4 ms·
Everybody in these discussions always mention privacy, but there's an equally important consideration which seems to be often forgotten: reliability. With elec
by cesarb 11y ago
Everybody in these discussions always mention privacy, but there's an equally important consideration which seems to be often forgotten: reliability.
With electronic forms of money transfer, both the sender and the receiver need to have an account with some entity. There have been cases where pressure has been put on these entities to close someone's account, like for instance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pressure-visa-and-mastercard-shut-down-payments-backpagecom https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pres... . With cash, there's no risk of someone closing your account, since it doesn't need one.
And, of course, there's the fact that all working electronic forms of money transfer I've seen are online; if the network is down, you can't do anything. Cash is offline.
- icebraining 11y agoAs far back as 1995, the association of banks here in Portugal created the PMB ("Porta-moedas Multibanco") which was a chip-and-pin card made for small transactions, and which didn't require neither a bank account nor an Internet connection to pay for stuff. One would load it on either an ATM (using your regular debit card) or an authorized shop (using cash), and the card itself would store the balance. They eventually discontinued in 2006, since it didn't really caught on.
- th0br0 11y agoWe have a similar system here in Germany (established in 1996) [1]. Still up and running and widely in use! (i.e. 141,2 million EUR loaded onto cards, 118,4 million EUR spent with the cards in 2013, see the German wikipedia page) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte