Slashdot Mirror
'The Cashless Society is a Con -- and Big Finance is Behind It' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes this opinion piece by former derivatives broker Brett Scott:
Banks are closing ATMs and branches in an attempt to 'nudge' users towards digital services -- and it's all for their own benefit... I recently got a letter from my bank telling me that they are shutting down local branches because "customers are turning to digital", and they are thus "responding to changing customer preferences". I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches... I am much more likely to "choose" a digital option if the banks deliberately make it harder for me to choose a non-digital option. In behavioural economics this is referred to as "nudging". If a powerful institution wants to make people choose a certain thing, the best strategy is to make it difficult to choose the alternative...
Digital systems may be "convenient", but they often come with central points of failure. Cash, on the other hand, does not crash. It does not rely on external data centres, and is not subject to remote control or remote monitoring. The cash system allows for an unmonitored "off the grid" space. This is also the reason why financial institutions and financial technology companies want to get rid of it. Cash transactions are outside the net that such institutions cast to harvest fees and data.
A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalised, disenfranchised from the cash infrastructure that previously supported them. There are also poorly understood psychological implications about cash encouraging self-control while paying by card or a mobile phone can encourage spending. And a cashless society has major surveillance implications.
While a cashless society might make it cheaper to run a bank, "A cashless society is not in your interest..." argues the author.
"We must recognise every cash machine that is shut down as another step in financial institutions' campaign to nudge you into their digital enclosures."
Digital systems may be "convenient", but they often come with central points of failure. Cash, on the other hand, does not crash. It does not rely on external data centres, and is not subject to remote control or remote monitoring. The cash system allows for an unmonitored "off the grid" space. This is also the reason why financial institutions and financial technology companies want to get rid of it. Cash transactions are outside the net that such institutions cast to harvest fees and data.
A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalised, disenfranchised from the cash infrastructure that previously supported them. There are also poorly understood psychological implications about cash encouraging self-control while paying by card or a mobile phone can encourage spending. And a cashless society has major surveillance implications.
While a cashless society might make it cheaper to run a bank, "A cashless society is not in your interest..." argues the author.
"We must recognise every cash machine that is shut down as another step in financial institutions' campaign to nudge you into their digital enclosures."
It's not only banks/financial institutions, but also governments that like cashless societies, because it gives them better surveillance and more control.
The good thing is: they'll likely overplay their hand and lose control: if governments get rid of cash, people will find alternative payment means completely outside the control of banks and governments. Bitcoin didn't quite get it right technically, but systems like that will catch on.
I think they (banks, Visa, etc.) Want to skim every transaction. Cash drives them nuts
Banks just want this so they can charge you some hidden fees, and illegally high interest rates... err, i mean, "late payment fee"
It's not because technology allows it that it must be the preferred option (electronic voting is a poster child of the idea). I don't mind if my neighbor prefers being tracked with his credit card and iPay and Air Miles, but at this point, global customer insouciance seems to pave the road to forced global surveillance in every aspect of our lives; we don't need this crap, wake up people, thank you very much.
At least with cash, if our benevolent overlords really fuck everything up, we can at least wipe our asses for a while.
If they're so insistent on taking cash away, take it one step further in the opposite direction and remember, in your neighborhood, you are surrounded by a ton of people with a ton of valuable skill sets. Barter where you can and cut both the bank and the government out of the equation entirely. I just traded some of my IT time and knowledge for a neighbors expertise in electrical and plumbing. We both came out ahead all the happier, with no bills, taxes, invoices etc. to tally up once the taxman arrives. Not every interaction has to revolve around money, and I managed to make a couple good friends as an added bonus.
Banks hate cash. It requires physical handling. It can be stolen. It wears out. It "isn't working for us" as it sits in a vault, an ATM, or an armored car. Electronic money can be working all the time - earning interest, being leveraged, being arbitraged, whatever. Cash is so "static" compared to electronic funds.
The Brave New World is almost here. Add an implant and the process will be complete. Can you imagine being arrested on suspicion of a serious crime because 30 minutes prior to the crime, in the "walking distance" proximity, you bought a pack of gum with your implant (or your debit card, or your smartphone)?
I'm rather old, my friends, and as you revel in your youth (assuming you are there), marvel at how anyone could be happy to be older. This world is yours. I'll be in it for a little longer, but not nearly as long as so many of you. I suppose cashless is your future - not so much mine.
Every transaction is traced, verified and identifiable. You can be unpersoned with a click of a button -- boom, you're homeless.
However, we see cashless societies all the time in sci-fi -- they've figured out how to make unforgeable, untraceable digital money. What's missing? Sci-fi digital money is typically tied to a physical device, essentially your wallet. In some cases, the digital money can only be transferred if this device comes into physical contact with another device and the transaction is approved.
