11 ms·

Almost every comment is about politics, choice, privacy, rights, markets and percentages. There's a completely different take; Civic resilience From an operat

Almost every comment is about politics, choice, privacy, rights, markets and percentages. There's a completely different take; Civic resilience From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. Therefore cash in circulation acts as a buffer that provides economic stability and continuity of operations. Also, take a look at a modern European bank note, like we have in the UK. It's a sophisticated technology. It's not like we still have Roman coins that any blacksmith can forge. There are many good, but more subtle reasons for preserving the use of cash, and regulating business practices if necessary to do so.

barrkel 3y ago
Cash improves operational security? Pull the other one.
Guthur 3y ago
If the scenario plays out as you describe the fiat currency won't be worth the fancy material it's printed on.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I haven't outlined any scenarios, but maybe you're considering a total Internet shutdown. No such drama is needed to make the case. Deloitte calculate the per day impact of a temporary shutdown would be on average $23.6 million per 10 million population. Not that bad actually. But that figure seems based on the immediate hourly estimate from places like The Uptime Institute and LSE. Other estimates puts it at between $11Bn per day for the whole USA [0] and only $10Bn for the whole year [1]. In reality the impact quickly compounds, making day 2 (24-48 hours) significant worse, and so on [2]. I am quite sure the aggregate downtime of AWS, Azure, Google and other cloud services in the past year has exceeded 24 hours per capita civilian use. Being able to take cash, as a "flywheel", makes or breaks businesses in those times. [0] https://bnn.network/finance-nav/unraveling-the-impact-of-global-internet-outages-a-digital-age-dilemma/ https://bnn.network/finance-nav/unraveling-the-impact-of-glo... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/internet-shutdowns-cost-global-economy-10b-so-far-in-2022-vpn-report-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/internet-shutdow... [2] According to studies I got masters students at York Business School to undertake. edit: formatting
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    > Deloitte calculate the per day impact of a temporary shutdown would be on average $23.6 million per 10 million population. That seems very low, surely the transaction volume of the average person is more than $2.36 a day?
    - Scharkenberg 3y ago
      Well, yes, but only a small fraction of the population buys something on a given day. It could be realistic, I don't know.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. But most businesses do. The main issue is there: why should a business be forced by law to accept cash if they absolutely need electricty and cables to work as a business ? It's one step below forcing them to accept hand written checks. Those are also extremely resilient, you just need a pen and paper. But god no I wouldn't want to deal with them at a car rental desk. Sure cash should be accepted in shops selling essential goods. But other shops should have the choice.
- sambazi 3y ago
  cashless has a lot of negative externalities hence a business should have a _very good_ reason to not accept the legal tender.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    What if I told you that outside of the US we're seeing tax offices progressively refusing cash payments and/or putting a penalty with a maximum accepted amount for people who still try to bring cash ? Forcing all businesses to follow a model that is already getting phased out doesn't make sense.
    - sambazi 3y ago
      yes it does make sense. tax office has very little similarity with a retail store, idk what you are advocating here.
      - Nasrudith 3y ago
        But they share the important detail of "essential to access". Now combine that with Operation Choke Point style abuses of power. Hello there arbitrary arrest and detention under the pretense of failure to pay taxes to the same government which prevented you from paying in the first place!
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
yftsui 3y ago
Cash is a superior technology for security -> Huh? The bullet proof glass cage protecting the cashiers is the “technology”.
- sambazi 3y ago
  that's right and it's superior because it usually cannot be circumvented with math or will accumulate known insecurities over time.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  That's too literal a view. In security thinking we have to consider the safety of all stakeholders, and the whole ecosystem/collective/society at large.
  - 8note 3y ago
    From a security point of view, you have no actual control over whether plenty of merchants and customers trade using counterfeit money, and so you have to maintain a large set of infrastructure around finding and punishing people who use or accept counterfeits. You can have all the tech for proving that a dollar is legit, but it nobody cares if the dollar is legit, then it doesn't matter
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Don't forget privacy is a very important part of security.
- dbbljack 3y ago
  that i can't steal from the other side of the planet.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Well at least it limits people to stealing from the building they're currently inside rather than from anywhere with an internet connection.
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
m463 3y ago
I used to think of cash as fiat currency. But nowadays cash is hard currency, while electronic payments are fiat currency, or like NFTs. I think of this after all the stories about paypal/square/etc withholding payments and destroying an individual or a business.
fodkodrasz 3y ago
Regarding resilience, and no need for electricity, and network: In Hungary currently it is mandatory to use networked cash registers for cash transactions and centralized digital reporting system for issuing invoices. There are some minor exemptions, for farmer's markets and some similar specific niche very low volume cash transactions. I know about no disaster protocols. (though the Hungarian mindset wouldn't give a damn about law forbidding sales without digital invoice in case of a slightly sustained emergency situation, possibly an outage longer than a day.) So basically even with cash you might need electricity. (until nobody starts to give a damn) I support using cash, for the several reasons outlined in the comments and the article. Yet I think when the trust in government/public services starts to break down (as ignoring laws banning non digitally accounted transactions), the trust in cash might also start to break down (though it takes longer imo)
