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.
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.