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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."
Good luck everybody
...that they know about.....are done with plastic.
Why would you ever want a cashless society? Cash is one option you have. Taking it out removes an option and therefore freedom.
As long as there is a demand for illegal drugs, there will be a need for cash. Lots of cash. Dealers don't take plastic.
As someone who has had a recent issue with a certain major bank(they closed the account and sent cashiers checks to me for the balance. Waiting 2-3 days without money wasn't pleasant)...I will never go cashless. Relying on these financial institutions for every transaction is something I will not trust. I won't get into the whole NSA/FBI/etc. potential tracking of all my purchases.
The other point of view is that cash is needed because the government is still all in our business. Get the government out of the morality game and the cash will more or less disappear on its own. In that way, cash usage is a proxy for government oppression.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Barter is occasionally impractical, yet relatively untraceable and virtually untaxable.
But cotton/linen fiber is legal tender for all debts, public and private. But especially for private.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Let's see the future free from pennies, first.
But they could always take bitcoin, paypal dead-drops, or many other forms of e-payment.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
A butcher near me already has http://canningsfreerangebutche...
From the article:
Biometrics will also make fraud virtually impossible â" identification is yours and yours alone, and therefore very hard to copy.
And impossible to change if it is somehow copied. (See: Fingerprints made from gummy bears", for example.)
How is this a good idea again?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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.
Last week I swiped my card at a gas station pump before noticing the tamper proof seals had been broken. I have replaced the card, but while waiting for the new card I used cash. You tend to conserve more money when it is cold, hard cash instead of of just swiping a card. Less surface area for compromise as well.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
In Canada we no longer have dollar bills. We have dollar coins. We also got rid of the penny.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
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.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
The only reason to transfer to a cash-less society is so instead of the Federal Reserve controlling our money, the credit card/debit card companies do.
It's bullshit that not only can the credit card company charge YOU interest, they also get a small percentage/flat fee if it's very small whenever you use one of their cards.
That's why prepaid cards want you to either direct deposit or make a retarded amount of transactions per month, they make more than the $4.95 they charge per month to keep your card active by simply you using it.
All in all, it's an entirely bullshit situation and I really hope something like bitcoin takes off.
"Cashless" is also a giant vacuum sucking service fees back to the banks and so on. Retailers pay a certain amount per transaction to a payment processor, even if you the customer don't pay directly. Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Just imagine how much money you would have if you got a penny for every transaction conducted in every North American Wal-mart for just one day -- you could retire several times over and still afford fuel for your yachts!
Are we really in that much of a hurry to keep giving more money to the banks?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
You can no more eliminate citizens living on the fringes than you can remove corruption from politics.
Trading in the illegal and the illicit is the second oldest profession.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I've had it several times in my life where my debit and credit card stopped working because of a glitch. Those few times if I didn't have cash on me, I would have been screwed because I got up-front services, like going out to eat or gas or I had to pay my electric bill that day or get cut off. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, I need a way to keep living.
In America, most stores won't take your card unless you plan to spend less than a pittance. Most stores will deny you if your transaction isn't 5-10$
At that point, because of the processing fees from the credit card company they lose almost to all of their profit.
I'm sure it'd be much different if the card user was charged instead of the merchant, but that's not how it works here. Credit card companies in the US are always double-dipping, charging processing fees to the merchants and collecting interest from cardholders.
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.
This is going to be disastrous if we remove stripper money.
... Slap
Where should I swipe my card miss?
Swipes
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"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.
Cash is accepted at more locations than Visa and Mastercard and always will. If government issued notes are eliminated, another form of anonymous exchange will arise. As previously mentioned, it may be gold or silver, it might be something else. People will find a way.
I was talking to an economist friend, and he was saying one way to greatly reduce crime would be to eliminate all hard currency over $5 and make the currency that was left just coins.
Yeah, yeah, I know the libertarians would go apeshit, but the world for the likes of Tony Soprano would crumble.... Most criminals would no longer be able to transact business, as they operate in a cash system.
fee on every transaction. Really, the greed of banksters is enough to make a mobster blush. However, going cashless would make the church rumple sale impossible. Once that aspect of the matter is made clear to politicians that will be the end of this dicussion.
There is a non-trivial fee associated with cash too. Cash requires labor to move/protect it, can go "missing" much more easily than credit card transactions etc. Cards are probably still more expensive, but not by as much as you may think.
Monstar L
the fiat, which can crash at any moment
The currency or the car?
(In before "yes".)
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.
Credit card companies in the US are always double-dipping, charging processing fees to the merchants and collecting interest from cardholders.
Often, yes. Always, no. I've had three credit cards. None of them charge any interest because I pay in full each month with an ACH transfer from my checking account.
