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Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#81

Post by impossiblefork »

asystole wrote: post #49
impossiblefork wrote: post #31

I think what's required is electronic cash, something like a CBDC with an electronically transferable, partially anonymous system that still allows offline payments if case the central computers get knocked out. GNU Taler satisfies one half of these constraints (cashlikeness + taxability). The Swedish e-krona pilot also has a token based component to allow offline payments.

We already have this. It's called bitcoin. For offline payments, there's physical devices like opendime and potentially Chaumian mints like cashu.

I think the advantage here is that it's ordinary money, which if people fail to obtain it, will lead to them defaulting on their debt and losing real things.

When you have enormous amounts of debts denominated in a currency, so many time the price of those things that would be lost, its value is almost entirely determined on what interest rate the central bank sets. If you hoard it to get people to default so as to obtain the value of the collateral, the central bank will printing to stop you.

Meanwhile, there's no point in trying to do that kind of thing with bitcoin. The value of the collateral is probably less than the value of the physical cash. What you do then is to invent your own bitcoin and hope that somebody will accept units of it.

For this reason I believe that the fair value of Bitcoin is zero, but I can't know when it ends up at zero, so I'm not shorting it, just as I am not shorting the US real estate market, even though it's clear that from a discounted-cash-flow PoV it must be incredibly overvalued, provided that it wasn't incredibly undervalued back when interest rates were at 1%.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#82

Post by ghaff »

jasode wrote: post #59
Alifatisk wrote: post #33

I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.

>I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash. But how do you get a regular re-supply of your cash to pay the places that take cash? For me, I would have to make a regular trips to the bank ATM machine to withdraw cash. That type of errand is inconvenient which is why I haven't done that in 15 years. It's been so long that I don'…

Be glad there are ATMs. I'm old enough to remember getting cash involved checks and bank tellers--assuming you had an account with a local bank because otherwise it was more complicated.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#83

Post by giantg2 »

Alifatisk wrote: post #33

I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.

"I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back."

The major stores would be a problem, but on an individual basis I would bet many people would switch to silver or gold if cash were truly eliminated.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#84

Post by PikachuEXE »

Alifatisk wrote: post #33

I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.

Benjamin Franklin — 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.'

Same for convenience

What liberty? The ability to make transactions without a centralized and/or permissioned finance system

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#85

Post by cge »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #45
Alifatisk wrote: post #33

I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.

> I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash. Buy somewhere else (if humanly possible), and tell this to the vendor who doesn't want to accept cash.

This is increasingly difficult, at least in Western Europe, without it being a significant imposition. I've had several instances where, despite absolutely no signage or indication anywhere outside the business, inside the business, or on the menu, I've waited in a queue, ordered something, and only when I'm ready to pay been told that the, eg, coffee shop won't accept cash. I've also been to several restaurants, especially in London, where despite officially accepting cash, attempting to pay in cash will result in the staff returning and asking you not to if at all possible: it appears that the staff at those restaurants are not actually allowed to handle cash payments themselves, and have to have management handle them directly.

While it's not clear that these behaviours are legal, it does not appear that there is any enforcement.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#86

Post by baq »

okr wrote: post #58
toenail wrote: post #29

I don't see why I should give a corporation information about all my payments. I already carry a phone with me, that's enough to spy on where I am, they don't need to know what I do or who I do it with. Privacy is a right, not a privilege, I don't see why I should just throw it away for a little convenience.

(Since when is privacy a right? Just curious. I always saw it as a privilege. Having my room with my bed to sleep in.)

If it’s written in the law then it is. Depends where you live.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#87

Post by forinti »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #16
madsbuch wrote: post #11

I Denmark we are removing the 1000kr bill as of May 2025. from then on the highest bill. is 500kr which is roughly equal to 80 usd. Denmark Is the most cashless society I have yet experiences (and I have been traveling a fair bit). This comes with pros and cons. and I think the reason why it works is because of an incredibly high social trust.

Besides high social trust, I assume also a great IT infrastructure with guaranteed high uptime, a tech literate population willing to adopt new technology and not be stubborn to change, plus a small business environment not focused on cash driven tax dodging, like in the German speaking countries.

I live in a middle-income country and it's now not unusual to see beggars with card machines at the red light.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#88

Post by keiferski »

mypastself wrote: post #6

> [On] 23rd August 1994, the chaotic music duo and performance artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1m of notes behind a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. They are not alone in attempting to reduce money’s power… They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so.

By what, 0.00001%? I think the quoted sentence is obviously talking about the symbolic power of money – and burning a million pounds certainly has a lot of that.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#89

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

madsbuch wrote: post #11

I Denmark we are removing the 1000kr bill as of May 2025. from then on the highest bill. is 500kr which is roughly equal to 80 usd. Denmark Is the most cashless society I have yet experiences (and I have been traveling a fair bit). This comes with pros and cons. and I think the reason why it works is because of an incredibly high social trust.

> high social trust.

With the rise of ML, and people salivating over the data inherent in currency flow, I suspect that trust may soon go the way of the dodo.

In the US, anything that makes money tends to get helped along. Regulators look the other way (until some knucklehead starts stealing from rich people), and even the lowest-level employees become "stans" of their bosses.

I am a believer in the promise of socialism, but, like communism, it's something that works on paper, but people screw it up.

Capitalism works. It does that, because it is completely in line with human behavior. Human behavior is pretty awful, when we don't have external restraints, so unrestrained capitalism is pretty awful.

Despite that cynical stance, I do have hope for the future. It will almost certainly make me uncomfortable, when it comes (as my own generation did, for my predecessors), but I think we'll prevail.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#90

Post by Freak_NL »

okr wrote: post #58
toenail wrote: post #29

I don't see why I should give a corporation information about all my payments. I already carry a phone with me, that's enough to spy on where I am, they don't need to know what I do or who I do it with. Privacy is a right, not a privilege, I don't see why I should just throw it away for a little convenience.

(Since when is privacy a right? Just curious. I always saw it as a privilege. Having my room with my bed to sleep in.)

It's fairly common:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

> Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy.

Not the US, but:

> In the US, privacy and associated rights have been determined via court cases and the protections have been established through laws.

Privacy is not a privilege, it is a right.

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