It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
It would be straightforward to establish the right to a free basic bank account (with transaction limits) for the homeless & (formerly) unbanked.
In my experience, the elderly can forget or mixup their card pins frequently enough to be annoyed by the ordeal. They are also more prone to expose their pins to others and be the target of theft.
>It would be straightforward to establish the right to a free basic bank account (with transaction limits) for the homeless & (formerly) unbanked.
The whole point is that in a cashless society the dependence on digital bank accounts is considered a single point of failure even for the banked, never mind the unbanked. The elderly and the homeless are also less equipped in knowing how to resolve problems that require digital solutions compared to the others.
The point of failure around scams with pins and such is very valid, see gift cards.
On the one hand the disenfranchisement is real. On the other hand many of these people are able to learn lots of new technologies if properly incentivized. It's generally an opt-out of society that's enabled by workarounds being available.
Should we forego on convenience because we have a bunch of naysayers?
Forget about cash, try living life in de Randstad area without a smartphone and half a dozen apps setup, configured and tuned for you life. It's definitely possible, but you will be living at a different level of velocity than if you have all the tools at your disposal.
It wasn’t so convenient during the Iberian power blackout last year when all the electronic payment machines were out of action.
Cyberattacks on infrastructure are increasing.
National resilience/contingency is worth thinking about too.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rogers-debit...
Besides this, people should be rewarded for using cash for purchases, as they both forego convenience for helping build a resilient society, and are more likely to be funding local businesses than large multinationals.
The act of handing cash over to someone heavily implies they're getting a cut of that.
The moment we introduce a card payment, 2% or whatever has instantly evaporated. Card payments are likely to be done online, too, which means further evaporation.
You only have to take a walk around UK towns to see the damage which digital transactions are doing to communities. They're devoid of life, and full of drugs.
I'd love to see an experiment of what'd happen if just legalised tax-free cash transactions in retail. Why bother paying tax at this level if the transaction itself it helping communities? It's far more efficient than letting % drift upwards to central government before being allocated back downwards.
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.
I actually invested in a kyc business after being a bit horrified by the scam compounds in Cambodia but was disappointed when I heard a presentation of their successes which were mostly fines for legit people filling the forms wrong. Meanwhile the scam compounds got closed by raiding them and imprisoning or executing the criminals. I think the latter works much better than the former.
Now tell me how intelligent the system is in that scenario.