Estonian Economist Suggests Abandoning Cash

J-Georg writes "Raul Eamets, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Tartu, proposed today during his TEDx talk that Estonia should stop using cash at all when adopting the Euro as the national currency (Estonian original). He also pointed out that abandoning cash would not be only important for the Estonian economy as a whole but also is a real challenge for both IT and banking sectors and would also improve Estonia's image as an IT-tiger."

Comments

Abandon all your cash

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take it

Re:Abandon all your cash

[Ethanol-fueled]

While we're at it, I propose the removal of the artificial limitations of citizens' double precision data to 16 digits with a floating decimal point.

It is an outdated model stuck on cheap hardware and a scam run by institutions paid by institutions pocketing the fractions (think salami slicing).

I want my bank account to be able to say ".0287863987569328746598137649582736985555726938475629835576459837" after the whole numbers' place. If I make games, I want to be able to sell virtual goods at $0.000000000000000000000000056 per transaction if I want to. When your audience is the entire internet and even very poor bushmen from Africa are on it, small amounts like that can rack up to pay for my six-pack. I want computer manufacturers to be able to do that for me affordably, and I want to see that number reflect in my account instead of being thrown away.

Re:Abandon all your cash

[badboy_tw2002]

Yeah, it should be pretty quick and easy to get a decent bank replacement system up and running. A few hours may be a bit short, but lets give the coder 2 days assuming he's using rails and a transactionless NoSQL solution to get the job done in time. We may need to test it a bit, so leave time for unit testing. After all, this is people's money, so you can't be too careful.

Re:Abandon all your cash

[JamesP]

Well, there you go. Also, there's no reason not to have imaginary numbers in currency.

Or even better, prizes sould be in C^3 !

Might I suggest an alternative currency

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaves might be a better choice. Given the country's forests every citizen would become quite wealthy overnight and it wouldn't require any additional infrastructure. I believe the next US Congress will be considering adopting leaves in the next session as the new US currency since leaves are worth more than the dollar.

Re:Might I suggest an alternative currency

[__aatirs3925]

Then we can all agree that money does grow on trees.

Re:Might I suggest an alternative currency

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're joking (hehe), but in reality that wouldn't exactly be true. The more of a currency there is, the less one unit of it is worth. For example, lets say there are a quadrillion dollars in existence; one dollar by itself isn't worth very much. However, if there were only a billion dollars, the dollar is worth a heck of a lot more. Same with leaves; the more leaves there are, the less each leaf by itself is worth. Every time someone plants a tree and waits for it to grow (err, that might take a while, but disregard that) the value of the currency drops, thus inflation.

We can solve that problem (and effectively revalue the leaf) simply by burning down all the trees.

Re:Sounds great...

[UCSCTek]

Swipe your card through her cleavage.

Re:What about tipping peopel like bellhops / skyca

[shoemilk]

Wow, this is the first argument I've heard that's made me want to support this.

Re:Barter is the workaround when cash is abolished

[M. Baranczak]

Bartering is all well and good until you have to make change for 1.95 goats.