
Surviving the cashless cataclysm - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122819-surviving-the-cashless-cataclysm
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joejohnson
ExtremeTech regurgitates the same figures and anecdotes from the articles in
the Economist, Wash Post, etc. and then prognosticates. This is the world we
live in now. We've turned all media into a big feedback machine. Has it beet
this way for a while, even before the Internet? Perhaps it's just more
apparent to consumers of media now that everything is so accessible.

Regardless, the result of the new buzz life-cycle is that even truly
interesting stories feel cheap and fleeting; oh well, we'll be worried about
something else is 3-5 days anyway.

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ChuckMcM
This is one of the reasons I don't spend nearly as much time reading blog
sites like ExtremeTech as I do reading things like the Economist and the Wall
Street Journal etc. But I expect that for a segment of the market they don't
bother with those other publications because folks like ExtremeTech boil it
down for them. It does, as you note, create a kind of volunteer bubble for
those folks, or an 'echo chamber' in the vernacular.

But to relate to the article in general which is extrapolating to a cashless
society and offering up bitcoin as a savior (of sorts) to ward off the
'privacy annihilation' such extrapolations are always wrong. They are wrong
because the systems they are extrapolating are more complex than a single
variable.

Currently cash is less convenient than a card, and the drawbacks of using a
card are not sufficient to discourage adoption. That calculus may flip however
if either the convenience of cash goes up, or the drawbacks get more extreme.
I suspect that cash will get more convenient when the digi-cash patents
expire.

