10 ms·

> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/stor

by pmlnr 1y ago

> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal-hit-by-power-outage-13357374 https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

leereeves 1y ago
I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
- pmlnr 1y ago
  Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
  - kokada 1y ago
    Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal. This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
    - dsr_ 1y ago
      If your building has a power outage, that works. If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
      - kokada 1y ago
        In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist. And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages. Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
        trollied 1y ago
        Used to work for a telco. Cell sites have battery backup. Some have generators. Any fibre repeaters also will, as do any radio based backhaul sites. The HLR/core network etc will run indefinitely due to generators & strict fuel supply contracts for said generators.
      - XorNot 1y ago
        If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems. Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail. Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density. It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?" Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
      - mrguyorama 1y ago
        Credit card processing existed before widespread telecommunications infrastructure. Maybe we should require payment cards to have raised numbers like they used to so the old carbon copy machines continue to work. Credit cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that. The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
  - ptsneves 1y ago
    In Lisbon's airport they are temporarily back to just stamping the passports without the biometric stuff. There are already reports that the checks are being lax.
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  It's not just stores, pretty much our entire socity runs on cheap power, without it the whole thing falls apart.
  - mathgeek 1y ago
    Our global society runs on a lot of cheap sources of necessary inputs. Power is just one of them.
- corbet 1y ago
  Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out. The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
  - pmlnr 1y ago
    Valid point, but there must be a price at the location of the item in the store.
- throw0101b 1y ago
  > My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags. I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
  - myself248 1y ago
    I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent. PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
- DebtDeflation 1y ago
  I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
- bilekas 1y ago
  > My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments.. > Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
  - bbddg 1y ago
    They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.
    - bilekas 1y ago
      Ah okay, that wasn't clear to me, I imagined only being able to use electronic payment types. But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!
    - kube-system 1y ago
      > They have to accept cash in the US as well. Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
  - daveoc64 1y ago
    >That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments.. That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this. https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal-to-refuse-cash/ https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
    - bilekas 1y ago
      I guess I was taking the recommendation as a regulation, my mistake. Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index.en.html#:~:text=Retailers%20cannot%20refuse%20cash%20payments,a%20different%20means%20of%20payment. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
- richev 1y ago
  I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque. Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
- jonathantf2 1y ago
  I was in a Tesco when there was a power outage - the self checkouts all died (and rebooted into a custon Debian based OS with a Chromium front end by the looks of it), but the staffed tills still worked and could accept Chip+PIN but not contactless.
mschuster91 1y ago
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue! Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction. As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.
- kortilla 1y ago
  > our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.
  - raverbashing 1y ago
    Yes But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to
    - mpweiher 1y ago
      As in the German government and most of the political class...
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Germany has dozens of links to its neighbours. We don't need much in terms of "black start" capacity, that's just pointless fearmongering by fossil fuel and/or prepper propaganda sites. As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.
belter 1y ago
And this is a trial for how a Carrington event will look like.
- pmlnr 1y ago
  You mean the part that anything above 130nm technology would be fried?
  - belter 1y ago
    Yes. For the moment I just want to see for how long the AWS Spain Region will stay up...
    - kortilla 1y ago
      Unless this extends to many days, the diesel generators will cover this easily.
      - Calwestjobs 1y ago
        most datacenters do not use diesel, but gas/methane/natural gas - utility connection, that way you do not need to truck/store anything. and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there. same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
        HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
        > and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there. Why? Every gas station stores that capacity.
        Calwestjobs 1y ago
        gas stations, at least in europe, have "safety zone" around them. also depends on data center, some datacenters are directly in middle of european city. in most dense part of city and dense in europe or asia is something else then dense in america.
seydor 1y ago
If anything, it shows how little use there is for physical cash , only as emergency backup
- pmlnr 1y ago
  "emergency backup" is a very strong, rational use, and should never be neglected.
  - mathverse 1y ago
    You can use cash but it mostly does not work in case of big chains or stores. They need to have access to their SAP/ERP software...It is not about payment for a long time.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Running a generator to power a point of sale machine and maybe an offsite server is a lot easier than generators to power the whole electronic payment chain.
lpapez 1y ago
Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion. When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
- kortilla 1y ago
  A cash register is not required to make cash transactions
  - Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
    Why would an employee tracking device be necessary to make transactions? It is just people without a cash position performing mental gymnastics in an attempt to justify it, by trying to bring it down to the level of electronic payment methods they convince themselves that, in a similar event, they would be no better off with cash, when in fact they almost certainly would. A merchant who refuses cash on account of a disabled cash register, under these circumstances, is not a serious one, since to do so would be to refuse all business. Those merchants who are so encumbered by scale and bureaucracy that they would be completely incapacitated should be circumvented.
- pmlnr 1y ago
  Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
  - seydor 1y ago
    Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal (And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
    - jjice 1y ago
      I'm sure they'd make an exception.
skc 1y ago
Another reason why itcoin is a pipedream too, particularly for third world countries
- PhilippGille 1y ago
  If an ATM is down, it's down. With Bitcoin you can still use mesh networks. Here's an old article about an example: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-enable-bitcoin-transactions-without-internet-access https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-ena... (Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)
- peab 1y ago
  You can have physical bitcoins - devices that hold a private key in a tamper free way. The private key holds a fixed amount of BTC
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    Without power or an internet connection you can't validate that the btc hash is unspent, avoid double spends, or validate that your taking ownership of it made it to the blockchain and was confirmed for a few blocks. Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
    - emporas 1y ago
      You've to got a reputation system with identities also stored on the blockchain, and you accept the transactions only from the most trustworthy people. Counterfeit paper currency exists, and counterfeit bitcoin (not BTC) transactions might exist, but not every person is equally suspect of using counterfeit money.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        Sure, but then you aren't really using bitcoin. The whole point of bitcoin was to be a trust less system where transactions are verified cryptographically on the blockchain. Transacting bitcoin private keys without going to the network and trusting the other party to not scam you defeats the whole purpose.
bradly 1y ago
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue. NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth: Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
ghc 1y ago
> whistleblowers Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
- trgn 1y ago
  Prophets
  - ptsneves 1y ago
    Peters
    - trgn 1y ago
      I'm a dummy, but I don't get it :) can you explain?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
croes 1y ago
There isn’t much you can buy with cash either if there is no electricity.

