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Why We Should Fear A Cashless World (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dominic Frisby writes with a very interesting, albeit heavily opinionated, article from The Guardian discussing why we should all fear a cashless world. He argues "it will hand yet more power to the financial sector in that banks and related fintech companies will oversee all transactions." Every payment you will make will be traceable. While inequality is already a problem, it may be exacerbated even further in a cashless society. Frisby writes, "Cash, on the other hand, empowers its users. It enables them to buy and sell, and store their wealth, without being dependent on anyone else. They can stay outside the financial system, if so desired."
If you give government a power, it will use it -- for its own purposes. Government is a business that makes money for its employees by inventing new ways to control you. Sure, it sounds like guy who lives in a van down by the river talk. The media and the $200k per year professors disagree. But history is clear on this: government serves itself, in the name of your best interests. Be cautious :)
Cashless society means that Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx can impose sales tax on everyone in form of transaction fees.
Using paper money, backed by nothing, certainly requires a financial system.
Operation Choke Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is an illustration of what can happen. Porn actors, gun auctioneers, and other people that the government didn't like, suddenly found themselves denied bank accounts. The government's flimsy excuse was that these *MIGHT* be doing something illegal. This is on par with the IRS going after conservative non-profits.
At least for now, people can still put cash under their matresses. Even so, the police often seize cash from individuals carrrying large amounts. But imagine what happens when there is no cash option. You can't get paid because you have nowhere to deposit your "money".
Just because you're not a porn actor, or gun auctioneer, doesn't mean you're safe. "First they came for the porn actors, but I wasn't a porn actor... etc". Be very, very afraid.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The one nice thing about the 'cashless economy' is that(unlike a great many awful ideas) both its backers and its detractors actually largely agree on the reasons for why it will be awesome/awful; they just phrase them slightly differently. More commonly you have to deal with one or both sides fundamentally disagreeing on what the effects of the plan will be, which requires you to sort out the fact of the matter, rather than just disagreeing on whether the effects are good or not.
The enthusiasts say "Hooray, saving the un-banked from their precarious existence and enabling access to financial services!" The detractors say "feeding the last holdouts and previously inaccessible markets into the maw of the financial service industry." They aren't actually disagreeing. The enthusiasts talk about the glorious transparency and ability to crack down on bribery, embezzlement, slush funds, and various similar things. The pessimists note the relentless and inescapable scrutiny and the ability to crack down on basically any flavor of transaction you don't much approve of. Again, not really a dispute over what the plan will do. Optimists extol the ease and convenience of frictionless electronic transacting without tedious stacks of paper. The less sanguine note that that's pretty much exactly what team Behavioral Econ says is the recipe to maximize impulse spending and consumer debt accumulation.
The fundamental problem is the "scourge" of crime.
Unfortunately, we're in a state of Industrial level crime: from cartels, to terrorism, to state sponsored shenanigans.
Most of these cash free laws aim at abetting crime. Cashless laws are supposed to stifle money laundering, ransoms, drug payments, gun payments, etc.
Anonymous transactions enable criminal transactions.
But free societies need to allow for crime, especially low grade crime. Nobody wants cartels, or terrorist groups, or even state sponsored shenanigans. But I do want to be able to pay people under the table for painting my fence. Or buying some weed on the street corner. Or buying a stolen stereo from the back of somebodies van.
With the pervasive surveillance society, we can't prevent crime, but we can post-mortem hunt down the perpetrators. We can run the tape back. Watch the guy with the knife walk backwards out of the convenience store in to his car. The car drive backwards down the street. The broken window suddenly reassembling itself as the guy pulls the hammer out of it and walks backward to the back alley, where he rides his bicycle backwards to his house.
But, we've been solving petty crimes like that forever using classic detective work and simply relying on people being people, and criminals being stupid.
That pervasive surveillance that nailed this guy with a mouse click is so oppressive as to stifle the real creativity of society. The growth of society. The change of society.
