It was perhaps too much of a sweeping generalisation that he made but I donāt think youāre helping yourself much with the following:
Also, if you know lots of people who are paid cash for āvarious reasonsā why not list some to support your argument?
Iām not at all defending the person, but the only thing Iād question from what you said is the above. I donāt think I can pay any of my providers (Mortgage, Sky TV, Water, Gas, Mobile phone etc) in cash so it absolutely needs to go in the bank so they can take their monthly payments?
I wouldnāt just list my friends on here but some of the jobs are casual farmworkers, casual labourers, some bar workers, a guy who collects trollies round our local town and his income is the pounds out of the trolies he collects, a grave digger mate is also paid cash weekly to name but a few. Most these people earn 200 or less a week and live in accommodation the pay cash weekly for.
Going to be great for cracking down on drug dealing and other illicit services as it ensures a papertrail. The only caveat is that the government needs to be half competent with chasing such transactions down, which theyāre terrible at doing today.
Iām sure people will find a way around it. A friend painted the shopfront of a local specialist store in exchange for store credit. Barter or something similar will return. There are upsides and downsides to everything. People have secrets, for example - which are not necessarily illegal, but they may wish to keep those things secret.
This is so true. We buy group lunches at work as a treat and I HATE getting paid back in odd shrapnel. I obsessively send everyone my Monzo.me now. I canāt keep track of all the odds and sods otherwise.
Mostly Iāve heard that if you owe money to any company they can take it from your account; itās harder for them to physically take it from you if you have it all cash in hand.
For the record I think we should be going cashless but Until people in certain areas of employment stop getting cash paid then it simply wonāt happen. People who I know that are cash paid canāt get out of those jobs for a multitude of reasons the main one being itās all they can get.
The idea that a cashless society will stop drug dealing/ crime is not true you can buy all the drugs you want on the dark web with your cash card and its posted to your door if you so wish. And alot of the stuff thats stolen finds its way to many sales/auction sites to be sold on in a cashless manner. If anything drug dealers and criminals are ahead of a lot of other small businesses.
The authorities are that far behind the criminals a vast majority make a very comfortable living completely unhindered.
Anonymity ended around 2010. You carry a location tracker and microphone, which tracks everything you search for, ask for, and read, pretty much everywhere you go, it contains almost a perfect summary of your life and transactions in the form of emails, messages, phone records. So does everyone you know. All your internet activity and phone calls for at least the last 30 days are stored (O tempora, o mores!). Cameras in shops and streets already record your likeness everywhere you go, facial recognition is in trials and will soon be widespread.
Cash is the least of our privacy concerns, really.
If it wishes, the government can easily take away all your money (including gold or cash etc), your job, your citizenship, and even your life. They donāt require online transactions for this.
Cashless is coming (because of convenience, cost, consumer demand), in the same way that paper notes replaced gold coins (which caused the same sort of angst), we should find ways to deal with it, not try to deny itās going to happen or form some kind of luddite resistance.
The upside is we might be able to break the stateās monopoloy on issuing currency, once they no longer have an iron grip over issuance. Itās much easier to issue digital currency than a paper one - the problem so far IMO is trust in the network and interop with state-issued currencies.
Weāre more in a āBrave New Worldā era where corporations already do that, and have been doing it for years It was, and still is, the entire point of loyalty schemes such as Nectar and Tesco Clubcard; to be able to link a customer to their purchase history.
Until something damaging can be done with the data, I think itās a good thing as they can adjust supply to demand: āOh look, guys in their 20ās are starting to drink more IPA - bring in all the IPA we have!ā
I get the feeling that @projectfortytwo meant anonymity in terms of what and where your money goes and what you spend. Sure CCTV, your phone and everything else you describe can track you and know where you are going, but if you use cash, they have no idea what you bought - for some that is comforting.
Iām always sceptical about brining forward any ādigital currencyā that isnāt tied to a paper currency or a single issuer/ regulator - the security (whether that is a monopoly or not) is that it is centrally organised.
It just screams ātotal economic breakdownā to me. Sure the vast majority of transactions are done digitally so you could argue that we have a form of ādigital currencyā but it is still tied down to the physical.
We may become a cashless society in the main - but I do have reservations about what that will bring and whether cash will actually ādieā.
Given the huge advances in image recognition in the last decade, the impression of anonymity/being untraceable that cash provides is a false one. At some point street and shop cameras will be recording who you are, along with what objects you have in your hands etc. I donāt think cash therefore is going to save you if you think you are anonymous. Already for important investigations cameras are used to manually track exactly what suspects did and what they bought - example. At some point soon automatically tracking each citizen will become viable, and governments will do this. At present they only do it for high value targets. Cash will not save you and does not provide meaningful anonymity.
Paper currencies are just an artefact, they have very little importance, the important thing is the issuer and how trustworthy they are, along with regulation/insurance etc - this is why we use nation state currencies, not because of the specific form they have. I can see why people might be nostalgic about paper notes, but not why youād think they are somehow necessary. People said the same about gold coins, then gold backed currencies, and now paper currencies. States will find ways to debase the currency whatever it is made of, and printing on paper has had its day.
I completely agree the current ācryptocurrencyā market is full of fraud, has no regulation, and solves the wrong problems, but I donāt think that should preclude people considering other non state-backed currencies. Unfortunately I suspect a corporation will be the organisation which creates a widely used supranational currency.
To you maybe yes, but to some that go to a local market or live in more rural areas with less CCTV and available tracking infrastructure, some comfort might go a long way. Yes the government can track you and that is known - but the idea of some form of anonymity might beat the actual reality.
Thing is, Iām not sure they will - not every square inch of the world (or UK) is available and therefore there are āblind spotsā if you will - therefore the point of tracking someone is futile. Sure you can track someone to near the spot where say a crime happened, that doesnāt mean that person committed that crime.
And they will continue to only do so on high value targets because IMO it is not cost effective.
I didnāt suggest meaningful anonymity but some form of concept of anonymity - hence why I believe some places of business/ sole traders/ personal individuals still use cash out of choice.
I agree and said as much in the quote you used. The actual āpaperā currency could be pinballs for all I care, its about the central reserves, how the money is regulated, how much money banks are regulated to have to pass stress tests - that is all governed by the BoE and FCA/PRA (I believe) so without that sure have your weird and wonderful cryptocurrencies but the subtle nuances, cultural differences in spending and economic differences mean that IMHO we will never have a centralised supranational currency - the Euro proves that it doesnāt really work.
The thing is though the same identification of value crossed over and evolved - we have operated in paper/physical currency for a while now and there is good reason for it.
Prior to physical currency, a merchant would known (Iām guessing here) that a cow is worth more than a chicken - however in a country that has no cows or chickens, they are worthless. Gold is the same, it has a perceived value attached to it. A Ā£10 note has a perceived value of in the UK of Ā£10 - take the note anywhere else and it is technically worthless.
Granted the physicality of the currency may be gone - but it is still attached to the same form of regulation and that is crucially where the trust lies.
It was, and still is, the entire point of loyalty schemes such as Nectar and Tesco Clubcard; to be able to link a customer to their purchase history.
