To be fair, apart from the privacy aspects, they’ve chosen some of the worst arguments against a full cashless society. Seriously, piggy banks and birthday cards?
Why do garage sales have to go away, I just went to one and used zelle to send the guy money.
I was scratching my head with that one too. HOAs are doing a better job at killing the garage sale.
I use my paypal card reader! Both when holding garage sales and when visiting, it’s pretty normal and a lot of people use it without blinking.
If you pearl-clutching Christians fearful of change don’t want a cashless society, maybe stop pouring all your support behind the political powers that want to see giant megacorporations flourish and crush out small businesses. The people who want to control your rmoney are not the banks nearly as much as the Walmart down the street that can now take credit card payments simply by glancing at the store as you pass.
No one is pushing for a “cashless society” like this post describes. It’s fear mongering.
26% in a recent poll:
In a cash based society they might make us nail coins to our body with special screws only the government can undo.
You, if digital transactions came before cash.
Whoever wrote this has very little imagination. Most of this is already not true
This is some boomer facebook shit.
I have a Paypal credit card reader I keep with me because I do commissioned work on the side, it’s the size of a stick of gum, I can take a payment anywhere, I’ve paid friends for dinner or other things with a quick tap and use it at garage sales.
Not saying I WANT a cashless society, nor do I think anyone is seriously pushing this issue because if you did away with cash people will come up with something to use as cash the very same day. But I do think this weird image/article is extremely 1-dimensional and likely published in some Christian magazine to reinforce the right-wing fear that anything will ever change at all.
What would you do if (insert hypothetical)? Oh okay. Well what would you do (insert more far fetched hypothetical).
Repeat.
But fine I’ll bite the bait. You can’t de facto bar bartering, as a significant amount if b2b is effectively bartering. Now if only corpos can do it, then I’d say we should really look into that socialist democracy stuff.
False dichotomy. Many, even most, of the examples given here could be accomplished in a cashless society (not that I’m actually advocating for one, but this is just factually incorrect).
Grandma slipped me a secret credit chip connected to an illegal bank account in Panama, with $5 in it. You want a soda or something?
How would you accomplish these things without cash?
I’m not sure how you would accomplish a secret credit chip, with or without cash, sorry.
Assuming we’re talking about granny slipping her grandchild a few bucks though, what’s stopping her? Nobody’s proposing a system where under 18s are cut out of the economy. Everybody gets a bank account the moment they learn to crawl. Granny just sends the money to her favourite grandkid of the month.
None of this is hypothetical BTW, before you start trying to come up with scenarios why this doesn’t work. This is literally the system in Norway.
Christmas could be accomplished via a spreadsheet too. Just have a big table where the labels on each axis are all the people, and you can enter the values for what gift each gave to the other. Reveal the squares in random order with a timer.
It’s functionally equivalent! It’s how we do Christmas in Norway, so there’s literally no reason it can’t work.
It’s not like kids will be cut out of the Holiday system. We can have special user accounts, maybe with read-only access to the spreadsheet.
It’s functionally isomorphic guys. It’s a proved model and we’re just wasting time holding off the implementation. Norway bro.
Well you can’t give someone cash if there is no cash.
Obviously nanna can transfer money to the kids.
The real question is what is the difference?
My kids have an account with an index fund. When I log in there’s a qr code you can scan which takes you to a payment gateway.
If the children are young enough, nanna can transfer money to some account the parents control. If the parents are fine, that’s fine. However, what if the parents are addicts (drugs, gambling, whatever)? Or what if they are so deep in debt that every cent on their accounts immediately gets turned to whoever the owe to? In that case the kid can’t even buy themselves lunch on their own.
Young children can not create a bank account so they can not get money transferred. In case their parents set up a bank account, the parents will have access to that money and see any transactions.
Now you are probably a good person who would not steal money from your children. However some parents are not good people.
There are also a lot of cases where parents don’t want their children to have things they need, like soap or tampons. Doubt much has changed about that from the time I was a child. It would be a lot harder for children to access things like that if no one can slip them some secret money.
