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.
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Use cash for now, but start transitioning to other privacy currencies, especially those that don’t depend on technology, such as precious metals and local currencies like Ithaca hours. Edit: I say transition away from cash (as in government-produced cash) because that they have serial numbers that enable tracking and they can decide to declare them invalid or inflate away their value through printing if people continue to use them anyway.
I know we’re meant to be discussing this from a privacy perspective, but my first thought whenever the topic of eliminating cash comes up is that, at least where I am in the US, it’s tantamount to euthanizing the homeless. The vast majority of unhoused folks I know (which is a lot, including myself for a terrible but thankfully short period of my life) get most of their necessities (particularly food) by buying them with cash they’ve earned through various means, rather than charities, food banks, soup kitchens, etc. And only a very small percentage of them has any sort of bank account and/or a device to manage digital currency.
But also privacy, yes. Cash is king.
Try GNU Taler https://www.taler.net/
Silver and copper still exist. https://ebay.us/m/Gcn2gM
I feel (maybe hope) that countries doing this would face significant challenges with currency substitution and private currencies. Ultimately if I want to buy something and my neighbor wants to sell me that thing the government becomes the, “Is there someone you forgot to ask?” meme.
It’d be metal af if I bought something from my neighbor and paid him in Yuan, lol.
all those bills you have are worthless.
That’s the tricky thing is technically the government doesn’t actually control what is worth stuff, its all just vibes. By undermining faith in their currency the government could actually lose a bit of control, not gain it. This was actually a huge fucking problem early in US history.
I feel by private they mean illegal and in the case of the USA at least, the elite are doing all their criminal transfers in the open anyway.
I remember reading an article from Australia where a woman requested to withdraw a five figure sum (over 20k) in cash from her own bank account but they’re like “sorry, we can’t do that” making excuses on the way of “need proof on how you acquired such money”, even though she provided all the evidence, they still refused anyway. She was like “WTF? It’s my own money!” so there’s a possibility that banks dictate how much one can withdraw.
Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people or who are liable to being scammed.
Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people
That happened to me in the US once. I deposited a paper check (cheque) for a large sum, and Bank Lady started asking questions. She was trying to protect me against scammers. There are scams where the perp gives the mark a bad check. Mark deposits bad check, withdraws funds immediately which banks let you do if you’re a customer in good standing. Mark gives funds to perp. A few days later, bank discovers the check is bad, unwinds the transaction. Now the mark is out the money. The perp has gone to ground and cannot be located.
I assured Bank Lady that I knew about that risk, and I trusted of the origin of the check. That satisfied her.
yes and fuck usian card operation for taxing our transactions.
For sure, even if it’s not perfect. Ready-to-use without electricity or internet, no payment processor shenanigans, and not nearly as comprehensive a system of tracking even if you account for serial numbers.
It is not the anonymity that is important.
It is not having to ask someone permission to spend money like with a debit card, credit card, and even fucking crypto need institutional permission to have access to your power to spend yo money.
anonymity ain’t shit.
Not even just permission, especially given most of these systems are made to operate on your phone rather than through a physical card.
Oops, your phone died? Sorry, no groceries for you! Did your internet connection stop working on your phone? Sooooooooooorry, you’re not gonna be able to pay your bus fare.
I don’t know about Samsung and Apple, but Google Pay works offline.
Most can, but they still rely on your phone getting an internet connection later, on your phone being trusted to send data over itself, and of course still require your phone to actually be charged. (Can change if it’s a regular card depending on the issuer though)
Also, if you’re just generally curious about stuff related to offline payments, there’s actually a major security hole that Visa refuses to fix, which allows a device to pretend to be an offline-only card reader, then charge any value to someone’s card, and get away with it, even if their device is locked.
Not really a point in favor of my original argument though, since CBDC infrastructure would require replacing or updating all the readers anyways, and implementing the standards to prevent such an attack, like MasterCard has used for a while now.
This is way less of an issue then your making it out to be. In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery or losing wifi?
