A cashless society means your overlords will have COMPLETE control of your lives. Of course the oligarchs will have secret avenues of cash for themselves.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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What happens when an abused person has to escape a partner/parent who controls all the money? Where do they go, what food and board are they getting?
How do small traders set up garage sales and marketer stands, especially if they don't want to give cuts of their money to corporate giants Eftpos and Visa?
How do those with impulsively/memory issues (such as ADHD, dementia, and teenagers) manage the abstraction of their money, leading them to accidentally overspending/overdrafts?
How do you spot a stranger in need a bus fare home?
How do we support the street artists and buskers?
....I don't like the idea of cashless. My country already uses eftpos and visa as the norm (so ofc we all pay those overseas companies their fees). But while wide accepting of the card is good and useful, true cashless has issues of usability. It's not just 'something something government tracking spending'.
Vulnerable people fall through the gaps, and it means people make a lot more consumer transactions and a lot fewer personal ones.
The answer is: We're fucked.
People were warned of mass surveillance, and here we are, cameras everywhere, over the entire world. Everything is tracked. Same thing will happen to paper money and coins.
look at sweden..hands out papers telling you to have cash for week...but doesnt accept cash anywhere. we all can learn from the dumb nations.
no cash means government controls who you can give money to. beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers... are all doomed. if you cant get a phone, you cant have money. if you dont have a home or money you cant sign a phonecontract and so on...
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed
In China, they have Wechat Wallet that people can give money to homeless people. Even homeless people have phones.
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
It is nasty and dystopian, I agree. But its not really a fantasy anymore, its real, the dystopian future is on the horizon. Soon, it'd be too late to stop the dystopia.
At first, mass surveillance cameras is only in China, but then even supposed "democracies" like the UK have millions of cameras. Then China became mostly cashless, that will also eventually happen to western countries.
The dystopia is coming. You can't stop it.
I visited Australia last year. There were surveillance cameras just about everywhere. Even on rural highways to catch speeders
heard that china pandler story too often by now. durinf sleep ppl tend to dream but reality will come they will wake up. maybe we are a cashless world by then...i wont stop it...but reality will. in a world of nations fighting each other digital money cant work.
In Spain credit cards still worked during the outage.
And the proposal for digital Euro already contemplate an offline mode for transactions.
As long as the power loss doesn't last days and batteries die out there would not be a problem with that.
And outage of days will bring so many problems that cashless society might be the less of them.
We can return to a primitive society to avoid dependence on electricity, but do we want that?
I think the best option is just people be prepared with food medicines and offline entertainment for a week in case of a big power loss.
Spain here... How and what area are you referring to? Internet, Cell Phone Towers, Everything was down, no one was accepting credit cards in my neighborhood. The only thing they were accepting were IOU's (if you knew the store owner) and Euros.
Center spain. Until 6pm we didn't had internet or electricity. But most TPV still worked.
Here is an article explaining why: https://www.xataka.com/servicios/resolviendo-grandes-incognitas-apagon-que-algunos-datafonos-funcionaban-red-otros-no
Basically there's two ways. The SAI of the supermarkets keep them going. Or they had the advanced models that accepted offline transactions.
I guess riots break out all around the world?
I feel like this idea that people are just going to riot and do mass violence is some right wing fear.
Most people, most of the time, are pretty social cooperative creatures.
I disagree and think it depends on where you live
Fortunately this would never happen, for the reason you listed. Cash is king and always will be.
People will adjust. What happened on Portugal and Spain was caused by excessive centralization of the power grid, not by digitization. If somehow we can't keep the centralized grid running anymore, we will break it down, and bear the extra costs for that.
Also, the sequence of a catastrophe is almost never a riot. Where do people get the idea of riots? People just go and do the right thing.
Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this?
The technicians did.
Where are the backups?
You mean generators? Lots of people have those.
Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?
I would understand this question if you lived in 1925, but by 2025 you should know the answer already. Are you so blind about everything that needs electricity that you think disaster would come from the lack of money?