by pmlnr 1y ago

leereeves 1y ago

I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.

pmlnr 1y ago
Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
- kokada 1y ago
  Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal. This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    If your building has a power outage, that works. If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
    - kokada 1y ago
      In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist. And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages. Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
      - trollied 1y ago
        Used to work for a telco. Cell sites have battery backup. Some have generators. Any fibre repeaters also will, as do any radio based backhaul sites. The HLR/core network etc will run indefinitely due to generators & strict fuel supply contracts for said generators.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems. Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail. Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density. It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?" Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      Credit card processing existed before widespread telecommunications infrastructure. Maybe we should require payment cards to have raised numbers like they used to so the old carbon copy machines continue to work. Credit cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that. The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
- ptsneves 1y ago
  In Lisbon's airport they are temporarily back to just stamping the passports without the biometric stuff. There are already reports that the checks are being lax.
kylebenzle 1y ago
It's not just stores, pretty much our entire socity runs on cheap power, without it the whole thing falls apart.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  Our global society runs on a lot of cheap sources of necessary inputs. Power is just one of them.
corbet 1y ago
Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out. The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
- pmlnr 1y ago
  Valid point, but there must be a price at the location of the item in the store.
throw0101b 1y ago
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags. I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
- myself248 1y ago
  I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent. PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
DebtDeflation 1y ago
I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
bilekas 1y ago
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments.. > Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
- bbddg 1y ago
  They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.
  - bilekas 1y ago
    Ah okay, that wasn't clear to me, I imagined only being able to use electronic payment types. But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!
  - kube-system 1y ago
    > They have to accept cash in the US as well. Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
- daveoc64 1y ago
  >That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments.. That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this. https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal-to-refuse-cash/ https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
  - bilekas 1y ago
    I guess I was taking the recommendation as a regulation, my mistake. Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index.en.html#:~:text=Retailers%20cannot%20refuse%20cash%20payments,a%20different%20means%20of%20payment. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
richev 1y ago
I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque. Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
jonathantf2 1y ago
I was in a Tesco when there was a power outage - the self checkouts all died (and rebooted into a custon Debian based OS with a Chromium front end by the looks of it), but the staffed tills still worked and could accept Chip+PIN but not contactless.

