Cashless Society

Will hard currency be done away with eventually? I think it could possibly happen, I do think it will happen sometime after the fall of the dollar.

 

with the current system, it costs businesses money to accept electronic payments or to have a merchant account for accepting CC transactions.

i think something like bitcoin sounds pretty good though

 

With the on-going development of IT, Cashless societies are already with us - for those of lesser access to such resources, some kind of 'bartering system' goes back to way back when ... and in many cases much more appropriate to needs.
'Hard' currency I guess will survive for those in middle grounds of the spectrum, though for me, it is moreover the fact that IT has a traceable ease of accountability about it

 

I never use cash. It's always my ATM or credit card that I'm swiping in the machines. I'm pretty much there--just short of having a micro chip implant in my forehead.

 

What will be interesting is what happens when the economy crashes in a "cashless" society.

 

Not sure but my guess is that there wouldn't be much difference. The only thing that seems to retain its value is precious metals, but even those might become obsolete in a cashless society.

 

A cashless society is one in which a private (two party) financial exchange is impossible. I can't give you money without telling a third party (the accountant, the bank, the what-ever-central-money-controler) to transfer money from my account to yours.

 

How about a penny-less society?

 

I am talking where all transactions are electronic and then the lights go out

 

moving the monetary concept, from something tangible you can cary in your pocket, to numbers encoded on magnetic media, is not what i would call cashless, by which i would mean non-monetary.

as money replaced land ownership as feudal wealth, in time actual technical skill will replace the symbolic value of currency.

people love convenience, and for its sake, have, for the most part volluntarily, given up the idea, of symbolic value, having to be represented, by a physical currency.

the conspiracy here, if any, is the invisible hand of massively popularized ideology, manufacturing consent.

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ah yes, and the lights someday going out and not comming back on for weeks or months or ever.

well that is certainly a vulnerability, though perhaps not in and of itself such an absolute one.

banks have (or so i would hope) all kinds of back up systems, to protect themselves (if not entirely their customers) from this kind of disaster.

however, what will make the power go off, and not come back on right away, will likely have weakened banks, and even people's obsession with symbolic gain, long before this eventuality itself comes about.

 

A cashless society is only a few more years down the road. Perhaps 10 years, I would say.

It seems like nobody uses cash these days, unless they're buying drugs.

 

what we need is a bankless society

 

i'm willing to second THAT emotion.

ounces of self dicipline are worth tons of finger pointing though.

as long as we have this notion of people owing anything other then to avoid causing harm, banks perform a useful convenience.
we just need to replace their executive management with something more logical and impartial then anything human.

 

That timeline seems about right. With the continued rise in technology, it really only makes sense in a modern world perspective.

 

just try making a counterfeit bitcoin .. someone would be hard pressed to fork the blockchain and have that fork get accepted by the rest of the network as the "correct" one. i do believe they would need to control more than 51% of the total network hashing power to do so.

it is possible to double spend by creating two transactions, each using the same input addresses and different output addresses and have both transactions be incorporated into a block in two seperate forks of the blockchain. However, only the longest fork will be used and only the first transaction will be valid, the second transaction will be found to be invalid by any miners that already have a block containing the first transaction and second transaction will not be added to the blockchain.

you *can* attempt to spend unconfirmed change, but any subsequent transaction with that change address(s) will eventually be found to be invalid in the case of a double spend because the input transaction was invalid .. so the double spend will never be confirmed by the network. this scenario if the attacker possessed a very large amount of the total hashing power might be able to get the double spend confirmed once or twice *maybe*, i'm not sure the transaction may appear to be valid for a short period of time and then the money get's "taken back" but this is why at least 6 confirmations are recommended for transactions, and the transaction fees for small transactions tend to make it not worthwhile. at least that's the way i see it.

 

How do people obtain credit in such a society?

 

i would assume in a similar way by establishing trust. there was just some talk of this or a similar topic last night in #bitcoin irc on freenode .. but i can't really claim i really understand it.

anyway, btc went down to $472 last night, just another bubble but it does seem to be trending downward still. probably a good idea to start buying some before it goes to the moon . I sure wish i had bought up a bunch about this time last year when it went way down to $20 (from $1200!) .. it went back up to around 600 a few weeks later and remained pretty stable since.

 

only problem with bitcoins is after much reading, i dont get it!

 

as long as you're talking about needing and using credit, you're still not talking about a non-monetary economic. currency is a symbol used to represent value. moving that symbol from being a physical object to representing it electronically, really isn't changing anything anymore fundimental then when money started being printed on paper. that's just changing the symbol to being a non-physical one. the concept is not a tangable thing. all this is talking about is moving away from representing the concept tangibly. its not changing the concept. so this business of cashless, is making a bigger deal of itself then it is.

how do these so called bit coins differ from numbers in a banks computer that represent your current balance? do they mean you can buy things on line without ever having to transmit an access code?

well anyway, as long as you're using the IDEA of money, i really don't see how that can be called "cashless".

also, where does the conspiracy come into it?

 

As far as I can tell, this thread is about cashless society, not moneyless society. The OP specified that he was talking about hard currency.