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Another problem is that no society is perfect. And even if it were, it won't stay that way.
There is a need for a small grey area in any system to stay sane, where people can workaround the limitations of said system.
Yes, it will be abused, and also used for nefarious purposes. But it's better than the alternative.
You need people to sometimes be able to do things the state doesn't approve. You need children to be able to mess around without parent knowing. You need to be able to go to a gay bar without living a trace. You need to be able to give cash to a homeless without him being part of the system.
Also if you make it very hard to try new things that are illegal or immoral now, your society will get stuck and lose a lot of opportunities to evolve.
Yes, it would be better to change the system to make it better first. But it's a slow and unreliable process, especially if you can't prove that your way is ok. So having little pocket of experimentation is important, and cash allows that.
Fantastic comment, this is to me the crux of what makes privacy so important.
"How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?"
https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
There is a need for a small grey area in any system to stay sane, where people can workaround the limitations of said system.
There is a similar analogy to what is happening in the computing world, and I've heard it called "the insecurity that gives us freedom." I agree.
I totally agree, but I wonder if physical cash is really the only way get there.
I fear that trying to keep a cash infrastructure in place will turn out to be a futile effort because it is so expensive. Long before cash is completely gone I bet that almost everyone who needs it will be priced out of actually using it. Also, cash has the downside of not being usable online.
The problem is that I know of no government wise enough to legislate/regulate in order to keep all the very important things you mention. Right now these possibilities exist only because they are side-effects of the physical properties of cash.
I suspect that once we really do lose cash, some sort of grass roots replacement will emerge (cryptocurrencies?). The danger is that it will be something that lends itself to money laundering and tax evasion on a grand scale. That would make it far too high risk for the purposes you're talking about.
The best solution I can think of is a constitutional right to make and receive smallish payments anonymously and a constitutional obligation for all vendors to accept one such form of payment that is available to everyone.
That would make cash one option without equating the struggle for a right to anonymous small scale payments with a specific solution that is easy to reject because it is so expensive.
This argument was made in the Battlestar Galactica tv series as well. Nicely put.
Barack Obama put it nicely I think:
"We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised. One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is, where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way they’re supposed to, without surprises?"
Great comment. Came here (to try) to say exactly this.
You can have a local virtual currency and good ol' US dollars.
Very insightful comment.
One of the problems with a cashless society is that the banks aren't required to give you a bank account.
If none of the banks will give you a bank account, and there's no such thing as cash... then you're just not allowed to have money. That shouldn't be a position that it is possible to get into.
A lot of people don't realize that in the US at least, there is a semi-secret banking blacklist, where banks will just deny you all services. I know because I managed to get on it, and then managed to get off it, no easy feat. How I got there is another story, but banks are not a friend of the people, and moves towards a cashless society give them even more power, something they already have too much of.
Sidenote: I was in on bitcoin back when you could generate blocks with a CPU... and came to the conclusion that privacy of transaction was too fundamental to a good coin and abandoned bitcoin. Given central banks ability to invent money at scale, I also always thought the 50% attack was something they would work towards... and so that's the story of how I almost became a millionaire.
> One of the problems with a cashless society is that the banks aren't required to give you a bank account.
In the UK, the nine largest banks are legally required to offer basic bank accounts specifically to cater to people who cannot otherwise get a bank account.
That is incorrect for EU countries. The EU, through Directive 2014/92, mandates that banks cannot refuse basic accounts to legal EU residents (unless they believe you're laundering money or financing terror groups).
I live in an essentially cashless country, but even countries where cash is still used would be very hard to live in without a bank account, so that legislation is important.
What’s the reason they wouldn’t give you an account?
It seems like helping people get bank accounts would be what you’d want, though the IT issues arround outages and lack of network services in area is a hard one.
I would love to see a cashless society because carrying around dirty bills and heavy coins is just a nuisance, and adds real overhead for stores as well...