- rescbr 3y ago
  If it is like in Brazil, the tax-enabled receipt printers have onboard memory that stores the transactions to send them off-line if the tax agency's servers are down. Something that I've learned when I worked with those devices in the past is that the tax authorities do have strong contingency plans.
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    That still needs electricity. I still won't be able to go into the store and buy some bottled water, a bucket and some sawdust for a makeshift toilet until the services come back, if the shopkeeper insists that the transaction needs its "electronic papertrail", despite having enough cash at hand, and the store having enough stock of the wares. I don't know about the implementation details of the system, it is working since about 8-10 years ago without any major noteworthy issue/outage apart from some minor hiccups in the initial deployment. It sounds logical that some similar disconnected operation should be available here as well.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      But here's a thing: it still needs electricity, but not Internet. The shop owner might have a battery or a generator that'll keep the register running. Unfortunately, the Internet cannot be stored in buckets full of bits, so if that's down (and that includes simply the servers at the other end being down), there's nothing you can do. Put another way, it's always a good idea to avoid hard dependency on a working Internet connection whenever possible. Be it your "smart" toaster, or your payment methods.
dodyg 3y ago
On the 2nd week at the beginning of the Khartoum war, the bus companies started to refuse electronic payments and only take cash because they didn't trust the banking system will remain working.
- op00to 3y ago
  I will be sure to remember to hit the ATM during week one of a horrible war.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Good luck with the long lines and I hope by the time you finally get to the ATM it will still have notes.
mnw21cam 3y ago
The problem with cash being a thing that keeps working if the lights go out is that there isn't enough of it in circulation to meet the demand if all the lights go out. Having a bit of cash means that you can still pay for your purchases if one random shop has a technical glitch with their card reader, but if the card payment system for a whole country falls over then there just isn't enough lying around to cope with everything that we want to do. It's a failover system that isn't adequately scaled.
- Xylakant 3y ago
  There's a broad space between "a single shop" and "an entire country". Entire cities or states being hit by a technical glitch or a natural desaster (flooding , storms, ...) happens on a moderatly regular basis. Backbone connnections failing and taking certain areas or chunks of the internet population offline is also moderately common. Banks having issues with payouts happens, too. There are a lot of scenarios where having cash as a fallback is great.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    There's not enough cash in D.C. for D.C. to function anywhere near normally in a not-short, total blackout. I don't think it makes sense to argue we should all use cash in case some small section of D.C. loses power for 10 weeks. The advantages to the cashless society far outweigh that small benefit to the average person.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      But there is enough cash to partially function. And partial function is better than no function.
    - Xylakant 3y ago
      > The advantages to the cashless society far outweigh that small benefit to the average person. You present that as a fact, but it is far from. The jury is still out. And I would also question whether this is a case where "average" is even the relevant metric - is it ok if a chunk of the population looses access to shopping, because VISA or MASTERCARD decided do cut off their access? Cash is controlled by the state, but digital payment systems are not, and unlike cash, do not ensure equal treatment.
gmerc 3y ago
One Carrington level event and we learn the lesson. For a while.
- op00to 3y ago
  Wipe out the networks and your cash is useless too. Why would I want your useless slips of paper?
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    A few words: black markets, corruption (in the sense of local employees figuring out their salaries won’t be coming but they still have access to valuable merchandise that they unfortunately can’t eat. Not to mention small stores owner-managed.
jdietrich 3y ago
>From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives. Most of the stores I shop at won't actually be able to sell me anything, because none of the products have price tags and I sincerely doubt that any of their staff are trained to revert to pen-and-paper accounting. Even if they did manage to keep things running, they'd likely run out of change by the end of the day. The grocery stores are JIT and have no more than a few days of stock of anything; again, I doubt there's a manual backup to their reordering system. Maybe things are different in countries with less reliable infrastructure, but I just can't think of a scenario in which cash would gain you any appreciable amount of resilience without much wider systemic changes. So much other stuff beyond payments is wholly reliant on technology. I'm not sure that would be a wise investment versus improving the resilience of power distribution and network infrastructure.
- Chris2048 3y ago
  It isn't just for infra failure. When your credit card provider cuts you off for "unusual activity" that they won't go into detail about, and you realise they are free to refuse you business as they feel like - you'll appreciate cash while rushing to find a new provider as existing debts still loom.
  - jbotdev 3y ago
    I’ve actually run into this more with debit/cash accounts than with credit cards. I’ve had checking accounts frozen, but I’ve never had a credit card entirely suspended for “unusual activity”. At worst they’ve declined individual charges until I called, or I just switched to a different card, since it’s easy to have many redundant credit cards.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      For travel, etc. it's absolutely a good idea to have multiple redundant cards (that aren't issued by the same bank). I haven't had issues for years, but I have had issues in the past and it's a lot easier to just pull out a different card than deal with international calls trying to get a problem resolved on the spot.