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable. Its still permissioned, but you’re not buying shit on the street with direct crypto transfers anyway (at-least in the West, outside of crypto enthusiast merchants/restaurants).
In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery
Not too regularly to me, but it happens frequently to most of my friends, and some street performers I know who don’t always have good access to a power outlet, or the money for a portable charger.
…or losing wifi?
I and many other people regularly experience complete cell dropouts when at my local grocery store. No service. (Works fine outside and slightly down the block) We are in a city, not the middle of nowhere either.
There have also been internet dropouts for my local store’s machines, meaning people paying with cash could go instantly, whereas people who only had cards or phone payments had to wait in a massive line since every transaction took 2 minutes to go through.
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable.
Sure, but at that point I could just get literally any card. I was only commenting on CBDCs, though I suppose the same critiques could apply to direct crypto transfers.
At the end of the day, CBDCs tend to rely on phones to work, and thus can’t work if your phone doesn’t, unlike cards, and especially unlike cash. (given cash relies on nothing but you and the person you’re transacting with believing the cash is real, vs phone payments or even just cards still requiring an internet connection at some point, and power to the reader, plus permission from an external gatekeeper as the cherry on top)
Yeah, both of those things happen to me on a regular basis. If I’m using my phone, it might only last a few hours into the day.
Especially with things like cyberattacks (institution losing access to your accounts), scamming (you lose access to your accounts), power failures (everyone loses access to their accounts), etc.
I mean, I literally have a small stash of money in the closet (some 20’s and a bunch of smaller notes), so that if a semi-major disaster hits, I can still buy any supplies I can find that I need - gas, water, food, a couple nights in a hotel, whatever. Plastic is a great backup system, but it relies on me having my card, my card having enough money free, the merchant having power to run the card, the merchant’s communications working, the system they link into having power and communications, etc. With cash, it’s just “here, take this” and it’s all good.
As Metallica said, sad but true. Ok, you have all your money in your bank account, but those are literally just 0 and 1s, our economy depends literally in non tangible numbers, and that’s it. And you cannot pay unless the bank explicitly allow it, so your "money’ isn’t your money now.
You wouldn’t download a bank
oh yes I would
fuck Metallica
Cash is not anonymous. The serial numbers are being used for tracking.
No serials on coins!
If I get cash in change from a vendor who doesn’t know my identity, and spend it at another vendor who doesn’t know my identity, what is there to tie the serial numbers to?
Nothing, they’re blowing out of proportion.
However, if you put them into a banking machine or deposit in your bank, then serial tracking can become something you should at least be aware of.
Some of your bills in your pocket may come from the vendor A, some may come from an ATM. So the bank knows some of the bills you got.
Vendor B might go shopping somewhere, or deposit his cash in a bank. Or put it in a sorting machine that scans the serial numbers.
You pay B with some bills from A and some bills from the ATM. And now the bank can connect all three dots. The transactions aren’t completely transparent, but aren’t truly anonymous anymore.
At best, B’s bank knows that B had some bills that once passed through your hands. But they have no way of knowing if you actually spent the money at B’s or if there were other transactions in between.
There are individuals who “copy existing bills exchanging those for legitimate ones with different serial numbers” (counterfeit) and that actually happens, like for example: North Korea is infamous for producing convincing clones of US$100 bills that look believeable.
There’s this:
If you get your cash out of an ATM, the machine could (I don’t know if it does, but I suspect at least some do) scan every serial number of every bill it gives you. To counter that, you’d need to “launder” it though some other person, the more times and the farther away the better, until it gets spent back into the system, where it can be, once again scanned.
If you get your cash out of an ATM, and then turn around and stick it in a bill receiver at some self-checkout machine, that could possibly be tracked. I don’t think this is hypothetical, I just didn’t find any evidence in a quick search, but the site above shows it happens somehow.
Yes, cash is much better than a card that tracks every purchase, but it’s not completely anonymous, either. And, it takes effort to ensure it’s anonymous. It’s not a given.
