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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 :)
I'm OK with this. Particularly if it finally means the adoption of Thunderdome as the chief method of conflict resolution.
Slashdot's "Digital" category was actually created for stories related to the Digital Equipment Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation hence the icon.
Maybe the category needs to be retired, or given the number of stories that have erroneously had it applied to them, maybe the icon need to be changed.
Design suggestions?
First buy visa gift cards. Then swap them around. :p
Every few months, swap your card.
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
When we have a cashless society we have slavery. Anyone who has deposited an out of town check has already discovered that you don't have the money right away. Oh, the bank where you deposited it has it that night. But you can't have it for up to 10 working days. This is called the "float". Banks "float" huge sums of money daily - your money - and lend it back to you and others at exorbitant interest rates. The banks, of course, keep those (up to 29% annually of the amount borrowed) interest collections. You can already, in the USA, transfer money only 10 times per month in the USA - even between your own accounts at the same bank. So already, you don't own your money and can't do with it what you please. You earned it. You've already paid taxes on your earning, but you still don't actually own what's left to do with as you please. You have restrictions on how much you can draw at a time etc. etc. Your money can be confiscated, blocked from usage and be divided by 1,000 overnight. Just ask anyone who lives in Argentina. You can literally go to bed a wealthy person, having worked fervently and saved your whole life, and wake up in the morning where every $100 you had in the bank is now only 10 cents. When your money is *completely* controlled electronically you are at the mercy of your government and the banks. Totally. You are effectively a hostage, if not a slave. I know, I've lived it already.
In the case of a zombie apocalypse or stock market crash, cash paper might become as valuable as toilet paper.
So, extremely valuable?
NIRP = Negative Interest Rates, a situation where a central bank tries to push interest rates below zero (instead of getting interest on your savings, you pay the bank to hold your cash). The theory is that THIS is the thing that will force consumers to spend their wealth, and yadda yadda, the economy starts growing and adding jobs (the reason for the 2% inflation target is similar, to make debt more attractive as one can pay it off in less valuable currency, and to institute a "use it or lose it" tax which doesn't need to be voted on by the legislature).
The PROBLEM is that if rates get too negative, then people will convert their wealth to cash. Large denomination bills enable that. That's why there has been a push on to eliminate the 100 dollar bill, under the guise of battling terrorists and criminals. The head of the European Central Bank has recently proposed eliminating the 500 Euro note for the same reason. A happy coincidence is that this makes it harder for people to convert their wealth to cash.
This won't be instituted all at once. This is how it is introduced, under a false casus belli.
A cashless society means you are a captive audience to these sorts of experiments. Additionally, while cash doesn't require infrastructure to complete transactions, cashless transactions require a great deal of infrastructure. Buying something electronically means you are requesting permission to buy - either via authentication or other constraints.
Humans have been using currency for thousands of years. Instead of hastily rushing to do away with it, we should approach the situation with a lot of caution. Something proponents most certainly do not want.
Currency is already a logical construct. The slips of paper are inherently worth very little. They don't even function that well as toilet paper (not that I would know). Currency which becomes an electronic logical construct gives a tremendous amount of power to the people running the servers. And even more importantly perhaps, their cronies.
Isn't cash similarly not-really anonymous though? Each bank note has a unique serial number on it ...
That's why I buy everything using pennies. Sure, buying the house and car was a bitch and my carry-on is troublesome at the airport, but the extra privacy is so worth it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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
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
Cash most certainly can be refused by a merchant. Legal tender just means that cash must be accepted for payment of debts. If a store lets me put a purchase on a tab and lets me leave with a product then they are required to accept cash later on if I want to settle that debt. But they are under no obligation to let me leave the store with the product in the first place because I offer cash. A store could have a policy that they only accept goats or squirrel skins or whatever. There's effectively a contract that is made during a payment and if I don't have whatever the store requests in exchange as a payment I have no right to demand that I get the product. Cash or not.
With those tiny hands? Not a chance!
This is why most preppers collect "junk" or Constitutional silver. It's a lot easier to handle day-to-day small transactions because it's recognizable and hard to inflate. Gold is for storing long-term wealth, not buying milk and bread.
Note that I agree with Bill Still wrt monetary reform. But in a post collapse scenario, silver will be king along with alcohol, cigs medical supplies and knowledge and anything of actual use. Search shtfplan.com for Bosnia. That's how it'll prolly turn out, assuming no large-scale nuke warfare.
In a total collapse, people *might* accept silver but I'm not sure constitutional silver is going to do you any good. The average person can't tell the difference between a silver quarter and the silver plated coins we have today and even if they can, what makes you think anyone will trust it more than the money that just collapsed? Sure, you can make arguments all day long but I'm not sure it's a sure thing as it's still just symbolic and has no real use in the day to day. On the other hand, gasoline, food, ammunition, and medicine are useful in any scenario. My first gut reaction is to figure out how to create antibiotic ointment in my basement as this would be a very valuable skill. This, however, only works in a stationary scenario where people trust or can see that your antibiotics actually work and you're not selling snake oil. Hundreds of pounds of food is also problematic if you're on the move. For price/weight ammunition would probably be one of the most valuable but is a very fixed supply and very hard to manufacture without a bunch of heavy equipment. Skills and physical labor are about the only highly portable currency that are a sure thing. The best thing is to stay in one place where you can gain trust from your neighbors and stockpile food and don't have to worry about portability. If I was going to be a prepper, I would try to find a way to have a 3 year rotating stock of canned goods, gasoline, and ammunition and forget about gold/silver. After that, I would try to acquire the skills for creating gun powder, reloading shells, and creating basic antibiotics and other commonly needed medicines in my basement. Oh, and gardening skills.