For example: in Canada, the bank accounts of those who protested were literally frozen (for simply speaking out or being critical) and talks of potential CBDCs (aka. used to deduct funds from one’s account as a fine) whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether.
The alternative (for now at least) may be Crypto (online) until they consider that “illegal” in the future penalizing those who are using it, framing that as money laundering or tax evasion, whilst pushing their propaganda of “tap & go is safe & convenient”.
The answers are divided between:
- “Cash is King” (it allows anonymous or “private” transactions between you and the merchant)
- “Contactless” (convenient, but your purchases & transactions are monitored by the state)
Cash is apparently the last bastion of “anonymous” transactions where it doesn’t appear on one’s statement and one gets to keep their money without the state deducting it from their account since a nation’s central bank has monopoly over CBDCs and one’s funds.
That’s not even the end of it: them trying to make BTC or equivalent illegal by making CBDCs the default replacing gold overnight, it would mean all those bills you have are worthless. At this point, the only payment method is CBDCs that are linked to one’s digital ID.
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For example: in Canada, the bank accounts of those who protested were literally frozen (for simply speaking out or being critical)
Yeah… try using that lie on people who live in Ottawa, see how it goes.
Whether those particular protesters were in the right seems less significant than the general threat of debanking being used by a government as a weapon to disrupt the logistics of protests. This is obviously not limited to disruptive right wing protesters with questionable grievances. Take for example the way the US has used sanction powers to disrupt the daily finances of ICC judges.
disrupt the logistics of protests
Again. This wasn’t just a protest.
Ok, I’m not trying to defend it, call it what you want. The point is that debanking is serious and a real threat.
It’s an alternative to using more serious threats, like physical violence. The state can freeze your bank accounts to get you to comply with its demands, or it can send a SWAT team in to arrest you.
In some ways it might be less serious, but that isn’t its only notable property. There’s also the way it bypasses many of the protections and assurances we have about the latter, like due process. The ability to silently, invisibly, and unilaterally shut down political adversaries etc. is dangerous, and there isn’t much reason to think it will be used only where there is legitimate justification (again, consider the sanctions against ICC judges for trying to hold war criminals accountable). It is entirely reasonable for people to want to preserve ways to defend themselves against this type of nonphysical state violence.
There’s also the way it bypasses many of the protections and assurances we have about the latter, like due process.
How does it bypass due process?
If you’re arrested, you have various established rights, like being innocent until proven guilty, jury of your peers, need for the circumstances of your arrest to have been legal, need to charge you with a crime and let you see a lawyer to continue holding you, etc. Debanking, afaik, is more of just something government agencies do at their discretion. Sometimes it’s even done without any overt process at all, financial institutions are simply given vague warnings implying they should cut certain people or organizations off, and they proactively comply.
To give the example of civil forfeiture, there your money is assumed to be criminal until you prove in court that it is not, a reversal of the standard and infamously easy for corrupt cops to abuse.
There’s definitely more to this story than OP is letting on, right?
The people who side with the so-called “trucker convoy” that was mostly non-truckers defend it as simply being “free speech”, and “being critical”.
But, what actually happened is that the so-called “truckers” occupied downtown Ottawa for weeks, including areas with high-rise residential buildings. They prevented any traffic from moving, and harassed anybody who came nearby that weren’t part of the occupation. They also leaned on their horns at night keeping people nearby from being able to sleep. Eventually two of the organizers of the occupation were tried and convicted for “mischief”, a crime that can lead to up to 10 years in prison. They got off extremely light with home detention for 1 year and another 6 months of a 10 pm curfew.
whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether
No personal exp with this, but I have a vague idea that the Nordic countries, or maybe Singapore etc are further down the cashless road than we North American peeps are. Though they may also have better protections in some ways.
I do want to preserve cash as an option. I try to use it for everything I can, just to safeguard the option. I try to get my friends to do it, but they find contactless too convenient.
Why is this a question?
“Should people be allowed to keep their rights?” – this is usually intended to spark discussion, but discussing from this pov helps those who want bad things more than those who dont.
Because some people have a tendency to question the validity of things that don’t make sense to them. I could see someone asking, “why even have physical money anymore when everyone uses banking or credit?”