So how will a child not old enough to have a bank account in his own name buy a candy bar at the convenience store?
screw you. I know and do business with tens of people who only accept cash, only
pay cash, can't take or process a check. They live hand to mouth, and they do
alot of the labor that keeps everything running. The majority of the ones I know
are white, and were born in the united states. not that that should matter
How convenient for you to depend on an underclass, legal or not, and piss on them
for not having as comfortable a life as yourself.
In America, most stores won't take your card unless you plan to spend less than a pittance. Most stores will deny you if your transaction isn't 5-10$
Not sure what backwards part of America that post came from, but I can tell you for certain that it's absolutely false in every part of America that I'm aware of. I use my debit card everywhere, for everything, including buying a single item at a dollar store if that's all I want to buy. No one has ever once even blinked. $1 at the Dollar Store, $3 at the fast-food joint, whatever, everyone's happy to take my business. I stopped using cash for anything at all over a decade ago, and the only people who don't want my card are the government -- they would rather I write a check for my driver's license renewal or whatever (which is funny, no one else will accept a check anymore around here).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I haven't carried cash in like 10 years. I just never use it.
This is living in Australia, and then in New Zealand for the past 5 years.
In New Zealand road side fruit sellers accept cards. Literally EVERYONE accepts cards, because everyone uses cards.
Cash is pretty much dead here.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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
Have more than one bank account?
Preferably in more than one country? I have bank accounts in 3 countries: Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. I can use my plastic card from any bank/country anywhere I go.
Works for me.
Never had a problem with a bank account getting "frozen".
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The underground economy has many faces.
drugs
Theft
worse crime
far less insidious, unreported labor
All these will have serous problems in a cashless world. There are ways around these with some problems. But, it will drive small players out of the market.
Not a pretty picture for some.
Practical question: how do you plan to tip strippers? I don't think they appreciate coins in the hooch...
C|N>K
few vending / pinball / video machines took them and making them take CC's is dumb as the fees will eat much of $1-$2 per buy they take in.
Anyone who puts a credit card, much less a debit card, in a vending machine is a fucking idiot. Those things are so incredibly easy to tamper with it's not even remotely funny. And the way they are built you would never have any idea it was tampered with, most legit ones already look like they could hold a skimmer (since many vending machines that do have them are conversion jobs to begin with). Not to mention the more and more skimmers are placed inside at this point - and some vending machine delivery guy probably being paid minimum wage has the key. Cash will never be replaced. Reduced, well, it already has, but replaced - not for a very long time.
This is the country where those in charge are so terrified of any change they had TV commercials promoting $1 coins - and then gave up on them. They are also afraid of big changes to US notes (why not make them from plastic like Australia does?) in order to fight counterfeiting. In this, as in all other technology, the USA will be well behind the rest of the world.
Banks love you using plastic. They tax every transaction. Paying with plastic costs you at least 2.5% and as much as 5% extra because the merchants must build that into the price to pay the banks for the credit card transactions. This is a hidden inflation. A hidden tax.
Banks also like it because they can collect data on your behavior and that is a salable product which makes them more money.
One of my clients made me get it to get paid, their accounting department was paying net 90 days and required all kinds of crazy insurance to get me paid through them. So paying with the department credit card was just easier. So when I setup the credit card account, they told me it would cost me 4.0%. Every month new and mysterious (to my account rep.) charges would show up: a fraction of a percent here, fixed fees there. He could never give me an explanation of what they all were, and they weren't consistent from what I could tell. I told them that those charges were ok with me as I was passing that along to my client, but it was hard to do that when I didn't know what I would expect (I was running around $10K a month through it for some other part time contractors and equipment). When the project was over, I couldn't cancel that account fast enough.
So I perfectly understand why some stores have a minimum charge or won't take credit at all, it's a big hassle and cost.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Not exactly. When someone with good credit pays off his "cash back" card at the end of the month, the bank passes on a portion of the merchant fees. That's the "cash back."
Of course, if you use your card as an unsecured loan for longer than the billing cycle then you pay interest. And if you're late paying you pay late fees. You're a fool to do that in anything but a dire emergency, and your parents, friends and colleagues have warned you about it all your life, but you're free to live your life any way you want to.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
lot's of small hotdog / food places want cash only.
"The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. "
"The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Privacy concerns and the black market will keep the cash alive.
I don't pay ATM fees - which makes all the easier to me to use cash as my primary payment method.
I can get cash from any ATM too, the limitation is that at banks other than my own the minimum withdrawal is 20 euros while I can withdraw 10 euros on my bank (and have the account balance printed).
