this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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Not that I think society should be cashless but why couldn't you donate to homeless people and do garage sales in a cashless society?
Pretty much everyone has a phone here, including beggars and homeless people. It's a necessity these days.
My country is basically cashless (as in almost no one uses cash and quite a few stores don't accept it at all) and we just send money with an app that almost everyone uses. It's easier than cash, bank transfers, and cards. It's also instant.
Hell, I have even gotten some money from my grandparents that way a few years ago.
It might be theoretically possible where there is cell service, but keep in mind that a lot of homeless people do not have and are unable to get bank accounts. De-banking can be and is used as a tool to control people generally. Being cashless might be benign if you are in a situation where the banks, financial apps, and governments can be trusted not to weaponize their absolute control over everyone's money, but in many places they cannot.
What kinds of places have untrustworthy banks and are becoming cashless?
I was thinking of the US and Canada https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/05/more-americans-are-joining-the-cashless-economy/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-banking
Sure ok. If you don't trust US and canadian banks your best bet is probably to go off grid and live in the wilderness. Good luck.
Yes, US Banks, famously the picture of honesty. If you know one thing about the US banks it's how honest they truly are. If you know two things the other is probably the depression or the 2008 financial crisis, don't worry about that though, they're as trustworthy as the CIA which has definitely stopped all those nefarious things they did as soon as Alan Dulles died.
Not being from the US or Canada I don't know the first thing about your banks or the CIA. That said, it just seems ridiculous to me that a bank would control you through the management of your money.
Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Paypal famously colluded to block donations to wikileaks. That control was exercised at an international level.
To you, because you don't know the first thing about our banks, no offense. If you did you wouldn't trust them either lol. It seems absolutely plausible they'd do it imo. They already do it with criminals to an extent, which could be argued as fair I suppose, but I don't want to see that expand at the very least.
I think I will instead promote keeping their power limited, such as by using cash
Lol, what? I guess Europe is wilderness then.
I guess almost any country has (some) untrustworthy banks. So whatever country is planning to go cashless, they will have both.
Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. Banks in those places will freeze your account easily, like a doc on file expiring.
US banks are more trustworthy with your money than European banks, but US banks are less trustworthy with your data. Exceptionally, there is a pitfall where you can lose your money: dormancy. I recall a woman in California who had a safe deposit box that she did not access for a number of years. The bank declared it “dormant”, drilled it, and gave the property to the state’s unclaimed assets, who then auctioned off her stuff.
In a cashless society, everyone would have a bank account.
Nobody wants to cut off people from the economy. Whether you want a cashless society or not.
They do though.
I recommended reading about statelessness. Some 4…5million people are stateless. As a result, they often don't have and cannot obtain any documents. Have you tried opening a bank account without documents? (Spoiler: basically impossible in most countries)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness
You're right, let's switch to a cashless society, there's no way someone like Trump could win again and decide to delist all his political enemies and of course "those dirty nwords and queers" to help his complete dictatorship style takeover of America. I mean, it's not like the Nazis forced the Jewish population to report their wealth right after the anschluss so that they'd be able to steal it easier during aryanization which one legal advisor for the Nazi Ministry of Economics deemed the “forerunner to a complete and definitive removal of Jews from the German economy.”
And of course it's not like making all currency digital and controlled by the same government that would be taken over by said cult of personality would make that even easier to do this time around or anything. Don't worry though of course "that could never happen here."