Hmmm. Since defacing a bill isn’t a crime, marking out the serial number of every bill you receive would break the chain, except that you’d be one of the very few doing it. That would need to become widespread for it to have any real impact.
If you rub out the serial number, I wonder if that would void the “valid for all US debt” designation on the bill… I mean, yeah the bill is damaged but it’s not like you can’t use damaged bills. I wonder how the legal argument would work here.
However, I think they could redesign the next years bill to print serials much larger / several times / encoded some other way. They could probably do it so that there will always be a readable serial, unless you completely destroy the bill.
It’s illegal in the US for sure and it would be worthless but I don’t think a random cashier would enforce it. In Canada you can’t mess with the coins but there’s no law protecting their plastic/paper money
Even if the bill was scanned when you withdrew it at the ATM and again when you spent it, there’s no way to know if the bill changed hands in the meantime through unrecorded transactions.
The hypothetical tracker doesn’t need to know 100%.
The kind of data analytics that would be used to track serial numbers to determine the parties involved works perfectly fine with probabilistic/incomplete information. The goal isn’t to create evidence for a courtroom, it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
It’s the Finding Paul Revere analysis, and it can get scary.
Sounds like pulling cash at a grocery store/gas station may bypass that serial number logging from traditional ATMs?
Those limits tend to be pretty low and on top of that we now have all this footage of you stopping all of these places and not acting like a normal customer. Classic case of looking sus at that point
Not to mention no ATM camera recording the transaction
The withdrawal can be done by using another person’s card (instead of your own) making it look like they did the transaction (think of skimming devices implanted onto ATMs that are compromised). However it’s a grey area.
That’s just theft. I mean, how could I use a stranger’s card to withdraw money from my account? How would I get a stranger’s card?
I mean, more of a friends of friends or room mate (not a complete stranger). Like the memes equivalent to “kid uses mom’s CC to spend on fortnite skins” but it’s more on your own circle, withdrawing large sums is too obvious. So, an individual will only make their own family members or friends withdraw small amounts at a time at separate intervals (every few months).
Coins dont have serial numbers. Time to pay for everything in quarters.
Many people believe Bitcoin was motivated by prospecting and pyramid schemes, but þe white paper focuses almost entirely (re motivation) on þe freedom aspect: to be free of monetary hegemony.
Anybody who really wants anonymity online – like, to buy drugs and such – is already using Monero.
Don’t darknet markets still accept Bitcoin at a greater rate than Monero?
Probably. Bitcoin is still þe gold standard for crypto, and it can be laundered if you are willing to pay and have a tolerance for risk. It’s not anonymous-by-design, though. It just has a decade+ head start in þe market.
I don’t recall þe whitepaper proposing it for anonymity. Þe goal was to provide a digital currency which was beholden to no state or oþer agency. Þe USA wields much of its soft power þrough control over þe US$. Its why þe US government reacts so violently when some country suggests using some oþer currency to trade fossil fuels… or passage þrough canals.
Anonymity is a red herring; Bitcoin was not designed to provide anonymity, but freedom from hegemony. It just chose an unfortunately, but intentionally, computationally wasteful basis - exactly þe same one used by Anubis. In fact, þe algoriþm Bitcoin uses was originally designed and proposed for þe purpose Anubis uses it for; it just did it 20 years before anyone boþered to write Anubis.
The whitepaper was explicit that it was pseudonymous, and implicit that this was “good enough”. Which it was, for “internet currency 1.0”.
It just blows my mind how people assume “crypto = untraceable” when in fact the public ledger is literally the opposite of “untraceable”.
Very few coins make a real serious attempt to cryptographically unlink the public information on the blockchain, from the actual accounts and amounts in the transactions. Of those that do, only one has anything like enough transaction volume to provide the entropy needed to hide in plain sight .
Yeah, but somehow “anonymous” is what people glommed onto. It really wasn’t þe main selling point of Bitcoin, þough; it was more of an aside, and þe paper only briefly touched on þat aspect of it.
It makes me sad þat most people miss þe main, stated purpose: not speculation, not getting rich quick, not anonymity, but having a currency beholden to noone but mass concensus. And it’s proven resilient to takover attempts, too.
