I'm Swiss and try to be as cashless as possible but I can absolutely understand people & businesses opposing a completely cashless future under the assumption that the current situation remains.
The fees associated with the current system are exorbitant. Credit cards, as expected, have a pretty high fee of like 2.5% or more for the accepting business and the new Visa/Mastercard debit cards that they force on everyone have even more egregious fees of CHF 0.5 to 0.95 + 1.5% per transaction. Twint (our digital payment app) also has ~1.5% in fees per transaction and the business case of Twint is to farm as much payment data of the customers as possible for analysis and offers/ads.
I do like the convenience of cashless but the cost in fees for businesses and the increased interest in exploiting my transaction history for an ads business sours this a bit for me.
It's more than just fees and surveillance. It means you need permission for each transaction. Permission to buy a loaf of bread, a taxi ride, a train ticket. And even Canada does things such as freeze protester's bank accounts without trial. Let's not make it that easy for them, shall we?
I'd mention ukraine, but even in peace time, there can be huge power outages in relatively large areas (as in US, more than one in the recent years), where point of sale terminals stop working, there is no internet connection to process the transaction, but exchanging a few bills, for whatever you need always works, even in the dark.
Also privacy... Want to buy a huge buttplug from a "Huge buttplug store ltd.", but your government could collapse in a few years and the new one might not like people (especially guys) using huge buttplugs? With cash, there's nothing to trace... with cards, the government can get a list of names in few seconds.
Don't even need something as widespread as a power outage. Ransomeware or other security breaches can bring down payment systems for extended periods of time and can be far more difficult to fix.
Been in Norway recently. After long drive and reaching the airbnb, we went to the store to buy some food for dinner. Electricity went out. Payment by card not possible, payment by cash not possible. I even asked if I could take the food, leave my ID and come later to pay. They said no. What to do? Luckily after 20 minutes it was back, and after few more minutes all terminals were back online.
There are other options than the credit/debit card model.
NFC secure area base locally stored accounts are a pretty good compromise for instance. The account is locally encrypted, anonymous, with a ceiling on the max charge. You’ll pay for bread with no latency, and will only hit the network at charge time and/or if you need to for backup.
If the state freezes your bank account then you're already fucked. And nothing stops them from raiding your home and confiscating your physical cash as well.
I'm from an ex-USSR country. You can't stop an authoritarian government with physical cash in your mattress.
> nothing stops them from raiding your home and confiscating your physical cash
Yes and no. I'm in Canada, so maybe the protests in Ottawa, which were mentioned above, are a good example to use.
It actually is much simpler for the Canadian federal government to just lock your bank account, than it is to raid a person's home and confiscate their cash. Entry to a person's home, or detaining them, invokes the entire set of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure and arrest. (And for complex, mostly stupid IMO reasons, your bank account does not.)
We do still have due process, judicial review, etc. If you were targeted during the protests without reason, and got a lawyer, you'd probably ultimately get the controls on your bank account lifted. But... you'd need to speak to a lawyer. And that requires some travel or an active phone plan. And that's where cash might actually help a lot.
There's also the question of scale. It costs a lot more, takes a lot more effort, to physically search for cash than to simply flip a bit in a database. Bank freezing can be done and applied at scale automatically, in a way that physical detention cannot. I do agree it is basically tending in an authoritarian direction. I'm worried about it and I'm not sure how we can and should fix it.
Yes, they can always stuff you into a cage when they catch you. That doesn't mean we should live in a cage full-time. As I and the sibling comment said, let's not make it easy for them. The USSR did break up, and tyrannical governments get overthrown - but that's going to be a lot harder to do if state repression becomes more efficient and easy.
What a weird argument. I guess you also don't use encryption ever because authoritarian governments can just extort the keys from you. Somehow I doubt you grew up in an USSR country or ever cared about the life back then in more detail
This doesn't change anything. It's actually even more scary that governments can pull up laws that quickly that are restraining liberties this much so quickly. I saw it in my country, which I hopefully didn't live in at the time: in less than half a year millions of citizens were stripped of basic liberties such as movement. And despite decades of anti-racism propaganda, it took less than a pair of months to create a state-enforced cast of paria with less rights than others (we're speaking of access to businesses, to healthcare, etc.) And they would have no legal way of exiting the country except by doing it illegally or by forging documentation.
Most Western states are a few bills away of turning full China. They now it, and will surf on any perceived or real crisis to get to that point somedays. In the meantime, they do it step by step.
This is all-or-nothing security fallacy. Having physical cash makes such transition harder for the country, because the dissidents can stay anonymous easier.
That's literally exactly what happened. People did something the government didn't like, and they made it an "emergency". It's a completely arbitrary power. If they can use it for a protest they can use it for anything.
My point is also that "revoking all bills" is a bigger step than "disable a card", even though both or possible. Having cash is a bigger buffer against politicians up to no good.
Also you can't target an individual by revoking bills, so the threshold is way higher.
Absolutely. Other comments here already discuss that. But I think there is discussion to be had about how cash enables certain crimes and what impact that has on us, how cashless can change this and on the other hand how handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government and what risks are associated with that and what mitigations are possible. Also the state already has many, many ways to make your life hell. How big the impact of this additional way is, also needs to be discussed. I'm pretty sure most people don't store their life savings in cash at home and freezing your bank account has a similar impact now even though cash is still available.
> handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government
Seems like the second one enables the crime of disenfranchisement, except that no one will be able to label it a crime and no one will ever be punished because it's the government doing it.
See the recent example of the Canadian government cutting off protesters bank access without trial. Whatever you think of the protests, that's a terrible thing for a government to be able to do.
Black markets are notorious for dealing in foreign currencies or exchanging goods or other convertible assets. Removing cash from the equation has never stopped criminals from operating, see prisons, hyperinflation, wartime, etc. People just invent or adopt a new currency if you take away the current one.
I'm Swiss too, and while the fee argument is a great one, my main concern is preserving the optional privacy you have when transacting with cash. It's one of the last aspect of your daily transactions that businesses and most importantly governments cannot trivially track and tie to your identity, aggregate, and potentially use against you (and people who consume like you) in various ways.
Giving up this power, out of convenience, is a bad deal for citizens. And before anyone argues that this privacy is used by criminal/terrorists/etc., I would need to be convinced that going fully cashless would stop them to even consider it in the balance... but as far as I can tell they happily use the banking system for their criminal dealings, with the support of banks, since each year there are scandals about banks helping money laundering to the tune of hundreds of millions, even billions at the time, I don't think it happens mostly thanks to cash.
Of course there are other reasons to avoid a purely cash-free society, but couldn't the Swiss government just limit the transaction rates/fees like the the EU?
> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;
Yes there are other reasons, you lose a lot of control, but there are other comments here already discussing that.
Yes there needs to be such mandates to limit this but it's difficult to anticipate if/when this would happen.
There was such a limit for the older Maestro cards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) ) (afaik, but I'm not an expert in this domain). I think there the limit was CHF 0.3 per transaction. But you couldn't use them in online shopping or Apple Pay. The new debit cards can be used for that.
Maestro debit cards are common in NL and you can use them with Apple Pay.
(Online shopping is a bit different, instead of Maestro cards we use an NL-specific system called iDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, basically direct bank transfers)
That still sounds like a situation where the merchants could shop around and where a functioning market could be created. That is a lot harder with the transaction fees as merchants typically don't charge different prices to customers with different cards.
Sumup charges 39€ once per terminal, .9% for debit card transactions and 1.9% for credit card transactions. Nothing more.
The times when accepting card payments was expensive have been over for years. Everyone whining about "card payments cost so much" should look what the combination of pricing caps and competition have brought up, especially with the pandemic.
To the contrary, small businesses can save costs by going at least partially cashless. Cash costs money in itself on a variety of factors - employee theft, employee mistakes (e.g. handing too much change, accepting counterfeit cash), robberies, counting and transporting the cash to a bank, securing the cash on-premises, lost business by people not carrying wads of cash any more...
Many small businesses are +/- one-man-operations. Robberies are not a problem in many parts of a world (last local robbing I hard about was 25-ish years ago).
Customer retention is not a problem if people are used to cash.
Transporting and keeping cash is still a thing if you accept cash. Accepting cash and cards is just doubling costs and logistical issues.
The issue for one man business is accounting. You have exceptions in some places (farmer's market) you can basically do as you wish, but in small shops you have to follow rules that makes cashless less painful.
Yes, but modern cashier's machine are more expensive (again, in France) than this new white terminal the new businesses around me uses.
> old good pen&paper seem to work great as well
I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France, if you take cash, you have to get a cashier's machine. Not 100% sure that's true but that's the explanation i got from a bubble tea shop who didn't take cash.
Cashier's machine is one-off purchase. You can get a really cheap 2nd hand. Meanwhile card processing embraced subscriptions all the way.
> I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France
Even tiny food businesses have quite a few transactions in a day. Wit weird sums that may make cash painful in other ways. €6.71 is fast by card than counting coins and queue length may matter at peak times. I was talking more about, for example, hairdresser where amount is square and there're very few transactions in a day.
> Isn't processing a $1.00 payment the same as processing a $1000 payment?
Technically yes, but the cost that Sumup or whatever else processor you use gets charged is based on a percentage amount set by the card networks. Sumup just adds a .5 or whatever onto the rates they get from the card networks and there's the .9/1.9% final charge.
Tax collectors are really good at estimating how much a business should be bringing in. Tax evasion by cash only businesses isn’t as rampant as many people think. Especially if the business sells things that require inventory. A cash only service business is more likely to be laundering money (and paying lots of taxes) than evading.
And as you can see in the charts, only about 1/6 of the tax gap is evasion. Accounting mistakes, interpretation, crime, etc make up much more. As for Greece, it’s difficult to use as a good example as their government is not well organized and corruption on every level is far more common.
Of course it exists but evasion isn’t the first thing I’d think of when considering a cash only business.
Well if it costs more why are we doing it in the first place? It was my understanding that online payment processing was orders of magnitude cheaper/faster/easier per transaction. Updates and infrastructure require a centralized system to maintain but in the case of tap chip cards, you basically reduce transaction time and effort to 0.
