French Town Tests Cashless Society

SamiousHaze writes to mention a Silicon.com article about an attempt in a French tourist town, Caen, to do away with cash in some locales. From the article: "Among [the locations in the trial] is an underground car park; the town hall; a bus stop which can transmit timetable information; a cinema poster which downloads video trailers to users' mobiles; a local supermarket, where people can pay for their groceries with a mobile phone, and a tourist information sign outside the historic Abbaye des Hommes. By touching the mobile against the 'Flytag' logo at each of these locations, users can pay for services or receive information straight to their phone."

Comments

You mean Caen, don't you?

[Dynamoo]

Normandy isn't a town - it's a whole region. I suspect many Normans regard it as a country in it's own right (bloody Vikings). Specifically, the article mentions Caen (which is a city).

Now, Caen is an interesting place. It's hardly a sleepy backwater - it's the busiest urban centre in the area. (And the traffic is awful). It's actually a very modern, thriving city that was rebuilt after being almost completely destroyed in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion in 1944 (even most of the pretty bits are actually restoration of the original buldings). I'd suggest that of all the places I've been to in France, Caen is certainly one of the top runners when it comes to modernity.

Also, the French are pretty keen on their plastic and were early adopters of payment cards and related technologies. So.. it'll be interesting to see how this experiment pans out because it's being carried out in more-or-less ideal conditions.

Re:You mean Caen, don't you?

[Creedo]

Damn, man, have you ever tried to move a tank through Caen? You have to keep rebuilding bridges, and blowing up gates. It's a real PITA. Helps if you have a covert ops, though.

Damn

[taskforce]

I read the headline thinking it might be some kind of experiment into anti-materialist anarchism... then up on reading the summary I realised that by "cashless" they meant "physically cashless, so you don't have anything that can be traded for goods and services if they decide to pull your card".

Somewhat different I must say.

Re:Damn

[JediTrainer]

physically cashless, so you don't have anything that can be traded for goods and services if they decide to pull your card

Sounds more and more like a real-life version of PayPal, right? The scary part is when they arbitrarily (and unilaterally) decide to freeze your funds and make it next to impossible to get them back, even if you did nothing wrong.

There will always be some form of cash

[Rude Turnip]

Even if it isn't the government-sancationed variety. I don't know of too many people that would willingly create a transaction record of payments for various of their habits.

Loss of privacy

[misleb]

Talk about opportunities for loss of privacy. In a truely cashless society, there would be no way to have private transactions. Everything would be accounted for. Maybe it is one of those things where if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, but still. I'd like to keep the option of paying my dealer^H^H^H^H^Hbookie^H^H^H^H^Hfriend without some kind of electronic trail.

-matthew

Re:Loss of privacy

[Xiroth]

This would definitely create a niche for banks which specialise in short-lifespan Swiss-style anonymous accounts that are easy to create and allow easy transfer of control (by giving a card or something). Unfortunately that anonymity could be legislated out of existance by government regulation for security purposes, so you'd need the banks to be in nations with a good track record of allowing privacy.

Re:Loss of privacy

[no reason to be here]

I would say very naive. most tax-evasion is done by the extremely wealthy and by mega-corporations, who fully disclose all their holdings, then avoid paying taxes on as much of it as possible through completely legal tax loopholes that their lobbyist bought for them.

Re:Loss of privacy

[TheRaven64]

Do you actually use cash in this day and age? About the only time I use cash is when I am buying a sandwich or a coffee at lunch time, or when I am getting a drink in a pub and cards charge too much per transaction for it to be available (why credit cards have a minimum commission I will never understand. It surely can't cost them much to move a small number from one location to another, and those 50p transactions add up to large numbers very quickly).

For private payments I always use direct bank transfers; that way I have a record that I've already paid, and it's less effort since I can do it anywhere I have an Internet connection, while cash requires me to find a cash machine.

Re:Loss of privacy

[LordNimon]

Do you actually use cash in this day and age?

All the time. My minimum for credit card purchases is $20, and I never write checks unless I have to.

Re:Loss of privacy

[OldManAndTheC]

Tax evasion is hiding income, lying on your tax forms, and otherwise cheating by illegal means. Tax avoidance is using legal means to avoid taxes, like tax shelters, transfer prices, profit laundering and other tactics used by the mega-rich and large corporations. The impact of tax avoidance is greater than that of tax evasion, because tax avoiders have more money and better accountants and lawyers.

This report has an excellent discussion of legal tax avoidance schemes by the rich and their impact on society.

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

strip clubs? Where do you swipe your debit card?

Yeah but what happens in case of a blackout?

[Spy der Mann]

Interesting irony. Debit and credit cards were used to stop burglars from taking your cash, but right now the electronic frauds are becoming popular so it's MUCH EASIER for someone to steal your identity (and then buy goods using your money) than to steal your cash.

Now suppose a natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane, who knows) took out the power lines. How will you buy the goods you need?

Re:Yeah but what happens in case of a blackout?

[powerlord]

Oddly enough, if the power is out, having cash may, or may not, help you.