FredPret 3y ago
Cash does need a network and constant checks and balances for foul play. You need trusted cashiers, need to check every received note to see if it's genuine, then you need to safely deposit that somewhere, the boxes of cash have to be transported likely in an armored truck. And you still need communications networks for all the checks and balances and automated systems to handle the cash. It's a massive logistic effort to shuffle around little certificates of value.
elzbardico 3y ago
I think it is sensible to keep a few hundred dollars at home. Our infrastructure, while reliable, it is not absolutely impervious to failure. While very improbable, scenarios of a multi-day payments system outage due to ciber attacks or maybe planned downtime in preparation for a major solar flare are possible. And if you think about local outages they are a bit more probable. But this precaution goes down the drain if no business is ready to accept cash anymore. Also, having some spare cash with you is useful if you want to help someone who has been robbed or a homeless person.
deltree7 3y ago
[dead]
CM30 3y ago
This is a good point worth considering, especially given we've already seen the consequences of people and businesses going cashless and a technical glitch throwing everything into disarray. Back in 2018, Visa's network crashed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outage-payment-chaos-after-card-network-crashes-live-updates https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa... It was absolute chaos. Most shops and restaurants lost a ton of business due to customers not being able to pay for products (many people here don't have cash in their wallets at all), and many of them couldn't sell even if they wanted to, since the card reader (and other parts of their point of sale systems) also relied on said network. Having cash as an option at least means things won't completely shut down whenever this sort of error occurs.
sgjohnson 3y ago
> It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. To be fair, credit cards also don't. At least didn't need to, up until very recently, when most issuers stopped embossing their credit cards. Imprinters exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter Sure, the risk here is that the charge would get declined later on, but you get the same risk if you accept personal checks.
- pc86 3y ago
  I don't really understand the point of this comment. "Credit cards don't need this network, except realistically they do, they just didn't used to." So in some scenario where electricity is unavailable, credit cards will be just as worthless in most cases as apps and gift cards.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    If you have an embossed credit card and the store has an imprinter, that's still true today. I don't expect any store anywhere to have an imprinter, but it's definitely an option.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Imprinters are a convenience, not a requirement. Stores could still accept the cards without one.
  - ExoticPearTree 3y ago
    You missed the point. Embossed CCs and an imprinter allows you to get your monet at a later date without a problem. Card present or online transactions only prevents you as a seller to make any money when the internet is not working.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      It's technically possible to do a card present transaction without the internet working. I haven't seen this happen in practice on ground, but it's actually very common on airplanes, especially on Ryanair. You can pay for everything on-board with a credit card, using a physical terminal, and I can assure you that they don't have satellite internet. They just post the transactions when the plane lands. But I am somewhat curious as to why nobody in my experience has implemented this on ground. Because if the customer pays with an actual credit card, the risk that the transaction won't go through when the internet comes back up is near-0, provided the card is valid. It is theoretically (and I assume practically too, given that every credit card agreement I've ever signed--and it's a lot of agreements, considering I was churning a lot for airline points--specifically outlined extra fees for "overcharging" your account) possible to overcharge the account this way (i.e. the transaction would still go through even if it'd blast past your credit limit, up to some limit though, probably)
dcow 3y ago
It didn’t matter if a blacksmith “forged” a coin because the coins were worth their weight in the material used to make them.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Forging a coin (profitably) entails using material which is cheaper than the nominal value of the coin.
grey-area 3y ago
Cash is not resilient in some pretty important ways: It is vulnerable to counterfeiting which mean citizens lose out regularly as they don't have the means to check all cash is valid as shops or banks do. Physically it is vulnerable to destruction and cannot be replaced if burned for example, unlike a bank card or other token of identity linking you to your funds. It is vulnerable to devaluation (in has this in common with electronic cash) In the event of societal collapse or degradation it becomes worthless fairly quickly, which is the opposite of resilient. Cash is not at all resilient compared to electronic money therefore, and people are voting with their feet to get rid of it, laws like this will just delay the inevitable for a decade or so. Bank cards will also disappear pretty quickly IMO (next couple of decades), as they're just a physical token of ownership and not really required if you can rely on say a combination of biometrics to assert identity.
wkat4242 3y ago
> Also, take a look at a modern European bank note, like we have in the UK. It's a sophisticated technology. It's not like we still have Roman coins that any blacksmith can forge. No but dollar bills are a lot less advanced. They're also all still the same size and color so it's very hard to differentiate them. For me the privacy point is the most important though.
jerryzh 3y ago
Typical bs when legacy is replaced. Same reason can also argue that cavalry and archer should remain in army
pyuser583 3y ago
If there’s a massive power outage, regular business rules change fast.

