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Predicting a Future Free of Dollar Bills
An anonymous reader writes with this story about how a cashless society might work and how far-off in the future it is. "...We're not there yet, but a cashless society is not as fanciful as it seems. Recent research suggests that many believe we will stop using notes and coins altogether in the not-too-distant future. New payments technologies are rapidly transforming our lives. Today in the U.S., 66 percent of all point-of-sale transactions are done with plastic, while in the U.K. it's just under half. But while a truly cashless society is some time away yet, there is raft of groundbreaking technologies that will make cash a mere supporting act in the near future."
Why would you ever want a cashless society? Cash is one option you have. Taking it out removes an option and therefore freedom.
Let's see the future free from pennies, first.
While cashless might make sense to a middle class with easy access to technology and banks, there is a significant percentage of the population does not have access to such things and they probably will not any time soon. As much as 10% of the US population has no bank access, no SS ID, no IDs of any type, etc.
So you are the reason that a lot of stores have a minimum charge amount for credit / debit charges. The transaction fees charged to merchants are ridiculous and so are ATM fees. Until these fees are reduced, you will never see a truly cashless society. And that doesn't include those that have less trust of banks than they do of governments.
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I've had it several times in my life where my debit and credit card stopped working because of a glitch. Those few times if I didn't have cash on me, I would have been screwed because I got up-front services, like going out to eat or gas or I had to pay my electric bill that day or get cut off. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, I need a way to keep living.
1. Privacy is more important to me than convenience. I like the idea that I can go into a store and buy something without someone making a recording of it and tying it to me.
2. The issue isn't to make the dollar go away, or even the penny go away. The issue is to fix the inflation.
Also needed if you happen to piss of the government and they order your accounts frozen. Then you starve unless you have cash. Or friends. Who are willing to risk "supporting a terrorist".
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
"Lots of people think it will happen" means about nothing. People are HORRIBLY bad at predicting future trends. More so en-mass.
What people say they want and what they really want (and demonstrate by doing) are pretty much unrelated. So even if people SAY they want cashless, I doubt they'll actually vote that way when the rubber hits the road.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Most criminals would no longer be able to transact business, as they operate in a cash system.
The biggest criminals run banks... or governments
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cashless only works if the poor can get bank accounts without having to pay hefty fees if they can even qualify at all.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Are we assuming all transactions humans do are with merchants?
Naive as hell !
Crappy list of examples, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples: 1) What about if I want to buy your [insert bike or computer or whatever]? 2) Baby sitter? 3) Kid's allowance? 4) Pay some kid kid to mow yard. 5) Underground transactions (illegal stuff)
The importance of cash will continue to decline with transactions with merchants, but it will never remotely approach "cashless".
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
As someone from the U.S. who just recently traveled in Canada, I have to say that I like their current currency system a lot. Using loonies ($1) and "twoonies" ($2) coins is nice as they can actually be used easily to buy useful things, which is the primary reason why (I think) dollar coins haven't really taken off in the U.S.
In Canada, parking meters, soda machines, etc.. take $1 and $2 coins. It beats having to feed a pile of small coins into a meter or machine, or trying to iron out and feed a frayed and mangled $1 USD bill into a soda machine and having it rejected. The coins are also fine for face-to-face transactions; they are not unusual. In contrast, Susan B. Anthony dollars in the U.S. can get you some funny looks and many vendors flat out won't accept them, legal tender or not. You can go buy a beer in Canada with the change in your pocket. The Canadian coins make small daily transactions simple.
In the U.S., getting change is a pain in the ass because you invariably wind up accumulating pennies which are a nuisance. You can't use them for tolls or in machines in most places, and toting around a pile of pennies large enough to actually purchase anything with is ridiculous. So you either start carrying a satchel of pennies around trying to pay exact change, or you toss them in a jar, spend time rolling them, and exchange them at the bank for larger denominations (yay! A trip to the bank just to dispose of pennies!). You can also use services like Coinstar, which takes a cut (yay! A special trip to dispose of pennies AND paying some money to a company taking advantage of the dumb system!). In Canada, prices are merely rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Sometimes it is a few pennies in your favor, sometimes it is a few pennies in their favor. On the whole it is a wash, and you would have to be a really miserly SOB for it to worry you.
Canada has cash pretty well figured out. It's not that difficult, U.S.!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The electrical grid is anything but reliable.
It's simply unacceptable to say, that if the power goes out, then we're screwed and can no longer trade.