This isn't just about small mom and pops either, but huge city walmarts and grocery stores who never have a moment of downtime, the amount of productivity gain from having instant easy payment allows those business to service drastically faster and higher significantly less staff, producing what across the world is probably ridiculous profit.
I understand they cost money but how much is the question. I agree some kind of fee system but a dollar + some percent on every transaction? Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor. And they need millions of people doing that just to be able to run a complex aws system? On top of ad revenue as well? Some fees are okay but that sounds like way too much.
> Well if it costs more why are we doing it in the first place?
> Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor.
They like it because they make money off of it, businesses sometimes like it because paying extra is worth not handling cash, people like it because it's convenient and you don't need to remember to take money out of the bank.
Not a good reason to eliminate cash though. Everyone should be legally required to accept cash.
On the other hand, the need for non-visa-sanctioned electronic transactions is real. If a society does go cashless, the majority will be finally convinced to end their duopoly and mandate other ways to transact, because having 2 companies mandating whether porn is an tradeable good is tyranny. And yes, crypto is the current option. At least it could work for small transactions.
Not just bad for businesses my friend. I like to use Credit Cards as much as anyone else but the Idea of a cashless society is just bad, to say the least.
It's more a problem why European countries gave up to American Visa/Mastercard duopoly for cards, where the alternative is... Google Pay/Apple Pay duopoly for mobile. Their only answer are miserable local debit/ATM card systems working only in individual European countries, or superfrauds like Wirecard.
Haven't tried it in neighbouring countries yet, but as I understand - it's a virtual Visa/Mastercard card, yeah. So it should be accepted in the same places where my physical card is accepted.
If we’re in to do Orwellian things, I’m not sure what’s technically stoping us from doing it now. All bills are scanned at the banks, we can flag who got which lot from the ATM, major POS systems scan for counterfeit, and retailers will return to the bank any excess from what they need for day to day exchanges (or not bother and return everything to the bank to get new bills in packaged stacks).
We’re already trusting our govs for not abusing the situation. The bridge is already crossed in my mind, going pure cashless is a small step in comparison.
Sadly even in Switzerland convenience has a very strong position in this. We have the same issue with the SBB getting rid of ticket machines in favor of apps and digital train tickets.
I'm not really sure where you're taking Switzerland being the only one from. As far as I know there's currently no country in the world that's cashless?
Switzerland is one of few countries in the world where the citizens WILL decide if they reject a cashless society. In most other societies, it is the politicians who decide, who are by and large beholden to corporate interests. And because corporations are more or less uninterested in freedom, and love big profits, corporations are fine with a cashless society.
For example China already is experimenting with digital "money" you can only spend until specific date (before it expires) so people won't have savings (needless to say they also control who pays for what and can even block you completely once you say something the state doesn't like).
Israel is not a cashless society yet but already requires people to specifically declare cash savings exceeding certain (pretty humble) amounts even if they have already declared the income and paid the taxes.
What's orwellian or horrific about a cashless society? Sure, there are valid arguments against it, but that doesn't make it orwellian or horrific, this is just hyperbole.
It does. It wouldn't happen on day one. But, slowly, it would start creeping in. As someone else commented: what if, you buy some mega turbo sex toy 3000 and a couple of years later super religious orthodox government wins elections. What if the government decides that you can buy one thing but not another. What if you want to organise a little poker night with your old buddies and so on. Look what happened with the internet. Endless scare stories about terrorism, pedophiles and eventually mass surveillance is in legislation..
If a super religious govermment wanted to punish you specifically - they don't need your transaction history. They can put you in prison using a completely made up reason. Just look what the Russian government did to Navalny.
Scare stories about authoritarian governments that still somehow respect rule of law and due process are funny.
You're missing the point, it's not a case of "we've identified zirgs as someone we want to punish so let's go through their browser history to find a reason to do it" a tyrannical government hardly needs to go to such lengths as you point out. The nightmare scenario is you get people in power who say "we can make the world a better place if we just eliminate all the people who do X" and they have the digital tools to simply filter all citizens by X and get a nice big list they can hand out to the secret police.
1. Not rouble. You could still withdraw RUB.
2. Invading other countries may have not-so-unforeseen-consequences.
3. War renders all kinds of money "just a number" I think.
War costs money. Civilians will be cut off from money and pushed down by security services and "law" enforcement, rewarded with privileges and confiscated money. So obvious, such a cliché, and works flawlessly every time ad infinitum.
It is already illegal for businesses in Switzerland not the accept cash [1]. In fact the law specifically states that you need to accept up to CHF 100 in coins and all bills (including the CHF 1,000 bill). The issues is there is no penalty define if you don't and some businesses have decided they don't want to accept cash.
This vote however wont fix this, all it does it force the SNB to continue to make cash available in the constitution when the SNB itself already clearly stated they have no interest in getting rid of cash and it is currently in the law. There was pressure from the EU for Switzerland to get rid of the CHF 1000 note but they didn't.
If no one accepts cash the vote is mute. At least some should be forced such as food and clothing stores. Stores that are not 100% online.