barrkel 3y ago

Cash improves operational security? Pull the other one.

Guthur 3y ago

If the scenario plays out as you describe the fiat currency won't be worth the fancy material it's printed on.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
I haven't outlined any scenarios, but maybe you're considering a total Internet shutdown. No such drama is needed to make the case. Deloitte calculate the per day impact of a temporary shutdown would be on average $23.6 million per 10 million population. Not that bad actually. But that figure seems based on the immediate hourly estimate from places like The Uptime Institute and LSE. Other estimates puts it at between $11Bn per day for the whole USA [0] and only $10Bn for the whole year [1]. In reality the impact quickly compounds, making day 2 (24-48 hours) significant worse, and so on [2]. I am quite sure the aggregate downtime of AWS, Azure, Google and other cloud services in the past year has exceeded 24 hours per capita civilian use. Being able to take cash, as a "flywheel", makes or breaks businesses in those times. [0] https://bnn.network/finance-nav/unraveling-the-impact-of-global-internet-outages-a-digital-age-dilemma/ https://bnn.network/finance-nav/unraveling-the-impact-of-glo... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/internet-shutdowns-cost-global-economy-10b-so-far-in-2022-vpn-report-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/internet-shutdow... [2] According to studies I got masters students at York Business School to undertake. edit: formatting
- saagarjha 3y ago
  > Deloitte calculate the per day impact of a temporary shutdown would be on average $23.6 million per 10 million population. That seems very low, surely the transaction volume of the average person is more than $2.36 a day?
  - Scharkenberg 3y ago
    Well, yes, but only a small fraction of the population buys something on a given day. It could be realistic, I don't know.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. But most businesses do. The main issue is there: why should a business be forced by law to accept cash if they absolutely need electricty and cables to work as a business ? It's one step below forcing them to accept hand written checks. Those are also extremely resilient, you just need a pen and paper. But god no I wouldn't want to deal with them at a car rental desk. Sure cash should be accepted in shops selling essential goods. But other shops should have the choice.

