I mean, it kinds seems inevitable to me. Books has become e-books. Cash is becoming digital transfers. China has done it. The west is mostly doing card-swipes. One day, that transition will be complete, and cash would be phased out.
What happens then? Think like the power outage in Spain recently. Some people had cash. But in 20-40 years. There might not even be any cash in existence. What then?
What if, instead of a few hours, its a few days? Or weeks?
I guess riots break out all around the world?
(Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this? Where are the backups? Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?)
Humans don’t plan ahead for preventables and get angry if you diminish current QoL for long term safety. We know this. Earth getting a direct hit solar flare ends civilization. There’s no divine safety guard rails, we’d just be fucked. Probably not extinction though. Just a lot of violence, extremism, and starvation getting to that point of very diminished stability again.
I like your use of “when” because it is fairly likely to happen one day. It already has, and Morse code had just been invented IIRC. Not that long ago, just wasn’t a big deal then.
Did you hear the news about definitive proof of rogue black holes? Billions of them exist in the milky way it is thought now zipping around fucking shit up.
People deciding on this will have what they have, because it’s other people obeying them first and foremost.
They also will have physical money when you won’t. At worst it’ll be pieces of gold or brilliants or whatever.
And you being left to rot in such a collapse is no problem. See how Russia’s regime just threw out dozens of thousands lives of those they consider unimportant, to utilize in a war. Those were mostly uneducated men from poor and depressive areas, for whom the money for that contract was something enormous.
“The politicians” is not some rotated pool of people in reality, it’s the same mafia layer. Most of them are of the same parts of the societies, there are no random people in power, at least not anymore. Not in the last 20 years, I think.
So, the answer to your question : then nothing. Your riots are inconsequential, they don’t affect most of power, there are Pareto laws everywhere, so if actually important logistics and information flow don’t stop, there may be riots for years without interruption, not changing anything. You might have read something like this about Iran, riots are a usual event for them, even despite rioters being sometimes murdered by security forces, sometimes even machine gunned. If something like that causes a problem for the elites, you’ll see rioters being machine gunned in Europe.
The fact that we see this all means that somehow our side of the stakes has lost any leverage and it’s all changing for how it’s better for them. As simple as that. “Cashless society” is about that too - where all your money is controlled centrally and can be, well, momentarily taken from you, being just bytes of data on spinners somewhere, and all you do with your money is surveilled by default.
OK, this was alarmist, dramatic and soap-opera like. But I do think that, because with the previous steps of that path what I describe has already happened 100%.
What happens if the power goes out now? We’re already going to be in a very degraded living situation with battery backups providing a minimum amount of connectivity.
look at sweden…hands out papers telling you to have cash for week…but doesnt accept cash anywhere. we all can learn from the dumb nations.
no cash means government controls who you can give money to. beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed. if you cant get a phone, you cant have money. if you dont have a home or money you cant sign a phonecontract and so on…
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed
In China, they have Wechat Wallet that people can give money to homeless people. Even homeless people have phones.
cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
It is nasty and dystopian, I agree. But its not really a fantasy anymore, its real, the dystopian future is on the horizon. Soon, it’d be too late to stop the dystopia.
At first, mass surveillance cameras is only in China, but then even supposed “democracies” like the UK have millions of cameras. Then China became mostly cashless, that will also eventually happen to western countries.
The dystopia is coming. You can’t stop it.
I visited Australia last year. There were surveillance cameras just about everywhere. Even on rural highways to catch speeders
heard that china pandler story too often by now. durinf sleep ppl tend to dream but reality will come they will wake up. maybe we are a cashless world by then…i wont stop it…but reality will. in a world of nations fighting each other digital money cant work.
People will adjust. What happened on Portugal and Spain was caused by excessive centralization of the power grid, not by digitization. If somehow we can’t keep the centralized grid running anymore, we will break it down, and bear the extra costs for that.
Also, the sequence of a catastrophe is almost never a riot. Where do people get the idea of riots? People just go and do the right thing.
Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this?
