Europe is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash (economist.com) 121
After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier.
Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.
The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.
Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.
The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.
Eurovisa (Score:2)
Re:Eurovisa (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Eurovisa (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, this is a great idea. Then the company could work with Mastercard and Visa to set up a standard payment protocol so that anyone using a cars from one of those issuers can pay at any retail location that supports the protocol. Maybe they could even call that protocol "EMV", with the "E" representing Europe.
Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
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Maybe it's time for Europe to establish their own payment network
There are 27 countries in the EU, most of them have their own banking systems and some have their own currencies. I believe there have been several attempts at establishing trans-EU payment systems, a new one went online recently - it covers a few countries and they are trying to add more. Most of my financial "dealings" are within one of two countries - only rarely between the two - and I have bank accounts in both.
Re:Eurovisa (Score:5, Informative)
We have plenty. The mistake you make is thinking we use credit cards. Right at this moment Wero is being rolled out, which is a debit-card payment system that has much lower overhead (no middle man), and no extortion interest rates (as it is a direct relation with your bank).
The only reason I ever use credit cards is to deal with legacy American companies that still live in the past.
You can keep your visa.
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Visa is just a payment network. It can be backed by either a credit account or debit a bank account. My bank debit card is a Visa card.
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We have plenty. The mistake you make is thinking we use credit cards. Right at this moment Wero is being rolled out, which is a debit-card payment system that has much lower overhead (no middle man), and no extortion interest rates (as it is a direct relation with your bank).
The only reason I ever use credit cards is to deal with legacy American companies that still live in the past.
You can keep your visa.
This.
It will shock many Americans that most Europeans pay with their own money and even more shocking, is that after your rents/mortgages/bills are paid, the average European still has money left as they're not paying off dozen credit cards.
I pay for the majority of stuff via card, but its a card that is linked to an account in positive balance. I've not had a traditional credit card since my last Australian one expired in 2018 and I use that so rarely I didn't even realise the card had expired until
Re: Eurovisa (Score:2)
Re:Eurovisa (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think the "E" stands for in EMV? It's not electronic. It refers to Europay.... alongside MasterCard and Visa.
Europay is the European payment network.
But not accepting cash is a form of class discrimination in the end - it means you don't do business with the unbanked, which means you already exclude a certain class of people.
(Plus, there are many reasons to stick with cash - if you're broke, for example, and have a hard time sticking with budgets - tracking your budget with cash is often far easier. If you have $100 to spend on things, it's easy to have a running tally of how much you spent and how much you have left. And spending money is a lot harder with cash than it is tapping a card).
Of course, I'd wish cash-free businesses would be required to put up a sign outside the door so you know when going on. I've been caught out a few times wanting to try a new place only for them to say they don't accept cash. Could've saved ourselves time and effort and saved wasted resources making me food I'd end up not buying.
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But not accepting cash is a form of class discrimination in the end - it means you don't do business with the unbanked, which means you already exclude a certain class of people.
Question for Europeans: Is this true? Are there really any "unbanked" in Europe? My understanding is that all jobs and all government assistance flows through bank deposits, so the only way to be unbanked is to not have any income at all. But my knowledge may definitely be incomplete, and may be specific to the countries I know best.
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Why would they qualify as unbanked? I know of not a single teenager without a bank account or debit card. Fun fact my bank will allow you to have a bank account capable of SEPA transactions and debit card from the moment you have a birth certificate. They literally list the age requirement as 0 years. The difference is the guardian needs to approve the opening of the account and has the ability to set limits on how it is used.
Re:Eurovisa (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some "unbanked". In the Nordic countries, if you are not a registered resident, you don't get a bank account, period. The law in Sweden is such that there is no mandate for a vendor to accept cash. So if you are unbanked in Sweden, you practically cannot function. It is super weird seeing illegal immigrant beggars in Sweden panhandling for money that nobody has to give them. The law in Norway is such that cash must be accepted, but getting NOK is difficult if you are unbanked. You can't get a job without a bank account because there needs to be a way to track taxation. Nobody really cares or considers it discrimination to not accept cash. The Nordic view is that if you are unbanked and all you have is cash, you're not supposed to be here, you're not in the system, you're not one of us; you're the problem, please go away.