Cash is definitely king here, I was absolutely astounded at the large denominations in circulation when I moved here. Back in the UK, people double check a 20 pound note, a Swiss cashier won't even blink after being handed a 1000CHF note
The good news is that if there is a global push to digitalize currency, any country that doesn't, e.g. Switzerland is going to see demand for their money as a reserve currency shoot up. I don't know which country is actually closest to mandatory digital currency, say england for example- expect to see (and ideally start participating in asap) a CHF cash market
The UK is a very long way from going cashless, we still have three of the four nations with independent banknotes!
CHF as a banking currency has long been a safe haven. For a while they had negative interest rates in a desperate attempt to keep the value of their currency down to avoid destroying their export industries.
The UK is in general making it very difficult to operate using cash. My experience last summer, as a tourist, was that certain attractions would accept card payments only. Want to go on a Thames river cruise or visit Warwick Castle? The only way to purchase tickets was via card. I also paid with a £50 for a few drinks in a bar and they did not have enough cash on hand to provide me with correct change. It was either end up out of pocket, or pay the correct amount with card. Making cash such an inconvenience means more and more people use cards (or some form of cashless payment), thus making it look like everyone wants to go cashless, which is not really the case.
A similar story on a small local mini-market. I had a small number of items and ask the shop assistant to man the till for me. She told me that was not possible and I had to use the automated check-out system. However, because I was buying alcohol, she had to come over and approve the transation manually anyway! I do wonder if people working these jobs realise that automation is doing away with their livelihoods. They should be instead actively encouraging people to come to the manual till for checkout.
> I also paid with a £50 for a few drinks in a bar and they did not have enough cash on hand to provide me with correct change
"£50 note in a bar" has been a mild horror story for as long as I can remember; bars hate accepting them. It's unlikely they didn't have enough cash to make change, unless you could see inside the till - more likely they wanted a non-confrontational way to refuse to take it, because £50 notes are the most common target for forgery, and they didn't want to give you real notes in change for a possible fake.
Nobody uses £50 notes regularly, the ATMs largest option is nearly always £20.
To be fair I think I've seen a £50 note in the wild perhaps twice or three times. They're really uncommon in practice and most public-facing businesses are loathe to accept them because they're often fake.
I know somebody who set up a cafe having outright rejected cash from the beginning but he was forced to start accepting it because of customer demand.
After what I saw happening in Canada now I keep a bunch of cash stashed away. Still I pay for everything via card/e-payment, a bad habit I would say as that makes removing cash easier for the state - most will not even notice it too much.
The Stupidity Convoy, sorry I meant the Freedom Convoy. A bunch of anti vaccination/Q-anon supporters decided to block the traffic in Canada because they couldn't phantom the idea of not spreading Covid. Most of them were able to remain blocking the traffic while still buying supplies because of the donations from other idiots in Canada and the US, so they froze their accounts
How would that cash help you wnen your bank account is frozen? You can't receive your salary. Can't pay rent or mortgage. And that cash will run out in a month or two. What then?
Depends on how independent you want to be at that point. If your account is frozen for the purposes of persecuting you then there's a non-zero chance you may want to go to ground or get out of the country entirely. Being able to grab a bag containing the necessities and a wad of cash is very important in that scenario.
If your personal account is frozen you could still work for someone else and ask them to pay you cash. Yes, reduces you options, but you still have options.
Ergo you can still make a living.
And if cash is a valid form a payment you can pay your mortgage with it.
Ask Trudeau why he did it like that. Most probably he didn't have a basis to arrest them, maybe he was afraid of fights breaking out or maybe it was a sign that "we can destroy your life anytime we want if you don't obey".
Either way we saw a lot of similar stuff here during Covid where the politicians simply ignored the most basic of laws "for the greater good".
The last time I used cash was some dodgy kebab kiosk. I don't carry any coins or banknotes. I don't even have a wallet, just a card underneath the phone cover. However, I don't want my or any other country going full digital on it. Hell is already wallpapered with initiatives like this.
One of the most functioning democracies of scale: the Swiss.
And even there I think lobby (the enemy of actual democracy) has big influence on the decision taking process; it just may not be more than 50%, that in most "so called democracies" it most certainly has.
I'd say it is down to the fact that the Swiss distribute their power better (by it being a collaboration of Cantons), instead of consolidating at the "lobbyable" top.
This is just another case where the far right picks up dubious fights in the name of freedom in order to recruit new supporters. There is really no imminent risk of Switzerland becoming forcibly cashless or people losing their freedoms.
I agree that this far right group bringing up this issue is a problem as I don't agree with any of their policies.
However on this issue:
There is a lot of push from Visa and Mastercard to get people to go cashless. Push of ads, claims that cash is dirty etc. PostFinance for example no longer is issuing their own debit cards instead are now also part of Mastercard. We have lost all control of our purchasing data.
Additionally there are now several businesses not accepting cash at all when this is forbidden by law.
It's hard for me to judge how much of a problem this is, and it's at least to some extent a matter of opinion, but even if it is a problem, the guiding principle for non-extremists is that you resolve problems at the appropriate level. An alarmist campaign and a national initiative isn't the appropriate level for this kind of problem, which can more productively be addressed through the relevant regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc ... The only reason to start a campaign like this one is to make noise, desperately trying to recruit supporters to far right causes. It's not an honest and genuine attempt to address a real problem, even and especially if you are convinced that this is indeed a problem.
