> I think it's fair to say that the system failed because it wasn't traceable. People wanted insight into their own card.
What do you mean by insight? You couldn't check the balance on your card?
What do you mean by insight? You couldn't check the balance on your card?
Not without making a purchase, visiting an ATM, or carrying an additional gadget to be able to read out the balance from the card.
I think the main problem is as follows: By its very nature, digital cash has the problem that you can't look up your current balance without some additional technical doohickeys, so compared to cash it always starts out at a disadvantage in that regard.
If you then add the additional constraint that your digital cash should mirror the privacy properties of physical cash, which means mimicking most of its major properties (both good and bad) into the digital domain, too, it means you haven't got all that many degrees of freedom left in order to positively differentiate yourself from physical cash and overcome the initial disadvantage of digital cash's intangibility.
Some advantages do indeed still exist (e.g. takes up less space in your wallet, avoids "no change given" situations and the like), but even taking those things into account, compared to the annoyance of not being able to simply look up my balance the way I can do with physical cash I personally never found the Geldkarte all that enticing.
(Whereas with a classic credit or debit card at least I get some more tangible benefits in return for giving up the tangibility of cash, like not having to manually re-charge the card all the time, or having a full transaction history available.)
> How about monthly statements? Purchase history? Stats, analytics, budgeting? In a mobile app? Without you personally or the merchants you buy stuff from having to do anything for that?
Cash has none of these.
Let's not move the goal posts.
The organisations that set up the system surveyed the public to learn why >80% never started using it and the users dropped off. The common answers included things like "can't see my own recent activities", "can't see how much money there is on the card" and "adding money to the card is a hassle", all of which were truish and IMO were side effects of features intended to make use of the card untraceable.
If you can't deliver a realtime feed of the transactions anywhere you can't deliver such a feed to your own smartphone either, see? And if you could deliver one to your smartphone, the system could also deliver a feed to other authorised destinations, and what's authorised, exactly? Can the card be traced to an authorising party? If not, how can you ensure that the destinations receiving a feed a really authorised? That kind of thing.