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The Nordic view is that if you are unbanked and all you have is cash, you're not supposed to be here
Is it also "If you're a minor, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or "If the power is out, or the payment terminal's antivirus service is having a senior moment, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or "If you can't afford a mobile phone with a data plan, you're not supposed to be here"?
Or at a garage sale, given the flat portion of the transaction fee: "If you are buying less than 10 NOK's worth of goods, you're not supposed to be here"?
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The Nordic view is that if you are unbanked and all you have is cash, you're not supposed to be here
Is it also "If you're a minor, you're not supposed to be here"?
Minors can have bank accounts, and bank cards.
Or "If the power is out, or the payment terminal's antivirus service is having a senior moment, you're not supposed to be here"?
Reliable infrastructure minimizes that issue. It won't go away entirely, of course, but from what I can see most of Europe has 99.99% uptime on their electrical grids. And if your payment terminals have to have antivirus, you're doing it wrong. Also, many credit/debit transactions in Europe are offline, so phone/data connection outages are less critical.
Or "If you can't afford a mobile phone with a data plan, you're not supposed to be here"?
Plastic cards exist and are very cheap.
Or at a garage sale, given the flat portion of the transaction fee: "If you are buying less than 10 NOK's worth of goods, you're not supposed to be here"?
I don't know about other countries, but garage sales are illegal in
Help me understand European flea markets (Score:2)
And if your payment terminals have to have antivirus, you're doing it wrong.
I had in mind the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. It caused a local bike shop to close for the day because they could accept no payment, and I had to find another bike shop not using CrowdStrike to get my tire looked at.
Plastic cards exist and are very cheap.
True of the person buying something or sending money. However, the person receiving money through a card payment still needs an Internet connection.
garage sales are illegal in much of Germany
I was not aware of that.
You instead take your stuff to a flea market and rent a table. I think most of Europe is like this, except I don't think most areas actually ban individual garage sales; it's just not what people do.
Which means you need to store enough stuff that you can afford to rent a table for a day, and you can't have one member
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Plastic cards exist and are very cheap.
True of the person buying something or sending money. However, the person receiving money through a card payment still needs an Internet connection.
No, they generally don't. Perhaps because of less-reliable telecoms infrastructure, 20-30 years ago Europe moved aggressively to chip cards, and the chip is trusted to authorize a lot of transactions entirely offline. The payment terminal must go online eventually to upload the transactions, of course, and there are various triggers in the card-side and terminal-side logic that will force the transaction online, but this rarely happens for small-value transactions. Or at least, that's how it was when I w
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Thank you. Your post sent me down a research rabbit hole, such as medieval "towns" being defined by the right to host a flea market for surrounding villages, and historic gazebos called "market crosses" that serve as information booths, and a 10th Anniversary Stadium that doubled as a market square in post-communist Warsaw, Poland, and some open-air market promoters (such as YLNI in Fort Wayne, Indiana) seeking to distance their producers' markets from the sort of flea markets that attract non-professional
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Your post sent me down a research rabbit hole, such as medieval "towns" being defined by the right to host a flea market for surrounding villages, and historic gazebos called "market crosses" that serve as information booths
Those are really interesting! I'm resisting diving down that rabbit hole myself. Must... get... work... done...
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The Nordics aren't in the EU. The EU has a Payments Accounts Directive which requires bank accounts to be issued to all, that includes the homeless, and non-registered.
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if you're broke, for example, and have a hard time sticking with budgets - tracking your budget with cash is often far easier
No it's not, banks keep track of exactly how much you spent and what you spent it on, and this information is now available in real time via mobile applications.
Cash can easily be misplaced or lost, you can forget what you spent it on or exactly how much you spent etc.
Keeping track of a bank account is MUCH easier.
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But not accepting cash is a form of class discrimination in the end - it means you don't do business with the unbanked, which means you already exclude a certain class of people.
Yeah usually tax dodgers. There is virtually no one unbanked. The EU PAD guarantees everyone can have a bank account, that even includes homeless people, and people waiting on their asylum claims to be processed. When everyone has the ability to do something you aren't discriminating.