The same deal with privacy, “why should I worry about internet privacy if I have done no wrong and have nothing to hide?” There are always people left out and harmed in pursuit of some form of purisim like those lines of thought.
I feel by private they mean illegal and in the case of the USA at least, the elite are doing all their criminal transfers in the open anyway.
I remember reading an article from Australia where a woman requested to withdraw a five figure sum (over 20k) in cash from her own bank account but they’re like “sorry, we can’t do that” making excuses on the way of “need proof on how you acquired such money”, even though she provided all the evidence, they still refused anyway. She was like “WTF? It’s my own money!” so there’s a possibility that banks dictate how much one can withdraw.
Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people or who are liable to being scammed.
Same in the UK, but its more a case of protecting people
That happened to me in the US once. I deposited a paper check (cheque) for a large sum, and Bank Lady started asking questions. She was trying to protect me against scammers. There are scams where the perp gives the mark a bad check. Mark deposits bad check, withdraws funds immediately which banks let you do if you’re a customer in good standing. Mark gives funds to perp. A few days later, bank discovers the check is bad, unwinds the transaction. Now the mark is out the money. The perp has gone to ground and cannot be located.
I assured Bank Lady that I knew about that risk, and I trusted of the origin of the check. That satisfied her.
Cash is king. Always use cash when possible. I do, and I love it…
It is not the anonymity that is important.
It is not having to ask someone permission to spend money like with a debit card, credit card, and even fucking crypto need institutional permission to have access to your power to spend yo money.
anonymity ain’t shit.
Especially with things like cyberattacks (institution losing access to your accounts), scamming (you lose access to your accounts), power failures (everyone loses access to their accounts), etc.
I mean, I literally have a small stash of money in the closet (some 20’s and a bunch of smaller notes), so that if a semi-major disaster hits, I can still buy any supplies I can find that I need - gas, water, food, a couple nights in a hotel, whatever. Plastic is a great backup system, but it relies on me having my card, my card having enough money free, the merchant having power to run the card, the merchant’s communications working, the system they link into having power and communications, etc. With cash, it’s just “here, take this” and it’s all good.
As Metallica said, sad but true. Ok, you have all your money in your bank account, but those are literally just 0 and 1s, our economy depends literally in non tangible numbers, and that’s it. And you cannot pay unless the bank explicitly allow it, so your "money’ isn’t your money now.
You wouldn’t download a bank
oh yes I would
fuck Metallica
Not even just permission, especially given most of these systems are made to operate on your phone rather than through a physical card.
Oops, your phone died? Sorry, no groceries for you! Did your internet connection stop working on your phone? Sooooooooooorry, you’re not gonna be able to pay your bus fare.
This is way less of an issue then your making it out to be. In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery or losing wifi?
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable. Its still permissioned, but you’re not buying shit on the street with direct crypto transfers anyway (at-least in the West, outside of crypto enthusiast merchants/restaurants).
In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery
Not too regularly to me, but it happens frequently to most of my friends, and some street performers I know who don’t always have good access to a power outlet, or the money for a portable charger.
…or losing wifi?
I and many other people regularly experience complete cell dropouts when at my local grocery store. No service. (Works fine outside and slightly down the block) We are in a city, not the middle of nowhere either.
There have also been internet dropouts for my local store’s machines, meaning people paying with cash could go instantly, whereas people who only had cards or phone payments had to wait in a massive line since every transaction took 2 minutes to go through.
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable.
Sure, but at that point I could just get literally any card. I was only commenting on CBDCs, though I suppose the same critiques could apply to direct crypto transfers.
At the end of the day, CBDCs tend to rely on phones to work, and thus can’t work if your phone doesn’t, unlike cards, and especially unlike cash. (given cash relies on nothing but you and the person you’re transacting with believing the cash is real, vs phone payments or even just cards still requiring an internet connection at some point, and power to the reader, plus permission from an external gatekeeper as the cherry on top)
Yeah, both of those things happen to me on a regular basis. If I’m using my phone, it might only last a few hours into the day.
I don’t know about Samsung and Apple, but Google Pay works offline.