Adding money transfer tracking just broadens the net.
Cartels and terrorism are social issues, not criminal issues. It's a different category of ill. But pervasive surveillance, is worse.
"That is how it was done for thousands of years" is one of the worst arguments you could make for doing something. Especially on a tech site. 0/10.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
What cash is, is something that can not be refused because it is your cash ie, how may I serve you today, oh you want to buy that loaf of bread, some milk and some baloney, sure and thank you for your money, oh wait the system says that money is shit because it's your money and I must refuse it, if it was someone else's that is OK but the banks have collectively decided that you can not eat today, please contact you nearest treasury officer for assistance.
A pocket full of cash and you eat, a pocket full of credit cards and you ask permission to eat. That is exactly how anonymous cash is, you do not need to ask permission to fucking spend it, it can not be rejected just because it is yours (most glaring example of exactly that, racism) and when it comes to stealing it, it takes real effort, rather than curruptly shifting around bits to enrich the minority at the majorities expence in some of the biggest scandals in history.
Also, don't ever forget, that the banks what to charge you too look after your money and pay not interest to use it for what ever they want to. Don't like that idea, tough fucking luck, we wont let you have that money we will only allow you to transfer it to one of our cartel members and charge a fee for that, so that then they can charge fees for gambling your money. The whole cashless society in capitalism thing is one huge scam, to basically enslave the majority.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That's what happens when you start to hire youngsters. They don't know squat about the Real World and Real Computing History. This in compared to us oldies (oh... at 42 now I really start to feel old :))
How will politicians collect their bribes if there is no more cash?
So many comments and so few mentions of the mark of the beast?
What people value in money is the ability to spend it as they wish. A cashless economy removes this freedom. This will drive people to seek other means of trade. Expect barter, silver, gold, bit-coin, soup cans, laundry detergent bottles, whatever.
I heard some people discuss alternative currencies on late night talk radio not too long ago and the expert they had brought up several means to bypass reserve notes and coins. The topic was not on a cashless society exactly but more generally about the value we place in government issued money.
One thing mentioned in this talk show was the potential use of currency from another country. There are laws already existing in the USA protecting the right of people to keep foreign bank notes. For a cashless society to work then laws like this would have to be repealed to prevent people from just using Euros or whatever, not that it'd prevent it completely but it would drive it underground.
As mentioned in the article there's just too many transactions where electronic transfers just aren't suitable. There's a lot of charities and such that live on small cash transactions, we even have a name for them, "a penny drive".
Oh, and the biblical reference to a mark of the beast will cause a problem with a lot of people.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
For a long time, I used to think like you did - that the merchant was getting ripped off to the tune of 1-2% when I paid by credit card.
However, that was before taking into account the costs of handling cash - paying staff to count the cash twice a day, infrastructure/security to store cash safely overnight, paying staff to transfer cash safely to the bank regularly, potential costs of staff theft, arranging/maintaining sufficient float to give change to customers, sufficient security for float cash during the work day, etc.
These are real costs on a business, which are not relevant for card transactions, and also get factored into the costs of goods and services.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Canada offers gold and silver ETFs which they at least claim are backed ounce for ounce with the physical reserves of the government. You can actually send an armored truck to pick up your metal at the mint in Ottawa. How are you going to prevent Americans from owning that?
By eliminating cash and controlling all digital transactions, of course! This right here is a great case for cash. Once cash is gone, financial institutions will have the ability to deny any transaction. Remember when Mastercard refused to process donations to Wikileaks? Well what would happen if you only had a Mastercard to pay for things? Sure, there are other methods now but it doesn't take much imagination to get to a time when laws prevent certain transactions. Heck, that the case now, except cash enables us to get around them. It's not just about buying drugs or whatnot, it could be about diversifying financially, as you describe. It's just a bad idea to insert a middle-man into every single transaction. It's a recipe for oppression and control.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)