...and the government passes on the costs of maintaining the cash system on to the people. Via taxes. The truth is that nothing is free and if you get something you will have to pay for it one way or another.
Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Of course it does. But there's not much I as an individual can do about it. So, actually this is an INCENTIVE for consumers to use credit cards, since at least with my card I can get a percentage back in whatever form of rewards (whereas cash only customers will just lose all of it). The only place where I have an incentive to pay cash is when merchants charge different prices for cash vs. credit, and there I generally would pay cash. (Of course, this assumes you never carry a balance on your card... and why would you?)
So get rid of mag stripes. You can't skim a smart card. At least not nearly as easily.
I'm not sure where you shop, but in NYC, here is how it works.
All corporate/franchise/not-family stores accept credit/debit cards with no minimum charge. Most family-run stores, if they accept a credit card at all, enforce a minimum balance between 10 and 20 dollars. That's because the credit/debit card business model is not profitable to small businesses, only mega corporations that can afford to eat a credit/debit card surcharge.
Here is an interesting mechanic I noticed in poor neighborhoods in NYC that paint this picture clearly. At the Bodega, you can get a good meal for between 2.50 and 5 dollars if you are strapped for cash and can not afford more. At the McDonalds, you can get a meal roughly the same size as the Bodega meal for between 4 and 7 dollars (we are not talking about "Dollar Menu" here, we are talking about quantity by weight). So in some of the worst places in the city where every penny counts, why does the McDonalds get more foot traffic and raucous customers than the bodega? Because the McDonalds will take your credit card for anything but the bodega will not. It's almost like a perpetual motion machine for putting debt on the poor. They can't use cash because they don't have it but they can spend more "money" because McDonalds and Visa are in on the racket together.
Plastic money is so great for society, right? Who needs that stupid cash stuffs? Don't buy gold, buy paypal credits. If you disagree, you are old-fashioned and or crazy, and you wouldn't want that!
You can get the hardware and an account to accept credit card payments using your iPhone, for instance.
But then you have to pay hundreds of USD for an iPhone (or maybe one hundred for a compatible Android phone) and hundreds of USD per year to upgrade from voice-only cellular service to smartphone service. Or what am I missing?
In theory electronic cash, such as bitcoins, could still allow anonymous transactions.
The other other point of view is that a uniform means of economic exchange with no additional cost is public service that the government should be doing.
I agree that a common currency is a core government concern. I wasn't advocating that the government should be out of the currency business, just positing that cash usage probably has some correlation to government's interaction with your daily life. There are some pretty large cash payments taking place to avoid taxes, or because the government makes sure it is hard to use credit cards for your illegal transaction.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Cashless" is also a giant vacuum sucking service fees back to the banks and so on. Retailers pay a certain amount per transaction to a payment processor, even if you the customer don't pay directly. Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
THIS. I can't believe everyone is so supportive of a cashless society when cash is the only transaction-free method of payment (also anonymous). Paying 3-5 percent convenience charge simply to not use cash boggles my mind. I often ask for a cash discount on large purchases and usually the merchant is quite eager.
Cash is king.
"is the fiat, which can crash at any moment"
Did they ever find that white Fiat Uno that hit the Ritz hotel Mercedes in that Paris tunnel on 31 Aug 97
People don't like dollar coins?
They seemed to like the Sacagawea dollar. When they first came out, people were ordering rolls of them at the bank. But then when the banks started re-rolling used dollar coins, they'd start slipping Susan B Anthony dollars into the rolls. That killed the dollar coin.
Nobody likes confusing SB Anthony dollars with quarters, which is a good part of the reason they never caught on. But the banks (the Fed?) appears to be stuck with them and the mints won't recall them. So, no dollar coins for us.
Have gnu, will travel.
If a tampered vending machine takes my cash, it's my word against theirs that it's my money they stole.
If they use my credit card details, I get the money back. The insurance for that is paid by the merchant fees. There is no cash insurance.
Writing the mag strip to a new card won't work for long anyway, since every time I put my card in an ATM machine, the mag strip is re-written.
You can't reuse a chip or contactless authorisation, they're both one time only.
Tell me again how cash in a vending machine is safer?
Is this daily, weekly, or just bi-monthly?
I have bank accounts in 3 countries: Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Have your Australian and New Zealand banks started their FATCA compliance reporting yet? You are ether a non-US person, very wealthy so as to make the trouble worth it to them, or they'll be closing your accounts soon.
Have gnu, will travel.
What denomination ???
Not Southern Baptist. You'll need a sprinkling denomination.
A cashless society is doomed to serfs and kings.
Whenever the kings want more, they raise the prices by adding fees.