Most can, but they still rely on your phone getting an internet connection later, on your phone being trusted to send data over itself, and of course still require your phone to actually be charged. (Can change if it’s a regular card depending on the issuer though)
Also, if you’re just generally curious about stuff related to offline payments, there’s actually a major security hole that Visa refuses to fix, which allows a device to pretend to be an offline-only card reader, then charge any value to someone’s card, and get away with it, even if their device is locked.
Not really a point in favor of my original argument though, since CBDC infrastructure would require replacing or updating all the readers anyways, and implementing the standards to prevent such an attack, like MasterCard has used for a while now.
Cash in the United States is not as private as it seems. Eventually the bills will be scanned at various points through the financial system and the serial numbers are logged by these authorities. It may take some time to collect the data versus being able to view a blockchain, but cash isn’t as anonymous as it appears. And with a vastly decreasing amount of cash in circulation, it makes it a lot easier for the Govt to track its usage. It’s still the best option even considering cryptocurrencies.
Another reason for the decline in cash is that as the U.S. debt increases, the economy will have to inflate along with it, and it’s much easier to manage increasing inflation in an economy without physical currency. If things get really bad and conditions exist that would cause a bank run, well, good luck doing that if you can’t have cash. Run off with a copy of the database or something.
You are wrong about debt leading to inflation, that’s monetarism and has been thoroughly debunked.
I’m so tired of hearing people spout QTM bullshit. Good on you, stranger, for calling it out.
There’s this:
If you get your cash out of an ATM, the machine could (I don’t know if it does, but I suspect at least some do) scan every serial number of every bill it gives you. To counter that, you’d need to “launder” it though some other person, the more times and the farther away the better, until it gets spent back into the system, where it can be, once again scanned.
If you get your cash out of an ATM, and then turn around and stick it in a bill receiver at some self-checkout machine, that could possibly be tracked. I don’t think this is hypothetical, I just didn’t find any evidence in a quick search, but the site above shows it happens somehow.
Yes, cash is much better than a card that tracks every purchase, but it’s not completely anonymous, either. And, it takes effort to ensure it’s anonymous. It’s not a given.
Hmmm. Since defacing a bill isn’t a crime, marking out the serial number of every bill you receive would break the chain, except that you’d be one of the very few doing it. That would need to become widespread for it to have any real impact.
Sounds like pulling cash at a grocery store/gas station may bypass that serial number logging from traditional ATMs?
Those limits tend to be pretty low and on top of that we now have all this footage of you stopping all of these places and not acting like a normal customer. Classic case of looking sus at that point
Not to mention no ATM camera recording the transaction
Coins dont have serial numbers. Time to pay for everything in quarters.
The withdrawal can be done by using another person’s card (instead of your own) making it look like they did the transaction (think of skimming devices implanted onto ATMs that are compromised). However it’s a grey area.
That’s just theft. I mean, how could I use a stranger’s card to withdraw money from my account? How would I get a stranger’s card?
I mean, more of a friends of friends or room mate (not a complete stranger). Like the memes equivalent to “kid uses mom’s CC to spend on fortnite skins” but it’s more on your own circle, withdrawing large sums is too obvious. So, an individual will only make their own family members or friends withdraw small amounts at a time at separate intervals (every few months).
Even if the bill was scanned when you withdrew it at the ATM and again when you spent it, there’s no way to know if the bill changed hands in the meantime through unrecorded transactions.
The hypothetical tracker doesn’t need to know 100%.
The kind of data analytics that would be used to track serial numbers to determine the parties involved works perfectly fine with probabilistic/incomplete information. The goal isn’t to create evidence for a courtroom, it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
It’s the Finding Paul Revere analysis, and it can get scary.
If you rub out the serial number, I wonder if that would void the “valid for all US debt” designation on the bill… I mean, yeah the bill is damaged but it’s not like you can’t use damaged bills. I wonder how the legal argument would work here.
However, I think they could redesign the next years bill to print serials much larger / several times / encoded some other way. They could probably do it so that there will always be a readable serial, unless you completely destroy the bill.
It’s illegal in the US for sure and it would be worthless but I don’t think a random cashier would enforce it. In Canada you can’t mess with the coins but there’s no law protecting their plastic/paper money
They want to keep track of everything so people pay their taxes…I mean a certain portion of the population that is.