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That would be the better idea, but that doesn't solve the "in case of power failure" / or even war.
I'm firmly opposed to a requirement to use cash. Let me pay with digital payments. Let me require customers to use digital payments. If a power outage happens, I'll accept physical cash, but only at that time.
The only places that should be required to accept physical cash are stores selling groceries and medicine. Even then, require the bills to be put through a counterfeit detection process to be accepted. Tr
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Tips aren't income.
They are a voluntary gift from the client to the servant.
At least in Germany there are Court Rules emphasizing that, and tips are not taxed in Germany. There are exceptions if the total amount of tips gets absurd high ...
Most other countries: people do not give tips.
One ruling for example:
https://www.bundesfinanzhof.de... [bundesfinanzhof.de]
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Many businesses don't accept cash for one reason... holdups. You have to avoid getting jacked at the cash register, you have to either pay a mint for the armored car to come pull the cash out of your safe, or take it home for a night deposit, and pray you don't get jugged on the way to the bank.
It is a lot harder and far less successful for someone to try to take a pile of receipts with card numbers on them than a pile of cash.
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I live in South-America, in a cash based economy. There are digital ways to pay, but cash is very much still king here.
My brother, who lives in the EU, has had recently a health scare and asked me to visit. I have no bank account in his country, or need for digital payment methods over here, so I don't have a bank card or a credit card. And here in South-America, banks have rules. Rules they can't get away with in the EU or the US. Rules with intent to rob you blind with every transaction you make. Because
EuroPay (Score:2)
Why don't they implement something like India's RuPay, or Russia's Mir? Where people have their bank accounts in their phones, and can use it to instantly pay others? It's like GPay (in fact, in India, GPay is RuPay compatible): when the phone scans the recipient's QR code, the transaction is instantly made, via blockchain. In that way, it's unlike Apple Pay, in that one doesn't have to worry about a 24 hour delay for the recipient to actually receive his money: it's pretty instant
Those who refuse to g
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The Eurozone already has SEPA instant payment and it works even for cross border bank transfers inside it.
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It's called Digital Euro [europa.eu], work in progress.
Re: Eurovisa (Score:2)
Ah, like all these things and companies that have an EU origin, like iban, ideal (wero), klarna, adyen, which gave us 1 second transfers between bankaccounts, both domestic and commercial, while the usa still relied on checks and steep cc fees. Cash is just a very reliable backup.
Good. Do it here (Score:5, Interesting)
For 50+ years an essential part of my budgeting has been to pull $x from the bank once a week. When I'm low on cash I start thinking "do I really need this?" When I'm out of cash I quit spending money.
Now that places only take credit or debit cards that strategy goes out the window. What we really need is a card that A) is not directly connected to my bank account; B) is not directly traceable to me; C) is easily refillable at the ATM, and D) has a display on it showing how much money is left on it.
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Your card idea would solve the problem of how to send the kid to the store for a gallon of milk when they can't legally have a credit or debit card.
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You can give your kid a secured credit card already though which only carries as much cash as you assign to it.
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Kids can legally have debit cards pretty much anywhere.
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Visa prepaid card? Outside of the digital display it hits all those marks?
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Generally suck. They have fees up the wazoo.
Usually $5 to buy one, then there are fees that they charge you after a few months (like $5/month). And plenty of places refuse them, so it's imperfect, at best/. And many require you to register them before you can spend the money on them. And they have expiry dates - use up all the balance of it just disappears. Or they'll give you another card for a $5 fee.
They are some of the biggest sca
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Then i guess it's crypto right? Should be a better world but if anonymity is that important it's gonna come at some extra cost and inconvenience. There's always crypto.
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I have 4 kids and the only way for me to give them non
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You can buy prepaid debit cards which work just like those japanese IC cards.
You can buy them for cash, you can top them up, you can give them to kids etc, and they work anywhere that already accepts debit cards.
Re: Good. Do it here (Score:2)
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Basically the cheapest prepaid card available is the Walmart Green Dot card, and even that one has a $6 monthly fee unless you get $500 or more in direct deposits in the previous month.