I was in New York City during the blackout a few years ago. I had cash, on the other hand there wasn't much you could do with it.
Some restaurants were open, but most were closed (no workers, no lights, no ability to ring up registers).
The major stores (supermarkets and the like) were closed. No registers, no lights, no refridgeration.

Good luck finding a taxi ... the streets were crowded and the traffic lights were out as well, but I suppose you could go somewhere by taxi.

All in all, the only store I know of that was open and doing business was the local hardware store, and the only thing they were selling was batteries.

Face it, our society has already become so dependant on electricity that in a lot of cases, if the power is out, having money may not help, there might be bigger issues to worry about.

Euros Merci

[digitaldc]

Great, now how is this guygoing to afford his lifestyle?

silly me

[nEoN nOoDlE]

When I read the article, I immediately thought that the town was going back to a bartering system.

Panhandling

[maddash1946]

I wonder what this will do to the beggar population in that town. I've notice that I almost never carry cash anymore and as such I have no money to give to beggars.

Overheard in the French town of Caen...

[slcdb]

"Aw crap! My wallet's battery just died."

Been and done

[jd]

I think it was Swindon, in the UK, that tried the Mondo cashless card over a decade ago. The card actually held the electronic cash, so that absolutely nothing went to or from any kind of central database. This had the massive advantage that it was extremely private. It had better privacy than cash, as there were no serial numbers or denominations involved. The cards used public key encryption and although I believe they never used long keys due to problems in generation, they were quite capable of handling keys equal to the strongest PGP/GnuPG can support today.

To me, this is the kind of electronic cash that should be the future. Total privacy, total anonymity, total freedom to use your own money as and how you like, absolute security against identity theft through reckless banks or merchants, hard limits to card misuse if stolen (and none of it attributable to you), relatively proof against electronic attacks such as keystroke monitors and viruses.

So why aren't these cards in widespread use? Merchants don't like extra card readers if no customers have the cards. Customers don't want cards they can't use. Neither like systems where most faults can be pinned on them and not the vendor. Banks hate systems that keep cash in the hands of consumers, as they make a lot of money speculating on the side (even in countries they're not strictly allowed to, they just do it overseas). Governments hate it because they can't track individuals and freezing accounts has less impact when you can carry a small fortune in your wallet.

The problem, then, is social and not technical. The French experiment uses inferior technology, for the purpose of satisfying some of the social requirements at the cost of placing all parties at greater risk.

(For some reason, humanity has all the attributes commonly associated with lemmings, when it comes to technology and risk. Given the choice of inferior products with greater risk, or superior products with little or no risk, societies always choose the inferior path.)

Cash...What's that?

[IDontLinkMondays]

I'm an American that lives in Norway. Since moving here 7 years ago, I don't recall using cash very much at all, much to my son's dismay. He likes to jingle my pockets for change to put in his piggy bank, but I have to make special stops to get change for him to avoid disappointing him.

I am a person that never has an empty savings account but regularly keeps my spending account low to avoid spending too much. See it's nice to have a reminder that you're blowing all your dough. I don't go to the ATM machine, so I never know what my balance is. Simply put, if there's no money in the account when I try to pay for something, I pick up my phone, push a few buttons, pay for what I need and I'm cautious for the rest of the month.

Since leaving the states, I no longer have a checkbook. All my bills (except my AMEX) is on autopay. I would put the AMEX that way too, but I'd like to see how much I'm spending on it.

The office I used to work in has a coke machine that was payable by telephone and I've even paid for train tickets using my phone as well.

As for cash, the only time I use it is when I'm paying the maid or paying the car wash that is run by people that would prefer to fly below the radar.

What I'm really trying to say is that Norway has been more or less a cashless society for several years now. Of course people still use cash, I know a lot of older people that still don't feel comfortable with the idea of everything being done with plastic, but it's an option which is nice to leave open to them. Cash has some benefits.

As for the experience in France, well, I see it as publicizing something that is not that interesting. It sounds as if they're just testing to see if telephone payment is an option. Personally I hate that idea since there are many times my telephone battery dies and I'd be stranded. Can you imagine not being able to pay for a taxi because you forgot to charge your battery?

As for America, well it's a long time before this modern world ever gets there. There's a tremendous amount of money made by the banks on bounced check fees and even worse, "Overdraw attempt fees" on using your check cards. I mean, come on, if the money isn't in the bank and the bank and the store knows it there on the spot, it's the store that should penalize you, not the bank. And having worked at a banking clearing house, I wrote a report generator for producing an account of three things on one report.
    1) How much money was lost due to bounced checks
    2) How much money was made from overdraw fees that were later corrected by the account holder
    3) How much of a difference was there between the two.
The number was always positive and not by small margins. I ran this script many many many times because I simply couldn't believe the numbers coming out. In one case, I printing a 60 page report of this activity over a single week and tallied it manually to ensure that what I was calculating was in fact correct. It's unbelievable. The American banking system is dependant on these overdraw fees and will never separate with them. So as long as that's the case, removing classic style paper based money and checks is out of the question.

Re:So much for being egalitarian...

[Fareq]

Question: How do you buy a phone?