Cash Might Be King, but They Don’t Care
That is such a dangerous trend.<p>I perfectly understand the appeal though. Automatic book keeping, no more cash to move around that can temp thieves, less mistakes and cons.<p>But for the society ?<p>This just get rid of another grey area, a safety valve, a space so you have margin to maneuver.<p>Indeed, no systems are perfect, but they will try to enforce their own rules, and have a big inertia and cost to be changed.<p>Having those greys area allows for people not to be crunched by the unperfect system, or to experiment with alternatives that the system would not let exist.<p>Without cash, kids can&#x27;t mess around as much without adults knowing. But doing so is very important to their development.<p>Without cash, you can&#x27;t pay for a service that is illegal, even if it&#x27;s not immoral. Do you know that we have freaking tomatoes that are legal to grow, but illegal to sell in France ? Yes, delicious, healthy tomatoes.<p>Without cash, you can&#x27;t finance an activity deemed immoral, even if it&#x27;s legal. Because people will learn about it and make your life a leaving hell.<p>Without cash, you can&#x27;t disappear. But what if you need to ?   Do you really trust the system to protect you if your life goes south ? We are not in the movies, the cops won&#x27;t post guards in front of your house because you dated a drug dealer.<p>Without cash, you don&#x27;t have the right to make mistakes. How many of us are perfect ? I&#x27;m certainly not, and I paid for plenty of my sins. I have many purchases I&#x27;m not proud of, but I would like them to be forgotten.<p>Without cash, there is no black market. Which mean if I&#x27;m looking for something that is not allowed in my country (say, boric acid to kill cock roaches), I can&#x27;t.<p>Without cash, society is less resilient. Power outage, network trouble or your card being unusable make you unable to pay for anything.<p>Without cash, we give way too much power to entities managing the payment systems. Card companies don&#x27;t like you ? You can&#x27;t pay or take money anymore. That happened with wikileak, remember ? It was not illegal in my country, but VISA and paypal sure prevented me to make a donation to them. They stopped me to use my money in a legal way because they didn&#x27;t like it. This is such a slippery slope.<p>So yeah, cash can be misused in plenty of ways. So can be a knife. But I certainly not want my life to be limited to a spoon-only consumption.<p>Also, saying it will fight cash laundering is telling only half of the story. The super-rich will still be able to do so.