sambazi 3y ago
cashless has a lot of negative externalities hence a business should have a _very good_ reason to not accept the legal tender.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  What if I told you that outside of the US we're seeing tax offices progressively refusing cash payments and/or putting a penalty with a maximum accepted amount for people who still try to bring cash ? Forcing all businesses to follow a model that is already getting phased out doesn't make sense.
  - sambazi 3y ago
    yes it does make sense. tax office has very little similarity with a retail store, idk what you are advocating here.
    - Nasrudith 3y ago
      But they share the important detail of "essential to access". Now combine that with Operation Choke Point style abuses of power. Hello there arbitrary arrest and detention under the pretense of failure to pay taxes to the same government which prevented you from paying in the first place!
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago

yftsui 3y ago

Cash is a superior technology for security -> Huh? The bullet proof glass cage protecting the cashiers is the “technology”.

sambazi 3y ago
that's right and it's superior because it usually cannot be circumvented with math or will accumulate known insecurities over time.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
That's too literal a view. In security thinking we have to consider the safety of all stakeholders, and the whole ecosystem/collective/society at large.
- 8note 3y ago
  From a security point of view, you have no actual control over whether plenty of merchants and customers trade using counterfeit money, and so you have to maintain a large set of infrastructure around finding and punishing people who use or accept counterfeits. You can have all the tech for proving that a dollar is legit, but it nobody cares if the dollar is legit, then it doesn't matter
globular-toast 3y ago
Don't forget privacy is a very important part of security.
dbbljack 3y ago
that i can't steal from the other side of the planet.
arrowsmith 3y ago
Well at least it limits people to stealing from the building they're currently inside rather than from anywhere with an internet connection.
xkcd-sucks 3y ago

m463 3y ago

I used to think of cash as fiat currency. But nowadays cash is hard currency, while electronic payments are fiat currency, or like NFTs. I think of this after all the stories about paypal/square/etc withholding payments and destroying an individual or a business.

fodkodrasz 3y ago

Regarding resilience, and no need for electricity, and network: In Hungary currently it is mandatory to use networked cash registers for cash transactions and centralized digital reporting system for issuing invoices. There are some minor exemptions, for farmer's markets and some similar specific niche very low volume cash transactions. I know about no disaster protocols. (though the Hungarian mindset wouldn't give a damn about law forbidding sales without digital invoice in case of a slightly sustained emergency situation, possibly an outage longer than a day.) So basically even with cash you might need electricity. (until nobody starts to give a damn) I support using cash, for the several reasons outlined in the comments and the article. Yet I think when the trust in government/public services starts to break down (as ignoring laws banning non digitally accounted transactions), the trust in cash might also start to break down (though it takes longer imo)

rescbr 3y ago
If it is like in Brazil, the tax-enabled receipt printers have onboard memory that stores the transactions to send them off-line if the tax agency's servers are down. Something that I've learned when I worked with those devices in the past is that the tax authorities do have strong contingency plans.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  That still needs electricity. I still won't be able to go into the store and buy some bottled water, a bucket and some sawdust for a makeshift toilet until the services come back, if the shopkeeper insists that the transaction needs its "electronic papertrail", despite having enough cash at hand, and the store having enough stock of the wares. I don't know about the implementation details of the system, it is working since about 8-10 years ago without any major noteworthy issue/outage apart from some minor hiccups in the initial deployment. It sounds logical that some similar disconnected operation should be available here as well.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    But here's a thing: it still needs electricity, but not Internet. The shop owner might have a battery or a generator that'll keep the register running. Unfortunately, the Internet cannot be stored in buckets full of bits, so if that's down (and that includes simply the servers at the other end being down), there's nothing you can do. Put another way, it's always a good idea to avoid hard dependency on a working Internet connection whenever possible. Be it your "smart" toaster, or your payment methods.

dodyg 3y ago

On the 2nd week at the beginning of the Khartoum war, the bus companies started to refuse electronic payments and only take cash because they didn't trust the banking system will remain working.

op00to 3y ago
I will be sure to remember to hit the ATM during week one of a horrible war.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Good luck with the long lines and I hope by the time you finally get to the ATM it will still have notes.

mnw21cam 3y ago

The problem with cash being a thing that keeps working if the lights go out is that there isn't enough of it in circulation to meet the demand if all the lights go out. Having a bit of cash means that you can still pay for your purchases if one random shop has a technical glitch with their card reader, but if the card payment system for a whole country falls over then there just isn't enough lying around to cope with everything that we want to do. It's a failover system that isn't adequately scaled.