We're so close to being able to store all our money on our smartphones. We will no longer need banks to tell us how much money we have. Fractional reserve banking is doomed.
The American Dream is itself a massive con - credit history, mortgage. People born in captivity do not even know that freedom exists. The joke is on us for handing over the reigns to corporations whenever that happened.
I love cash, but electronic money is more convenient, more versatile and great.
Just ask a non-bancarized guy in Kenya or Tanzania using M-Pesa about it... And trust me when I tell you that Safaricom and Vodafone did not implement this from the goodness of their hears, but for pure profit, and yet, it ended up raising the living standards of the people at large, and specialy of those non-bancarized.
Sources:
The economist Sept 26-oct 2, 2009
And IEEE Spectrum here:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/stat...
Yes, if we look at electronic money and a cashless society from the optic of a westener who has enough diposable income to aford a computer and knows what this "internet" thing is, is all doom and gloom.
But once we try to get ourselves in the whorn -out shoes of less fortunate people that make less than $1 a day (and for me, being in Venezuela, this is easier, as is not a tought experiemnt, but a reality I see everyday) we see that electronic money can be beneficial for everyone, warts and all...
So, I for one, welcome our e-money overlords... Yes, I wish there would still be cash, but... whatever benefits the many is ok by me...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
This has been the banks and governments plan for decades. They've been slowly and methodically desensitizing the population to E-commerce for years. And just when they are about to make the final assault on cash Bitcoin shows up. Everyone laughs at the absurdity at first but Bitcoin has an ace up its sleeve the banks didn't count on. Anonymity. I don't profess to know how it works but one mechanism of cryptocurrency is the transaction can be made anonymously if so desired. This has the banks and world governments scrambling to ban it, control it, or own it. But I'm still holding on to my cash.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
because people stopped showing up. I stopped going to banks when I could take a picture of checks and have it deposit to my account. I don't miss waiting in line at banks. And no, the long waits weren't because they were closing branches. They understaffed like everybody else did post 2000 when companies realized they could just make us wait since there was little or no competition left for essential services.
Now, if you want to see the banks take a real hit do Post Office banking.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And a fully transparent, public blockchain. For the anonymity. /s
I recently got a letter from my bank telling me that they are shutting down local branches because "customers are turning to digital", and they are thus "responding to changing customer preferences". I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches...
Er.. yes, yes you did. You're one of the customers turning to digital, by your own admission. You don't go in to the branch to conduct your business face-to-face. Because of folks like you, branches are seeing vastly reduced people-counts coming through the doors. Thus leading to closing of branches, because people like you don't use them. And now you're the majority.
You did ask them to do it. You ask them every time you fire up your smartphone app to move money between accounts, or make a payment. You did this. I helped. Deal with it.
I currently live in Hong Kong and find that cash can largely be replaced with two notable exceptions. /mastercard/apple pay cash quick payments in many shops as well.
Most popular is the use of the octopus card - it is the public transport card that many, so very many shops accept as well. And then there is visa
Frankly, I love that.
The exceptions: infuriatingly (not just me thinks that), local taxis demand cash. Also the smallest street stalls or wet market stalls are cash only.
Believe it or not, some banks employ some people who actually plan ahead. Not all of them, by a long way, but some. And those people make plans based on how they think the future is going to play out, they steer their banks to thrive in that world, and if it doesn't come about as quickly as they thought, they stand to lose out.
So yes, of course they're going to try to nudge their own customers - and indirectly, the rest of the market - into the world they've prepared for. There's nothing particularly sinister in that, it's common sense.
If you don't like it, change banks. Don't sit and whinge, use your own money to vote for the future you want.
Look forward a few years, and the situation could easily be reversed. You know those cameras that are pointing at every cash register in your average store? Soon (if not already) they'll be high-res enough to read the serial numbers on every dollar bill you hand over or flash in your wallet/money roll. Just like automated facial recognition, this'll be done automatically; suddenly, cash can be followed from one transaction to another, and connected to people thanks to said facial recognition. Expect the ATM to record serials, and the cameras at your bank. This'll be done in the name of 'tracking money stolen in robberies' but will be used for other purposes. Expect a 'serial number blacklist' that causes a flag to be raised if you use flagged cash, too many flags and the cops are shown the tapes or the facial recognition blacklists you. You also get blacklisted if the facial recognition determines you're a known retail thief/robber. Expect Walmart greeters to be notified not to allow someone in because the facial recognition recognized someone who was blacklisted. With facial recognition, your cash purchases can still be correlated into a profile and shared/sold, like supposedly happens with credit cards.