US recently introduced the bright idea of banknote serial numbers blacklists. Great incentive to hold greenbacks!
how do serial numbers get on the blacklist?
That’s at government’s discretion. E.g. they might decide to increase the velocity of money, by causing it to expire. The point is that they can render your cash invalid, with no recourse.
You happen to have a source for this? I can’t seem to find much.
Will stores be checking the serial of every bill they take? That doesn’t seem scalable. I’d expect they would just be not recirculated the next time it’s brought to a bank. Or if it has to be in stores, by checking the series, not serial.
Unfortunately I don’t have an official source either, I’ve seen it on a Telegram channel a few days ago. Banknote serials are logged when dispensed from ATMs and when cash is being counted at the bank, e.g. when brought in by a business. So there are already checkpoints for banknote tracking. Cash isn’t as anonymous as people think, but for coins.
“Rendering my cash invalid with no recourse” might be on the extreme end of this, if the places that its checked are ATM and banks - so long as it’s still exchangeable for goods/services (e.g. not being checked by stores)
I’ll keep an eye out for kore info though.
But yes, with serials are tracked when taken from/put in ATM/bank, it is not anonymous. Potentially breaking larger bills at common places (stores/gas stations) could mitigate this, but theres still information about where you’ve been inherent in that.
In the event of a disaster where the power grid and/or data communication goes down, how the fuck you gonna buy groceries, or anything else for that matter? 🤔
I’m not sure how card payments work in the US, but here the terminals have offline-mode where the purchases are just stored locally until it comes online again.
If there’s a total blackout, having cash maybe be better (but absolutely no guarantee they’re usable at the grocery store)…but there’s a whole lot of other much more pressing issues in that case.
My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.
People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn’t run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.
Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I’m in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.
Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don’t).
None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.
There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren’t really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).
And this is far from the only situation were you’re stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can’t pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I’ve seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can’t pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn’t activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn’t.
In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural “buffering” with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn’t exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.
That’s where cash serves a purpose, as a payment method during that kind of scenario.
In most cases this problem is already there, even with cash. One time the local supermarkets lost the connection to their backbone system due to a cyber attack. They did not sell a thing, not even for cash, as their registers were dependend on that connection.
Why do you think you’d be able to buy groceries with cash if the power grid goes down?
Hurricane Katrina, 2 weeks no power and no internet or cell service. The local store was literally giving the cold foods away, as the coolers didn’t work, but they ended up getting a backup generator in for basic power to the lights and pumps, and they had like a mile of cars lined up to get gas, and buy dry goods and canned goods.
This was back in 2005 ya know, in a small town flooded in and struggling. Even the people running the store were struggling, they had to resort to taking a tractor to work. But we all helped each other, and the store was glad to sell whatever viable goods they had, for cash, and kept up with everything on pen and paper.
And after Ida. No power for a month in some places. People were selling cooked food on the streets for cash. I’m sure if you were enterprising, you could buy/sell groceries the same way.
They could have just used the pen and paper with no cash.
they had to resort to taking a tractor to work.
I feel bad for the situation but TBH that’s kind of badass.
I don’t see the benefit for the average person to get rid of cash. If it’s digital it’s trackable, can be hacked and more easily controlled by other parties. Also it allows for banks to charge more service fees.
Cash is not 100% anonymous though. Vendors see you, cameras record you, you may even have to sign and present id for some transactions.
Bills also have serial numbers on them
I feel (maybe hope) that countries doing this would face significant challenges with currency substitution and private currencies. Ultimately if I want to buy something and my neighbor wants to sell me that thing the government becomes the, “Is there someone you forgot to ask?” meme.
It’d be metal af if I bought something from my neighbor and paid him in Yuan, lol.
all those bills you have are worthless.
That’s the tricky thing is technically the government doesn’t actually control what is worth stuff, its all just vibes. By undermining faith in their currency the government could actually lose a bit of control, not gain it. This was actually a huge fucking problem early in US history.
For sure, even if it’s not perfect. Ready-to-use without electricity or internet, no payment processor shenanigans, and not nearly as comprehensive a system of tracking even if you account for serial numbers.