mschuster91 1y ago

> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue! Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction. As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.

kortilla 1y ago
> our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.
- raverbashing 1y ago
  Yes But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to
  - mpweiher 1y ago
    As in the German government and most of the political class...
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Germany has dozens of links to its neighbours. We don't need much in terms of "black start" capacity, that's just pointless fearmongering by fossil fuel and/or prepper propaganda sites. As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.

belter 1y ago

And this is a trial for how a Carrington event will look like.

pmlnr 1y ago
You mean the part that anything above 130nm technology would be fried?
- belter 1y ago
  Yes. For the moment I just want to see for how long the AWS Spain Region will stay up...
  - kortilla 1y ago
    Unless this extends to many days, the diesel generators will cover this easily.
    - Calwestjobs 1y ago
      most datacenters do not use diesel, but gas/methane/natural gas - utility connection, that way you do not need to truck/store anything. and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there. same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
        > and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there. Why? Every gas station stores that capacity.
        Calwestjobs 1y ago
        gas stations, at least in europe, have "safety zone" around them. also depends on data center, some datacenters are directly in middle of european city. in most dense part of city and dense in europe or asia is something else then dense in america.

seydor 1y ago

If anything, it shows how little use there is for physical cash , only as emergency backup

pmlnr 1y ago
"emergency backup" is a very strong, rational use, and should never be neglected.
- mathverse 1y ago
  You can use cash but it mostly does not work in case of big chains or stores. They need to have access to their SAP/ERP software...It is not about payment for a long time.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Running a generator to power a point of sale machine and maybe an offsite server is a lot easier than generators to power the whole electronic payment chain.

lpapez 1y ago

Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion. When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

kortilla 1y ago
A cash register is not required to make cash transactions
- Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
  Why would an employee tracking device be necessary to make transactions? It is just people without a cash position performing mental gymnastics in an attempt to justify it, by trying to bring it down to the level of electronic payment methods they convince themselves that, in a similar event, they would be no better off with cash, when in fact they almost certainly would. A merchant who refuses cash on account of a disabled cash register, under these circumstances, is not a serious one, since to do so would be to refuse all business. Those merchants who are so encumbered by scale and bureaucracy that they would be completely incapacitated should be circumvented.
pmlnr 1y ago
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
- seydor 1y ago
  Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal (And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
  - jjice 1y ago
    I'm sure they'd make an exception.

skc 1y ago

Another reason why itcoin is a pipedream too, particularly for third world countries

PhilippGille 1y ago
If an ATM is down, it's down. With Bitcoin you can still use mesh networks. Here's an old article about an example: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-enable-bitcoin-transactions-without-internet-access https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-ena... (Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)
peab 1y ago
You can have physical bitcoins - devices that hold a private key in a tamper free way. The private key holds a fixed amount of BTC
- _heimdall 1y ago
  Without power or an internet connection you can't validate that the btc hash is unspent, avoid double spends, or validate that your taking ownership of it made it to the blockchain and was confirmed for a few blocks. Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
  - emporas 1y ago
    You've to got a reputation system with identities also stored on the blockchain, and you accept the transactions only from the most trustworthy people. Counterfeit paper currency exists, and counterfeit bitcoin (not BTC) transactions might exist, but not every person is equally suspect of using counterfeit money.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      Sure, but then you aren't really using bitcoin. The whole point of bitcoin was to be a trust less system where transactions are verified cryptographically on the blockchain. Transacting bitcoin private keys without going to the network and trusting the other party to not scam you defeats the whole purpose.

bradly 1y ago

> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue. NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth: Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."

ghc 1y ago

> whistleblowers Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.

trgn 1y ago
Prophets
- ptsneves 1y ago
  Peters
  - trgn 1y ago
    I'm a dummy, but I don't get it :) can you explain?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

croes 1y ago

There isn’t much you can buy with cash either if there is no electricity.