Now look at open-source end-to-end encrypted communication software like Signal. And the cryptocurrencies that happen to be defacto decentralized. One can easily imagine (in the unlikely event it doesn't already exist) a situation where digital exchanges of currency are anonymous, unblacklistable, and decentralized. Also, since it's decentralized you don't have to worry about a single point of failure... failing. As opposed to a computerized cash register that crashes and is unable to accept cash, and the employees are forbidden from selling items not sold through the register.
I've seen people who are reticent to break a large bill because once they break it, they'll spend it because they treat small bills as worthless. Others treat cash as 'free money' that they blow whereas numbers in an account are 'important money' that they don't touch. If these people went full cash, they wouldn't save enough to pay their bills. Also, is your annoying relative or whatever hitting you up for money regularly? "Sorry, no cash on me", problem solved. If you always carry cash on you then it's an ongoing problem. Credit cards often have points or other rewards/cash back programs, with cash you get nothing like that.
Institutions want to get rid of cash because handling cash is difficult to automate, and cash has higher marginal cost to guard, particularly from the handlers. Cash also tends to get stolen, despite all the money spent on guarding it. It also gets counterfeited, lost, destroyed, and requires quite a lot of money to produce (for the treasury). Forget ATMs, if society goes cashless, banks can get rid of many of their branches. Loan applications can be done via Skype video calls or whatever. Kill checks and money orders and branches wouldn't really be needed for much.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Where I live, NW-Europe, the driving force for going cashless are people like me who prefer the convenience.
I hate having to carry British Pounds, Euro's, Swiss Francs, Danish and Norwegian Kroner.
We've very recently seen an hours-long failure in the Maestro/Mastercard system here in Europe, lucky were those that also carried cash or a Visa based card.
Years ago I ran into a similar an issue when I wanted to use my debit card to pay fuel, the filling station was prepared and had IOU's to fill out that included a copy of the driving licence and the failing card, it just worked albeit slower than usual.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Plus, if you cross them, all they have to do is turn off your mobile payments. After a day or two of starvation, you'll turn yourself in to the nearest police station for whatever offense they accuse you of.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have seen the banks closing up shop in Europe and the Middle East and making it hard for the general public, with the result that 'Exchange Services' are popping up everywhere, doing exactly what the bank branches used to do. So, it will backfire in the US, same as in the rest of the world.
Just because something is beneficial for someone doesn't make it a con. It's not like people are dying to use cash and are tricked into using cards or other digital means. What the banks say is true: people have largely moved out of cash simply because it's less convenient. Most people buy online these days, where cash is impractical, and if they can use the same means of payment in brick and mortar, why wouldn't they?
So sure, banks do get something from this too, but likely not nearly as much as users, most of whom would lose a lot of money and convenience if they couldn't buy online. And sure, there are drawbacks to digital money, but in practice they're rather small.
While I personally am 95% cashless as my entire expenses consists of Grocery Store, Gas Station, Repeat throughout the month with all my major bills either on direct withdraw or I pay over the phone. I still will not do this.
I pay one of my bills in cash every month for convenience as it is easier than writing the person a check and should I ever want to do stuff I don't want tracked, I plan on using cash.
If I ever decide to go to a porn show with all the sex toys and stuff, I intend on cash, if I ever go do stuff I don't want my family or friends to know, I do it in cash as I have family who works at the bank and the last thing I want is them being able to see absolutely everything I do even if it is completely safe, legal and harmless.
And also, just because those in power have no issues with it, doesn't mean the next people will. Or if I ever get into power, they can scour those records for dirt on me.
The old adage, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear is reversed, it is actually, "Only when you have nothing to fear, that you have nothing to hide".
Do I personally have something to hide? Hell yes I do depending on who I am dealing with and who is in charge. My sexual preference, my sexual activities, my religious preference, my religious activities, my political affiliation, my political activities, my views on any number of issues, my favorite sports team and so on.
Just because Obama had no issues with certain things, doesn't mean Trump/Sessions doesn't either and won't overstep their authority at every chance to attack me as much as possible while trying to avoid push back. Or the next Authoritarian coming in, or potentially Trump trying to declare some wartime power to stay in office looking at people with democratic views as threats to their power and limiting them and so on.
And if you don't like my views about Trump, you can imagine it as the next guy who comes in or whoever you want, but the fact remains, so long as you have a reason to ever fear now or future abuse of power, you will always have something to potentially hide.
I'm often fascinated by the hoops Americans are willing to jump through to avoid having to give people basic rights, but this is the first time I've heard it argued that we should keep cash around to avoid having to offer poor people basic banking services.
Cashless allows negative interests and bail-ins, and this time you can't take your savings out of the bank. There's no bank run. Next bail-out will be a bail-in: you will pay the big banks' debts.
