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Is Australia Becoming A Cashless Society? (abc.net.au)
Australia's Reserve Bank will roll out an instantaneous money-transferring technology later this year, "which will push Australia even further towards being a cashless society," according to ABC. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
In 2014, 12 financial institutions signed up to build the "New Payment Platform," partly as a way of bringing Australia up to speed with other countries that are ahead in the race to becoming completely cashless. Sweden is on track to become the world's first completely cashless economy, and just last November India got rid of its highest denomination bills, effectively eliminating 90 per cent of its paper money... The "New Payment Platform" will mean money can be transferred almost instantaneously, even when the payer and payee are members of different banks.
"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is lost in tax revenue due to the sort of cash economy," says an economics professor at the University of New South Wales, who predicts Australia could be cash-free by 2020. The Australian Payments Association reports that over 75% of the country's face-to-face payments are already tap-and-go, and ATM withdrawals have sunk to a 15-year low.
"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is lost in tax revenue due to the sort of cash economy," says an economics professor at the University of New South Wales, who predicts Australia could be cash-free by 2020. The Australian Payments Association reports that over 75% of the country's face-to-face payments are already tap-and-go, and ATM withdrawals have sunk to a 15-year low.
What this kind of paranoid person doesn't understand is that they can already track you to an incredible degree, and there's fuck all you can do about it, so ultimately all you're doing is arguing against having the convenience. Black markets exist anyway, so that's not really an argument either.
This is 99% about control. There are multiple players here. Local governments, the US major political players, credit card companies, banks, they all get to win. Control means you know much more about transactions, you get more say about what transactions you favor or not, you get a larger percentage on transactions, you get to use negative interests in the bank because people can no longer extract their money from the bank. There's a lot. It's about power and the threat of power. For one thing it means the US can threaten to stop all financial traffic for any target they pick, on the spot. There is a big difference between using little cash and taking away the possibility to use cash.
This article http://norberthaering.de/en/ho... describes what happened in India. India is mostly cash based, or was until some people decided that was no longer the case. The result was a caricature of unchecked power.