All the other cards cost as much as $10 to buy, or they have high fees to reload like $3 or more reload fees, and some of them have several dollars per transaction fees too. Prepaid cards can be good options for buying a 1-time $100 gift card for somebody
Re: Good. Do it here (Score:2)
I feel like you could simulate this with an app. It wouldn't even need to be online to track a single number for a single person.
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That's weird. For me, "cash" has been always, way back when I got an allowance from parents, "stuff that you just spend on candy and other crap and it doesn't really count", while cash on bank account is the "real money" that I actually need to budget.
So I pay with credit card that I pay in full at the end of each month with zero interest, and if the balance on the card(s) seem like they are going over my budgeting threshold, I'll cut down on non-essentials. Cash is just crap that falls between couch cushio
Kind of obvious (Score:2)
Having encountered enough failures in electronic payment systems. I make sure I always have enough cash for the important things.
I also have a jar for cash designated for the times I go out for a beer and a bite with mates. That way I can never overspend.
Obvious isn't always right (Score:2)
The problem is that in most chain stores even if you pay by cash they still have to put it through the point of sale system. If there's no power there's no sale. Cash in most western countries is really only likely to work in small shops and street stalls in a power outage.
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The problem is that in most chain stores even if you pay by cash they still have to put it through the point of sale system. If there's no power there's no sale. Cash in most western countries is really only likely to work in small shops and street stalls in a power outage.
if the shit really hits the fan, a pen and paper can be used to write receipts, then reconciled with the computerised systems when the power/EFT system is back online. It's not efficient but it's 100% legal and better than doing no business at all during an outage. Here in .au, there seems to be a major hours-long EFT outage every couple of years. It's fun to go shopping during these times because all those people who hate cash stay at home.
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Places that sell beer were among the first to stop accepting cash
There are a couple of bars in my home town that tried this. I like beer, I spend money on beer, but those places get no money from me.
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If the alternative is robbing grocery stores (Score:2)
Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food.
That makes excellent sense.
I spend a lot of time in Germany and cash-only businesses are far more frequent that ones which ban cash altogether, the only "ban cash" places I know are in a food court in a shopping centre in Frankfurt and one Chinese restaurant. Germany as a whole has pretty much rejected moving away from cash.
The UK is not as extreme as Sweden but they have gone a long way down that road.
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The UK is not as extreme as Sweden but they have gone a long way down that road.
It varies. London is leading the charge. I was surprised on a day trip to Ramsgate (which is really not very far) to encounter cash only businesses.
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Accepting cards is very easy and cheap, and the costs of handling cash for a business is actually higher than the costs of accepting cards.
Any "business" that only accepts cash is either not a business at all (ie someone's side hustle) or is doing something else suspicious like trying to avoid paying taxes.
Re:If the alternative is robbing grocery stores (Score:4, Interesting)
Accepting cards is very easy and cheap, and the costs of handling cash for a business is actually higher than the costs of accepting cards.
That's not universally true. The credit card companies skim processing fees off the top which is a cost that's not associated with cash. Processing cash has somewhat fixed costs associated with it, i.e. someone to deal with the cash, keeping a float, etc, but if they're accepting cash they already have that person and if it's a small business that person is the owner anyway.
A lot of London food trucks went card only, but I've seen a few that have reverted recently, and now prefer cash. It's the processing fees that cost, plus quite a few food wholesalers will accept cash too, so there's no real problem there either.
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The processing fees on debit cards are a lot lower than credit, some places choose to only accept debit cards because of this. The fees are up front, and show up on your statement. Keeping track of transactions also comes as part of the service.
For cash you have:
(usually) Bank charges to process cash deposits, especially larger ones needing an armored truck
Bank charges to provide small change
Risk of theft, losses if theft occurs
Higher insurance cost due to easily stolen cash being on the premises
Extra secur
When the total is less than a dollar or euro (Score:2)
Accepting cards is very easy and cheap
Say you're buying something for 0.50 USD at a garage sale. With two quarter dollar coins, the seller sees all of it. With cards, the bank and payment network take 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total, which is more than half of the price.
Cash is still king in Germany (Score:2)
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Are the Dutch close to the border going shopping in Germany? Because it used to be the other way around, lot of Germans in NRW went to Venlo for groceries. Did that myself back in the day, before moving to a different federal state.
