Really?
Which is more convenient when purchasing a coffee at 7/11? (1) Fishing out bills and coins and from my pocket to give to the cashier (and waiting for change), or (2) tapping my Apple Watch to a sensor and walking on?
I can think of many examples where using credit is the convenient (i.e., lazy) option. There are a lot of very good reasons for purchasing things with cash, but convenience is not one of them.
FWIW, I do not own a smart watch of any kind and I have no intention of buying one. And I prefer to use cash for most local purchases. But a cash transaction definitely takes more time and effort on my part than does a credit transaction.
Like the EU toying with the idea of removing large denomination notes from circulation (Bank of England my be considering the same) because, obviously, only drug dealers and other organised crims use these things. (Insert eye-rolling gif)
That’s interesting. Banks know when they’re being used to launder money. They just look the other way, and claim they didn’t know because ‘oh, no. we’re just poor dumb bankers. oh, my’.
Well, I don’t buy that (obviously). But – because of their money-spending visibility – big money dealers and international traffickers do clean their money if they can so they can spend it freely. Dropping down $5M in paper cash on a mansion tends to draw suspicion.
Was the banking system growing fast enough to accommodate the consumption growth?
Does China has a high crime rate to justify people being averse to money?
The first one was what motivated the adoption of cashless options in Africa, and the second one explains why credit cards were preferred in Brazil.
We even had a more secure system for credit cards to deal the their theft or other frauds, IC cards were common here for a long time, and for us is amazing how other countries as the USA still used the magnet stripe cards for a long time.
Another country who also follow this process is Japan.
Since they had a good system to get cash and a low theft rate, they still rely mostly on cash.
Is that even allowed? One of my local restaurants was giving a 5% discount on cash payments and almost got their contracts with MasterCard and visa pulled because the contracts specified that the restaurant could not offer different pricing based on the method of payment.
Well, in China, the government has a say in how you run your business. There is certainly a member of some governmental organization sitting on your board, several in your employ you were forced to hire, and a whole bunch of bureaucrats who watch what you do and tell you what to do if you want your business license to get renewed. So, as per an example from the article, when you make a vending machine, you don’t include a cash option, or a card reader, in part because the government people said so. In addition, your old machines are all mysteriously vandalized so those options don’t work anymore, and the official news service pushes propaganda about how all these machines are getting looted for the unguarded cash, and the card readers all hacked to steal your numbers. True or not, now the people, seeing the old machines all beat up and not trusting the other options, go for the phone app. Once that sector’s conquered, wash rinse repeat.
The question that comes to my mind, though, is what happens when, inevitably, these systems get hacked and are no longer trusted? With an application monoculture, once someone figures out how to clone someone’s authentication or crash the servers, its all over. Imagine a country where nobody can buy or sell anything because the government-approved cashless system is broken, and there nothing to back it up but some pocket change and a few stuffed mattresses for a few days.
I think you are getting confuse.
This is not a movie we are talking about, this is the life of billion of people and their freedom at stake. These is absolutely no fun there.
This is now. There is no escape.
.
YOU should wonder how this will not happen to you on the other side of the world.
If you think watching a movie can help you, and your future kids, please do.
I’m not getting confused by anything, nor did I claim that the episode of the series would be fun. And as I’ve said many times on this site, what’s going on in China should be seen as a preview and test market for the “friendlier” version that American crony capitalists have in store.
If people in America or China aren’t going to listen to dry and lifeless socio-economic exposition about why this trend is dangerous and can get worse (or even more engaging work like Shoshanna Zuboff’s) and just buy into these systems, speculative fiction might well serve that admonitory purpose for them instead.
Perhaps one of the reasons that situation has gotten so dire in the society you’re trapped in is because too many serious people agreed with your assessment of speculative fiction, especially the Western variety*, as frivolous.
in tokyo at least it seems quite mixed. more and more places seem to accept, or even prefer, metro cards ( basically prepaid cards ) over cash. and it is super convenient. ( one card for your train and your snacks )
i also think the prepaid thing fits in well with old school japanese culture where husbands might still get a set allowance from their wife.
That’s really not how it works. Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies are pseudoanonymous. All of your transactions are public (it wouldn’t work otherwise) but nobody knows anything about the account aside from the fact that it’s transferred money to these other accounts. In a government run system you’d probably be assigned your account number by the government, which accomplishes exactly what we’re talking about here, just with more steps and complexity.
Some governments, like Canada and Estonia, would disagree, since both central banks have seriously explored the idea of issuing cryptocurrencies (Venezuela, too, but that was a desperation move). There’s nothing in such plans that requires the government to issue the individual user’s account or wallet (thereby linking a given public transaction to the two parties).
So you could have a government issuing cash in digital form that, via blockchain technology, preserves the level of privacy you get from banknotes or private cryptocurrencies while adding a layer of digital convenience (and a very accurate audit trail, if needed) and the stability of central bank governance.
In Stockholm, you’re probably too late. Pretty much everywhere is card-only; cash isn’t just discouraged in many places, it’s simply not accepted.
Not knowing, I took paper kroner when I visited this summer, but changed almost all of it back afterwards; I’d been able to spend precisely 50SEK (~£4 / $5) in cash.
Of course, people being people, it automatically fails.
Every system has people who will push to exploit others until they breach a boundary and are destroyed. It’s simply the nature of some humans.
Create a system where people’s ability to prevent exploitation is suppressed and you merely enable more exploitation until the people finally rebel. It’s the built in failure mechanism of every autocratic government.
Even if you have one ruler who is rational enough to exploit only so far, you can be guaranteed he will be succeeded by others drawn to the power to exploit others who will keep pushing until the system self-destructs. Suppression only pushes the day of reckoning and makes that day much, much worse.
The not-so-secret super-power of democracies is the ability to “rebel” every few years without violence. I often (usually?) don’t like the outcome (I’m fairly left of the median voter), but I’ll take it warts and all.
I guess things have changed (oops - pun not intended) fast since I was there about four years ago. I used cash constantly, having changed a it more than was necessary.
