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?)
One huge condition will be: has your country invested enough in a super reliable infrastructure?
Spain wasn’t bad in this regard (like most western European countries) but that recent event was hardly foreseeable. And they forgot to prepare for the “black start”, which prolonged the problem.
In the future, the grids must become even more reliable and fault tolerant.
Some countries should better increase their invests by magnitudes.
Microgrids with solar panels on every residential home is key
It was probably the best case scenario. This happening outside of winter or a war was pretty lucky.
Now they get to learn and improve.
Tbh, I heard it caused the UK government to actually revise it’s plan for such a scenario as well.
solar power and batteries exist too you know
ik that stuff in Spain happened, but if there were more batteries it might notve
Cashless requires power all the way from PoS to wherever the servers live.
Not 100% true: I know some places in Norway that have unreliable internet connectivity. They have terminals in the store that will save your purchase and wire it to the bank when connection is restored. Of course, this means you can over-draw your card, but I’ve never heard of that being a big issue in those small places.
Interesting, TIL — thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
As if money would be people’s biggest concern of the power went out everywhere for two weeks.
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.
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.
Werd the banks in my state are still required to have bank books specifically for this reason.
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.
They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet. Normally they just use the computer system.
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.
They are there as a backup, for if the bank loses power or Internet
I feel like you aren’t actually reading my comments?
2 weeks without power
How will you get food and stuff?
You go there where it is, and ask. If they trust you enough to pay it later, ok. Otherwise you beg. And beg more.
Problem is that shops are now faceless corporations who have no idea who you are. It’ll be fine if it was the village grocer’s staffed by the guy you went to school with who was in the year above you, but when nobody knows everyone in an individualistic society, it’s hard to establish trust.
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.
This is silly. Absolute worst case, we go back to bartering for goods and services. There will never be a need to panic.
I mean there might be reason to panic and a fallback on the barter system, both.
Why do you think everything will become completely cash-less?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
That will never happen. Cash is useful for laundering money, and governments are full of people working for criminals that need to launder money.
It won’t ever go 100% cashless. There’s too many coins and paper money floating around.
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.
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
Cigarettes and other things of value will become cash again.
Luckily, there are Nuka-Cola bottle caps…
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.
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
Books has become e-books.
To some extent — but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.
even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything
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.
this is kinda hilarious lol okey understood
Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can’t buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.
Debt and ledgers.
Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.
People will adjust. What happened on Portugal and Spain was caused by excessive centralization of the power grid, not by digitization. If somehow we can’t keep the centralized grid running anymore, we will break it down, and bear the extra costs for that.
Also, the sequence of a catastrophe is almost never a riot. Where do people get the idea of riots? People just go and do the right thing.
Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this?
The technicians did.
Where are the backups?
You mean generators? Lots of people have those.
Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?
I would understand this question if you lived in 1925, but by 2025 you should know the answer already. Are you so blind about everything that needs electricity that you think disaster would come from the lack of money?
In that case we have to rely on Elons white power.
