
Going Cashless: My Journey into the Future - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/business/going-cashless-.html
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mindslight
Wow - I would've never thought things could be so easy when you just give in
to loving big brother!

It's a bit disingenuous to describe this as an "experiment" when the actual
effects of the increased surveillance won't be felt immediately, or even in a
concentrated fashion. Card companies could easily implement untraceable
payment technology. But they don't because they want to profit not just on
transaction fees, but on selling your personal transaction data on the back
end.

I've personally begun a deliberate effort to use more cash, especially for
routine purchases (like groceries) that would be easy to default to using a
card for. If needing to interrupt your plans to find ATMs becomes a burdensome
occurrence, the problem isn't cash but your planning.

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landcoctos
"Cash, he argued, enabled all sorts of bad behavior. Drug dealers, illicit
arms traders, tax evaders and sex traffickers all rely on cash"

Replace Cash with digital, drug dealers, etc with different bad actors and you
could... come up with the same conclusion as the author.

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nachiketkumar
I've been this way for at least 3 years and it's not really a struggle in a
major metro area. The only times cash is needed is for tipping, and we don't
really valet that often or have other need to tip.

~~~
miranda_rights
Yep - I've also been unintentionally been cashless for the last few years.
Part of it is I don't like carrying a purse and like being able to only have
my cards stored in one of those card-holders that attach to phones. I do feel
guilty about not being able to tip sometimes but most of the time, tipping is
done on a card, and my city has raised minimum wage enough that tipping is
supposedly on its way out.

