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?)
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.
Cash will always exist. Even though I pay cashless 99% of the time, there’s always that little 1% when having a bit of cash on you is useful. It just means any cash on me will last a long time before I even get around to spend it.
And why would there be riots? Spain had zero riots, people were calm from what I’ve seen.
Okay so. Say. There is 2 weeks without power, sudden and unannounced, unpredicted power outage. How will you get food and stuff?
So if people can’t get essential stuff, there would be fear, and with fear, riots are likely to happen. Doesn’t matter how “civilized” or “developed” a country is, everyone has their breaking point.
The existence of cash is probably the least of one’s problems in that scenario. How is food going to be delivered to stores without working gas pumps? How will stores open their electronic doors or process payments without a cash register?
If this is something you are worried about, store enough non-perishable (eg canned) food in your home so you don’t starve in that scenario.
how will we get gas without working gas pumps
Gas stations are required to have generators where I am for this exact scenario.
How will stores open their electronic doors
These are legally required to be openable by hand without power in the United States.
How will stores process payment
Hence the reason why cash still exists.
But yes, I believe everyone should have a week or so worth of clean water and easily cooked non-perishables in the case of an emergency. Although I’m more worried about natural disasters rather than some random power loss.
In that scenario most of the food has gone bad anyway and is stuck in distribution centres as the shops can’t send orders up through the supply chain.
Also, without power most places couldn’t take cash. Tills are computers that do all the maths so the 16 year old serving you doesn’t have to they also track inventory going out.
The cash that there is is stuck in banks because the banks have no way of knowing what money is yours as we haven’t had bank books for like 20 years already.
Werd the banks in my state are still required to have bank books specifically for this reason.
Presumably even there though they check the details from your book against the computer system, to not only check that the book is accurate and that the branch has enough cash on hand to fulfil your request? The computer system that has had no power for a week.
They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet. Normally they just use the computer system.
So you have to use them every time you use the bank, I’m assuming this also means that these accounts don’t allow you to do any kind of internet or telephone banking.
They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet
I feel like you aren’t actually reading my comments?
It’s called a natural disaster and we get along just fine. If the entire planet loses power, there’s nothing to be done, but even if an entire US state loses power, gas generators come online and trucks haul fuel in from long distances. It doesn’t take long for a grocery store or bank to open up with cash withdrawals again.
This is silly. Absolute worst case, we go back to bartering for goods and services. There will never be a need to panic.
I mean there might be reason to panic and a fallback on the barter system, both.
As if money would be people’s biggest concern of the power went out everywhere for two weeks.
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
People will adjust. What happened on Portugal and Spain was caused by excessive centralization of the power grid, not by digitization. If somehow we can’t keep the centralized grid running anymore, we will break it down, and bear the extra costs for that.
Also, the sequence of a catastrophe is almost never a riot. Where do people get the idea of riots? People just go and do the right thing.
Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this?
The technicians did.
Where are the backups?
You mean generators? Lots of people have those.
Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?
I would understand this question if you lived in 1925, but by 2025 you should know the answer already. Are you so blind about everything that needs electricity that you think disaster would come from the lack of money?
What happens when an abused person has to escape a partner/parent who controls all the money? Where do they go, what food and board are they getting?
How do small traders set up garage sales and marketer stands, especially if they don’t want to give cuts of their money to corporate giants Eftpos and Visa?
How do those with impulsively/memory issues (such as ADHD, dementia, and teenagers) manage the abstraction of their money, leading them to accidentally overspending/overdrafts?
How do you spot a stranger in need a bus fare home?
How do we support the street artists and buskers?
…I don’t like the idea of cashless. My country already uses eftpos and visa as the norm (so ofc we all pay those overseas companies their fees). But while wide accepting of the card is good and useful, true cashless has issues of usability. It’s not just ‘something something government tracking spending’.
Vulnerable people fall through the gaps, and it means people make a lot more consumer transactions and a lot fewer personal ones.
Cards destroyed so many lives but if you say it out loud people think you’re a tin foil hat nutjob
Cards themselves have been very useful. They’re much lighter and harder to steal money than carrying hundreds in cash in your pockets.
It’s cashless that is a concern, not the existence of cards.
The answer is: We’re fucked.
People were warned of mass surveillance, and here we are, cameras everywhere, over the entire world. Everything is tracked. Same thing will happen to paper money and coins.
Cash is expensive for stores to manage, count, and sort. That’s the actual reason they want it gone, not tracking. Sure, we’re being tracked, but that’s not the point. Thanks to our phones, our personal lives have already been completely disseminated.
Cashless is about making things easier for businesses that struggle with handling cash. A cashless society acts like consuming goods from those businesses is the only reason money exists, and that’s wrong.
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
heard that china pandler story too often by now. durinf sleep ppl tend to dream but reality will come they will wake up. maybe we are a cashless world by then…i wont stop it…but reality will. in a world of nations fighting each other digital money cant work.
Books has become e-books.
To some extent — but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.
solar power and batteries exist too you know
ik that stuff in Spain happened, but if there were more batteries it might notve
Solar panels are enough for power during the day.
Cashless requires power all the way from PoS to wherever the servers live.Edit: see below
Not 100% true: I know some places in Norway that have unreliable internet connectivity. They have terminals in the store that will save your purchase and wire it to the bank when connection is restored. Of course, this means you can over-draw your card, but I’ve never heard of that being a big issue in those small places.
Interesting, TIL — thanks!
Also, I can tell you from personal experience, cards were working Monday during the blackout. Not on wireless machines obviously since we had no cellphone reception, but for example Supermarkets were letting you pay with a card.
What then?
Yeah it’ll just be over.
Meaning, people would try to barter, which is really bad because it forces extremely bad trades, because it’s so hard to establish a good value for things.
We 100% rely on consistently working electricity and network connectivity for digital currency to work.
Which is why we should never get 100% rid of cash, even if we transition to mostly cashless, people should keep an emergency stash of hard currency. The same way people should keep an emergency food and water supply, in case of power outages like the one in spain. We can secure our infrastructure against many things, but not 100% secure against everything. Keeping a few bottles of clean water, a little bit of essentially never perishing food and a little cash and a few candles really isn’t too much to ask.
For some reason it’s become commonplace to think that barter is what preceded and/or would replace cash if we ever lost cash.
Anthropologist David Graeber has written a more compelling account of history with examples in a variety of societies showing that debt and ledgers are what came before cash and I’m thinking a system based off of them would probably be strong contender for a future without cash.
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.
A cashless society means your overlords will have COMPLETE control of your lives. Of course the oligarchs will have secret avenues of cash for themselves.
secret avenues of cash for themselves.
Gold treasure.
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
Oh, I must have explained wrong.
Yes, everywhere is legally required to accept it still. But the usage is really low, and there has been talks of removing the requirements of accepting cash.
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.
Come to eastern europe if you want to pay by cash
You can’t steal/tax evade as easily with e-money
If society collapses, what good would physical cash be other than toilet paper?