Xylakant 3y ago
There's a broad space between "a single shop" and "an entire country". Entire cities or states being hit by a technical glitch or a natural desaster (flooding , storms, ...) happens on a moderatly regular basis. Backbone connnections failing and taking certain areas or chunks of the internet population offline is also moderately common. Banks having issues with payouts happens, too. There are a lot of scenarios where having cash as a fallback is great.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  There's not enough cash in D.C. for D.C. to function anywhere near normally in a not-short, total blackout. I don't think it makes sense to argue we should all use cash in case some small section of D.C. loses power for 10 weeks. The advantages to the cashless society far outweigh that small benefit to the average person.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    But there is enough cash to partially function. And partial function is better than no function.
  - Xylakant 3y ago
    > The advantages to the cashless society far outweigh that small benefit to the average person. You present that as a fact, but it is far from. The jury is still out. And I would also question whether this is a case where "average" is even the relevant metric - is it ok if a chunk of the population looses access to shopping, because VISA or MASTERCARD decided do cut off their access? Cash is controlled by the state, but digital payment systems are not, and unlike cash, do not ensure equal treatment.

gmerc 3y ago

One Carrington level event and we learn the lesson. For a while.

op00to 3y ago
Wipe out the networks and your cash is useless too. Why would I want your useless slips of paper?
- elzbardico 3y ago
  A few words: black markets, corruption (in the sense of local employees figuring out their salaries won’t be coming but they still have access to valuable merchandise that they unfortunately can’t eat. Not to mention small stores owner-managed.

jdietrich 3y ago

>From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives. Most of the stores I shop at won't actually be able to sell me anything, because none of the products have price tags and I sincerely doubt that any of their staff are trained to revert to pen-and-paper accounting. Even if they did manage to keep things running, they'd likely run out of change by the end of the day. The grocery stores are JIT and have no more than a few days of stock of anything; again, I doubt there's a manual backup to their reordering system. Maybe things are different in countries with less reliable infrastructure, but I just can't think of a scenario in which cash would gain you any appreciable amount of resilience without much wider systemic changes. So much other stuff beyond payments is wholly reliant on technology. I'm not sure that would be a wise investment versus improving the resilience of power distribution and network infrastructure.

Chris2048 3y ago
It isn't just for infra failure. When your credit card provider cuts you off for "unusual activity" that they won't go into detail about, and you realise they are free to refuse you business as they feel like - you'll appreciate cash while rushing to find a new provider as existing debts still loom.
- jbotdev 3y ago
  I’ve actually run into this more with debit/cash accounts than with credit cards. I’ve had checking accounts frozen, but I’ve never had a credit card entirely suspended for “unusual activity”. At worst they’ve declined individual charges until I called, or I just switched to a different card, since it’s easy to have many redundant credit cards.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    For travel, etc. it's absolutely a good idea to have multiple redundant cards (that aren't issued by the same bank). I haven't had issues for years, but I have had issues in the past and it's a lot easier to just pull out a different card than deal with international calls trying to get a problem resolved on the spot.

