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?)
Places with the wireless battery powered payment terminals will still work without power for a while. Lots of them don’t even need network, they just sync up later.
But for the most part, if there is a significant power outage, things are screwed anyway.
Humans don’t plan ahead for preventables and get angry if you diminish current QoL for long term safety. We know this. Earth getting a direct hit solar flare ends civilization. There’s no divine safety guard rails, we’d just be fucked. Probably not extinction though. Just a lot of violence, extremism, and starvation getting to that point of very diminished stability again.
I like your use of “when” because it is fairly likely to happen one day. It already has, and Morse code had just been invented IIRC. Not that long ago, just wasn’t a big deal then.
Did you hear the news about definitive proof of rogue black holes? Billions of them exist in the milky way it is thought now zipping around fucking shit up.
What happens if the power goes out now? We’re already going to be in a very degraded living situation with battery backups providing a minimum amount of connectivity.
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.
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?
I guess riots break out all around the world?
I feel like this idea that people are just going to riot and do mass violence is some right wing fear.
Most people, most of the time, are pretty social cooperative creatures.
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?
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.
Yes, civilization ends if the power is out for weeks.
The politicians have thought of this, but “people can’t pay for groceries anymore” isn’t the top priority.The situation will be like a war zone or a failed state. If the government can’t restore power, its money will also be worthless, electronic or not.
Come to eastern europe if you want to pay by cash
You can’t steal/tax evade as easily with e-money
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.
That’s a little bit easier because they’d “only” need a satellite dish and battery backup. It’s less dependent on local infrastructure.
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
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.
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.
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.
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%.
