More important than privacy issues, is the issue of control.
Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen. If all your money and payment ability is digital and controlled by a central authority, your ability to transact can be turned off with the flip of a switch. And in the complex world we live in, that can literally mean that your ability to keep eating can be digitally switched off at almost no cost to your attacker. Is that something that can be continued? Maybe not, but the attacker could drag out the issue in a bureaucratic and legal mess for long enough for you to fall into homelessness and despair if they're motivated enough to destroy you.
Cash has the nice property that it enables permissionless economic transaction. We can exchange cash peer to peer without anyone's explicit or implicit consent. And being private is also nice because it gives the people you transact with some protection from potentially aiding some kind of blacklisted individual. I wonder if people like Harriet Tubman and the people that aided her would have been able to do what they did if their money could have been turned off due to their illegal actions helping slaves escape.
Permissionless and peer to peer cash is a critical feature of a free society that we should be very fearful of losing.
> Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen.
This is a key point that needs to be emphasized.
For everyone posting about not using cash, consider the thought experiment of how your day/week/month will go if all your non-cash payment mechanisms are shut down.
As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over. The majority of us already kept all our wealth in digital form. I continued to use 100% cash day to day many years after all my colleagues had switched to contactless (only switched when I got Monzo around 2017/2018). But I wasn't walking around with a wad of cash and I didn't keep my salary in a vault at home. It was in a current account and I took out at the very most £100 at a time. If someone had shut down all my non-cash payment mechanisms and froze my account I'd still only have enough money for a week.
I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.
The thing is, even if you don't save and hold lots of physical cash to maintain your needs, if you ever did get your digital money turned off, you could still work with your employer or friends to get cash and buy things.
In a cashless society, that option is completely off the table, and you will be forced to rely on the goodwill of others to buy things for you, and hope they don't also get turned off by sin of aiding you.
> As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over.
That's not what the term cashless society is usually used to convey though. If you really wanted, you could've been operating largely cashless ever since credit cards became widely accepted (1970s?). But even today (at least in the USA) you can still withdraw your whole paycheck in cash and pay everything that way, if you wanted to. So we're fortunately not a cashless society at all.
I also strongly agree with these two posts. Yet this appears to be a Northern European phenomena because I see large areas like Asia, with large population numbers, do it. Whatever the opinion, it is not going away. I used cash to buy groceries today.
It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.
> It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.
People trying to push an agenda (not you) love to create a sense of inevitability. Don't believe it.
Lots of people have no access to digital payments, and objectively, how are they more convenient than cash? Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?
> Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?
Yes. I get paid on my account like everybody else in this country and then I can immediately use it at any merchant in the country by using a credit card. No need to run to ATMs (where are they even and if it is not my banks I get charged extra), no need to figure out change etc.
I don't even carry a wallet anymore because I can just pay with my phone, so no need for a physical card.
A lot of us young people live far enough down the slippery slope that it doesn't seem like a practical concern. I wouldn't find it remotely tolerable to be cut off from online payments - no Steam, no Netflix, no Amazon? So rather than making sure there are good cash-only options, I want to make sure everyone has the right and ability to perform credit card payments or some kind of similar electronic transaction. (This is where a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasm comes from, and while I'm a skeptic in general I wholeheartedly endorse this motivation.)
I agree that we definitely need some harsh policy enacted to enshrine transact-ability as an inalienable right.
I personally see cryptocurrency as something akin to second amendment rights. You hold and support it as a citizen's check and balance to make government abuse of people harder to implement.
No, but if you did find yourself in that situation, you could still request cash from your employer, friends, or family, without obviously implicating them in aiding you. Or you could do odd jobs or beg on the streets for the cash you need to survive.
If you're digitally blacklisted, and can't send or receive money, then the only option you have is hope that someone in your life is willing to risk helping you directly by buying you things with no guarantee you'll ever be able to pay them back.
My point was that I still need to rely on a bank to get new cash, and that bank still operates in digital ways, ... there is no point in just looking at the way you pay in a shop.
Like you are not really better of in the long term just because you have some cash in your wallet. You would need to keep all your money as cash, to have a systematic advantage.
Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen. If all your money and payment ability is digital and controlled by a central authority, your ability to transact can be turned off with the flip of a switch. And in the complex world we live in, that can literally mean that your ability to keep eating can be digitally switched off at almost no cost to your attacker. Is that something that can be continued? Maybe not, but the attacker could drag out the issue in a bureaucratic and legal mess for long enough for you to fall into homelessness and despair if they're motivated enough to destroy you.
Cash has the nice property that it enables permissionless economic transaction. We can exchange cash peer to peer without anyone's explicit or implicit consent. And being private is also nice because it gives the people you transact with some protection from potentially aiding some kind of blacklisted individual. I wonder if people like Harriet Tubman and the people that aided her would have been able to do what they did if their money could have been turned off due to their illegal actions helping slaves escape.
Permissionless and peer to peer cash is a critical feature of a free society that we should be very fearful of losing.