Visit Iceland, Sweden or Denmark - almost everything Can be paid with card, app or something similar. Since government has put up boundaries for what the card/app providers can charge, itâ(TM)s transparent and used by most, even down to teenagers with special secure accounts. Stop your hunger for cash and enjoy the freedom without.
I recently pulled up to a drive through of a nationwide bank chain to find that it had closed just a week before; I had to go into the lobby and stand in line.
While in line, a "personal banker" approached and asked if she could help me with anything. I commented about having to get out of my car and walk across the parking lot to come inside while it was raining.She explained that the bank was removing DT tellers at most locations, because so many people use digital payments.with their phones, so no one was using the DTs anymore.
I explained that I know just how secure phones are, and that I would never trust financial stuff to a device that is so easily stolen. "If they get your phone, they can get just about anything else."
She assured me that that was not true, and even if it were, I would only have to use their APP to track what was going on, and to report the bogus transactions.
"You mean the APP on my stolen phone, where your website sends the confirmation text for your two-factor authentication?"
She didn't appreciate the irony...
In Sweden it's hard to find shops that don't take cards or other means of electronic payments like Swish. And a growing number of shops are cashless, often restaurants.
Even taxis, parkings, road tolls and similar services normally takes electronic payments.
It can go months between each time I use cash these days.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Here in Australia EFTPOS allows me to go cashless 90% of the time. There are some places that still dont take EFTPOS (e.g. the local kebab shop doesn't take cards and a bunch of food trucks I sometimes buy from also dont take cards) and there are a bunch of other places that do take cards but charge a fee for the privilage of using cards (the worst offender here is the ridiculous 5% fee all the taxis charge if you use a card instead of cash although the movie theaters I go to and some food places I go to also charge a fee for using cards) but otherwise I use EFTPOS (or sometimes Visa Debit) everywhere because its so easy.
And my bank doesn't charge me a cent when I pay with EFTPOS so its cheap too :)
Crypto is the new cash!
Nudge tactics began in the UK, copied by Australia - only worse.
Cost shifting tries to force you to use forms and FAQ's online, only government faqs are NOT the faqs but smart-ass questions by PR experts making it sound kinda reasonable.
The card fees in Australia are high - it is the store wearing the costs - ultimately the consumer. Do remember Visa and Mastercard have been fined for credit card fee price collusion many times before. 3.5% for foreign transaction - yeah right.
DID the banks tell you there are cozy waiting rooms and personal assistants for the ultra rich?
Revelation 13:16-17 (NLT) 16 He required everyone--small and great, rich and poor, free and slave--to be given a mark on the right hand or on the forehead. 17 And no one could buy or sell anything without that mark, which was either the name of the beast or the number representing his name.
does not have once center of failure.
Having spent a lot of time in China it has been very interesting to see them leapfrog Sweden in cashlessness.
When I started goi g there in 2011 it was cash everywhere. Over the last few years it had gone so far that a week or 2 ago the Chinese government passed a law that required businesses to accept cash as a payment method.
Additionally their alipay and wechat pay services are much more convenient than the options we have in Sweden such as swish or SEQR.
"Cash, on the other hand, does not crash. It does not rely on external data centres........."
Oh come on, this is a stupid justification.. Cash can burn, it can decay, it can get damaged if in a flood. It can carry diseases.. et al.
... is, apart from the per-payment-fee they want to profit from, one more obvious reason why every non-central bank wants to get rid of cash - they can create electronic money almost as much as they like in the existing fractional-reserve banking system. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I love it when I can catch out so-called reasonable people that still ask for more conservative-bias koolaid.
No, there was actually next to nothing done congressionally during "the first few months" of Trump's term. By 4/18/18, Congress has passed only 25 joint resolutions, barely 5 of which could you conceivably consider real legislation. And that's only if you consider a law to promote female entrepreneurs and another to promote female astronauts as real work, otherwise you're down to 3 at best.
The CASH society is a scam and big finance is behind it.
Between cash and online transactions, there is a third option: Digital offline transactions.
How would it work? You have a card, you load it with money, and then each time you want to buy something you pay with this card...no online connection required, the money value on the card is decreased.
For security, not only the communication protocol would be encrypted, but it can also be setup in such a way that it requires entering a pin number for each transaction, with the card's small numeric keyboard.
The state machine of the card's software would be small enough to validate it mathematically 100%.
have a debit card
i read the fine print of every single one thats available in my country and realized there were not really debit cards by my definition (and thats the only definition i really care about)
there isnt almost any prepaid card either. The other day i could not beleive it when i saw a steam prepaid card in my local "walmart equivalent", i was in awe, not that i need it, i learnt a long ago to pirate everything. So what i do is this: i dont buy online in places like amazon, aliexpress etc, i do it in other places. Its more expensive, but since by not having the card i buy A LOT LESS stuff, it doesnt even matter, at least to me. Now on the other hand, i guess to the people that are not selling the stuff that might not be optimal
theres also a pretty cute limit on cash spending, which is going to make my next computer a little bit cheaper than it could considering ive already have the money set aside since 2014...
