I mean, it kinds seems inevitable to me. Books has become e-books. Cash is becoming digital transfers. China has done it. The west is mostly doing card-swipes. One day, that transition will be complete, and cash would be phased out.
What happens then? Think like the power outage in Spain recently. Some people had cash. But in 20-40 years. There might not even be any cash in existence. What then?
What if, instead of a few hours, its a few days? Or weeks?
I guess riots break out all around the world?
(Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this? Where are the backups? Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?)
It won’t ever go 100% cashless. There’s too many coins and paper money floating around.
The existing currency pool is not the reason. Paper money has a pretty short durable life, and coins don’t have enough value to operate society on. It’s actually a fairly big task for a government to maintain the currency supply.
Come to eastern europe if you want to pay by cash
You can’t steal/tax evade as easily with e-money
Humans don’t plan ahead for preventables and get angry if you diminish current QoL for long term safety. We know this. Earth getting a direct hit solar flare ends civilization. There’s no divine safety guard rails, we’d just be fucked. Probably not extinction though. Just a lot of violence, extremism, and starvation getting to that point of very diminished stability again.
I like your use of “when” because it is fairly likely to happen one day. It already has, and Morse code had just been invented IIRC. Not that long ago, just wasn’t a big deal then.
Did you hear the news about definitive proof of rogue black holes? Billions of them exist in the milky way it is thought now zipping around fucking shit up.
even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything
fun fact, businesses operate without power by using battery operated calculators and inventory pads.
every minute a business isn’t in operation is a cost to the business.
I worked at Super Walmart decades ago. power went out for the whole town. the main HV lines collapsed after a tornado.
mgmt marked all the ice cream down 80% and we were still checking customers out on generators.
reduce risk, increase profits, mitigate losses. the only bad opportunity is the one you ignore.
by god we sold almost every tub of ice cream in an hour.
this is kinda hilarious lol okey understood
Why do you think everything will become completely cash-less?
The less people use physical cash, the less it gets produced. Eventually governments/mints will say “hey, you aren’t using this much anymore, so we’ll stop recognising it”, or something along those lines.
That will never happen. Cash is useful for laundering money, and governments are full of people working for criminals that need to launder money.
I know its not the same thing, but we’ve completely done away with the barter system. Way back in the days of yore people would be swapping things for things, and then money came along and they were like “whaaaat you want to take my stuff in exchange for a few little discs?” And now it’s totally normal.
We have not completely done away with the barter system. It is just less visible.
I worked on a farm for a while that grew vegetables, and bartered some of those vegetables for other products from neighboring businesses. We got a pallet of apples in exchange for squashes from a local orchard, and seconds frozen pizzas in exchange for veg for pizza toppings from a local restaurant. We even bartered labor. There was someone who came in every week and spent a few hours cleaning and organizing the tomato cooler in exchange for some tomatoes that were on their way out.
In each case it was mutually beneficial for all parties to exchange in kind without using cash.
So while bartering is not common, it still exists.
I’ve been at some festivals where the bartering system was alive and well! People would trade beer for camping chairs or a volleyball for some duct tape. Good times :)
In Spain credit cards still worked during the outage.
And the proposal for digital Euro already contemplate an offline mode for transactions.
As long as the power loss doesn’t last days and batteries die out there would not be a problem with that.
And outage of days will bring so many problems that cashless society might be the less of them.
We can return to a primitive society to avoid dependence on electricity, but do we want that?
I think the best option is just people be prepared with food medicines and offline entertainment for a week in case of a big power loss.
Spain here… How and what area are you referring to? Internet, Cell Phone Towers, Everything was down, no one was accepting credit cards in my neighborhood. The only thing they were accepting were IOU’s (if you knew the store owner) and Euros.
Center spain. Until 6pm we didn’t had internet or electricity. But most TPV still worked.
Here is an article explaining why: https://www.xataka.com/servicios/resolviendo-grandes-incognitas-apagon-que-algunos-datafonos-funcionaban-red-otros-no
Basically there’s two ways. The SAI of the supermarkets keep them going. Or they had the advanced models that accepted offline transactions.
In that case we have to rely on Elons white power.
Cigarettes and other things of value will become cash again.
Luckily, there are Nuka-Cola bottle caps…
Debt and ledgers.
Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.
I guess riots break out all around the world?
I feel like this idea that people are just going to riot and do mass violence is some right wing fear.
Most people, most of the time, are pretty social cooperative creatures.
I disagree and think it depends on where you live
Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can’t buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.
look at sweden…hands out papers telling you to have cash for week…but doesnt accept cash anywhere. we all can learn from the dumb nations.
no cash means government controls who you can give money to. beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed. if you cant get a phone, you cant have money. if you dont have a home or money you cant sign a phonecontract and so on…
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed
In China, they have Wechat Wallet that people can give money to homeless people. Even homeless people have phones.
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
It is nasty and dystopian, I agree. But its not really a fantasy anymore, its real, the dystopian future is on the horizon. Soon, it’d be too late to stop the dystopia.
At first, mass surveillance cameras is only in China, but then even supposed “democracies” like the UK have millions of cameras. Then China became mostly cashless, that will also eventually happen to western countries.
The dystopia is coming. You can’t stop it.
I visited Australia last year. There were surveillance cameras just about everywhere. Even on rural highways to catch speeders
Cash will change to a digital form or disappear, I don’t agree with the people claiming it wont’t.
Scandinavia is so close already, recieving cash is considered bothersome. No one uses it for anything anymore. Well… Besides drugs.
Both electricity and the internet is critical infrastructure. Any downtime of either is really serious. It is however not rocket science to solve the biggest issues in regards to payments. As long as people can show their identity we can agree on tiny loans for stuff. Or just having the government bail out all verified purchases after the fact.
100$ per person isn’t that much money. Any bigger purchases can be handled with invoices.
So I am more worried about heating in the winter and access to water and sanitation.
This is bullshit. Everywhere I was in Scandinavia, you could buy with cash. If one shop didn’t take cash, you just went across the street to the other that did. Even in small towns north of the Artic Circle.
Even Scandinavia isn’t stupid enough to become 100% cashless
If society collapses, what good would physical cash be other than toilet paper?
Same applies to crypto-currencies like Bitcoin - as far as I understand they need constant power and global internet connection to function. Otherwise the network fractures into shards that have different views of payment history.
Maybe if the system breaks, it can be restored to an earlier state, and synchronized with islands which did not have the outage, once power is re-activated.
That’s a little bit easier because they’d “only” need a satellite dish and battery backup. It’s less dependent on local infrastructure.
Interesting did not think about it that way.
- that satellite dish will eat a lot of energy for bidirectional communications, starlink requires as much as a refrigerator, if I recall correctly
- maintaining that satellite network is quite energy intensive, but requires non local infrastructure