Itemize transaction fees (Score:3)
This is fine, but I think what is really needed to put all of the forms of payment on an equal competitive footing is to require merchants to itemize transaction fees on the receipt, and not to include them in the list price.
This includes a transaction fee for cash, BTW, because accepting cash is surprisingly expensive. Between "shrinkage" (theft), errors, the labor cost of counting, managing, storing and depositing cash, the cost of purchasing fresh cash from banks, the reduced checkout throughput and the increased difficulty/cost of self-checkout systems that can accept it, cash is far from free. In practice, it costs about 1-2% of the transaction, which makes it more expensive than debit cards, or other low-fee electronic payment systems. The costs of accepting cash increase as the cash transaction volume declines, too, because much of the cost is fixed overhead. These are the reasons that so many merchants are just refusing cash entirely.
But there are legitimate reasons for people to prefer cash, too, especially privacy. So the best solution is to make the costs visible to consumers and let them choose whether they prioritize convenience, theft/fraud minimization, cost, or privacy.
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" it costs about 1-2% of the transaction, which makes it more expensive than debit cards,"
I always found it interesting how this creates the incentive for grocery stores to offer "cash back". The store is essentially converting small bills to large bills all day and it's cheaper to give the large bills to you at par than to take them to the bank and be charged for the deposit.
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" it costs about 1-2% of the transaction, which makes it more expensive than debit cards,"
I always found it interesting how this creates the incentive for grocery stores to offer "cash back". The store is essentially converting small bills to large bills all day and it's cheaper to give the large bills to you at par than to take them to the bank and be charged for the deposit.
I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense.
It's interesting that the large grocery store chain I built a cash management system for ~30 years ago didn't mention that. Cash back was less common then, as I recall. Also, I wonder if the cash back transaction amounts were/are just too low to make much difference. I don't know about you, but on the rare occasion I've gotten cash back I only get like $20. If I want a few hundred cash I go to an ATM instead.
The cash management system was kind of cool,
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You've just also made the argument for American style sales tax and against price inclusive value added taxes.
Only if the transaction fee must be included in the sales tax/VAT. I'd argue for including sales taxes and VAT in the listed price, but excluding transaction fees. Alternatively, if there is only a small number of transaction fee regimes (2-3 at most), retailers could put all of them on the labels: e.g. cash price, debit price, credit price.
The per-order portion of a transaction fee (Score:2)
Alternatively, if there is only a small number of transaction fee regimes (2-3 at most), retailers could put all of them on the labels: e.g. cash price, debit price, credit price.
I don't see how putting three prices on everything could account for the flat portion of a transaction fee, such as 0.30 USD per swipe. When the bank charges 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total for credit, the bank takes more for three 5 USD orders (0.45 USD each, totaling 1.35 USD) than for one 15 USD order (0.75 USD).
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Alternatively, if there is only a small number of transaction fee regimes (2-3 at most), retailers could put all of them on the labels: e.g. cash price, debit price, credit price.
I don't see how putting three prices on everything could account for the flat portion of a transaction fee, such as 0.30 USD per swipe. When the bank charges 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total for credit, the bank takes more for three 5 USD orders (0.45 USD each, totaling 1.35 USD) than for one 15 USD order (0.75 USD).
That's a good point. Yeah, prices can't be fully-inclusive if transaction fees have both flat and proportional portions.
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No, the listed price should include BOTH the "transaction fee" and the VAT/sales tax. If there are different transaction fees show a different total for each.
Not showing the total amount of money you are about to lose to acquire an object is skewing free market rules.
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Store owners who want to make a political point should be perfectly free to say "$12 of this price goes to pay for wars/abortions/bad art..." listing whatever their pet peeve is, but they have to show the exact total amount of money that will leave the purchasers account at the top.
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No, the listed price should include BOTH the "transaction fee" and the VAT/sales tax
wyHunter made the excellent point that including the transaction fee in the price isn't possible, not the way transaction fees are currently structured. The percentage portion of the transaction fee can be included in the price, but the flat portion of the transaction fee can't.