It's not a "con", "panacea", "revolution", "leap", "sign of the times" or any other journalist garbage term you invent four times a year.
It's a complicated process. Stop generalizing it, instead report actual facts, you know, what you are supposed to do, "journalists".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalised
Foolish assumption. Cashless payments implemented in many places, notably Alipay and Wechat, did NOT require a bank account at all. You can go to any convenient store and deposit cash into your Alipay a/c. Linking it to a bank account simply make it easier to transfer to/from it.
This is why Americans can never have a working public transport and public health care. There are too many fools who cannot imagine how things can be different, so they insisted that anything new must be just like the old so it cannot work.
With one stroke, Alipay and Wechat go rid of two huge problem in China - counterfeit bills and pickpockets, while making online commerce a huge thing (much bigger than in the US). Less than 10 years ago, you need to very careful when getting change after taking a taxi, as many taxi drivers will come across counterfeit bills and will try to swap them for your authentic ones. And you have to be very alert of your wallet because it would be very likely picked if you weren't paying attention.
Now everyone pays cashless, so there is no worry of counterfeit bills. And everyone is watching their phones all the time and carry no cash, so there is almost nothing left to pick.
America, enjoy your stay in the last century while the rest of the world leave you behind.
After actively opting out of paperless bank statements by unticking the pre-ticked box every time I logged into my bank online, for several years I got an e-mail from said bank saying they were sending me paperless, but all was not lost, I could opt back in to real paper statements, but only after they'd opted me out which they were going to do at an indeterminable time in the next 2 months.
If banks gave a single fuck about their customers wishes they had me fooled.
The negative implications are already covered enough :-) Simply state that I don't disagree, but would like to point out the positive possibilities. A true cashless society would...
Be less susceptible to theft. Both from the petty level and the corruption level. Bribing somebody would become suddenly more difficult. Other crimes would also become harder to profit from, as money-laundering becomes a nightmare.
Be easier to tax fairly. Of course that is not a given, as incompetence runs wild in officialdom, but it at least opens the possibility.
Even the Government should be forced to be more open, as anybody (possibly armed with a judicial mandate) could follow the trails of money back to their sources, even if the sources (or the sinkholes) are official entities.
I am undecided on the issue, really, but not particularly fearing it. Like mostly everything, a lot depends on implementation.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Without citations, you're just engaging in more of the same. So basically, you're saying you love to pile on more spam in public discussion forums.
The central banks have been pushing lower and lower interest rates for a while to the point where it's basically zero.
When it was no longer possible to lower interest rates any further they ran out of their prime economy manipulation tool.
If everyone was forced to have all their money in the bank then they could impose negative interest rates and not be worried about bank runs.
So every month they would steal money straight out of your savings, and they could bail out whatever with all your money and you'd be able to do nothing.
I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches...
Did you go into your branch every day to justify its rent and the payment of staff? Correlation does not imply causation. Branches have been getting smaller and emptier for a long time now and the only evil nefarious reason is that people don't use them very much.
My bank also sent me a letter telling me they were shutting down my closest branch, a branch I genuinely never knew existed because I haven't walked into a branch since opening the first account with the bank 4 years ago.
People without bank accounts
WTF? Homeless people have bank accounts. Who are these people who still don't have one?
And a cashless society has major surveillance implications.
No, *your* society has major surveillance implications. In many places of the world what can be seen and done with data is well regulated for consumer protection. Fix the root cause rather than the symptom.
So, we should go back to gold coins?
Do remember that once upon a time (less than a century ago), paper money wasn't considered "cash". Paper money was "banknotes", and the only real "cash" was gold and silver coins.
Yeah, I'm sure that everyone will be really happy to haul one hundred pounds (45 kg) of gold to the dealer to buy a car. Or five hundred pounds (225 kg) of gold to buy a house....
The only way you're going to get back to even your limited understanding of cash is if you stop using banks (no credit cards, no checks, no savings) and keep big piles of banknotes (yes, the Federal Reserve is a bank, technically) in your house. That'll go over real well right up till the time someone breaks in and steals your big pile of banknotes, and you suddenly have no way to buy food till payday....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That Bank should be non-profit and shouldn't loan money.
Everybody would have a "current account"-only without interests, just to leave cash there and would have a normal debit card to access it.
I've seen more and more ATMs coming online over the past few years. Frequency of service has slowed on some but most are just as active as ever. Christmas and before the 4th of July is some of the peak ATM usage times.