We need the ability to trade regardless of operating on or off the grid, and plastic or cashless methods can't do that.
At the cost of anonymity for those who want to frequent such establishments without so much log file trail.
And there are plenty of other use-cases for people wanting their name decoupled from their deeds.
Not all of them are exactly bad, either.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Prepaid debit cards, and burner cell phones, are only anonymous if you...oh, pay for them in cash!
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
You wanna know a really cool feature of cash? If the merchant from whom I buy something with cash gets robbed/hacked after I leave, I don't lose the rest of my cash. It's pretty nifty.
Suppose there's 5 guys in different parts of town who each have 1000 un-opened pre-paid debit cards. I buy one and swap it straight across for one in a dept card anonymizer's collection, and then drive somewhere and do that again. It wouldn't be hard to make vending machines that would do this job, although some might prefer to trade with humans.
Why not? I was on a Delta flight the other day and the only way to purchase in-flight cocktails was via credit card. On another flight the same day, the same purchase could only be made in cash. I am not aware of any laws that require businesses to accept a certain form of payment, and why should there be? If a business doesn't accept cash (or credit cards, or chickens, or bitcoin) and their customers prefer that method of payment, it will show up in their bottom line. Why would the government need to intervene in such a transaction?
Enigma
The moment cash was eliminated, you could kiss your precious freedom goodbye. That is not a joke, and it is not a fantasy.
Surely if they are writing cheques, then that is already cashless? Sounds like they've beaten the rest of us to it...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
You wanna know a really cool feature of credit cards? If you get mugged after you leave the store, you don't lose any of your money when you cancel the card and dispute any transactions.
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The moment cash was eliminated, you could kiss your precious freedom goodbye. That is not a joke, and it is not a fantasy.
Yes, I went totally cashless about ten years ago, and still lament the loss of my freedom.
If there is anything worse than having an itemized statement of all my purchases, and paying it off every month, then getting cash back, I don't know what is, unless it is....
The nightmare scenario of automatically paying your bills. Jesus, that's awful.
Some times I wonder if the doomsday preppers haven't taken over Slashdot these days. We've always had a strong streak of libertarianism, but half the comments these days read like they are posted from a bunker in Idaho. The second, fakey one, because we don't want the Guvmint finding the real one by tracking our phone. Back to the rabbit holes everyone!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And no, the cash is accounted for n withdrawal, it has not "disappeared".
I think you missed my point. Suppose you take $60 out from an ATM to cover miscellaneous cash expenses for a week (or two or whatever). That number is immediately deducted from your balances, so if you look at your checking account to decide what you have to spend for future purposes, the cash is "invisible." Moreover, if you want to track individual cash transactions, you would need to enter and itemize them manually, which frankly most people can't be bothered with unless they do a lot of cash transactions or use large amounts of cash.
So, if you use financial software, cash becomes this untraceable invisible part of your financial total (like credit cards used to be), while every other transaction will automatically update and modify your net worth. I'm NOT saying you CAN'T keep track of cash... I'm saying for people who don't use it very much, it's more difficult, and people don't bother.
The cluster of odd bills in my wallet has become sort of like the "change jar" that people throw their coins into. You don't quite know how much is there, because you don't need it or use it very often,, but it's probably less than $100, and if you ever need some, you can probably dig out a couple quarters as necessary.
That younger people cannot maintain a balance in their heads is no reason to dispose of cash in society for those who can.
I know that this is what TFA is about, but I never argued in my post to get rid of cash. I don't think that would be good at all. My post was simply responding to others who said that cash was easier to track in your wallet -- for previous generations, yeah, today... not so much.
15th of March 2013 Cyprus. Overnight the banks were frozen, all electronic transactions ceased, the banks were closed, ATMs suddenly did not work (they were turned back on with severely restricted withdrawal limits later). There four kinds of people The cashless Those who kept cash outside the system. Those with other things like gold/silver/food/petrol. The wolves who travelled into Cyprus to strip the cashless of their assets for fire sale prices. The cashless starved, and had to sell their assets at fire sale prices, because they couldn't get any money, they couldn't use their cards AND they couldn't escape. Those who kept cash out of the system did not starve and could escape. Those who had other things like gold/silver/food/petrol ended up cleaning out the cashless of their assets and picked them clean as they had no choice as they had to buy water and food. Trevor a wolf went out there and started buying cashless peoples' Jewellery for about 5 cents on the Euro. The cashless had no choice but to sell to a wolf or starve.