Why we should fear a cashless world

A lot of these comments mention that cash gives the government less control, however try visiting India or China or Greece and ask people the real reason they use cash. It's to evade taxes and launder money! Same with cash tipping in the US. So in some ways electronic is better to help catch the cheaters, but if it's not transparent it could pose a problem if the wrong people get in charge.

The average person is not a financial expert and so there are very lucrative opportunities for those who know the system well to make a lot of money at the expense of those who do not. Payday loan companies and high interest credit cards come to mind as extreme examples, but every time you put money in a savings account at your bank they are making a lot more on it than they are paying you in interest, and every time you use an on-line payment service or swipe your card in a store you're giving a significant cut to the payment services involved, not the person you thought you were paying. This is before we even get into the privacy implications and so on.

The average person is also not a technical expert and so there are analogous opportunities to take advantage of them, but we are becoming so dependent on technology that if anything the opportunities here are even more one-sided and certainly much greater in number. Day-to-day functionality and communications increasingly rely on isolated, closed ecosystems, run by commercial operators that have every incentive to lock people in and then exploit them, yet which are typically not subject to regulation as essential public services the way that traditional phone and mail systems typically have been. The "war on general purpose computing" is well underway, again with even basic things like the software you can run on your own devices locked up through a combination of proprietary repositories or app stores, cloud integrations, DRM and similar technologies, and legalised anticompetitive behaviour thanks to ever-increasing distortions of IP laws.

Much of this comes down to the same recurring themes with new technologies: as well as providing useful new capabilities, they can also become a threat to privacy, to ownership, and ultimately to the freedom of smaller businesses or private individuals to create and use technologies and data as they wish rather than as the controlling mega-businesses and governments dictate.

This does not seem healthy to me at all. However, since most of it is predicated on the average user of these technologies not understanding the full implications and often not having any meaningful choice apart from giving up on a technology altogether anyway, there is only so much the little guy can do.

We should fear a cashless world, but we should fear more the kind of world that cashless transactions exemplify.

I like to use cash a lot too. And the privacy benefits are true sometimes, but more and more places want your information when you purchase anything. I bought a weed wacker the other day and they wanted my address and phone and email. I never say no, but instead reply with, "555 Fake Street" which is obnoxious, but its like you don't need my damn address to sell me lawn equipment. Amazingly, most people dont understand why anyone would give false information to a random business.

My problem is that I usually do things online and plus I'm always feel much more secure knowing my Amex would be fully protected vs cash. Day to day I'm not worried I'll get robbed, but in the off chance I'm somewhere where I might I'm much happier carrying no cash and just my Amex.