...BUT, for privacy and the unbanked, I suspect this necessarily needs to go along with credit-card-compatible "cash cards" that would have to be:
1) Anonymous (e.g. buy a card for $1 from any drugstore, swap them with friends, buy in bulk and give away, whatever -- don't need to show an ID)
2) Secure and robust (value stored on-card without the ability for the government to deactivate etc., or for transactions to be cancelled after-the-fact)
3) All ATM's and banks required by law to support transferring any reasonable value (e.g. <$10K) from one card to another anonymously (so if I need to pay you, the two of us can walk into any bank). Ideally be able to do this at any convenience store, etc.
For whatever reason, I rarely see the idea of anonymous cash cards discussed in these types of conversations.
> For whatever reason, I rarely see the idea of anonymous cash cards discussed in these types of conversations.
Because it's really really hard to prevent forgery. Maybe impossible.
A side effect would be that the three points taken together would effectively make the cards a new form of cash.
As in, if people decide to simply exchange the physical cards instead of charging/discharging them, the cards effectively become a plain old traditional currency.
Anonymous prepaid cards are a thing, very useful for e.g. people with debt problems.
> Secure and robust
> value stored on-card
These two things don't go together.
Large denominations get removed from circulation because they are used to enable crime.
I've recently visited London for the first time. What really stunned me was the huge number of homeless people. They were practically everywhere.
And they all relied on cash donations. I wonder what will happen to these people as society becomes more and more cashless? What effect will it have on crime?
Begging is a controversial issue in the UK. Our welfare system is far from perfect (and it has been substantially denuded by the current Conservative government) but there are relatively few people who need to beg to survive - primarily non-UK nationals with no recourse to public funds.
The consensus view among charities who work with the homeless is that a) most beggars aren't rough sleepers, b) most rough sleepers don't beg and c) begging primarily serves to fund drug addictions. Though by no means universal, many people in the sector are of the opinion that giving to beggars has a net negative effect by helping to perpetuate addiction. Begging certainly isn't a sustainable solution to the factors that cause homelessness - mental illness, addiction, economic insecurity and a lack of social housing. It is entirely plausible that the diminution of begging by a move to cashlessness could see an increase in acquisitive crime.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/09/sweden-how-cas...
> SituationSthlm is a Swedish magazine similar to the UK’s Big Issue, sold by homeless people in Stockholm. But the sellers couldn’t sell magazines to people who didn’t carry cash. The solution? A badge for sellers with a QR payment code. Buyers scan it with their phone, make a digital payment using the mobile payment system Swish, and then the seller collects their cash from the SituationStklm offices soon after.
> “This solution originated to help sell magazines, but soon showed other benefits. It helped homeless people carry less cash – which reduced their vulnerability to theft, and also gave them a way to budget by leaving their money at the office until they needed it,” said the report.
> The researchers also found that Sweden had benefited from lower crime and higher tax revenues as cash usage had fallen, but it added: “We must not demonise those who operate in cash, when many have no choice.”
It does seem to have got a lot more evident in recent years. Not really solving the underlying issues leading to there being so many in the first place, but some homeless do accept contactless donations[0] and there is a city-wide contactless donation scheme[1].
[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/homeless-people-wearing-b...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-46372244 and https://www.taplondon.org
Speaking just to crime, there are still about 10 bank robberies per day in the US[1], plus many crimes against individuals where the goal is to obtain cash. I would think that a cashless society would have much less of this?
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/bank-crime-statistics-20...
In a China, beggars will have a QR code that you can use to give them some money.
I lived in London since I was a teenager, but moved out in 2015. When I next visited it in 2017, I thought there were a lot of homeless people. It was a huge increase, and the composition was changed -- more British accents asking for change, more people in "nice" areas (like near the theatres) and far more rough sleepers. There were even tents on streets in central London, which I'd not seen previously.
A friend a decade older than me said it was the usual effect of Conservative government policy, but I was too young to have noticed the previous implementation. I was 11 when the Conservatives lost power in 1997, and they only fully regained it in 2015.
The implications of a cashless society on privacy are terrifying
The implications on life for the poor are terrifying!