This happened in Ukraine when they were attacked with a cyberweapon (NotPetya) by Russia in 2017
If you want to know what happens when all of the computers (banks, bus pass scanners, grocery store cash registers, ATMs, etc) stop working, I highly recommend listening to this episode of Darknet Diaries
I know nothing of or even care about IT stuff but I fucking love this podcast.
If society collapses, what good would physical cash be other than toilet paper?
even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything
fun fact, businesses operate without power by using battery operated calculators and inventory pads.
every minute a business isn't in operation is a cost to the business.
I worked at Super Walmart decades ago. power went out for the whole town. the main HV lines collapsed after a tornado.
mgmt marked all the ice cream down 80% and we were still checking customers out on generators.
reduce risk, increase profits, mitigate losses. the only bad opportunity is the one you ignore.
by god we sold almost every tub of ice cream in an hour.
this is kinda hilarious lol okey understood
Cash will always exist. Even though I pay cashless 99% of the time, there's always that little 1% when having a bit of cash on you is useful. It just means any cash on me will last a long time before I even get around to spend it.
And why would there be riots? Spain had zero riots, people were calm from what I've seen.
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Debt and ledgers.
Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.
Books has become e-books.
To some extent
but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.
Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can't buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.
Cash will change to a digital form or disappear, I don't agree with the people claiming it wont't.
Scandinavia is so close already, recieving cash is considered bothersome. No one uses it for anything anymore. Well.. Besides drugs.
Both electricity and the internet is critical infrastructure. Any downtime of either is really serious. It is however not rocket science to solve the biggest issues in regards to payments. As long as people can show their identity we can agree on tiny loans for stuff. Or just having the government bail out all verified purchases after the fact.
100$ per person isn't that much money. Any bigger purchases can be handled with invoices.
So I am more worried about heating in the winter and access to water and sanitation.
This is bullshit. Everywhere I was in Scandinavia, you could buy with cash. If one shop didn't take cash, you just went across the street to the other that did. Even in small towns north of the Artic Circle.
Even Scandinavia isn't stupid enough to become 100% cashless
Oh, I must have explained wrong.
Yes, everywhere is legally required to accept it still. But the usage is really low, and there has been talks of removing the requirements of accepting cash.
One huge condition will be: has your country invested enough in a super reliable infrastructure?
Spain wasn't bad in this regard (like most western European countries) but that recent event was hardly foreseeable. And they forgot to prepare for the "black start", which prolonged the problem.
In the future, the grids must become even more reliable and fault tolerant.
Some countries should better increase their invests by magnitudes.
Microgrids with solar panels on every residential home is key
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Cigarettes and other things of value will become cash again.
Luckily, there are Nuka-Cola bottle caps...
solar power and batteries exist too you know
ik that stuff in Spain happened, but if there were more batteries it might notve
Solar panels are enough for power during the day.
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What then?
Yeah it'll just be over.
Meaning, people would try to barter, which is really bad because it forces extremely bad trades, because it's so hard to establish a good value for things.
We 100% rely on consistently working electricity and network connectivity for digital currency to work.
Which is why we should never get 100% rid of cash, even if we transition to mostly cashless, people should keep an emergency stash of hard currency. The same way people should keep an emergency food and water supply, in case of power outages like the one in spain. We can secure our infrastructure against many things, but not 100% secure against everything. Keeping a few bottles of clean water, a little bit of essentially never perishing food and a little cash and a few candles really isn't too much to ask.
For some reason it’s become commonplace to think that barter is what preceded and/or would replace cash if we ever lost cash.
Anthropologist David Graeber has written a more compelling account of history with examples in a variety of societies showing that debt and ledgers are what came before cash and I’m thinking a system based off of them would probably be strong contender for a future without cash.
In that case we have to rely on Elons white power.
The power isn't infinite, but it's enough.
It won’t ever go 100% cashless. There’s too many coins and paper money floating around.
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