I was once a proponent of cashless societies. Not anymore. Too many vulnerabilities, too many ways for governments to take control of your finances.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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If it isn't cash you have to ask permission from someone to use it
Most of us need permission just to get our hands on cash.
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Not to mention total monetary surveillance
Hmm, I don't anticipate the government to have many issues with that part... But if they have access, then enemies of the state may also gain access, which is the real problem they care about here.
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Yeah, considering how bad banks and other financial institutions are at IT security and the fact that there's no incentive for a capitalist financial institution to fix that problem, it's not a good idea.
That's not entirely true. In order to be allowed to keep processing transactions you have to adhere to strict rules which do get regularly audited. And then there's the whole "customers will switch to another more reliable party in case of outages or security problems". And trust me, I've seen first-hand that they do.
You have to put on a show that you are sticking to those processes, on paper. But the fines for data breaches are generally way less than they save on not having a fully funded IT department and using security products that someone got a kickback for rather than the best product.
"Hacking" isn't some magical, intensely creative process for geniuses loke on TV. For the most part, it's usually just finding the really common things that IT departments don't do because they are underfunded and treat IT people like replaceable cogs. There is software out there to exploit those deficiencies. So they are forced to do things like use default or obvious admin passwords because who knows who is going to be there tomorrow to fix something and without the proper tools to store credentials, there's no way to properly secure things.
And when a security vulnerability is found, there's a reason why many don't bother informing the company before going to the media. Those companies pour tons of money into lawyers to avoid admitting the fault, often getting the innocent person who found the problem arrested, and never fix the actual issue. Just ask any pro whitehat security researcher not hired by the company all the things they have to do to protect themselves from being sued or arrested for "hacking" when they notice a problem.
And government technical auditors are a rarity because the regulators are underfunded. So they might go through some small list of things during regular audits, but they don't know to check if a DBMS system that contains backups and is stored "in the cloud" is using a default password or other common hacking targets. Hackers don't go after the primary infrastructure most of the time. It's not necessary because there are so many sloppy processes or left over insecure projects that "the last guy" was working on or that got defunded before it was completed, but only the primary infrastructure gets audited usually because that's all there is time and money for.
As for going somewhere else, there often aren't other places to go and when there are they usually have the same problem because there's very little reason for any of them to compete with each other. Most industries have consolidated so much that there are only a handful of parent companies left so it's easy to collude just because their leaders are often all in the same room at conferences and such.
I think you're being too pessimistic about IT security, particularly in the Financial sector. A lot of the security rules and audits aren't even government-run, it's the sector regulating itself. And trust me, they are pretty thorough and quite nitpicky about stuff.
The cost of failing an audit also often isn't even a fine, it's direct exclusion from a payment scheme. Basically, do it right or don't do it at all. Given that that is a strict requirement for staying in business, most of these companies will have sufficiently invested in IT security.
Of course it's not airtight, no system really is. But particularly in the financial sector most companies really do have their IT security in order.
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Cashless can only work if you adopt a digital cash such as monero, other wise you are taking away privacy, control and possibly small transactions (depending on what fees are common in your country)
In a cashless society banks and credit companies become your rulers as you have no real way to bypass them.
I suspect that any country that tries to go cashless without a real cash alternative, will just find itself with a new form of cash (gold, silver, etc) since eventually there will be enough people trying to avoid fees and taxes
Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.
There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.
Do you know how Monero's advantage could potentially be lost?
From what I understand, which honestly, isn’t a lot - the method used to anonymize transactions and balances is more like obfuscation than anything else. The system uses various techniques to fuzz up the data in such a way that it becomes impossible to trace.
It’s a bit like if you wanted to send a bank transfer for £200 but anonymize it somewhat, you could transfer that money around between a bunch of other bank accounts, before sending it on to the final source. And if multiple people are doing the same thing, it becomes essentially impossible to determine where the money entered and left.
The problem is though that such systems aren’t true encryption in the same way that RSA is, for example - the data isn’t unreadable, and it’s not impossible to reverse, it’s just that there’s so much junk data and it’s such a mess that it makes the true transactions difficult to identify and the end user has extremely strong plausible deniability. However, it’s likely just a matter of time before some state actor finds a vulnerability in the technique that allows them to trace transactions - if they haven’t already done so.
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Just having a power outage is enough lol, never mind an attack.
Carrington event and we are fuckarruuh
Though having cash is not enough. The stores also need to be able to accept cash without internet usage. I think we had a case in germany a few years ago, where some supermarkets could not sell anything, because the servers, to which the local payment system connected (also uses for cash) didn't work. Not sure, if that was because of a security incident.
Really? I would imagine stores could keep paper notes to record transactions and recheck inventory once internet access is restored.
I see cash businesses all the time that can operate without power or Internet. Festival / market vendors, food trucks, etc. It's not hard to count money, give change, write down a receipt if needed.
Stores where I live have had to go cash only a few times a year when one or another issues shuts down their ability to accept cards.
You would think any functioning capitalist would have a backup method of taking your money.
My derped eyes and pronked brain read cashless as moneyless. Comon, Nordic countries, you can do it.
They call that type of "no currency" economy bartering. It works well for peer to peer transactions. Not quite so well for larger ones.
In a post-scarcity society, you wouldn't need money.
We could actually achieve that too. We'd just need to solve food logistics hurdles, homelessness, useless subsidies, bigotry, corruption, greed. Totally doable in our lifetime. /s
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Sure, but if a cyber attack knocks out your credit card systems in a targeted attack, chances are they're taking your cash machines down as well.
And who carries enough cash around to be useful any more? I know I don't. I might have a £20 note tucked in my phone case at a push.
And who carries enough cash around to be useful any more?
I do. Maybe not physically in my pocket, but between my wallet and my home there's enough cash to buy a tank of gas and a few days of groceries.
Parts of the debit/credit processing system are fragile enough that I've seen them down randomly for signifigant portions of a day.
Cash has got me food when other people have been stuck without the ability to pay more than once in the last couple of years.
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£20 should still get you a meal of some kind until the credit cards and cash machines are back, hopefully within a few hours or next day at the latest.
Can't really say I even have that much on me most of the time though - perhaps I should change that, keep a minimum of like €50 that's only touched in an emergency or something. Swedbank has had several outages in the last few months here in Estonia and it affects many stores' payment terminals too.
I'm more concerned with the threats from the people in charge of the system, but whatever gets them to the conclusion that it's a bad idea is fine with me.
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