I've always said my job is in its decline but at the moment it's more busy than ever. Institutions are still even sending coin regularly. Colleagues to the North (where the penny has been retired 5 years ago) are still picking up pennies regularly.
Banks would rather you use their credit cards so they can profit from buyers and sellers. Credit card rewards come at a severe price.
While gov't likes to see transactions and banks benefit from going electronic, the main factor is the creation of a superfluous middleman who makes a profit from all transactions. Banks have created a high-profit industry out of thin air. A debit card might be "cashless" in the sense that the user doesn't actually handle paper money, but in reality it's just paying a 3rd party to make your payment: You go to a gas station and you pay for your gas. Or, you go to a gas station and use a card to tell your bank to pay for the gas. Your bank then charges a fee to the station, which you end up paying in the long run. You're paying someone else to carry your wallet.
Somehow people have been convinced that cash is dirty, dangerous, and used mainly by sneaky people.
What I find especially surprising is that the Millennials have been trained to think this scam is "futuristic" and somehow hip. I have a neice who gets annoyed at merchants who can't accomodate her waving her iPhone to complete a transaction. The Millennials also seem to be the most likely to wrongly believe there's no cost for these transactions.
I recently discovered that Bank of America won't let me deposit cash in a friend's account! I was even prepared to show that my friend and I live at the same address. I was told that it's for their protection. How about if I deposit the money in my account and then come back and write a check, and deposit that? Sure, they said. No problem. I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a Monty Python skit.
If we move to a cashless society you can bet consumers would be consumed with fee's from merchants and transaction fee's. I've noticed already some places around me now charge a set fee if I do not pay in cash and its perfectly legal to do so. China is a whole other demon of government controlling transactions. Maybe they do not charge fee's but they certainly can collect data on what you buy and where you go. A lot can be learned by this paper trail.
This is why we need to support Bitcoin. Technical hurdles have mostly been leapt at this stage. Time to solve some of the design hurdles, then get everyone moving into the new era.
You should read the obits first. BEFORE getting out of bed. If you're in there, you don't have to get up
Yup. Beggars in India have swipe digital POS/swipe machines. See article https://indianexpress.com/arti...
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
... but WeChat is losing money on the free electronic payments, so they're not free any more... http://www.businessinsider.com...
I don't respond to AC's.
The credit unions I use are opening branches near me. Banks are for suckers.
I don't respond to AC's.
Here's the official record of Congressional CRA actions rolling back Obama's last-minute regulations:
https://www.rpc.senate.gov/cra...
And an article from about 70 into Trump's term:
https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
Banks love the "cashless society" because they get a profit from every transaction everywhere. The government loves it because it provides a trail of breadcrumbs through every place you visit, complete with time stamps. Does the government really need to know which fast food outlet you prefer or where you go to buy groceries? I don't think so, but the data is being collected nevertheless.
The original post indicates that cashless societies are dangerous. Well, it is a different danger. There are reasons why low-infrastructure, high violence locations (Afghanistan) turn to digital money. Cash invites criminals to commit violence for cash in cash societies. Businesses hate handling cash when it gets to be enough to be a security concern.
While the digital can have broader theft, it has less violence. That is a point in its favor.
Stupidity on tap. And some conspiracy theory, the Illuminati, the Masons and the Jews are in his mind, but he is just smart enough to say it. Cash does crash. And at every war it does crash. And without digital systems people are unable to save their lifetime deposits. Which is what the speaker wants, because in times or war only the sinful bougeoisie might have money to save.
Try living for a few days or weeks without power and see how well your cards work.
You also have the issue of child support. While cash is necessary for privacy, its far, far, far bigger effects are (1) avoiding the obligation to pay child support by getting paid in cash, (2) underreporting taxes to commit tax fraud, and (3) money laundering / the purchase of illegal goods.
The big effect on the other side is the issue of how you're going to help people who can't get bank accounts, which is a real problem among poor and homeless people.
Real lawyers write in C++
... you would have each been better off performing the transaction through a market.
I assume you're being sarcastic. If the transaction was satisfactory to both of them, there's no difference between this and another other market transaction - except for lower transaction costs and receiving some extra intangible value.
They're better off with this trade than if they'd spent time researching competing providers, splitting the deal into two pieces with money, paying the government a cut, and spending the extra time to handle the accounting for taxes. Then there's the intangible benefits of friendship reenforcement and satisfaction with mutual sufficiency.
(By the way: They DID perform the transaction through a market. They just happened to find their corresponding market player next door, with a satisfactory .)
The fact that exchange in kind hampers productivity has been known for centuries now.
