Replies (34)

Tee's avatar
Tee 1 year ago
That sounds really sad - hope it never comes to it! I used to pay everything by debit card, now i make an effort to use cash whenever possible
In Scandinavia there's homeless people who receive donations via app. They will just make apps for every use case unfortunately, so if everyone owns a smartphone anyway from the age of 6, this line of argumentation against cashless will fall on deaf ears with many people. To be clear, I'm firmly opposed to a cashless society.
the T(axable) in Taler makes it useless. Arguing that we should build systems to help mass coercion and theft (taxes) to meet in the middle is completely misguided. Middle ground of what? Complete freedom that we inherently should have but was slowly and surely eroded through decades and centuries of narratives and monopoly of violence? There is no middle ground for freedom. You are either free or you're a slave. You might be decently dressed and have sufficient caloric intake of garbage provided by dear government, but you are still a slave. If noone is whiping you on daily basis it doesn't mean that you're free, it only means that the whip is invisible and prison walls built from ideas, not concrete.
I'd agree that arguing/pushing to achieve the ideal, when things are already bad and also trending towards the worse, is good. Will any ideal (regardless of which goal you choose) ever be achieved? No. And that's okay IMO. You won't ever have absolute freedom, no matter how hard you fight for it, unless you entirely leave society.
nix's avatar
nix 1 year ago
What cashless also means is that foreigners in your country can't buy anything until they have a bank account. Last year I used my card to pay for a fresh foreign student's lunch, which he then gave me in cash, because all venues on campus were cashless. View quoted note โ†’
bye's avatar
bye gbfgsb 1 year ago
Keep paying cash! I mostly avoid the places that don't even accept it, but it sucks when more and more places in the city seem to go along... and mostly they have some naive teenager working there looking all glazed when I point out that by law they should accept cash.. As a useful tip. I carry much small change so I can always pay the exact price when the excuse is given that they don't have change..
or if we rebuild society on better principles. middle ground implies that we should give up something. the only thing we should give up is the government.
And this is a distinguishing factor between cards and Bitcoin. People often don't get that before they start using Bitcoin. And with e-cash, privacy is even better than with physical cash.
I have to check the legal situation in my country. In the end you don't need that much small change if you don't mind over-paying by half a dollar unless they then can refuse to get a tip.
I think most people on nostr refer to Chaumian e-cash when they talk about digital cash. I'm not a Monero user and have never heard this analogy.
I think we are already building parallel structures where we have more freedoms. In the digital realm it's possible and yes, the physical realm might be lost but that's more and more ok as long as "being big" in the physical realm isn't important to you. How important is living in a big mansion with five Ferraris to you?
bye's avatar
bye gbfgsb 1 year ago
Maybe more useful with euro's. Dollar bills, like them, never knew how much I had in my pocket. De euros bills all different sizes with five being the smallest, so carry one and two euro coins etc.. I understood why many go cashless. One snack place owner told me how he needed to pay extra to deliver cash to the bank and had to pay more and more to get rolls of coins.. So incentive is pushing to cashless.
Paul's avatar
Paul 1 year ago
We gotta do everything we can to build privacy layers on BTC!
Cross posted on IG. Got these... How is a cashless society not imminent? Does USA Today mean for everyone but the west? So it would be thinly disintegrated into nothing instead? Gee... that sounds fun.
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