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The idea of doing ALL payments and transactions by mobile is a horrible future. It is the lack of privacy that cash gives us, and the complete dependence on mobile phones, corporations, and banks. What about people that don't want to have smart phones and refuse to pay via paperless? We have the ability to choose what technology to use - let's not get rid of cash shall we?


Who says we have to lose our privacy because we use digital payments? Just take a look at Bitcoin.


Bitcoin provides a number of great features, but anonymity is not one of them.


Please explain.

Bitcoins are inherently anonymous, it's just hard to convert between bitcoins and real-world goods/services/currency without identifying a wallet.

This is not a social problem (can't be solved with technology, even though lots of tech tries). This is a technical problem (advances in privacy services can make bitcoins more easy to use safely).


Bitcoins are certainly not "inherently" anonymous if it requires the use of external mixing services to sufficiently hide one's activities in the block chain.


By that token, neither is cash money - every bill has a unique serial number.


Each "bill" in bitcoin includes a full transaction history, which gets shared with every other bitcoin user. It's quite different knowing that a dollar bill got from A to B, vs a bitcoin which tells you exactly how it travelled from A to B.


Where I can see analogue of http://blockchain.info/new-transactions for cash?


If this future comes true, maybe the situation will reverse and there will be a 2.5% cash handling fee instead of the fee some companies currently charge for credit card transactions :)


I agree it's somewhat frightening but also inevitable. We geeks should do what we can to make the future as human-friendly as possible.


Bitcoin is a good alternative to cash in the future, for privacy purposes.




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