Maybe that's okay. The percentage portion could be included in the price, and you'd just expect that you're going to pay an additional 30 cents (or whatever) on the whole transaction. The receipt could itemize out both the perce
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wyHunter made the excellent point that including the transaction fee in the price isn't possible
Correction, it was tepples who made that point, in a different subthread.
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Put a range for the resulting price including transaction fee. The consumer can then be mad at their card if the total ends up near the upper end of the range.
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"You've just also made the argument for American style sales tax and against price inclusive value added taxes."
Have you never made a purchase somewhere with a "price inclusive value added tax"? The amount of the VAT is not hidden, it's printed on your receipt.
we used to have europay, then greed happened (Score:1)
Merging Europay and MasterCard should've been stopped back in 1993, but I guess no one could foresee the current political climate.
At least Thales is European, they make most of the cards.
And Wero is being rolled out.
Maybe digital euro will be rolled out too, but a lot of EU parliament are a bunch of pussies and listen to American bankers and thin-foil-hat crazies, so it probably won't happen any time soon.
The case for cash (Score:3)
There are things that I don't think should be illegal, but in many countries, including mine, they are. Generally I'm referring to some classes of intoxicants. Cocaine, MDMA, psilocybin... I think it's ridiculous. Yes, these things have negative impacts on society, but so do lots of perfectly legal things. When buying these things one must generally use cash.
But even beyond simple consumerism, I think that testing the borders of legality is a stage of growth. Smoking weed in countries where it is illegal isn't just getting high. It's about learning your position in "morality" as you define it relative to the position society hands you in the form of legislation. And if you haven't considered that position, I don't know how you claim to be moral, when the more likely case is that you are just amenable to being led. So I think the anonymity afforded by cash leads to more well rounded people, even more that it facilitates the worst in us.
Long live cash.
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I'm fine with this position. With one caveat: You don't expect a societal safety net to rescue you when your choices lead you onto hard times.
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Well, I expect society to pick up as much of the cost as they currently do for all self-caused harm. I think that's a fair balance. For instance, liver failure due to alcoholism is still treated under the public umbrella in my country, but you're bubbled down to the bottom of the priority list, effectively making you ineligible.
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Sorry... should have said "donor transplant priority list".
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Cash is also for the undesirable but still legal things. Things one doesn't someone else to know (e.g. buying porno). Having every transaction traced electronically is very dangerous - it allows central analysis of spending to flag outliers and deviants (however you wish to define deviant).
In my opinion, anonymous transactions are vital to a free society. I don't really think there is an alternative to cash (crypto currencies can be traced with enough effort) if one wants to maintain a free society. (I know
what a great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had this great idea for a fabulous new technology! I'm calling it CASH. Here are some of its features:
Transactions are unhackable. No need to worry about who stole your credit card info every time a retailer suffers a security breach.
Transactions not stored in any bank's database forever, to be sold to unknown third parties at any time in the future, for any purpose.
No middleman taking a percentage of every transaction, cleverly hidden from the consumer, generating a 2% drain on the economy.
Does not rely on any network or other technology - works even when the internet goes down.
Always know exactly how much money you have and how much you are spending, and never be in debt.
Fast as pulling a bill out of your wallet. Never wait for an overloaded network.
And, obviously, cash is private and anonymous. Your transactions are nobody's business but yours and your counterparty's.
I'm looking for seed funding for this idea. Please send me cash.
Re: what a great idea! (Score:1)
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1) The original desire for electronic transactions is to reduce theft. Talking about one kind while ignoring the other is immensely ignorant.
2) Most businesses use something called a cash register to store the transactions forever. True, it does lack identifiable information, but if the place also has cameras it can easily be recovered.
3) If you do not understand the IMMENSE cost of cash you should re-read the article. It is far more than 2% drain. It costs more than 2% per transaction to do things like
"5 min read", 250 words (Score:2)
If you do not understand the IMMENSE cost of cash you should re-read the article.
I couldn't find that in the article. The heading said "5 min read", but the body was only about 250 words, ending at "announcing that a payment has gone through."
It is far more than 2% drain.
That depends on the size of a transaction. When a transaction is close to 1 USD, such as at a garage sale, the flat portion of the bank's fee (around 0.30 USD plus 3% of the total) is a sizable fraction.