I figured FBS was far-right despite not reading German, simply from some keywords, the illustrations, and the web design.
Interestingly they're presented neutrally ("a pressure group") in the linked Reuters article. It took some googling to find their webpage: fbschweiz.ch.
I am sort of stuck on this. I never use cash, I hate cash. But the fact it exists does protect us from a bunch of dumb BS that I think would eventually happen otherwise (negative interest rates, compulsory spending, "haircuts"). I would have no issue with it being used to tackle tax evasion. I guess we will see...
Would it be possible to create some form of anonymous digital currency?
Personally I think it would be sad purely for cultural reasons to completely move away from physical currency, but I think if there were some verifiably anonymous way to make transactions digitally I'd probably be okay with it.
I'm sure there would still be some state issued physical currency which you could trade or deposit at a bank if people wanted to some for the novelty of it. For me, like most people, the primary concern is the power it gives the state. It seems clear society will continue to move away from using cash, regardless of what the state mandates. In the UK there are already plenty of retailers who won't accept cash payments. So I think whether we like it or not, we probably need to be proactive to ensure the inevitable move towards cashless is done in a way that protects our freedoms.
Monero makes for a strong anonymous digital currency. But it also suffers from all the inconvenient benefits a truly anonymous digital currency offers that cash does not and which governments and casual users tend not to appreciate (for understandable reasons).
The difficulty in tracking and the ease with which large transactions can be done in it would be a big differentiator from cash and one of the things government wouldn't like about it.
While it doesn't bother me personally, it would be an issue of any digital truly anonymous currency as far as governments are concerned.
That said, I was referring to more mundane things, like how most people aren't used to the responsibility that comes with that kind of currency (eg if you accidentally send to the wrong address, the money is essentially irreversibly lost).
Cash, being a physical item is less prone to some of these issues and because it isn't entirely fungible (with bills having serial numbers), there are various things that can be done with cash that can't with a truly anonymous digital currency, like tracking stolen currency and/or reissuing it.
Digital is always prone to being lost/tracked/etc. You need to keep some "wallet" of credentials or something, there's always a trail, etc.
For societies with no trouble, that might seem fine. In societies (which can include a huge chunk of the world) with turmoil, dictatorships or hostile governments, war, and so on, it's impossible to have the anonymity and portability of cash in digital form, while also being able to use it (a) without electricity, (b) without internet access, (c) without a trail
I don't disagree. Similar issues exist with most digital technologies though and that doesn't stop their adoption – outside of the situations you describe digital solutions tend to be more convenient. I mean I'm not going to stop using Google Docs because one day I might not have electricity.
I think if you live somewhere where you're concerned about the government your best bet isn't physical state issued currency, but owning commodities like gold. I'm not sure your concerns are specific to cashless, but digital solutions generally.
The issue I see is that the privacy of cash is non-scalable. This results in an equilibrium where ordinary transactions can be untrackable, but you can't quite move hundreds of millions in or out of the country in a suitcase.
For digital currency it's just a number. One cent or a trillion dollars are equally easy to transfer. This tips the balance in favor of the "grey" and "black" economies. Long-term, that's likely to be destablizing.
(Grey being roughly "not technically legal but the average citizen doesn't care", such as paying people small amounts of cash so they can avoid tax, and black being "illegal and also agreed to be bad for society")
Actually this might be a case for GNU Taler - unlike cryptocurrencies it’s specifically designed so that merchants do not have anonymity, so tax can still be assessed, but users do.
> it's specifically designed so that merchants do not have anonymity, so tax can still be assessed
This is one of the biggest selling points of GNU Taler - it's not designed to circumvent the government, it's designed to cooperate with it. It is perhaps one of the few privacy-focused systems that have a chance of getting widely adopted in a legal way.
Germany had something like that ("kontoungebundene Geldkarte"), it failed. You could store money on the card itself and use it to pay without trace and without a network connection. You could do that with the card that almost everyone carried around, and also the anonymous kontoungebundene variety. The former was traceable given enough cooperation, the latter not.
It failed, and after 10-15 years of steady decline almost all banks have now stopped issuing new cards with this function. Paying to maintain a system people don't care to use is unattractive.
I think it's fair to say that the system failed because it wasn't traceable. People wanted insight into their own card. The design which blocked tracing also blocked insight. That's not the whole story, there were other reasons, but that reason is both relevant and significant.
Not without making a purchase, visiting an ATM, or carrying an additional gadget to be able to read out the balance from the card.
I think the main problem is as follows: By its very nature, digital cash has the problem that you can't look up your current balance without some additional technical doohickeys, so compared to cash it always starts out at a disadvantage in that regard.
If you then add the additional constraint that your digital cash should mirror the privacy properties of physical cash, which means mimicking most of its major properties (both good and bad) into the digital domain, too, it means you haven't got all that many degrees of freedom left in order to positively differentiate yourself from physical cash and overcome the initial disadvantage of digital cash's intangibility.
