even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can't buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.
Books has become e-books.
To some extent
but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.
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.
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Cigarettes and other things of value will become cash again.
Luckily, there are Nuka-Cola bottle caps...
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
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)
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.
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.
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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.
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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.~~
Edit: see below
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.
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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.
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As if money would be people's biggest concern of the power went out everywhere for two weeks.
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.
So, You are society today. Your chance to turn it into a different society is now.
Treat people as worthy persons. Start building trustful relationships. Make sure they do not want to see you hungry and suffering and begging.
Start with one.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I would think a lot of countries are tackling a lot of emergency scenarios at the moment.
Increasing defence, digital sovereignty, robust power grid, basically just preparing for bad shit
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