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Every bill has a serial number. Soon all cash transactions must have bills scanned by next draconian law.
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Please send me cash.
I would like to invest. Will you accept this picture as payment https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org] or did your new payment method turn out to be fucking useless for the modern age? Can I send you cash from my phone? Don't tell me you proposed something physical, that sounds like a pain in the arse.
No source for TFA and TFA is just slop (Score:2)
The article is behind a paywall.
Even if you manage to snatch it, it is the typical journalism drivel that starts with some bullshit about how there are candles lit in Sweden in winter, but does not have a single link to any of the rulings it refers to.
In particular there is no link to the ruling or vote that apparently has happened in December. I do not doubt it happened, but as an European, I am very interested in the details.
This is the kind of slop that made journalism superfluous.
Cashless has reduced crime (Score:2)
There's less robbery if society is more cashless. Robbery of both persons and stores, especially armed robbery.
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Simple fix: EU-wide RKBA.
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Less robbery from individuals? Yes.
But now the robbers just demolish and plunder ATMs. Or steal cars for the purpose of ramming through walls of any financial institute, jewelry stores etc. and then take what there is to get.
In the end, individuals lost cars, store owners lose their inventory, lose a boatload of money repairing damages, everyone sees insurance premiums go up, prices going up to cover what insurance doesn't decide to pay out...so yeah, the robbery that is happening in this day and age is ver
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No, there's MORE. Banks, et. al., now call "identity theft" to put the onus on the user instead of them.
+1
Of course (Score:2)
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I have seen that in action during a solar storm about 20 years ago. People can actually do recipes on paper! It is even legal! Yes, the register I paid at had 3 people instead of one, but they had no trouble doing it all manually. Does require people that can do addition on paper and yes, all taxes are included here in the advertised price by law. In the US, doing this may be a bit more difficult...
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Interesting. Some things clearly need a rethinking.
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You may be underestimating the motivation of "keep the change" when it comes to cashiers completing cash transactions under no-power or no-internet conditions.
Cash register needs power, not Internet (Score:2)
Nobody seems to note that if the power or the internet goes down, so to all the electronic cash registers and price scanners.
A cash register needs electric power but not Internet access. It can cache the prices of all products on shelves at the start of the day. If electric power is known to be unreliable in a particular region, the store can run its registers on a backup battery or a generator or even put a price sticker on each item.
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"Rediscovering"? WTF? (Score:2)
Yes, I can pay electronically here. I can also almost always pay cash. The one exception I have encountered was a very small Sushi shop with just one person, a big warning sign and when I asked, they made it possible anyways.
Labeling it with old people is a psyop (Score:2)
While it might technically be true that old people are more likely to use cash out of habit, leading with that as the reason to keep using cash is a bit of a psyop. It's basically saying, "We'll keep this around a little while longer for grandma" and patting you on the head.
The real lead needs to be the robustness of cash in emergency situations, or even ordinary outages that happen all the time. That doesn't go away when the old people die. Accepting cash needs to be a legal requirement, at the very least
crypto (Score:2)
wait, that can't be right (Score:2)
Wait, but, but, all those Europeans on youtube and here telling us antedeluvian Americans what losers we are for using cash and checks? How can this be? Europe is so much superior, surely it does not need cash.
Credit Card Surcharge Avoidance (Score:2)
On Friday, my car dealership wanted to ding me an extra $3 on a $100 service bill for using a credit card. I plunked down $100 cash instead of a debit card (which I don't have).
After quite a bit of button pressing on their end, they took the cash.
No they aren't. (Score:2)
Some silly proposal that hasn't even made it past the discussion stage in the EC is not rediscovering anything. In order to rediscover something it would need to be debated, passed, approved, and adopted by member states. Quite a few member states do not have any appetite for this, quite the opposite since the move to digital payments reduces tax avoidance.
The EU has actually passed a directive and it has been adopted by member states regarding cash, and that was *limiting* the maximum cash payment allowed.
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==sigh==
s/an OrangeBucks joke/a joke about OrangeBucks/
My fingers thought they knew were I was going and Preview again failed to stop them...