Some advantages do indeed still exist (e.g. takes up less space in your wallet, avoids "no change given" situations and the like), but even taking those things into account, compared to the annoyance of not being able to simply look up my balance the way I can do with physical cash I personally never found the Geldkarte all that enticing.
(Whereas with a classic credit or debit card at least I get some more tangible benefits in return for giving up the tangibility of cash, like not having to manually re-charge the card all the time, or having a full transaction history available.)
How about monthly statements? Purchase history? Stats, analytics, budgeting? In a mobile app? Without you personally or the merchants you buy stuff from having to do anything for that?
Are we comparing things against cash or against digital stuff?
> How about monthly statements? Purchase history? Stats, analytics, budgeting? In a mobile app? Without you personally or the merchants you buy stuff from having to do anything for that?
The general public is not required to keep the goalposts still.
The organisations that set up the system surveyed the public to learn why >80% never started using it and the users dropped off. The common answers included things like "can't see my own recent activities", "can't see how much money there is on the card" and "adding money to the card is a hassle", all of which were truish and IMO were side effects of features intended to make use of the card untraceable.
If you can't deliver a realtime feed of the transactions anywhere you can't deliver such a feed to your own smartphone either, see? And if you could deliver one to your smartphone, the system could also deliver a feed to other authorised destinations, and what's authorised, exactly? Can the card be traced to an authorising party? If not, how can you ensure that the destinations receiving a feed a really authorised? That kind of thing.
The New Zealand government is working on a central bank digital currency but it has requirements for AML and terrorism funding so they refuse to make it anonymous. I'm sure most governments are similar. They just need one reason like that and then they can poke around in people's spending for whatever reason they want. There'll always be some bogeyman that the general population or international pressure leads them to track people for.
I love dystopian novels and have recently finished reading Limes inferior[1] by J. Zajdel. Policies implemented in the story (written in 1982!) and their similarity to present day politics are frightening! SPOILER ALERT: I'm describing the currency system from the novel.
Currencies were replaces by points stored on a device called the Key (= modern smartphone). There are red, green, and yellow points.
Red points are the simplest: all people are equal, so everyone gets the same number of red points per month, doesn't matter their skills, employment status, health, etc. That monthly allowance is enough to survive. It's like basic minimum income.
Green points are similar to red points, except they're paid out based on intellectual ability. A smarter person will always get more green points, irrespective of employment status. They were necessary because "all people are equal" is actually false.
Yellow points are most similar to a monthly salary. You can get the only by working. The higher your position in the hierarchy, the more yellow points you get every month.
Not all points are created equal, despite the official 1:1 fixed exchange rate. Quality goods are available only for yellow points, with other colors capable of buying substandard goods. That opened door to a host of black market activities for chameleons (who act as currency exchanges).
A central computing system, called _Syskom_, is used to track citizens' moves. Despite claims of objectivity, it's rules are often manipulated for policy goals.
A simplified example: some working people want to go up the hierarchy by faking their credentials. Criminals, called lifters, who can help them are often found in various bars. Those bars have slot machines allowing you to win hundreds of yellow points (an average salary is ~ 10 yellow pts). There's a non-zero chance that a winner, often drunk, will be approached by a lifter at a bar and hire him.
What does the government to catch more lifters? Increase the likelihood of winning at a slot machine and keep track of where the prize flows. "You pay 300 yellow points and you get a lifter" as they phrase it.
Umm, yes and yes? Their physical vaults are one of the things Swiss banks have historically been famous for. Not only cash of course, but also gold and other assets.
There are a lot of people here talking about privacy and preventing the seizing of money. There is another issue though. Being able to buy things without power is also important.
I have the hope that recent revelations about censorship, and the problems with the covid vaccines on all levels have alerted people that their rights and interests are under attack globally. Good to see one of the few directly democratic countries move into that direction, with regards to possible mandatory centralized digital cash systems.
This is great. I'm all for the convenience of paying with a card, and use it for 99% of my transactions, but cash has a place in a free society. Without it, the state and the banks have the means to shut off a person's participation in society. That's too much power going to unaccountable people. To say nothing of the surveillance a cashless society affords as well.
A cashless society is incompatible with a free society.
Yes. Its crazy how much people dont realize that thing can change fast, an authoritarian gov comes and take your rights in the name of "security". Just look at russia, iran, china, or even also kanye west / andrew tate who had their account frozen.
If the cash machine knows the serial numbers of your banknotes that its issued, and you then go and spend some of that money with someone, when those bank notes come back into the banks hands, they can use this to build up a map or pattern of behaviour. Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
In another situation, most on here will be familiar with FIFO and LIFO for buffers, and whilst most cash registers take a serialised bank note and hand it back out in a LIFO manner, sometimes the register operator will take bank notes and put them at the bottom of the pile.
This creates a new state, LILO as its gone to the bottom of the pile of bank notes. In addition why did the shop or business engage in that activity with some people and not others?
Is there something shady taking place or are they displaying knowledge to others?
How does that mess around with the banking systems ability to build payment networks what central banks would call the velocity of money?
A cashless society would make some crimes less possible like muggings, but could it also escalate the extremity of muggings? For example if fingerprints are required with a card or smartphone, would muggings evolve becoming more extreme with events like cutting off peoples fingers?
