For example: in Canada, the bank accounts of those who protested were literally frozen (for simply speaking out or being critical) and talks of potential CBDCs (aka. used to deduct funds from one’s account as a fine) whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether.

The alternative (for now at least) may be Crypto (online) until they consider that “illegal” in the future penalizing those who are using it, framing that as money laundering or tax evasion, whilst pushing their propaganda of “tap & go is safe & convenient”.

The answers are divided between:

  • “Cash is King” (it allows anonymous or “private” transactions between you and the merchant)
  • “Contactless” (convenient, but your purchases & transactions are monitored by the state)

Cash is apparently the last bastion of “anonymous” transactions where it doesn’t appear on one’s statement and one gets to keep their money without the state deducting it from their account since a nation’s central bank has monopoly over CBDCs and one’s funds.

That’s not even the end of it: them trying to make BTC or equivalent illegal by making CBDCs the default replacing gold overnight, it would mean all those bills you have are worthless. At this point, the only payment method is CBDCs that are linked to one’s digital ID.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.

    People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn’t run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.

    Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I’m in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.

    Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don’t).

    None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.

    There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren’t really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).

    And this is far from the only situation were you’re stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can’t pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I’ve seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can’t pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn’t activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn’t.

    In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural “buffering” with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn’t exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.