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Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm
MrSeb writes "There's been a lot of noise about Sweden becoming a cashless economy, and the potential repercussions that it might cause, most notably the (apparent) annihilation of privacy. Really, though, I think this is a load of hot air. Physical money might be on the way out, but that doesn't mean the end of anonymous, untraceable cash — it'll just become digital. If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing. What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash? We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money. No longer would handling money require expensive cash registers, safes, and secure collections; your smartphone could be your point of sale. It won't be easy to get governments to pass digital cash into law, though, not with big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency. Here's hoping Sweden makes the right choice when the referendum to retire physical money finally rolls around."
If it's secure, it's traceable, otherwise you can duplicate it.
Back in the 1990's, I was working on payment machines when the Mondex Trial started out in Swindon.
Essentially, this was just a smart card which you could load up with cash - if you lost your card, then you'd lost whatever cash was on it at the time.
At the time, I thought it was a useful idea, and it did take off to a certain extent for micropayments, particularly in newsagents, but as far as I recall, the trial fizzled out an died after a while. I do recall at one point the promoters were trying to hand out free Mondex cards loaded up with £5 but the general public just weren't ready for the concept 20 years ago.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
For the criminals, the simplest alternative would be to use another convertible currency for your transactions.
Euros, US dollars, whatever; as long as all countries haven't joined in to the digital cash trend, evil doers can just ignore it
After that, what . . . barter?
Bank transactions rely on open audits between the trading partners... you can't just say "hey, some guy just gave me $5M", you have to be able to verify where it came from, otherwise "some guy" can give the same $5M to 5 different banks.
My computer (and yours) can make a perfect copy of any string of 0s and 1s.
So-called digital cash relies on either special, supposedly un-copyable by the masses, hardware, such as in today's paper money, or traceable transactions recorded by trusted servers, such as today's bank to bank wire transfers.
If the traceability is implemented by the government, you can be sure that it will be accessible for "matters of national security," just as today's banking transactions are. The only way to make a secure transaction untraceable is to give something un-copyable to the parties doing the trading.
Precisely this. Remember that "A does not necessarily equal B", in this case digital cash does not automatically mean an anonymous currency - all money these days is digital in actuality, as no major currency is backed by a gold or silver standard anymore - new money is created by issuing it to an account in a computer, and it suddenly exists because the computer network says it does. Central banks move money to regional, trading and public banks by transferring it electronically, not by moving huge piles of notes around. Only when you actually take some physical money out of an ATM does it stop being digital.
And it's all traceable.
Remember that BitCoin also had several PR failures recently because of its irreversible feature - BitCoins were stolen, but there is no way to cancel that transaction even tho you can see where the money went because there is no way to reverse the procedure. Sort of the worst of both worlds, semi traceable but totally useless at the same time. Both better than and worse than cash at the same time.
I don't give a crap about who tracks what already. Cash may be one of the last bastions of anonymity and privacy left to us! If I want to pay for cash for everything I can, then I should be able to do that! What I buy at the grocery store, or what movie I go see, or what restaurant I eat at, etc. is nobody's business but mine. Aren't things already bad enough in this world? I can't say it loud enough: DO NOT WANT!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Bitcoin is not anonymous. Bitcoin transactions are necessarily public information.
You can't be anonymous (disconnected) while at the same time expect digital currency to remain globally consistant and secure. It's an oxymoron.
Even if it were possible it is unrealistic to assume a single government exists on the planet who would choose to implement such a system. Where is the value to the government in not being able to trace all transactions even if you ..wink wink nudge nudge don't know "who" owns what money at a point in time.
It sounds more like Revelations 13:17
First, the obvious: How do you pay someone who doesn't have the means to register your payment? Private to private money deals will become virtually impossible unless both parties have some kind of electronic device on them permanently. And it may be unbelievable to some, but there are still people who refuse to carry a smart phone around. How do I lend my buddy 10 bucks if he has no means to receive them?
Then, the criminal. Untraceable, yeah, sure, tell someone who believes you. Criminals will not use it. Instead, they will keep the cash in circulation. And why shouldn't they? The very first thing I will do as soon as it becomes a fact that this goes through is to go to the bank and withdraw as much money as I can in the lowest possible bills available. Trust me, this money will become more and more valuable as time goes by, as it is used for back alley deals and as it gets out of circulation because of busts and people returning it to their account. ANY currency that you can only spend but not collect becomes more valuable over time, as long as there are people who give it value. And that stuff WILL be valuable, and if not, I can always still hand it back to the bank and deposit it. The alternative being, of course, that some foreign currency suddenly becomes the street bill. For reference, see Cuba. You want something aside of the state-approved crap? You better have greenbacks with you.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it. Now on the other hand, try to open an account if you're homeless. Try it. I dare you. How the heck do you think these people will ever get back on their feet? Because then your excuse "if he really wanted, he could" doesn't work anymore. He CANNOT anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The user could pay someone else to buy the card at a small premium.
So when the drug dealer's money is confiscated and traced back to someone, it will be someone who you paid to buy it for you, and since there is no physical money anymore, that person will be able to provide your info to the cops. Or he'll go to jail.