It also highlights the fact that's society is not configured/setup properly because such events like muggings are taking place.
I think coinage should be dropped (ie non serialised money) and banks should start displaying the serial numbers of bank notes much like the blockchain, so that people can track and trace where all the money is going.
For example, celebrities helping out less fortunate people with autographed products including things like NFT's could evolve, because a celebrity could hand out cash to someone which has its immediate utilitarian value as currency, but just like collectors demonstrate, that bank note could actually be worth more to a collector willing to pay x times more for that celebrity bank note which the less fortunate currently has in their possession.
Ergo could poverty be reduced with this method or would human behaviour change and less celebrity worshipping occur?
And would less celebrity worshipping be a bad thing or not?
> when those bank notes come back into the banks hands, they can use this to build up a map or pattern of behaviour. Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
I am comfortable with it, since by the time those bank notes come into the bank, they do not know how many times, and between whom, they have changed hands.
There is also plausible deniability: the suspect guy bringing cash into the bank with numbers I had might have gotten them from me spending them at the supermarket, or from me getting change at the restaurant, and the restaurant owner doing business with him.
Arguably democracy as we know it in its current form is a forced form of democracyn if not a dictatorship, purchases are a more natural form of democracy by voting with your money and purchases, ergo some activities would not be hidden away and science would have a more accurate picture of human behaviour than is currently on display.
On the point of they do not know, humans are creatures of habit, it is possible to know where money is being laundered and its not a single step process.
But a simpler example would be looking at the reCaptcha I'm not a robot process.
So google dont know what these random images are when they present them to people in recaptcha. The user does not know who these images have been presented to previously if at all. Users treating it as a hurdle will click the right images, the malicious user trying to mess up the image recognition will deliberately tick the wrong image. Over time, google gets to find out what images are a bike or plane or traffic lights, helping to train their visual recognition AI models, or at least clean their streetview dataset, they also get to know who are the deliberate malicious users.
So with money going into a supermarket, periodically money is taken from tills and sent off outback for the bank. This is a snapshot of the serial bank notes during a period of time in the supermarket. The checkouts also know what amount of money was handed over. If money is being laundered as cash in a supermarket, or pub, its possible to identify who these people are from cctv, over repeat visits. You see not everyone will be making a monthly food shop, some are just buying lunch so might only hand over £10, someone laundering money will do a monthly shop handing over £200 or £300 pounds.
As these places tend to receive cash and hand out coinage, its possible for the banks to work out the cash trail of money from spending habits. Same goes when money laundering is taking place around an area, like weekend holidays paid with cash. What these money launderers dont know is how many other people from their base area are also on holiday in the same place like a weekend away a few hundred miles away?
There are so many ways to track cash but I dont think most people think about it. The fact people are using cash is a deliberate red flag for a start. Sure some jobs are best done using cash like taxi firms, fast food outlets and pubs, but these are also red flags for scrutiny as well. Arguably its just another form of intellectual surveillance.
> So with money going into a supermarket, periodically money is taken from tills and sent off outback for the bank. This is a snapshot of the serial bank notes during a period of time in the supermarket. The checkouts also know what amount of money was handed over. If money is being laundered as cash in a supermarket, or pub, its possible to identify who these people are from cctv, over repeat visits. You see not everyone will be making a monthly food shop, some are just buying lunch so might only hand over £10, someone laundering money will do a monthly shop handing over £200 or £300 pounds.
The original concern was
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
You moved the goalposts to money-launderers, but let's assume only money-launderers, which I am not, because it is fun thinking about these things.
Your hypothesis only holds if at least some pubs, supermarkets, record serial numbers, or if we assume that "money launderers" always pay in 200 or 300 pounds and there is an active investigation of cctv cameras.
Now, going back to the original question:
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
This is not a concern at all, because the bank does not know who I hand my cash to. Cash that the bank recorded as given to me can travel many many times before the bank gets to see it again, thus proving nothing about who I handed to it.
I didnt move the goal posts, unless you are trying to distance a banks involvement and thus reduce the legal ramification of the legal concept known as joint enterprise?
This is good, but switzerland tend to spread this kind of news to build a very progressive image, things inside of switzerland is a bit different, i.e. this swiss intel/security hiccup: https://www.strauss-engineering.ch/posts/sevices.html (in french).
While I generally agree, practically it's probably not a huge difference compared to what we have now.
Most people keep their money in banks, instead of cash. So if the government wants to target you they can already do it, no matter if you have a few 1000 in cash or not.
I am not a blockchain person, but I think this was one of the better philosophical reason to like the blockchain. It seems to allow digital money that's not easily revocable by an authority.
Of course in practice it probably is, but I appreciate the theory.
Most blockchain money is pseudonymous and very easy to track. Eg bitcoin has a globally readable track of each transaction ever.
You can use enough cryptography to make blockchain transactions anonymous. But I think you can use the same cryptography to make non-blockchain electronic money anonymous, too.
That's not transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain though.
Once you have access to Bitcoin on-chain and have other people willing to transact directly through Bitcoin, with no fiat intermediaries like exchanges... yeah, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the transaction from going through (eventually).