Serfs will have no say in the matter.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
technology lets poor people receive payments from one another. I imagine pre-paid type debit cards with nfc chips. Funds can be transferred non-anonymously between people via African style cell phone transactions and moved between the cell phone and the debit card via nfc chips in both. If people can load up cards identically (or asymmetrically if a payment is involved) and swap 'em, after a few swaps the cards should seem anonymous enough for those not sufficiently motivated to barter.
Politician is the oldest profession. The guy giving the orders takes a cut of what everyone else is doing. Prostitution is the second oldest profession, as they can't get paid till there is a revenue stream.
From Alien: Resurrection:
GEN. PEREZ: Elgyn, these were very, very hard to come by. *slides a stack of cash to Elgyn*
ELGYN: So was our cargo. You're, uh...not about to plead poverty on me, are you, General?
GEN. PEREZ: No. Just saying very few people deal in cash nowadays.
ELGYN: Just the ones don't like to keep business records. Yourself, for example.
[End Of Line]
Some private company would invent something to replace it.
There are just too many microtransactions on too many levels to totally replace cash.
I can't take anything seriously after that.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
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.
Ex. power blackouts like NY had last year, or ~15 years ago when New England and Ontario had a power outage for a couple days. Most things will shutdown anyways in those scenarios but still are businesses really not going to want to be able to sell things because their card reader isn't working? Or how about your wallet gets stolen, credit card gets hacked etc? With cash you might/likely have some around the house. How many people have a spare copy of their bank card and credit card and will it work once you report the other one as missing? What you are just going to not buy anything for 3-5 days while you wait for another one?
I lived in Laos for a while and was surprised that they have no coins there, only paper money. How do you flip a coin? You have to keep a foreign coin just for flipping. Then I came back (to Thailand) and thought it was weird that we have two kinds of currency - paper and metal. Why? Don't know.
As for all purchases being electronic, have you ever heard of Edward Snowden? Come on, be real! Currency is the last vestage of privacy! Buy a book for cash and no computer in the world knows that you own it. How will you use your credit card to give a beggar a dollar? Tip the lady at the massage parlor and your wife hits you with your bank book. "Officer, forget the speeding ticket; just take a hundred from my Visa card." A world without cash? Not in my world.
Even if the fees are being paid for by the merchants, forcing them to charge higher prices, the people who pay in cash at places that accept both are having to pay those higher prices just as much as a person who doesn't ever carry cash would..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't pay a 3-5 percent convenience charge on anything. It's a violation of the rules in the US for them to charge it. And cash isn't free to the merchant either. BoA is at about 0.3% cash handling fee (some "free" each month, but a business account with large cash deposits will get charged a fee for using cash.
Also cash is much more likely to be stolen by employees or others, or just plain get lost.
Learn to love Alaska
How smart is it to essentially Privatize Currency? Electronic money isn't handled by the people for the people, for public good. It's private global corporations using proprietary *everything*, with what's essentially a local exchange rate rate to you/me/us that's always to their own benefit. Electronic money is just trading power for convenience.
There's no reason the replacement would have a fee on every transaction. Opposing change because you are too stupid to solve problems doesn't make the change bad.
Learn to love Alaska
So why replace it with banks that launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and dodge taxes? Normal human beings do need to not pay what are effectively taxes to corporations. If they knew how much the credit cards were taking on the merchant side (that shows up in their prices), they might clamor to pay cash more often.
I think that it's hard to pay with card in the US in some places like Taxi and small shops - something that's so common in Sweden that it gets annoying when you can't.
The few shops that don't take cards these days have to put up huge signs to avoid annoyed customers that assumes cards are good there.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
NSA? Is that you?
many believe we will stop using notes and coins altogether in the not-too-distant future.
I remember hearing exactly the same thing back in the 80's.
Cash will be around for a long time yet, because in some ways it's still preferable. Different tools for different things.
In $GOD we trust. All others must pay cash.
(your choice as to how to define $GOD)
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
When Canada switched to dollar coins, the mint actually gave some thought to those kinds of problems and made the coin non-round and slightly bigger then a quarter (our coinage was always the same size as American coins, no idea about the current dollar coins) . Then they lost the dies, stuck a loon on the coin and now we have loonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
there's a water sports denomination?
tracked? no one cares about your beer, pizza, gamer video card, lap dance and dime bag purchases
I move the goalposts when failure modes become apparent to me. I apologize for not anticipating all such failure modes in advance. But the next one is that cash works without electric power, without a cellular subscription, and where coverage is unavailable.
CEO of sage writes a one-sided pro-industry article about a dream standing to benefit his companies bottom line.... who cares?
Would prefer a piece from @Dunkin_CEO detailing how 90% of the world is projected to be addicted to gooey confections by 2020.
All those running around proclaiming demise of cash would constitute some kind of death knell to illicit industries must have been hooked up with some great shit.
I love cash. You can have it when you pry it from my col... wait... not quite. But for me to stop using cash, you have to make electronic cash work first. That means three things that are absolute requirements and I will not ever negotiate:
As long as even one of these conditions is not met, I will have to carry cash around me anyways, and if I have cash with me, I will use it wherever I can.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The last number I saw published here in Norway said that cash only accounted for about 5% of the daily transaction volume, debit cards are used in 80% of purchases. Published statistics also say that cash is more expensive to handle than electronic transactions.
I can't remember using cash a single time during the last few months.
Unless one posits a governmental alternative to private banks, the U.S. Constitution raises some barriers to a "cashless society." In the Supreme Court's recent Obamacare ruling (PDF), the court held that neither the Commerce Clause nor the Necessary and Proper Clause provide Congress with power to require that a person participate in commerce, i.e., by requiring that they buy health insurance. The relevant legislation was upheld under the Congressional power to levy taxes, in the form of a penalty for those who do not buy health insurance.
Requiring that people enter into a business arrangement with a private bank to handle their funds would seem to run into the same barrier, leaving the question whether Congress has power to require people to pay all debts via a private bank under its power to coin money and set the value thereof, in legal effect requiring people to loan money to private banks in the form of deposits.
The factual basis for such a test case already exists because of a statute requiring that all payments of Social Security and Dept. of Veteran Affairs benefits (and wages of federal employees) be made by electronic funds transfer, which as currently implemented can only be made to private banks other than the Federal Reserve Banks.
By way of disclosing my bias, I have boycotted banks since the collapse of the economy in 2008 because of massive bankster fraud that caused that collapse. I have refused to accept payment of VA and Social Security benefits by that method. I do not intend to loan my money to banks and am willing to litigate that issue if necessary.
Paul E. "Marbux" Merrell, J.D.
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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There are still some things to solve for the cashless society.
1. Electronic transactions are still far too expensive. Every shop I go into to get (say) my lunch have a minimum amount you have to spend before you can use your debit card (or you have to pay a surcharge). My lunch always falls below this value so I must use cash. Things like vending machines too. Until it's cheap enough to use something like a debit card to buy an item costing 60p, then you'll still need cash.
2. Security. Debit/credit cards are too insecure, and the burden of making them secure is on the merchant in the form of PCI-DSS. It means if you're a small business taking debit/credit might not be an option. The burger van in the car park for instance, it's still impractical for him to take electronic transactions due to the equipment requirements and PCI-DSS.
3. Very hard to settle private debts. For instance if I hire a builder for a small job, he now has to give me all his bank details if I'm to do an electronic transfer. It's about 100 times easier to give him cash.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
Why blame the man working within the system for charges applied by someone completely different? Either the merchant should be happy to absorb the transaction cost, the merchant should specify the minimum cost, or the bank shouldn't charge the fees. But it most definitely is NOT the fault of the person simply buying something.
Now let's flip the thing around. For the few cents per transaction that end up going to the banks for small purchases how much could be potentially saved by not tallying up the register, not storing float offsite or managing a safe, not having to train staff to manage cash securely, not having to bank your earnings at the end of the day (that's a good expensive one there), and above all when the cash register disagrees with the paperwork not spending an hour trying to figure out where the money went.
There is a cost of doing business in cash. You just don't see it and point to credit fees instead. I for one pay an accountant to do my taxes because he's faster and cheaper than the time I'd spend doing it, so why not pay a bank to manage the money (if we went cashless).
are you sure about that? Common Currency means Walmart can show up and sap all the wealth out of local economies, forcing everyone to get with the program and take on debt for college degrees for finance jobs to ride the highly-vertically-integrated financial american economy.
I'm alright with a cashless future, so long as it's done right. One thing it can't be is the current propriety charge card system implemented by and for rent-seeking middlemen. It is the government's job to develop modern, usable currency (electronic or otherwise), and they have been lax in this responsibility.
I bet department stores and gas stations do much more than that portion of their business by plastic. I bet sweetshops and toyshops deal with a lot of cash, because a large chunk of their customer base doesn't have plastic. Also greeting card shops, newspaper kiosks, and other institutions that deal with a lot of small transactions, because cash is more convenient for small purchases.
There is a non-trivial fee associated with cash too. Cards are probably still more expensive, but not by as much as you may think.
I don't think you have much idea of the total cost of cards. It is not just the transaction fee that Visa rake in. My wife was a bookkeeper for a small company (trade supplier - guttering etc) and they thought long and hard about installing a credit card capability. It is not just the transaction fee that Visa rake in, the other fees were shocking too - set-up fee, deposit on the equipment, hire of the equipment, phone charges, admin charges. Having the facility was going to make a massive dent in the company's annual bottom line. The cost was much worse than taking cheques (which the banks are massivley discouraging too). That had to be balanced against the loss of customers who will only pay by plastic these days.
In the end, everyone would be worse off except the credit card company, who for some transactions would be making more profit than the merchant - just for having a computer running.
Wow, you really are a loony.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Since technology innovate every year, this is not surprise at all.
I pay no fees for my direct debit card. And transfers within the same country are also free. In fact the only fees i get are from Visa when i use that.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
And they came to the conclusion that paper bills were cheaper than coins.
Coins cost more to make. Canada had to mint 1.6 $1 coins for every paper bill they replaced because people hang onto them and hoarding coins is somehow a benefit to the government.
Personally I think the explanation/justification is somewhat tortured. I haven't listened to the podcast in a while but I think it comes down to some fairly esoteric economics, including seigniorage, the difference between the cost of producing the coins and the value of the coin.
I think they also factored in the cost of the conversion activity of business to accommodate $1 coins -- cash registers, vending machines, etc.
While government certainly does enable giant chain corporations, I think you are overlooking the more obvious culprit: limited liability. Without the invention of "the corporation" - and the limited liability aspect in particular - nothing like Walmart would have ever scaled to that size. Hell, if all that was holding Walmart back was a common currency, we'd all be using "Wally Bucks" right now.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Best form of digital payment, with almost zero transaction fees, and no risk centralized control of regulation.
New Economic Perspectives
I am pretty sure that in Canada > 75% of transactions are made with plastic, easily. It may be more in the 85% range.
When Arthur came up here (Atlantic Canada), it took out the power for a few days.. heck some were without power for a week. While without power, all the big box stores were closed. However, small mom & pop shops stayed open, using a hand ledger and accepting cash. I was actually in one store buying supplies that was operating by candlelight.
tracked? no one cares about your beer, pizza, gamer video card, lap dance and dime bag purchases
What about that AR-15 bought from a friend? Or what about those electrical/electronic parts you ordered that could either become the heart of an IED timer/detonator device or fix the controls on grandma's hobby-ceramics firing-kiln in her garage that she's been after you to fix, after some nutcase phones in a bomb threat?
Or what about bus/train/plane tickets to a city where an anti-government protest is scheduled, coupled with your purchase of spray paint and other sign-making supplies?
If all such data is so uninteresting and worthless, why is it authoritarian governments historically make such a priority out of obtaining as much as possible from everyone they can force to comply?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Phones without a data plan cannot run a Bitcoin wallet, and phones with a data plan are too expensive per month for a child to afford on his allowance.
...and the government passes on the costs of maintaining the cash system on to the people. Via taxes. The truth is that nothing is free and if you get something you will have to pay for it one way or another.
And the Fed controls the money supply, and taxes Americans even more using inflation.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
the quickest way to a cashless society is make everybody broke.
no more beef for the 99%. we'll all be eating bugs in the future.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2...
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Cash needs to be done with because its primary uses these days include buying illegal drugs, pay for illicit services, dodge taxes, and conduct money laundering. No normal human being in America really needs to keep using cash for legitimate purposes these days. I can't wait till cash is just abolished, anonymous money transactions are really evil and hurt America.
Hmm, what to make of this one? Trolling? Naive? Paid shill? Pure sarcasm? It can be hard to tell these days!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
My life's goal is to swim in my own Money Bin like Scrooge McDuck. Don't take that dream away from me.
At the cafeteria at work, they have a $3 minimum for card purchases. Not much of a problem, since most of their crap is well over $3 anyway, but they do have that min.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
See if they can phase out pennies first. If they can't get rid of the smallest coin, they have little chance of phasing out all cash in general.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
have your mom order pizza so the local economy doesn't collapse
so pay in cash for certain things, I was addressing the tin foil wrapped paranoid schizo and his imagined need to use cash for everything. besides, you won't be getting or using that plane ticket without valid ID
The road to dystopia is paved with good intentions.
lose != loose
https://bitcoin.org/en/you-nee...
Lots of things work in theory but not practice.
To be "anonymous" with Bitcoin, you basically have to use a different address for every single transaction, and never cash out.
To be anonymous with Dollars, you... pay for stuff with Dollars, and you don't have to use a different wallet every time you buy something.
Cash wins.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Depends on the business.
BigCorp, Inc. generally doesn't care, because they make enough off other purchases that the occasional loss due to merchant fees doesn't hurt their bottom line.
Pop's Mom Stand, on the other hand, can't afford a $3 fee on a $2 transaction, so he has a minimum purchase amount.
The local smoke shop where I purchase my tobacco recently switched to a $5 minimum for card transactions, after their bank imposed a $2.75 fee on all credit/debit transactions.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The first things that come to mind about what going cashless could potentially fix would be tax dodging and illegal immigration.
Lots of folks love to get paid in cash so they don't have to report it to the IRS as income. In fact, many illegal immigrants are paid this way so a company can continue using them. The incentive for the illegal worker is no tax reporting to draw attention to the fact they're not supposed to be here anyway.
I rarely use cash anymore because unless you write down every purchase, it's difficult to track what you're spending it on. I just put it on a CC, pay it off in full every month and let them send me a report of where most of it is going.
Once you start tracking your own expenses, it definitely becomes an eye opener for you.
tracked? no one cares about your beer, pizza, gamer video card, lap dance and dime bag purchases
They will the moment I decide to run for office, or become famous in some way, even locally.
If you don't care, then by all means, post a list of everything you've ever bought from the sex shop, along with your age, gender, and most frequented social clubs.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Obviously criminals will resist electronic money. And those who knowingly invest in criminal enterprises will also resist to the bitter end. Electronic money raises the specter of eliminating almost all money based crime. Whether it is running dope or cheating on income taxes electronic money can make it impossible. So next we have the issue of powerful individuals who just happen to invest in criminal enterprises. If a US senator owns a chunk of a bank and that bank happens to make money from a drug cartel will that senator try to cripple electronic money? Are we at the point that we can confront the degree to which criminal organisations own businesses? We might also run into issues such as the government itself having financial transactions with organised crime. For the first time in history we do have the potential to eliminate almost all crime. We are about to discover that to many people freedom means the freedom to be criminals. I'm not so sure we can look into that mirror.
I'm pretty sure this isn't limited to any particular country.
There is a trend however, of criminals kidnapping people and taking them around to various ATMs with their credit and debit cards until their accounts are empty.
Actually, there are two reasons the replacement would have a fee:
1. To recoup the cost of the infrastructure.
2. To increase the profits for the provider.
These are banks, after all.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I see what you did there...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
sure lets get right on that so I can hold you personally accountable for the lives your medical devices failed to save and the engineering fault in the car that killed your brother.
There's a very good reason we have limited liability, a reason many countries haven't bothered looking at, and they hurt because of it.
I'm pretty sure this isn't limited to any particular country.
No, it's pretty much every country using fiat currency controlled by a central bank. In Europe, the central bank isn't even affiliated with any one country, it's a stand-alone financial entity that the countries have "agreed" to obey.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I love being able to order stuff from Germany without worrying about currency conversion rates.
Criminals are not going away, ever... If there is a system they will find a way around it, through it, or profit from it. If the system is so locked down to keep that from happening a new system will be built to support vice.
People want what they want, regardless of the legal or morality of said things. To think it can been eliminated by getting rid of cash is just naive.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
You are presuming that it's a bank processing the transactions. I am not.
Learn to love Alaska
Have to say this is pretty much false everywhere I shop, but will add I wouldn't shop anywhere where this is true. Any business whose survival depends on saving a few pennies on credit card fees is destined for failure around here because there are very few willing to walk around with cash just to keep them alive.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I think we would probably survive if limited liability were rolled back just a tad. Sure, I'll admit that there probably is some benefit to having corporations with protected stockholders - in particular people who only buy or sell the stock and have little to no influence in the business. I don't see any reason to shield executives, board, or activist investors.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I have never understood why the US treasury doesn't just stop producing $1 bills and force a coin into circulation.
I'm fairly certain that a major reason for the lack of change is that US Founder and first CEO (or President, I forget the terms these days) George Washington is on the dollar and also on the US Quarter, thus making it very difficult to simply mint a dollar coin as a replacement.
You might laugh, but these kinds of peccadilloes, added to the general incompetence and recalcitrance of today's Congress, result in a whole lot of "doing nothing".
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
If a tampered vending machine takes my cash, it's my word against theirs that it's my money they stole.
And woohoo, you're out $1. If your identity is stolen, if your card information is relayed and used, that's a hell of a lot more money available. My five-dollar bill is great because... it can't be used for anything other than five dollars. There's no way for that five dollars to be used to get at more of my money.
Writing the mag strip to a new card won't work for long anyway, since every time I put my card in an ATM machine, the mag strip is re-written
And yet card skimmers are currently quite profitable. The local Costco just found a bunch of them combined with pinhole cameras on their gas POS kiosks. Why would people go through all that effort if there was no financial payday?
If they use my credit card details, I get the money back. The insurance for that is paid by the merchant fees. There is no cash insurance.
All of that drives up fees -- that insurance is passed onto you. No one else is eating it, you're paying the cost through higher prices.
(Of course, this assumes you never carry a balance on your card... and why would you?)
I'd guess it's because you don't have enough money to get what you need, so you charge it.
Nope -- that's NOT why most people carry a balance on a credit card. They "don't have enough money to get what [they] WANT."
Yes, there are lots of poor people out there in dire straits, but most of them can't even qualify for credit cards, because they don't have reliable income or whatever credit history they have is bad. The people who charge extra on credit cards are typically people who have enough money for what they NEED, but they WANT more stuff faster than they can make money to get it. If they really NEEDED something, there are often ways to take out loans that would give a better interest rate than a credit card, or they could get government assistance or something if it's a basic human need.
The other group of people who carry a balance are the people who usually did pay off their balance in the past, but they've lost a job or had some other unforeseen expense. Most of these people could also have been saving more for a "rainy day," but I have a little more sympathy for them. And there are some for whom the "rainy day" has lasted so long that it depleted a reasonable savings... they should perhaps not be faulted either.
But most people just use credit cards for crap they don't need that they can't afford, but they want it NOW. And I personally think that's a stupid financial decision, because at credit card interest rates, it will cost you more in the long-term than just waiting a little while to save up or just buy something more affordable that will work in the meantime, like responsible adults do.
In my 30+ years on this planet, I've never seen a private sale of used goods (e.g. a "garage sale" or "yard sale") that takes plastic. All are cash only. So is Coney Island, a historic hot dog restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
From the summary:
Recent research suggests that many believe we will stop using notes and coins altogether in the not-too-distant future
I am certain that research is correct. Just as it was correct 40 years ago.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Nice language, dude! The credit card companies, at least here, charged a fixed percentage regardless of the sum. That's why you logic is all wrong, the cost for the merchant is the same (relatively) for a 10 cent purchase as it is for a 100€ purchase. On the contrary, handling cash is way more expensive.
I once tried to by a car with plastic, but was refused because the transaction fee would have been enormous.
And no, I'm not a immigrant, and yes, I have loads of sisu.
Why does the kernel go through stable and then unstable forks? Can't it always be a stable build, like with Windows?
There is a non-trivial fee associated with cash too. Cash requires labor to move/protect it, can go "missing" much more easily than credit card transactions etc. Cards are probably still more expensive, but not by as much as you may think.
And credit card fraud doesn't exist? At least with cash, you are usually aware of it as it happens and you are limited to what you have on you at the moment, they can't take your whole account in one go.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Credit cards are a loan, not an electronic money transfer. That would be more like your debit card. And yes, you will loose all the money in your account while the bank sorts it out. This could take 6-8 weeks. Can you survive without any money for 6-8 weeks?
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
if your card information is relayed and used, that's a hell of a lot more money available
It's still all insured.
And yet card skimmers are currently quite profitable
Because not all banks off the service. The technology goes by the name of "liquid encryption numbers" or "LENSecure". The country I live in has chip+pin and contactless terminals everywhere. Not a single terminal is magstrip only. Much harder to skim a magstrip when it's never swiped.
No one else is eating it, you're paying the cost through higher prices.
It is passed on to you. When I buy something on my credit card at a place that doesn't have a surcharge (which is pretty much every brick-and-mortar shop to go to), everyone not paying with a credit card is subsidising me. Not only that, my credit card rewards scheme pays back in cash. It pays much more than the annual fee, so I save money.
I also save interest on my home loan by having any entire months worth of spending sitting interest free on the card.
Again please, how is cash safer
The country I live in has chip+pin and contactless terminals everywhere
Yeah, I'd love to get rid of the magnetic stripe, and the "CC number + security code" system in the US. Not sure what it will take to actually get that ball rolling.
I can, theoretically, defend myself against a mugger. I can't defend myself against what happened to Target, except by not using credit cards.
The number+expiry+security code is an online thing. You should never give your security code to a person. It's not embossed either so it won't show up on a zip-zap carbon copy.
To accept a fully cash free society you have to acknowledge a totalitarian government as completely free of wrong doing or accept your slavery as law. There may be another way around this, short of barter, but I haven't considered it, yet. Without cash, reconstruction of credit or value in society can't be accomplished. Even Microsoft with their insistence we adapt to their new operating system has met with incredible resistance and it has taken two operating systems for them to come to terms, they realize who keeps them in business. The British discovered they weren't going to be able to keep the 'Colonies' as their cash cow when the people rebelled. If this is really something to be concerned about, I don't think we will be able to bring a viable solution to the table short of non-compliance.