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?)

  • rayyy@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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.

  • Trinsec@piefed.social
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    18 days ago

    Cash will always exist. Even though I pay cashless 99% of the time, there’s always that little 1% when having a bit of cash on you is useful. It just means any cash on me will last a long time before I even get around to spend it.

    And why would there be riots? Spain had zero riots, people were calm from what I’ve seen.

    • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      18 days ago

      Okay so. Say. There is 2 weeks without power, sudden and unannounced, unpredicted power outage. How will you get food and stuff?

      So if people can’t get essential stuff, there would be fear, and with fear, riots are likely to happen. Doesn’t matter how “civilized” or “developed” a country is, everyone has their breaking point.

      • CHOPSTEEQ@lemmy.ml
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        18 days ago

        It’s called a natural disaster and we get along just fine. If the entire planet loses power, there’s nothing to be done, but even if an entire US state loses power, gas generators come online and trucks haul fuel in from long distances. It doesn’t take long for a grocery store or bank to open up with cash withdrawals again.

      • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        In that scenario most of the food has gone bad anyway and is stuck in distribution centres as the shops can’t send orders up through the supply chain.

        Also, without power most places couldn’t take cash. Tills are computers that do all the maths so the 16 year old serving you doesn’t have to they also track inventory going out.

        The cash that there is is stuck in banks because the banks have no way of knowing what money is yours as we haven’t had bank books for like 20 years already.

          • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            Presumably even there though they check the details from your book against the computer system, to not only check that the book is accurate and that the branch has enough cash on hand to fulfil your request? The computer system that has had no power for a week.

            • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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              16 days ago

              They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet. Normally they just use the computer system.

              • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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                16 days ago

                So you have to use them every time you use the bank, I’m assuming this also means that these accounts don’t allow you to do any kind of internet or telephone banking.

                • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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                  16 days ago

                  They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet

                  I feel like you aren’t actually reading my comments?

      • Guidy@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        This is silly. Absolute worst case, we go back to bartering for goods and services. There will never be a need to panic.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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        18 days ago

        The existence of cash is probably the least of one’s problems in that scenario. How is food going to be delivered to stores without working gas pumps? How will stores open their electronic doors or process payments without a cash register?

        If this is something you are worried about, store enough non-perishable (eg canned) food in your home so you don’t starve in that scenario.

        • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          how will we get gas without working gas pumps

          Gas stations are required to have generators where I am for this exact scenario.

          How will stores open their electronic doors

          These are legally required to be openable by hand without power in the United States.

          How will stores process payment

          Hence the reason why cash still exists.

          But yes, I believe everyone should have a week or so worth of clean water and easily cooked non-perishables in the case of an emergency. Although I’m more worried about natural disasters rather than some random power loss.

  • MoonlightFox@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      18 days ago

      This is bullshit. Everywhere I was in Scandinavia, you could buy with cash. If one shop didn’t take cash, you just went across the street to the other that did. Even in small towns north of the Artic Circle.

      Even Scandinavia isn’t stupid enough to become 100% cashless

      • MoonlightFox@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Oh, I must have explained wrong.

        Yes, everywhere is legally required to accept it still. But the usage is really low, and there has been talks of removing the requirements of accepting cash.

  • it_depends_man@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

    • Grappling7155@lemmy.ca
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      18 days ago

      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.

  • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Unironically, yes. If the “internet” were to disappear tomorrow civilized society would no longer exist. Too much had been built on an unstable jenga tower of technology. We put a lot of faith in the status quo existing despite the fact that little evidence suggests it will

    • Flax@feddit.uk
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      18 days ago

      Especially with so much being built on top of AWS, even ICANN in some ways (although I’m sure that there are loads of backup DNS records to fall back on)

  • vane@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can’t buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.

    • WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social
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      18 days ago

      The less people use physical cash, the less it gets produced. Eventually governments/mints will say “hey, you aren’t using this much anymore, so we’ll stop recognising it”, or something along those lines.

    • Yermaw@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      I know its not the same thing, but we’ve completely done away with the barter system. Way back in the days of yore people would be swapping things for things, and then money came along and they were like “whaaaat you want to take my stuff in exchange for a few little discs?” And now it’s totally normal.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        18 days ago

        We have not completely done away with the barter system. It is just less visible.

        I worked on a farm for a while that grew vegetables, and bartered some of those vegetables for other products from neighboring businesses. We got a pallet of apples in exchange for squashes from a local orchard, and seconds frozen pizzas in exchange for veg for pizza toppings from a local restaurant. We even bartered labor. There was someone who came in every week and spent a few hours cleaning and organizing the tomato cooler in exchange for some tomatoes that were on their way out.

        In each case it was mutually beneficial for all parties to exchange in kind without using cash.

        So while bartering is not common, it still exists.

        • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
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          18 days ago

          I’ve been at some festivals where the bartering system was alive and well! People would trade beer for camping chairs or a volleyball for some duct tape. Good times :)

  • make -j8@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      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.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    It won’t ever go 100% cashless. There’s too many coins and paper money floating around.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      The existing currency pool is not the reason. Paper money has a pretty short durable life, and coins don’t have enough value to operate society on. It’s actually a fairly big task for a government to maintain the currency supply.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    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%.

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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    18 days ago

    Fortunately this would never happen, for the reason you listed. Cash is king and always will be.

  • Owl@mander.xyz
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    16 days ago

    Come to eastern europe if you want to pay by cash

    You can’t steal/tax evade as easily with e-money

  • scratsearcher 🔍🔮📊🎲@sopuli.xyz
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    16 days ago

    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.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      15 days ago

      That’s a little bit easier because they’d “only” need a satellite dish and battery backup. It’s less dependent on local infrastructure.

      • scratsearcher 🔍🔮📊🎲@sopuli.xyz
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        14 days ago

        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
        • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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          14 days ago

          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.