The way that money beats barter is that it is usually easier to arrange turning a piece of your productivity into needed goods or services provided by someone else if you do it in two steps than trying to find someone who happens to need your stuff and can provide what you need. When the opportunity for a good barter falls in your lap, you win by eliminating the frictions of the middle steps.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
FTFY
Sure, there are points of failure for cash too, for instance, physical theft, fire, etc. But they're a lot fewer.
These breathless cluetards who want a pure cashless society can't think their way out of a paper (or digital) bag.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not just banks operating the U.S. financial system in a way that is bad for the nation. There are many areas of poor and insufficient U.S. government management.
You have got to be kidding. In Seattle the homeless (and actually everyone) can get a week of high quality groceries for free. Usually they'll ask you if you can cook or have access to refrigeration too. The only thing you have to do is wait in line and you can go twice a week. So even if you're a homeless guy with a job you can probably convince your friend to go for you one day.
If you want to give money to the homeless then donate or buy them food directly. Giving them money makes that neighborhood dangerous, they run right over to their ruthless corner crack dealer and give him your charity. So that he can spend the rest of the day intimidating passerbys to enforce his "turf".
Meanwhile that starving bum runs into a public restroom, locks the door, and dies with dignity on the shitter.
Thanks fucknut I live here hope you feel good.
Being homeless in the city is extremely dangerous, if they're sleeping on the streets downtown it's because YOU are there to give them money, they could be camping out in the wilderness, ride the light rail into town with the free bus passes that many charities in town are handing out. Then conduct whatever business they need to do and get away from all the high crime maniacs that will stab you in your sleep in these tent cities.
They want drugs, they want to live in close proximity to these drugs and they want to do them right away. I know this because I was homeless for awhile and it was no big deal at all the worst part was other homeless people. I didn't look homeless, I didn't ask for money, and other than keeping me kinda busy obtaining like food, water, and showers it was easy. I formulated an exit plan and executed it with no issues at no point was I ever worried that my situation would not be resolved.
By far the hardest part was getting clean clothes and regular showers.
The bank or Government can freeze your accounts on a whim if they donâ(TM)t agree with what youâ(TM)re doing. Thus, they can control or influence what you do since you wonâ(TM)t have the option to use cash.
Porn industry and Gun Dealers whoâ(TM)s accounts were closed for no reason other than the industry they represented come to mind for this.
Going full digital will basically add a hidden tax to every purchase. A processing fee or something similar.
Think of major CC vendors transaction fees.
Full digital is also a surveillance States wet dream as every purchase can be tracked, flagged and / or categorized.
Finally, the proliferation of malware and assorted nasty stuff designed to steal digital credentials for purposes of fraud is a real turn off for going cashless.
Fix all the aforementioned problems and weâ(TM)ll talk about it. Until then I will use cash when I wish because I can.
while the value of paper money is the full faith and credit of the national govt issuing it, thats a pretty big thing. but, for it to have value to you, you must OWN the cash. the bills circulating are NOT the property of the govt. they are owned by us, if we have them in our physical possession legally. banks can hold our money and lend it out, but we can always walk into a bank and withdraw our money. with a cashless society, we dont ever actually possess anything. the value is held by the institutions that the money is held by. thus, we have lost control of our own money. can you imagine a govt issuing an order to banks to close out peoples account, zeroing them out? for no reason other than social control? if i can get to my bank and withdraw cash, i can use that cash, if my govt still has value, to survive. if its us dollars, i can use them in other countries. say goodby to all that. im not a prepper, survivalist, critic of fiat currency, barter enthusiast. i love our liberal, complex society as much as anyone. but goddammit i want my money.
You old people are largely responsible for this. At least in the US all the mismanagement between mental health, school shootings (cumulating with Columbine), and finally 9/11 were what allowed this crap to begin steamrolling without limits. The millennials were only following the inevitable path of society you paved for them with the partial lack of privacy they had growing up, and the complete lack the majority of post millennials have embraced. And you know what? Most of the old people aren't reminding children of the bad things. They are too busy sucking the cock of facebook while being social media whores, or wasting hours of their time with on-demand netflix videos because it is more convenient than tv. Or paying cashless because 'it's much more convenient and I get points!'
If I had the choice I would purge the whole lot of you on principle, before setting out to clean up the mess you have wrought.
legal pot shops are very cash only and banks don't really want to deal with them.
Instead of prohibiting cash, let's prohibit personal checks at merchants where there are checkout lines.
And that's why we'll have another, "bail bond" type, middle man who will get the poor, homeless, credit-card-less what they need for a cut off the top.
You do realize that our society has changed so much, ignoring what where previuosly conservative ideas, that Democrats are now the conservative party? The republican party was captured by nationalist radicals, proposing that we now change course from what we have been doing. Being conservative does not automatically mean republican.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
As well as eliminating cash handling, they want to collect data about all your purchases: when, where, what - so they can sell you to other companies. Every time you use EFTPOS or credit cards, you are tell them about your spending habits.