The end goal with Bitcoin is to bypass all the permissioned fiat rails eventually.
>What's the volume of Bitcoin traded outside of exchanges
How could you ever know? A group of people could trade paper wallets with 1000s of Bitcoin trillions of times and no record of it would show up on chain.
It's always Bitcoin in any scenario we can think of since value never ever leaves the chain, only the person with control of the on-chain value changes.
>Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.
I used "paper wallet" as a simple place holder, many tamper resistant one time use solutions exist, like Opendime.
...from KYC exchanges. There's already tons of non-KYC darknet exchanges that will happily take your btc and give you xmr, at which point you're off to the races. Any attempt to extend requirements at KYC exchanges would spur further developments in non-KYC/decentralized swappers, as we've seen so far.
It’s not just about exchanges it’s about taxation. So long as governments can enforce taxation (e.g. income, sales, VAT). They maintain the power to restrict mediums of payment.
The world your proposing isn’t just about upending financial plumbing. It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation. That would send us back to the dark ages of finance. That’s not something I support.
> It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation.
Imo this is a positive, but that's a little besides the point - it is inevitable in the same way that encrypted communications are inevitable and don't care whether Australia decides its laws trump the laws of math. If you care about the ability to maintain taxation, etc, then riding the wave is vastly preferable to being crushed by it.
Nobody here has addressed the actual issue of Blockchain in a cashless society. You need internet for using crypto, your internet company accepts only legal currency (card, cash, etc) and since there's no chash and you have been cut off from using cards you can't pay for your internet bill and that means it'll eventually get cut and you won't be able to use crypto. Crypto needs cash to work, because people need cash or card for utilities, those companies won't accept your make believe money like the little shop in the corner does.
I agree with the premise but in practice something like Bitcoin would be perfect for a police state. Easily trackable, just have to block the endpoints to repress people, forever history.
There are several ways to obfuscate transaction history on origins, such as coinjoins or simply opening a few private Lightning Network channels and pushing sats a couple of hops through them to unidentified end addresses.
During covid for a moment red/green status in a mobile app was determining basic civil freedoms and freedom of movement of an individual. This is the future if we go cashless. If things start going wrong, it takes few days for tyranny to creep in. Most people are ecstatic when given authority to control others and to toggle their rights.
The problem is not dystopian control. Societies are much to chaotic to keep that up. Even in china it fell apart and does fall apart. People rebel by withdrawing the will to life in such a society.
Dystopian totalitarian states burn themselves out in one way another. Some final act is usually some futile war against a neighbour, before turning into small substates fightin one another.
A tokken represents the value of what a society can do for you.
When that shrinks and all those billionaires, become just paper factory owners. Thats were the hurt is. What does it matter who and how you hold that weimar paper money fort.
"During the Zombie apocalypse, whether or not you're a zombie is determining basic civil freedoms and freedom of movement of an individual. This is the future if we go cashless"
WTF? You do realize that it's not an arbitrary status in an app that mattered, but whether you're at risk of infecting hundreds, right?
Do you realize it was an arbitrary status based on arbitrary decision by arbitrary politicians based on opinions of arbitrary scientists?
You may also analyse the currently available arbitrary data. Then you may realize that the status was indeed arbitrary. There is not even correlation, let alone causation on infection outcome when comparing arbitrary countries and states whose arbitrary politicians arbitrarily decided to listen to a different set of arbitrary scientists.
We're talking about a highly contagious disease. I've lost my entire sense of smell (I used to be a quite good amateur chef before that, cooking for friends all the time, now that's gone) and I'm exhausted instantly when I do anything physical now, struggling with tasks that I used to do easily before.
I'm not going to have any sympathy to people who intentionally and knowingly bring that upon others.
It sounds like you're arguing for the right to knowingly infect others with contagious disease.
Sometimes things happen that cause society to need to be rearranged. In the case of COVID it really didn't require that much rearrangement - prefer outdoor activities, wear masks, stick HEPA filters in enclosed spaces, keep windows open. Contact tracing apps, maybe. We had those in Taiwan in a way that protected privacy.
Predictably, people with reactionary tendencies, well, reacted, to which I say good luck in your next hurricane I guess? "Bah to this flooded city, I'm not about to let a half meter of water change how I live my life!"
Why should society give preference to people unwilling to acknowledge the reality of a pandemic? Seems the obvious solution is to allow access to the commons to those willing to take steps to protect eachother, and block access to malcontents. I'm really confused why this was suddenly controversial during COVID - we had ridiculous rules about commons access before such as you must wear a certain kind of clothing, but mask or vaccine requirements is somehow different? I don't get it but, whatever.
> They are over because people eventually decided they were done with them.
People didn't "eventually decide" anything.
People accepted that Covid was a pandemic of a new virus and some temporary measures would have to be put in place to avoid a potential repeat of the Black Plague. Reasonable thing to do with a completely new human virus.
So governments put those measures in place <<temporarily>>.
Just like when a storm is coming and you close all the windows, all the doors, make sure that everything important is inside, etc.
Again, reasonable people always knew that strict measures were temporary.
Unreasonable people just assumed we'd be boarded up with wooden planks like in China, for the rest of our lives.
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