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I doubt offline cash-like electronic money will ever happen. Like others also already mentioned, we also had a system like this 30 years ago for vending machin

I doubt offline cash-like electronic money will ever happen. Like others also already mentioned, we also had a system like this 30 years ago for vending machines and cafeteria in a large corp. Banks want tracking (for customer profiling). Governments wants tracking (for anti-terrorism and anti-money-laundering). So it won't happen.

esprehn 3y ago
Consumers also want protection against lost cards, fraud and refunds when the merchant or product is bad.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
It happened in 1995 with Mondex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex But I suspect that your reasoning is correct nonetheless.
paulgerhardt 3y ago
https://offline.cash/ https://offline.cash/ I mean. It’s already happened. Thanks to some clever non-intuitive use of escrow contracts one can create fungible cash-like electronic money for offline transactions.
mindslight 3y ago
The general trend that I see is that institutions [0] will always favor centralization of telemetry and control (eg the concept of legibility). You don't even need to phrase it in the terms of profiling/tracking per se, although those are instances of the general. I think I even feel the same dynamic with something as banal and informal as home automation. With some kind of computer (eg microcontroller) at every node I certainly could keep the local control local. Or I could just focus on publishing data to the "network" [1] and getting commands back, and making the interface a given device exports as simple as possible. We see the results of this harsh dynamic for platforms that allow for hub-less control (eg Zwave I think). Nifty and more robust, but it adds to the bespokeness and siloing/lock-in. It's just so much more complexity that then has to be configured, and then grokked to know what the system will actually do. Whereas backhaul state and control to a general purpose Linux machine running python and you can do "whatever you want" (modulo that singular machine having a problem). Not a great dynamic for those of us that like freedom. [0] or really any entity, corporations and governments can just fulfill the imperative at scale [1] full extrapolation in the corporate context - "cloud"
jmclnx 3y ago
I believe this is the case too, at least for the US. Why, no profit to be made from people using these. We have Credit Cards and the Banks get a cut from the store and from people who do not pay their full balances off, and the stores hide these fees from their customers. Now some stores are starting to add special fees for Credit Card use, which the Banks are trying to eliminate these fees via the US Congress. They know as well as I do, if stores start charging fees for Credit Card use, many people would jump right back to cash. This would decrease their profits.
redwall_hp 3y ago
Consumers want mugging to not happen, and shopkeepers also want robbery to not happen. Violent theft has trended down along side the rise of debit and credit cards. Cards that act in cash negate that benefit, since you can once again steal something untraceable that can't be remotely revoked. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191235/reported-robbery-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191235/reported-robbery-... Wikipedia has a similar table somewhere, but the Statista link is easier to find on mobile.

esprehn 3y ago

Consumers also want protection against lost cards, fraud and refunds when the merchant or product is bad.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

It happened in 1995 with Mondex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex But I suspect that your reasoning is correct nonetheless.

paulgerhardt 3y ago

https://offline.cash/ https://offline.cash/ I mean. It’s already happened. Thanks to some clever non-intuitive use of escrow contracts one can create fungible cash-like electronic money for offline transactions.

mindslight 3y ago

The general trend that I see is that institutions [0] will always favor centralization of telemetry and control (eg the concept of legibility). You don't even need to phrase it in the terms of profiling/tracking per se, although those are instances of the general. I think I even feel the same dynamic with something as banal and informal as home automation. With some kind of computer (eg microcontroller) at every node I certainly could keep the local control local. Or I could just focus on publishing data to the "network" [1] and getting commands back, and making the interface a given device exports as simple as possible. We see the results of this harsh dynamic for platforms that allow for hub-less control (eg Zwave I think). Nifty and more robust, but it adds to the bespokeness and siloing/lock-in. It's just so much more complexity that then has to be configured, and then grokked to know what the system will actually do. Whereas backhaul state and control to a general purpose Linux machine running python and you can do "whatever you want" (modulo that singular machine having a problem). Not a great dynamic for those of us that like freedom. [0] or really any entity, corporations and governments can just fulfill the imperative at scale [1] full extrapolation in the corporate context - "cloud"

jmclnx 3y ago

I believe this is the case too, at least for the US. Why, no profit to be made from people using these. We have Credit Cards and the Banks get a cut from the store and from people who do not pay their full balances off, and the stores hide these fees from their customers. Now some stores are starting to add special fees for Credit Card use, which the Banks are trying to eliminate these fees via the US Congress. They know as well as I do, if stores start charging fees for Credit Card use, many people would jump right back to cash. This would decrease their profits.

redwall_hp 3y ago

Consumers want mugging to not happen, and shopkeepers also want robbery to not happen. Violent theft has trended down along side the rise of debit and credit cards. Cards that act in cash negate that benefit, since you can once again steal something untraceable that can't be remotely revoked. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191235/reported-robbery-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191235/reported-robbery-... Wikipedia has a similar table somewhere, but the Statista link is easier to find on mobile.