaction overhead negligible or virtually nil.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Three guys are at a strip joint. A stripper comes up close to the first one and he hooks $10 into her thong. She shakes her booty at the second and he pokes a $50 bill into her underwear. She wiggles at the third guy who takes out his ATM card, swipes it down her butt, and takes the $60.
Many of you are saying that cash is anonymous. It may be more anonymous than Bill Gates' credit card but it is definitely traceable. Beware of the power of thousands of bored people connected to the Internet. Check Where's George. And that's without analyzing fingerprints, DNA, cocaine traces,...
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu