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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 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.
Let's see the future free from pennies, first.
A butcher near me already has http://canningsfreerangebutche...
There are a full range of benefits of paying with cash. Limiting the number of credit card transactions to make it easier to track proper and improper ones. Discounts that are available when purchasing with cash. The trades prefer to be paid cash and discount accordingly somewhat fair as their payment can not be tax deducted unless you can hide you home behind a business. It works when the power is out. It keeps perverse privacy invasive government agencies and corporations from tracking every single thing you do.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
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
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
In theory electronic cash, such as bitcoins, could still allow anonymous transactions.
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.
Cash isn't anonymous. Every time you spend cash it eventually gets scanned and the numbers sent to the government. You take cash from the bank, scan. The gas station deposits that money, scan. You might have paid a hooker with it, and then she bought cash- but if they can trace all the other money from the gas station to tourists then it's more likely it was you buying gas.
Uh, you take the hundred dollar bill from the bank teller, then you buy something with it and get change with smaller bills and so on. Notice how your original withdrawal gets lost in the noise?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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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