Care to debate which option your local prepaid VISA card reseller who doesn't want to go to jail and doesn't give a damn about you will pick?
It doesn't matter who you buy the card from, they'll have your information because you can't pay them untracably. Even if you could barter all the money you need with them, they'll have your info.
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Give us a break about BitCoin and this non-sense that given the fact that it failed was to be blamed on not having sovereign backing. If it had no one would have used it as the only ones using it are criminals. Yes, criminals. Most are trying either to avoid paying taxes.
Back in the 60s, there was also a lot of noise about "we need a currency the government can't destroy by printing endless amounts", because we had recently officially left the gold standard (we had unofficially left it under FDR when he outlawed private ownership of gold). Being the 60s, one often-discussed proposal was the use of hemp-backed currency. A note might be backed by 20 pounds of hemp (and be printed on hemp paper, of course). But that was mostly hippies discussing this, and so it went nowhere.
From what little I've read, to the extent BitCoins are in use, it's as an underground currency, mostly to buy illegal drugs (I'm a bit skeptical, but it could be so). So perhaps we've come full circle to a new hemp-backed currency? I kind of hope so, just for the humor value.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can't remember which Heinlein novel (maybe Time Enough for Love?) was set in a 'nearly' cashless society. Cash however, was still needed because, as was phrased, it was 'the oil needed for the wheels of commerce'. What Heinlein was implying was that the contribution of black and grey markets can't be ignored, and indeed without them, normal commerce wont work at all.
If the cards change hands frequently enough, then the tracability of the card becomes as difficult as the tracability of the unique IDs on cash bills.
The reason that the ids of cash bills are essentially untraceable is because almost nobody currently tracks them.
The card data will be tracked by everyone, since everyone who touches it will need to process it as data and the computer will record it automatically. Unless you think people will just accept your word that "this card contains $25" and not run it through their scanner to verify the amount and validity, at which point the record is made.
The various denominations of card would never go through a card swipe machine, except to permanently denude it of its assets prior to its physical destruction.
Wow. So you really do think people will just accept your word that the cash card you hand them contains $25 just because you say so.
That 200$ card can have changed hands physically hundreds of times before then. This is the same problem as cash bills.
Cash bills are easily exchangable like that because there is some measure of trust that the bill is genuine and has not had its value stripped from it by an intermediate owner. There are also people with guns who deal with people who try to produce fake bills, and usually identifying a fake bill takes nothing more than really looking at it.
How do you deal with the person who "denudes" 100 cards that contain $1 and then transfers the contents of one $100 card to all 100 of the blanks? Or doesn't transfer anything to them. You've now got 101 cards that are valued at $100 because the guy who has them says they are $100 cards. He started with $200, he's now trading for $10,100. You can't tell just by looking, it's a piece of plastic with a magstripe on the back or a few gold contacts on the front.
Well, you deal with that by either "swiping" every card when it is used (which gives you tracability) or making cards that have strong visual authentication systems so no swiping, or even any electronic measure, is needed (and thus you have made a one-for-one replacement of "paper cash" with "plastic cash", copying all the problems of paper cash over into your "plastic" system.)
The only reason paper cash is untracable is because most people don't write the numbers down. If everyone has to write all the numbers down, and has to do it electronically because the numbers are only available via electronic means, then you've converted "paper cash" into just as tracable a system as this new "digital cash" will be.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it.
At least here in Norway there no such thing, through the post office you're always entitled to a bank of last resort. Ignoring that I've never been asked for my bank account number until after I've been employed, they may think I'm crazy but they'd still have to pay my salary - they will need my id number for tax reporting though. I would not get paid in cash but I would get a "payout referral" or something like that - I'm not sure how to translate it, it's not a cashier's check but more a wire-to-cash transfer you can collect at the bank. The money is reserved but the transaction is not done until the recipient collects at the bank. If the recipient doesn't collect in 3 months, it expires and the reservation is lifted and the money stays on the account. I used to work in the financial industry and occasionally customers would get payouts but have closed the bank account they were supposed to receive it on. We would then send out these things, most people would simply direct the money to the right account but they could also cash it without having any account at all. If they didn't collect we still had to keep them as client funds until someone asked for them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm? You're kidding. I have been dating her for 15 years...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
But---you use the apostrophe to form the plural, so you're still in. Congrats.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Failed at what exactly? Neither you nor the article define exactly what it is that it has failed at.
Linux is only 1-2% of desktops after 20 years... is that a failure? Scale isn;t great but look how many linux users there were after 3 years ... https://linuxcounter.net/charts/_stats_number_users_40years.png?1332412189
Sure bitcoin is still niche, revolutionary change doesn't happen overnight. Price discovery takes a while and often overshoots. Same with equities, and even indexes. That's all speculation driven. Beneath that there is an economy of sorts - it's small, tiny but thats how things starts.
If/when it gets outlawed, then I think we can start talking about failure. Thought technically it never failed - if anything, outlawing it suggests it was threatening to be a success.
Invaders must die