The technicians did.
Where are the backups?
You mean generators? Lots of people have those.
Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?
I would understand this question if you lived in 1925, but by 2025 you should know the answer already. Are you so blind about everything that needs electricity that you think disaster would come from the lack of money?
In Spain credit cards still worked during the outage.
And the proposal for digital Euro already contemplate an offline mode for transactions.
As long as the power loss doesn’t last days and batteries die out there would not be a problem with that.
And outage of days will bring so many problems that cashless society might be the less of them.
We can return to a primitive society to avoid dependence on electricity, but do we want that?
I think the best option is just people be prepared with food medicines and offline entertainment for a week in case of a big power loss.
What then?
Yeah it’ll just be over.
Meaning, people would try to barter, which is really bad because it forces extremely bad trades, because it’s so hard to establish a good value for things.
We 100% rely on consistently working electricity and network connectivity for digital currency to work.
Which is why we should never get 100% rid of cash, even if we transition to mostly cashless, people should keep an emergency stash of hard currency. The same way people should keep an emergency food and water supply, in case of power outages like the one in spain. We can secure our infrastructure against many things, but not 100% secure against everything. Keeping a few bottles of clean water, a little bit of essentially never perishing food and a little cash and a few candles really isn’t too much to ask.
For some reason it’s become commonplace to think that barter is what preceded and/or would replace cash if we ever lost cash.
Anthropologist David Graeber has written a more compelling account of history with examples in a variety of societies showing that debt and ledgers are what came before cash and I’m thinking a system based off of them would probably be strong contender for a future without cash.
solar power and batteries exist too you know
ik that stuff in Spain happened, but if there were more batteries it might notve
Cash will change to a digital form or disappear, I don’t agree with the people claiming it wont’t.
Scandinavia is so close already, recieving cash is considered bothersome. No one uses it for anything anymore. Well… Besides drugs.
Both electricity and the internet is critical infrastructure. Any downtime of either is really serious. It is however not rocket science to solve the biggest issues in regards to payments. As long as people can show their identity we can agree on tiny loans for stuff. Or just having the government bail out all verified purchases after the fact.
100$ per person isn’t that much money. Any bigger purchases can be handled with invoices.
So I am more worried about heating in the winter and access to water and sanitation.
Debt and ledgers.
Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.
A cashless society means your overlords will have COMPLETE control of your lives. Of course the oligarchs will have secret avenues of cash for themselves.
secret avenues of cash for themselves.
Gold treasure.
even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything
fun fact, businesses operate without power by using battery operated calculators and inventory pads.
every minute a business isn’t in operation is a cost to the business.
I worked at Super Walmart decades ago. power went out for the whole town. the main HV lines collapsed after a tornado.
mgmt marked all the ice cream down 80% and we were still checking customers out on generators.
reduce risk, increase profits, mitigate losses. the only bad opportunity is the one you ignore.
by god we sold almost every tub of ice cream in an hour.
this is kinda hilarious lol okey understood
Come to eastern europe if you want to pay by cash
You can’t steal/tax evade as easily with e-money
Same applies to crypto-currencies like Bitcoin - as far as I understand they need constant power and global internet connection to function. Otherwise the network fractures into shards that have different views of payment history.
Maybe if the system breaks, it can be restored to an earlier state, and synchronized with islands which did not have the outage, once power is re-activated.
That’s a little bit easier because they’d “only” need a satellite dish and battery backup. It’s less dependent on local infrastructure.
Interesting did not think about it that way.
- that satellite dish will eat a lot of energy for bidirectional communications, starlink requires as much as a refrigerator, if I recall correctly
- maintaining that satellite network is quite energy intensive, but requires non local infrastructure
Right now it’s mostly unidirectional. There’s a satellite constantly broadcasting the blockchain, and if you want to publish a transaction you need to get it back to civilization somehow. So isolated communities would need payment channels with really slow (weeks) settlements.
You can use Starlink too but yeah like you said that’s not cheap or easy.
Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can’t buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.
