LogFAQs > #968606648

ReturnOfFa posted...

Keep seeing this gem

About half of that is absolutely true though. Peer-to-peer transactions rely on trust in the person logging your account info, so most people wouldn't just trust a random stranger to swipe their credit card via an eReader/their phone... so you probably do overcomplicate or completely negate things like yard sales and flea markets, and impulse donations to charities or street performers or homeless people. You can still give you kid a debit card or something similar to give them spending money, but it does pretty much eliminate the more tangible experience of being able to save money as a physical object (and in turn, develop a better sense of the actual value of money, which is something a lot of people today have terrible grasp of already), and the entire concept of the Tooth Fairy does kind of get a bit more stupid (if it's something you want to perpetuate in the first place). And in the same sense, people who use physical storage to offset poor money awareness to save (ie, putting excess change in a jar, putting aside $20 a week in an envelope to save up for a vacation, etc) would completely lose the ability to do so (unless we overcomplicate accounting and start doing nested savings folders or other ways to compartmentalize your digital money).

And speaking as someone who has literally dealt with the problem before, lack of power or network connection can absolutely fuck you if you desperately need something immediately and there's an outage. Yes - as you say - lack of those things can also prevent withdrawals... but that's more of a long-term problem if you're smart enough to keep cash on hand for emergencies, but in a purely cashless scenario it's also a short-term and immediate problem.

And yes, it abso-fucking-lutely does play a role in transaction privacy, regardless of what some people may choose to believe.

The trick is, most of that is more a question of degree than a simple binary assumption. People love the idea of a black & white world, but we've literally never lived in one.



ReturnOfFa posted...

I guess they forgot that most transactions are recorded

Not if you pay cash (which is the entire point of this argument). A seller may have a record that a sale was made, but unless you literally give them your name or use some sort of account ID card (like a shoppers' rewards card), there's no record of who the item was specifically sold to.



ReturnOfFa posted...

your cash withdrawal is recorded

And while you may know that I withdrew x amount of money from my account, you have literally no way to know what I used it for. Paying cash obscures the transfer from point A to point B.

If I take out $100 and then spend $80 of that buying weird sex toys and $20 buying lunch on the way home, simply looking at my withdrawal info doesn't tell you that.

Again, it's not black & white, but a question of degrees. It's not a choice between ALL privacy and NO privacy, it's a choice between SOME privacy and NO privacy. Suggesting that it must be an all-or-nothing scenario is basically engaging in a logical fallacy for rhetorical purposes.



ReturnOfFa posted...

your cash withdrawal is dependent on power and internet too

And that might actually matter if you exclusively only withdraw money at point-of-purchase (but if you do that, you're essentially already living in a cashless society, because you're basically just using a credit card with an extra unnecessary step). Or if you only pull small amounts out of an ATM shortly before you anticipate needing it (and again...).

But if you keep cash on hand for emergencies, or have a tendency to withdraw larger amounts at the beginning of the week (or month, or whatever) to ensure you always have spending money if you need it, then a short-term outage doesn't stop you from buying anything because you already have the cash. And an outage that is long enough to become a long-term problem is going to start introducing other more pressing issues regardless.

If anything, most of your perspective on the issue seems to be rooted in the fact that you're likely already living a cashless lifestyle, so you're intellectual incapable of understanding the benefits or cash because you never do it anyway.

In which case, none of this is about you and your opinion is kind of meaningless and unwanted.



adjl posted...

Indeed. If nobody's able to access any of their digital wealth, society isn't suddenly going to start worshiping the people that still have cash. They're going to prioritize restoring that infrastructure and probably barter some of their physical assets in the mean time.

Depends on the degree of the outage.

In a short enough timeframe (like, say, ohh... I don't know, a two-week power outage due to a massive hurricane smashing tons of physical infrastructure), having physical cash that is universally known and accepted as tangible currency used to purchase goods and favors absolutely gives you an advantage. Because people know the power is going to come back eventually, and that the cash they are accepting will retain its value and can be cashed in later, it still retains its initial value. Which in that moment makes it infinitely more useful than digital currency stored on a mainframe you cannot access. At the same time, the fact that cash has a specific and established value makes it more useful and efficient than pure barter - the guy selling me bottled water and toilet paper may decide to gouge the fuck out of me and charge $100 for it, but we both still implicitly know what the value of $100 is. Whereas if I'm trying to trade my canned food for someone else's bottled water, we have to establish our own balance of trade in the moment and based on tons of personalized factors (how badly do I need the water? How badly does he need the food? How likely am I to find an alternative elsewhere?).

Cash really only loses its value if the disruption is long enough that society itself is destabilized to the point where governments and banks are disrupted (which requires a catastrophic level of crisis literally none of us alive today have ever seen in a Western nation). At which point the prime form of currency is going to become canned food and shotguns.