FredPret 3y ago

Cash does need a network and constant checks and balances for foul play. You need trusted cashiers, need to check every received note to see if it's genuine, then you need to safely deposit that somewhere, the boxes of cash have to be transported likely in an armored truck. And you still need communications networks for all the checks and balances and automated systems to handle the cash. It's a massive logistic effort to shuffle around little certificates of value.

elzbardico 3y ago

I think it is sensible to keep a few hundred dollars at home. Our infrastructure, while reliable, it is not absolutely impervious to failure. While very improbable, scenarios of a multi-day payments system outage due to ciber attacks or maybe planned downtime in preparation for a major solar flare are possible. And if you think about local outages they are a bit more probable. But this precaution goes down the drain if no business is ready to accept cash anymore. Also, having some spare cash with you is useful if you want to help someone who has been robbed or a homeless person.

deltree7 3y ago

[dead]

CM30 3y ago

This is a good point worth considering, especially given we've already seen the consequences of people and businesses going cashless and a technical glitch throwing everything into disarray. Back in 2018, Visa's network crashed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outage-payment-chaos-after-card-network-crashes-live-updates https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa... It was absolute chaos. Most shops and restaurants lost a ton of business due to customers not being able to pay for products (many people here don't have cash in their wallets at all), and many of them couldn't sell even if they wanted to, since the card reader (and other parts of their point of sale systems) also relied on said network. Having cash as an option at least means things won't completely shut down whenever this sort of error occurs.

sgjohnson 3y ago

> It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. To be fair, credit cards also don't. At least didn't need to, up until very recently, when most issuers stopped embossing their credit cards. Imprinters exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter Sure, the risk here is that the charge would get declined later on, but you get the same risk if you accept personal checks.

pc86 3y ago
I don't really understand the point of this comment. "Credit cards don't need this network, except realistically they do, they just didn't used to." So in some scenario where electricity is unavailable, credit cards will be just as worthless in most cases as apps and gift cards.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  If you have an embossed credit card and the store has an imprinter, that's still true today. I don't expect any store anywhere to have an imprinter, but it's definitely an option.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Imprinters are a convenience, not a requirement. Stores could still accept the cards without one.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  You missed the point. Embossed CCs and an imprinter allows you to get your monet at a later date without a problem. Card present or online transactions only prevents you as a seller to make any money when the internet is not working.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    It's technically possible to do a card present transaction without the internet working. I haven't seen this happen in practice on ground, but it's actually very common on airplanes, especially on Ryanair. You can pay for everything on-board with a credit card, using a physical terminal, and I can assure you that they don't have satellite internet. They just post the transactions when the plane lands. But I am somewhat curious as to why nobody in my experience has implemented this on ground. Because if the customer pays with an actual credit card, the risk that the transaction won't go through when the internet comes back up is near-0, provided the card is valid. It is theoretically (and I assume practically too, given that every credit card agreement I've ever signed--and it's a lot of agreements, considering I was churning a lot for airline points--specifically outlined extra fees for "overcharging" your account) possible to overcharge the account this way (i.e. the transaction would still go through even if it'd blast past your credit limit, up to some limit though, probably)

dcow 3y ago

It didn’t matter if a blacksmith “forged” a coin because the coins were worth their weight in the material used to make them.

tuukkah 3y ago
Forging a coin (profitably) entails using material which is cheaper than the nominal value of the coin.

grey-area 3y ago

Cash is not resilient in some pretty important ways: It is vulnerable to counterfeiting which mean citizens lose out regularly as they don't have the means to check all cash is valid as shops or banks do. Physically it is vulnerable to destruction and cannot be replaced if burned for example, unlike a bank card or other token of identity linking you to your funds. It is vulnerable to devaluation (in has this in common with electronic cash) In the event of societal collapse or degradation it becomes worthless fairly quickly, which is the opposite of resilient. Cash is not at all resilient compared to electronic money therefore, and people are voting with their feet to get rid of it, laws like this will just delay the inevitable for a decade or so. Bank cards will also disappear pretty quickly IMO (next couple of decades), as they're just a physical token of ownership and not really required if you can rely on say a combination of biometrics to assert identity.

wkat4242 3y ago

> Also, take a look at a modern European bank note, like we have in the UK. It's a sophisticated technology. It's not like we still have Roman coins that any blacksmith can forge. No but dollar bills are a lot less advanced. They're also all still the same size and color so it's very hard to differentiate them. For me the privacy point is the most important though.

jerryzh 3y ago

Typical bs when legacy is replaced. Same reason can also argue that cavalry and archer should remain in army

pyuser583 3y ago

If there’s a massive power outage, regular business rules change fast.