61–70 of 294 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Australia has phone based drivers licenses This is news to me, out here on the West coast. Might have to look into that!
Travelling to the West coast i asked a fellow passenger "how far back should i wind my watch?". "About 20 years" came the reply. :D
I do believe it's a different pace of life out here :)
As for me, the only problem is that when your phone is dead, you can barely purchase anything. So I always carry a credit card.
I do have some cash at home for emergencies. But it was already locked there for several years.
The only reason when you need cash would be that you want to "hide" the trade. The police has already cought a lot of drug dealers by tracing the payment records of their customers.
However, as most of pepole will not use cash. So it will be much more easier for police to trace the serial number of the cash. It is getting more difficult to "hide" payment these days.
Not only for drug dealers, also for the husbands who wnat to have some small private money. Especially when you want to buy some games or some new useless gadgets. You will miss the good old days with cash.
Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…
The veneration of this type of cash forgets what it is in a modern world - a receipt for banking liabilities at either the central bank or the government Treasury. It's those that make the tokens worth something.
Another thing to consider in that credit and debit card processing fees, which in the US are substantial, especially for small merchants that can't use large volume to negotiate a discount. This amounts to a ~3% hidden "tax" on all transactions, the bulk of which goes to one of four enormous corporations.
3% is actually not bad for what it gets you: fraud detection, not having to lug cash to the bank every day, reduction of theft and employee mistakes, better recordkeeping for taxes, a way to handle refunds, and cleanliness. Small merchants often use Venmo where I am, and they save 3% in exchange for that awkward dance of sending payments.
If the government is going to replace cash with technology, why can't it do it itself and not involve some trabsbational bohemoth like Visa or Mastercard?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a surprising point I never see raised, that cash has its own overhead costs, just that they're diffuse (training and paying employees to close and count the registers, hiring Garda trucks to transport cash) versus explicit (processor fees). 3% is presumably still far higher than cash's overhead, but the rate is so entrenched in the US that I wonder what it would take to get it dislodged.
3% is not for electronic payment, 3% is for accepting credit card payment. Debit cards are much, much cheaper. And merchants are free to charge credit card payers an extra 3% or whatever they want to cover credit card costs. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/new-rules-el... > Beginning October 1, 2011, interchange fees for certain debit cards are capped at 21 cents plus 0.05% of the transaction value. h…
This would seem to make it potentially quite expensive on small transactions?
People use cards for the most trivial amounts here in Australia. Apparently the typical transaction fees are apparently 0.5% for debit and 0.9% for credit, which means that yeah, I just wave my phone to buy a donut...
Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…
James Burke, in the series Connections, warns of the "technology trap", where our dependence on various high-tech systems becomes so heavily ingrained that any significant outage leaves the workings of society lethally nonfunctional. Certainly something to consider...
In an entirely cashless society, the problem isn't that "not everyone is included", the problem is surveillance. You can solve inclusion easily enough... Replace cash with prepaid cards (an idea posed in the article), or issue small, purpose-built digital wallets (equivalent to a low-power smartphone, except only for managing your digital bank account), or any number of other solutions. An even better idea is to just legally require businesses to accept cash (although this goes directly against the concept of cashless).
Digital (non-"crypto") currencies could do a lot of good when applied properly. I just don't think any government or institution would apply it properly.
Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…
In a cashless society there is a lot of information about people in few hands and you never know how this information will be used now or in the future. It can be a democracy or a dictatorship. The corruption is everywhere, the threshold is different.
That said, most people do register them or use their phones in 2022 so in that case, yes you can be tracked.
According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.
If you give me the choice between being able to buy a loaf of bread and having my payments private I'm feeding myself ten times out of ten. I'm not saying that privacy isn't important but I don't think it is the main problem compared to people being unable to use currency.