It's true that the world is moving towards cashless, and I expect that 30 years from now all transactions will be made digitally.
If you're running a business dealing with cash has a cost. You need a till, you need to keep track of what goes in and out, and at the end of the week you need to take the cash and deposit it in the bank. This is all overhead, and it's much more efficient when all of that is done automatically by Square or whatever POS system you choose.
High traffic services such as public transportation or supermarket shopping will bottleneck with cash. Can you imagine if everyone that wanted to use the Tube in London needed to pay in cash? You'd have a queue that starts in the Cotswolds. Alternatives (like in Berlin) are to make sure everyone buys their train ticket beforehand, and then use ticket inspectors to make sure people travelling have paid - this will lose the transport operator money and make it harder to optimise services based on real-time demand.
We aren't moving towards cashlessness because of some government conspiracy to track us everywhere (governments can do that easily enough via the Internet anyway), it's because it's cheaper, faster, and more convenient for everyone participating in the economy.
Finally, I don't think the dystopia painted in the article is realistic in western countries. The flow of money in the economy is primarily controlled by the private banking sector, with oversight from a central bank (which is public-private hybrid). Transactions can be handled directly from bank to bank, or via a payment processor like VISA or Mastercard. These are all for-profit corporations, and they comply with governments for requests for data, but governments do not have any direct intervention in individual transactions, nor are there rules that could be applied to block transactions on a granular level.
TL;DR we're going cashless because it's objectively better.
This view doesn't stand to scrutiny. If it were objectively better, you'd expect that government mandates wouldn't be needed, people would just switch to it because it makes their lives easier. It seems to me most businesses accept what people have to give them, that is, debit cards as well as cash. Some businesses have gone electronic only, that appears to be largely a political statement (from groups that supposedly don't want corporations scalping money off everyone at every turn but I digress).
No, I think governments want electronic only payment specifically to raise tax revenue first, because they can get documentation on every little transaction and so can squeeze taxes out of them if they need to, as well as to keep the capital in a central location so as to be in control of it in the event of an emergency. Banks like it because every unit of currency in the economy constitutes their reserves. All in all this looks to me like the dictionary definition of fascism, that is, the marriage of government and corporate power.
I think at the end of the day you'll continue to think what you want, and that's your prerogative. Handling both cash and card is more expensive for a business, which is the main driver for businesses going cashless, not some government conspiracy to track you.
Obviously the dynamics of this will be per-country, and in a country like Germany which is predominantly cash-based my argument is not true, in a country like Sweden or a city like London it is. I expect this economic pressure to spread to more countries and cities unless there is a strong resistance to it.
An analogy HN might understand: Asking banks and payment processors to report on transactions is like when the UK government tried to get ISPs to store customer's browsing histories. It puts a big maintenance and security burden on the ISP, creating a chilling effect in the economy that no government wants. The type of information that can be recorded is limited because TLS traffic won't contain the individual paths the user visited, it'll just record the IP address being connected to, the time, and the amount of data. Transaction data is at this level of fidelity - you can know that party A transferred $X to party B, but the details of the purchase are not known. For that you'd need to request the transaction details from the individual company, which would have records but is only legally obligated to keep them for 6 years.
I'll leave you with the UK's Payment Markets Summary for 2022, which includes a forecast for 2031 - https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2022-08/UKF%20Paym.... People are using these forms of payments because they're easier, faster, and empower them to keep track of their finances. There's a reason challenger banks have been successful - people want to be able to keep track of their spending, and that's really hard with cash.
Cash isn't going away in part because how else are MPs going to pay for cocaine and prostitutes, but I expect more and more businesses to not accept the cost of handling it, especially as it becomes a minority payment method.
> Obviously the dynamics of this will be per-country, and in a country like Germany which is predominantly cash-based my argument is not true, in a country like Sweden or a city like London it is.
What's the difference between these places? Is it cultural? Maybe a little bit. But it's largely due to governments constructing artificial incentives. And why do governments do that? Because they have an incentive to do so. Collect taxes, "stop crime" (which necessarily means tracking subjects), you can use the word "conspiracy" to dismiss it out of hand but this is happening because governments want it, it is not happening organically. Note I'm not talking about the appeal of electronic payment, I'm talking about going cashless.
I agree with you over the parent. The idea that being a so called "Western nation" makes you immune to government abuse seems to be more propoganda than fact.
I looked into Canada's bank seizures, and at the hearings it came out that it was the banks not the government that was pushing for that. Canada's elites do act like the general population are more property than citizens... But I don't see how physical money can solve the problem of tyranny better than digital.
A tyranny can search and seize your physical assets just as much as your digital ones. They passed laws making it harder to store money anonymously, and storing digital assets anonymously might actually be easier in our day and age
If you're running a business dealing with cash has a cost. You need a till, you need to keep track of what goes in and out, and at the end of the week you need to take the cash and deposit it in the bank. This is all overhead, and it's much more efficient when all of that is done automatically by Square or whatever POS system you choose.
High traffic services such as public transportation or supermarket shopping will bottleneck with cash. Can you imagine if everyone that wanted to use the Tube in London needed to pay in cash? You'd have a queue that starts in the Cotswolds. Alternatives (like in Berlin) are to make sure everyone buys their train ticket beforehand, and then use ticket inspectors to make sure people travelling have paid - this will lose the transport operator money and make it harder to optimise services based on real-time demand.
We aren't moving towards cashlessness because of some government conspiracy to track us everywhere (governments can do that easily enough via the Internet anyway), it's because it's cheaper, faster, and more convenient for everyone participating in the economy.
Finally, I don't think the dystopia painted in the article is realistic in western countries. The flow of money in the economy is primarily controlled by the private banking sector, with oversight from a central bank (which is public-private hybrid). Transactions can be handled directly from bank to bank, or via a payment processor like VISA or Mastercard. These are all for-profit corporations, and they comply with governments for requests for data, but governments do not have any direct intervention in individual transactions, nor are there rules that could be applied to block transactions on a granular level.
TL;DR we're going cashless because it's objectively better.