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The the greatest respect, I don't think you have studied how these things unfold in practice. In all security scenarios having defence in depth, including maint

The the greatest respect, I don't think you have studied how these things unfold in practice. In all security scenarios having defence in depth, including maintaining secondary and tertiary systems greatly slows down a decline. The problem for a society that worships efficiency and convenience is that security feels like a luxury too expensive to maintain. That becomes a rationalisation to say things like "that will never happen". Or psychological 'splitting' ; "If the power goes off we're all screwed anyway, so why even try to prevent needless massive loss of life as an interim posture" > Modern power infrastructure is incredibly resilient and outages I'm sorry but you've been exposed to wishful thinking. I've a masters degree on my desk from an MoD student who did a thesis on black start and lockout scenarios as part of national security research (sorry I am unable to share it but you can dig up the same stuff from any published civilian university these days). I don't wish to be alarmist but there is a great deal to be concerned about and a great amount our governments and engineers need to do to secure things here in the UK and in the US.

jameshart 3y ago
Surely if you want to predict how resilient ‘cashless’ societies are to systemic shocks, you could do worse than to to look at Ukraine, where I think it’s fair to say power and network infrastructure underpinning digital payments have had a challenging operational environment for a few years now, and people have every reason to flee to the most secure and trustworthy ways of transacting. So what’s happening there? Reversion to a cash economy? Not really. > In 2023, most card-based transactions in Ukraine were cashless despite the full-scale war... cashless card-based transactions accounted for 65% of the total amount of card-based transactions last year, up from 61% in the pre-war year 2021. https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi-viyni-obsyagi-bezgotivkovih-rozrahunkiv-zrostayut https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi... > In Ukraine, digital payments have become mainstream with 60% of payments with Mastercard cards being made digitally today, ... For five years running, Ukraine has ranked among the top 10 countries worldwide at Mastercard by the number of NFC payments using digital cards. https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/2023/leading-the-digital-payments-evolution-in-ukraine/ https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/202...
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  I'm confused, wouldn't 100% of card transactions be cashless? What is a non-cashless card transaction?
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I'm confused as to what a "cashless card-based transaction" would be. I'm wondering if they meant 'contactless'. That would fit with the other concept. As long as the infrastructure is up, they may prefer contactless or mobile pay, but what do they use when the infrastructure to accept ANY card is down? I understand the European chip model is slightly more resilient in this regard-- the idea of not being able to get a live authorization is a little more baked in, and you can fall back to "we expect to settle the transactions a few hours or a day or two later" concerns. I suspect the standard practices go out the window for a long term siege.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    A non-cashless card transaction coild be an ATM withdrawal or cashback transaction. Or it could be a translation error and they mean to report the cashless/card transaction rate as a proportion of all transactions.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
SiempreViernes 3y ago
> I've a masters degree on my desk from an MoD student who did a thesis on black start and lockout scenarios as part of national security research Just get the Tories out and you can get an energy system where almost every bit has trivial black start capability, there's no technical reason why it'll be a problem in a renewable dominated system (and that's ESO's word, project Distributed ReStart). Also, it's funny you say "greatest respect" when your opening was "you have to be mentally challenged to disagree".

jameshart 3y ago

Surely if you want to predict how resilient ‘cashless’ societies are to systemic shocks, you could do worse than to to look at Ukraine, where I think it’s fair to say power and network infrastructure underpinning digital payments have had a challenging operational environment for a few years now, and people have every reason to flee to the most secure and trustworthy ways of transacting. So what’s happening there? Reversion to a cash economy? Not really. > In 2023, most card-based transactions in Ukraine were cashless despite the full-scale war... cashless card-based transactions accounted for 65% of the total amount of card-based transactions last year, up from 61% in the pre-war year 2021. https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi-viyni-obsyagi-bezgotivkovih-rozrahunkiv-zrostayut https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi... > In Ukraine, digital payments have become mainstream with 60% of payments with Mastercard cards being made digitally today, ... For five years running, Ukraine has ranked among the top 10 countries worldwide at Mastercard by the number of NFC payments using digital cards. https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/2023/leading-the-digital-payments-evolution-in-ukraine/ https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/202...

hamandcheese 3y ago
I'm confused, wouldn't 100% of card transactions be cashless? What is a non-cashless card transaction?
hakfoo 3y ago
I'm confused as to what a "cashless card-based transaction" would be. I'm wondering if they meant 'contactless'. That would fit with the other concept. As long as the infrastructure is up, they may prefer contactless or mobile pay, but what do they use when the infrastructure to accept ANY card is down? I understand the European chip model is slightly more resilient in this regard-- the idea of not being able to get a live authorization is a little more baked in, and you can fall back to "we expect to settle the transactions a few hours or a day or two later" concerns. I suspect the standard practices go out the window for a long term siege.
- jameshart 3y ago
  A non-cashless card transaction coild be an ATM withdrawal or cashback transaction. Or it could be a translation error and they mean to report the cashless/card transaction rate as a proportion of all transactions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

SiempreViernes 3y ago

> I've a masters degree on my desk from an MoD student who did a thesis on black start and lockout scenarios as part of national security research Just get the Tories out and you can get an energy system where almost every bit has trivial black start capability, there's no technical reason why it'll be a problem in a renewable dominated system (and that's ESO's word, project Distributed ReStart). Also, it's funny you say "greatest respect" when your opening was "you have to be mentally challenged to disagree".