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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

#271

Post by jonkho »

fzeroracer wrote: post #261
CommanderData wrote: post #233

The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying. Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade. Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it. That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems bec…

The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse. Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (…

There are things that are justified to exist whose sole purpose is keeping things in-check. If any of your aforementioned tools gets abused by the authorities we can still fall back to using cash. If you take away the fallback alternative, then abuse is much more difficult to keep in check. This is called Game Theory.

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

#272

Post by wiredfool »

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.

My eldest has gone off to uni in Scotland this year, and he’s literally spent no cash at all in his time there. The only cash he uses are 1 pound coins for the gym lockers, and they return when you’re done.

He spent 3 months in Germany last year, and used cash for just about everything.

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

#273

Post by vixen99 »

tyfon wrote: post #248
noodlesUK wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were already costs. There were always costs and risks associated with cash handling: armored trucks doing cash collection, risks of money in tills being lost. If it really were a lot cheaper you wouldn’t see businesses clamouring to go cashless. That’s not to say I think cash should go the way of the dodo, but I don’t think there’s that much difference paying g4s to collect your money vs Mastercard. IMO the ben…

I work in a bank and cash handling is a major headache in terms of internal control, logistics, reconciliation and AML. It's a large extra cost. It is much cheaper for the bank and customers to use cards, but where I live the banks own a payment network that does not involve visa and mastercard so the cost is much lower and there is no rent seeking so card use have no fees. We also have an app for sending "cash" for…

Some quote! "I work in a bank and cash handling is a major headache". Doubtless but perhaps we should reconsider the larger purposes of the banks in relation to their customers.

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

#275

Post by 34679 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #157
34679 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the US. There are no laws requiring businesses to do so. Why would employers spend the resources required for such a thing?

Some scenarios I hope you see as obvious: - you take out cash from an ATM. The machine is loaded with sequential or logged order of SN that can be matched to withdrawals and times. - you take that cash immediately to a vending machine or supermarket auto-checkout that takes notes. The machine scans all notes it ingests and can match them to timings and purchase details. - Even a small shop might have a camera at the…

I haven't commented on the ATMs, I was only replying to the question, not the statement that preceded it.

I have owned a retail shop. There are plenty of rules and regulations to worry about, and labor is a massive expense. At no point would I have been inclined to purchase equipment or pay for labor to track serial numbers on bills without a specific mandate to do so. No such mandate exists.

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

#276

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

fzeroracer wrote: post #261
CommanderData wrote: post #233

The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying. Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade. Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it. That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems bec…

The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse. Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (…

There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far more expensive for the government, and the protesters have more options to fight back—run, hide the cash, etc. Not to mention it will probably drum up sympathy for the oppressed.

And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.

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

#277

Post by ACS_Solver »

madsbuch wrote: post #264
ACS_Solver wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such robustness is currently a subject of government studies and planning. It's definitely an area of concern. A personal-level outage is a problem but less so than with cash. I have three separate items on me I can use to pay - my card holder with bank cards, my phone and my watch. That's more redundancy than with cash, which is one item (wallet). Power or network outages aren't a big issue. I've experienced those a…

For you last point regarding national level outages: I am quite sure that trains companies would instantiate emergency systems in that case – maybe just by letting people travel for free. Such an event is also not expected to last for long.

Quite possibly, yes. There's also the consideration that such an outage would likely be part of an even bigger problem.

Over here, like most of Europe, we're pretty safe from natural disasters aside from storms causing local power outages. There are no earthquakes, tsunamis or similarly destructive events. So a hypothetical situation where payments are down nationwide for a significant period of time would almost certainly be part of an even larger disaster where a lot of infrastructure is non-functional due to military attack or something akin to a complete crash of all computers.

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

#278

Post by nonrandomstring »

yyyk wrote: post #186
nonrandomstring wrote: post #102

There are two fallacies I frequently feel the need to debunk in this discussion. - Cash is anonymous - Cash is an "old" or "low" technology. When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Modern cash is high technology . Look…

>how much the police can do to trace cash It doable but not at all trivial. >It's well past the point of being worth forging The news seem to indicate plenty of forgers still, e.g.: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/poss... >it is likely that future banknotes will use einks einks are too expensive right now?

> einks are too expensive right now?

Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost "intelligent cash".

For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored, decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.

It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable portable artifacts to transfer value.

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

#279

Post by vlovich123 »

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.

opendime is a one time use bearer bond that costs ~$10 per device. It cannot be used like cash - you have to transfer the full amount - and it can break much more easily than cash.

cashu is still online and its anonymity claims should be taken as suspect given that no cryptocurrency has managed to achieve it in practice.

So to summarize: Bitcoin only really works online, offline equivalents are more fragile and can’t be used for the same use cases as cash, and anonymity continues to lag physical cash.

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

#280

Post by thuuuomas »

beAbU wrote: post #166
happytiger wrote: post #148

Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions. I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper. You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the…

And yet, when last did you get a 3-4% discount when paying cash? I remember that from the 90s and 00s. In fact, I have seen some small places ask a 3-4% surcharge for cash payments, because banks don't process cash for free any more.

Every gas station in my area offers a lower cash price.
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