But, yeah: anonymous, it is not.
i feel old fashioned when i hear of such things; here i am having odd conversations with dealers and using cash like it’s the stone age. lol
Seriously get with the modern age. Darknet markets have sellers with reviews, and you have so much choice as a consumer.
it’s not for a lack of trying. i can google how to recompile the kernel or how to use tor, but i haven’t yet figured out how to google finding these sources.
not to mention that creating an non-traceable wallet of crypto currencies as well.
In the event of a disaster where the power grid and/or data communication goes down, how the fuck you gonna buy groceries, or anything else for that matter? 🤔
In most cases this problem is already there, even with cash. One time the local supermarkets lost the connection to their backbone system due to a cyber attack. They did not sell a thing, not even for cash, as their registers were dependend on that connection.
That’s where cash serves a purpose, as a payment method during that kind of scenario.
I’m not sure how card payments work in the US, but here the terminals have offline-mode where the purchases are just stored locally until it comes online again.
If there’s a total blackout, having cash maybe be better (but absolutely no guarantee they’re usable at the grocery store)…but there’s a whole lot of other much more pressing issues in that case.
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.
Why do you think you’d be able to buy groceries with cash if the power grid goes down?
Hurricane Katrina, 2 weeks no power and no internet or cell service. The local store was literally giving the cold foods away, as the coolers didn’t work, but they ended up getting a backup generator in for basic power to the lights and pumps, and they had like a mile of cars lined up to get gas, and buy dry goods and canned goods.
This was back in 2005 ya know, in a small town flooded in and struggling. Even the people running the store were struggling, they had to resort to taking a tractor to work. But we all helped each other, and the store was glad to sell whatever viable goods they had, for cash, and kept up with everything on pen and paper.
they had to resort to taking a tractor to work.
I feel bad for the situation but TBH that’s kind of badass.
And after Ida. No power for a month in some places. People were selling cooked food on the streets for cash. I’m sure if you were enterprising, you could buy/sell groceries the same way.
They could have just used the pen and paper with no cash.
Definitely, cash is critical
Who needs cash when you have bottle caps
the entire money system of fallout boy doesn’t make sense; surely making the bottle costs more than the caps alone.
Caps in fallout are backed by water. It’s not about how much it costs to make them. It’s like how the dollar used to be backed by gold.
wasn’t nixon also a president in the fallout universe? would he too not divest from the gold standard in universe?
I’m not saying the dollar was/wasn’t backed by gold in fallout. That was the case in real life up until they separated them at some point. I’m just saying that’s how caps work in the fallout universe. Their value is based on a specific amount of water you can trade them for.
that seems to imply that there’s sources of water under centralized control/record to that can speak authoritatively to price of water per bottle cap.
does that exist in game universe?
Here’s some links if you want to read up on it.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Bottle_cap
The Hub merchants selected bottle caps because of two factors: First, the technology to manufacture them and paint their surfaces had been mostly lost in the Great War, which limited any counterfeiting efforts: The paint used, machining, and metal type all have to be very specific in order for a bottle cap to be genuine.[8] Second, there is a limited number of bottle caps, which preserves their value against inflation to some degree.[9] Finally, the Hub merchants in New California could support it as a common unit of exchange by backing it with water.[10]
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hub#Guarantor_of_bottle_cap_currency
With who?
One of the towns in the earlier games. I only played the ones after 3 so I don’t know for sure if it was part of the game mechanics but it’s in the lore.
I’m not crazy brushed up on my fallout lore but I know that the general timeline is the exact same as the real world but the fallout universe splits when (in real life) the microchip was invented, instead of that (in the fallout universe) they focused on atomic nuclear energy instead of making computers smaller. I think it’s generally the same even after as far as presidents go, there are mentions of Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, etc. but it might be similar to the Elvis case in universe where there’s not much information left on these people so it’s hard to learn about and the average person in the wasteland probably barley understands what a president is
Fallout boy?
another senior moment. lol