Businesses would love to be able to exclude people too poor to use their services from society- It's a real ugly situation. Like a decentralized apartheid based on financial status.
Without the government stepping in and trying to prevent this discrimination, there is no one to stand up for these human being's lives
The monetary implications are even scarier.
The real reason they are pushing for "cashless society" is so they can impose negative interest rates. Since you won't have the option to withdraw your funds into cashier, you bank balance will be debited monthly as a privilege for giving the bank money.
Its their next hairbrained scheme to try and shore up their ponzi-scheme economy.
tracking the sources of income for an individual, without exception, is also part of this story
It seems to me that a cashless society can have many advantages - when everything works well.
Yet, cashless societies would be pretty disastrous in case of natural disasters, acts of war, acts of terrorist, industrial accidents, and any other circumstances that would take out electricity and/or telecommunications. To me that seems a good reason to kill the case for going cashless nationwide.
Britain is not Britain in this regard.
London has a ton of places that don't accept cash already.
Go to smaller towns in the North and you'll hit minimum charges to use a card or broken machines.
Admittedly I've not lived in London for 5 years or so, but I never went to single place that wouldn't accept cash. Name one.
I can't think of anywhere in 'the North' where this is anything other than a random event.
Ironically, in 'the South' I believe a lot of card machines in cabs have a habit of being broken unless you're adamant that you don't have cash on you?
I live in Newcastle, and this isn't the case anywhere around the North East.
The Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge is the first place I've come across that is cashless. It struck me that for a Foundation that is trying to promote computing to children, they're exactly one of the main demographics that won't have access to cashless payments.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-store/
(Digressing, but I was also saddened that their tills are tablet EPOS systems and not home-brew with a Pi at their heart)
Before talking about cashless society they should allow anonymous bank cards and anonymous cryptocurrencies. Otherwise it is an Orwellian surveillance state. The government doesn't want better and convenient payment system, they just want to be able to see all transactions between citizens and to be able arrest their money. Today you agree to the cashless society, tomorrow you are assigned a social rating.
A cashless society would be a wet dream come true for intelligence agencies, Facebook/Google and other mass surveillance proponents or beneficiaries.
You need to keep things off the books sometimes. Try saving up for a significant other's gift, if you can't keep a few things hidden.
Cashless society shouldn't be a thing in a democracy. It requires too many hurdles and money. It's inherently prejudiced to many poor people.
Unless there were a state (consumer) bank, the implication of a cashless society is that it ought to be a illegal for people not to use private banks. In my mind this effectively make banks an extension of the state apparatus without the sort of accountability that would be expected.
If the state doesn’t issue cash then other items will become cash - as it did in Somalia.
This goes alongside the campaign on protecting cash as a payment option: https://campaigns.which.co.uk/freedom-to-pay/
If 25 million are dependent on cash then we won’t be going cashless any time soon.
How we/society/constitution stopping government from just create arbitrary number on some server to create money out of the blue ?
This reads very strongly like someone made a conclusion and then looked for every detail they could they thought might support that theory, some much weaker than others.
These types of articles are only useful if your looking for a starting point to get a conversation going on a topic. They are not good for supporting your conclusion one way or the other once you have analyzed the topic.
Given the current technological landscape, we are not ready for a cashless society. People don't have the knowledge nor the equipment required to make it a good system. Avoiding this cashless thing seems like the correct move, until we have good social infrastructure (in my opinion, not likely to happen before 2060). We need what Richard Stallman calls digital extraction:
>Projects with the goal of digital inclusion are making a big assumption. They are assuming that participating in a digital society is good, but that's not necessarily true. Being in a digital society can be good or bad, depending on whether that digital society is just or unjust. There are many ways in which our freedom is being attacked by digital technology. Digital technology can make things worse, and it will, unless we fight to prevent it.
>Therefore, if we have an unjust digital society, we should cancel these projects for digital inclusion and launch projects for digital extraction. We have to extract people from digital society if it doesn't respect their freedom, or we have to make it respect their freedom.