Well one happens while grandma is hugging the kid. It involves perceiving and interacting with a physical object, which uses parts of the brain that are hundreds of millions of years older than the parts you’re using when you see a notification on your phone.
Also there’s the fact of the secrecy, which isn’t there when all transfers are recorded for possible analysis later.
Quite a bit is different actually.
Most of these things would be solved with payment apps like Venno or CashApp.
You can also get pre-paid cards to give to homeless people on the street, or use a “garage sale” app that has digital payment options like OfferUp to sell your unwanted crap.
I also wouldn’t want the banks to have full control, but I know there are already solutions to most of the problems listed in the image. The only one that seems accurate is the domestic violence one.
Possibly with the exception of the domestic violence example, the examples that directly reference ‘cash’ make the least sense. Of course you can’t give cash to your grandchildren, there’s no more cash!
When I was a kid my parents controlled my account and would take money out of it sometimes, sometimes to punish me for this reason or that (staying up late sneaking SNL back when it was good, for instance.) What they didn’t control is the cash they didn’t see my grandparents slip me on my birthday, and therefore they couldn’t steal that. Sure “well they shouldn’t have done that in the first place,” but they did, or “you shouldn’t have disobeyed your parents,” ok whatever Mom, but I’m thankful I had my secret stash.
For people who think that Crypto will solve these issues, it won’t. In a mass-adoption scenario, a few coins will be accepted as currency while the rest remain mostly useless for commerce. Those orgs behind those coins and their exchange platforms will then become just like the banks of old. Any attempt at democratizing Crypto is illusory, it’s a fantasy.
For people who think that Crypto will solve these issues, it won’t. In a mass-adoption scenario, a few coins will be accepted as currency while the rest remain mostly useless for commerce.
That argument is entirely dependent on what the “few coins” hypothetically turn out to be. For example, regarding privacy, Monero is private by design.
Those orgs behind those coins and their exchange platforms will then become just like the banks of old. Any attempt at democratizing Crypto is illusory, it’s a fantasy.
Are you arguing that it is inevitable that exchanges, or some other entity, will inevitably gain majority control of the networks of decentralized currencies?
No government would ever allow coins like Monero to become main forms of currency. The potential for abuse and tax evasion is just too high. They would sooner ban them outright. No legitimate business would accept them then.
Accepting random alt coins would also come with the expense of having to track them and their wallets separately, exchange costs, volatility, etc, so over time just a few will become generally accepted by businesses.
And yes, the most likely consequence of long-term crypto usage is that users will centralize into a few trusted platforms who will get the Lion’s share of tokens and power.
No government would ever allow coins like Monero to become main forms of currency.
It depends on what you mean by “allow” and “main form of currency”. Afaik, in the US (and the rest of the west), at least, there are no laws regarding what form the medium of exchange should take for the exchange of goods and services. The dollar is simply the standard currency to make payments to the government. For example:
United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts. [31 U.S. Code § 5103 (archive)]
Accepting random alt coins would also come with the expense of having to track them and their wallets separately, exchange costs, volatility, etc, so over time just a few will become generally accepted by businesses.
Is that just a statement of fact, or is that supposed to be an argument against Monero? I’m not sure what the point of that statement is. In any case, I don’t see any issue with that outcome — it would simply be a market decision.
And yes, the most likely consequence of long-term crypto usage is that users will centralize into a few trusted platforms who will get the Lion’s share of tokens and power.
I’d say that this is still TBD, but yes centralized control is a concern, as it would break the current designs of cryptocurrencies (as far as I currently understand their designs, that is). Though, note that there is a difference between central ownership of coins in circulation, and central ownership of the network (of course depending on the design of the network — I feel that proof of stake would be vulnerable to this).
Probably, but at least you can just copy-paste your home folder across most distros as long as they’re similar enough. Also your distro isn’t quite as important as your personal finances lol. Even in the case of potential security issues, most people would rather have their PC hacked into than their bank acct.