I tend to use cash for my day-to-day spending so I leave less of a digital footprint. I don't want to be blitzed with advertising for laundry products when they think I'm due to buy washing powder. I really don't want to get a series of advertisement for laxatives after I buy a fibre supplement.
"the American dream" has nothing to do with what you typed, so how can it be a con?
Traditionally, "the American dream" was that you could form a family and be mostly left alone by the government while living better than your parents - and then pass that on to your kids who would live better than you. It had nothing to do with credit histories, mortgages, corporations, captivity, or the rest of that drivel. People who live in an apartment in a mega city and watch too much TV could be easily stupified by all the ads pushing loans, credit scores, consumer goods and the other accoutrements of a shallow and meaningless life presented as part of a path to a faux American dream, but that's as illusory as a bad drug trip.
Plenty of average Americans are living their own American dreams every day all across the nation. If you are not, then your dream is probably loaded with cheap mad-in-China crap which you use to distract yourself from your own failure to get off the sofa, get out of the apartment, and start doing something productive in the real world. Get a LIFE.
With cash, a customer hands money to a vendor in exchange for goods or services. The prices might be inflated a bit by the government skimming cash from the transaction if it is in a state with a sales tax. The bankers are not part of the transaction - they must earn their money providing loans to homebuyers an businesses using cash they hold on behalf of depositors.
Without cash, the bankers are a part of every transaction, demanding a tiny bit of the transaction as a fee (and now in the Facebook era of corporate monetizing of data about users, they can sell info about the transaction as well). Bankers then depend on government to keep them in the profit loop with regulations, and they no longer feel the need to appeal to traditional banking customers in order to stay in business. Their traditional customers start to feel like a burden and they get arrogant as they attach fees to services they used to provide for free. They can afford to abuse and piss-off their customers because they have a massive guaranteed revenue stream from the fees (essentially a big crony-corporate tax) on all buying and selling.
Cashless societies are the on-ramp to spy-state-on-steroids totalitarianism and hyper-corruption.
Uh, yes he did. He voted with his feet. Every time he used a credit card, ATM, or just got cash back at the grocery store, he voted that those were choices he preferred over a physical branch office. There's no reason for him to be surprised the bank reacted.
Personally, I'm totally down with that. I use a bank branch maybe once every two years. I go to an actual ATM a few times a year, tops. And I'm an old coot, not a millenial.
Again as I have said before this is WHY cryptocurrency is so popular with many people. They do not want to be tracked by the banks and governments. ...And again why banks are freaking out and continually keep blocking it. If the world embraces cryptocurrency then they go out of business or at the very least completely lose control of the money.
Sure fine, but they had better get on the ball and make some serious changes because all it's going to take is some Silicon Valley startup to make them look remarkably outdated and stupid by offering really excellent banking services with realtime near instantaneous transactions. You see those delays make money for the banks so it is in their interests to slow things down.
That's why we need Monero! try my pool mmmoneropool.com
There are gold bugs for whom this idea would be very appealing.
Seriously, have you ever heard from a true gold bug? They carry on endlessly about central bank manipulation, fiat currency, and how gold is the only "true" currency. Many want to re-institute the gold standard for national currencies. In fact the gold bugs sound rather like the current digital currency folks now that I think about it. I wonder if there was/is some connection, inspiration, or something like that?
When a hurricane knocks out power and internet for 100 miles in every direction.
http://www.newser.com/story/18...
> The republican party was captured by nationalist
There was a nationalist president elected with (r) appended to his name.
The most-elected, longest serving democrat, Robert Byrd ( Democrat senator 1959-2010) was first elected to KKK leadership. That doesn't mean the Democrats are controlled by the KKK. Once upon a time, the KKK was an arm of the Democrat party, but that's not true today and it wasn't true when they elected Byrd in 2004. One politician does not a party make. Just because Clinton was a serial sexual harasser doesn't mean the Democrats are the sexual harassment party. That's just Clinton. Trump is Trump, he isn't Republicans, and a LOT of leading Republicans are not at all fond of him.
The Republicans unanimously chose Paul Ryan for speaker, even after he said that he would not do campaign appearances and stuff for them, like house speakers normally do. If you wanted to look at one guy who represents the party, Paul Ryan is the guy the all liked. And of course Ryan didn't like Trump - it took a long time for Ryan to even say he'd hold his nose and vote Trump over Hillary.
So we'll see what happens. Trump got a lot of voters in 2016. That's one election. I hope the party doesn't swing that way much. That would leave us with both major parties driven by emotional rhetoric completely, with no sound reasoning anywhere to be found.