Would Taler be more resilient than a typical EMV/AmEx card? It’s designed as an online payment system but it’s less centralised, so that could help.
It’s already an attractive project due to its privacy feature, and due to it being more regulation-friendly that cryptocurrencies. If it’s resilient enough it could act as a digital cash.
To me Taler is not a cash alternative, but a card alternative, besides cash. It’s better then cards, probably for everyone involved, but it isn’t better than cash.
Cash alternative
I don’t think replacing cash is a good idea
cashless society is a really stupid idea. it’s not worth sacrificing privacy and stability for a tiny bit of convenience.
I don’t understand why we can’t have multiple forms of payment. I’ll keep cash and cards so I have options
Same here. In a more general way, I don’t understand why people can’t simply let things coexist in peace. Just because one doesn’t like or use something, doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t. I’m getting tired of that behavior in our society, to be honest.
Need to send a friend some money? How about you download this proprietary app made by some random company who takes a cut out of the middle. Cash is so outdated we need to use phones for no reason
People are shilling something they don’t understand and the regime is taking advantage of their poor education and impulses.
Adults need to adult. Use cash and educate people around you about risks of cashless.
Prolly a futile fight but what are we gonna do, give up? Fuck that
Doing my part.
I agree. If every of us would do their homework right.
Doing my part.
Does anyone actually want a cashless society though?
I don’t carry cash for the same reason I don’t carry my socket wrench. I use it for specific things at specific times but I don’t need it day to day. That doesn’t mean I think socket wrenches should be outlawed.
Governments love the idea. It’s much easier to collect taxes or punish dissidents in a cashless society.
Well, our own government has never said anything about it. If they did propose it I guess our democratic process would find the best way forward. The same could be said of a great many things that will never exist.
Also collecting taxes ought to be easy and fair. If no one cheats then no one pays too much if they do not cheat. Besides that, there’s plenty of other measures that can be applied in 2024 to diminish tax evasion.
It’s now illegal in many parts of Europe to make large cash transactions.
Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.
Totally. My petrol station allowed me to pay in seashells while everyone else were just standing around complaining, was kinda nice
I…
I have so many questions
Sand dollars?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.
Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.
The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.
Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.
The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.
In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.
The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No, that is not correct. Global outage shows the dangers of centralized systems would be a better headline. Monero Worked all day throughout the entire outage with no problems.
Monero isn’t bad but I don’t think it is great for easily buying things. At the end of the day trying to use two different currencies is hard. Also Monero gets a bad name because it is used primarily for illegal transactions. It is simply two complex and has no accountability
The fact that it’s used for crime means that it actually does what it’s supposed to do and keeping people private. Shoes are also used by bank robbers and we don’t ban shoes. Monero is a tool the same as a hammer or a shoe or a car or a gun.
… And if the systems you actually interact with go down, you can get fucked as well.
If you want to buy food with Monero and the payment processor for the local shop doesn’t work, even if it’s a local machine sitting in the back office, you still can’t buy anything.
A local machine sitting in the back office, acting as a payment processor, is much easier to access and fix than the Visa Network.
Not for you. And certainly not for the staff working in the shop.
Currently, you’re bartering with copious amounts of copium.
Even central currencies can work if you can make offline and peer to peer payments.
Not easy to pull off cryptographically, though.
Does Taler do this?
True, but do you really expect them to let you use a central bank digital currency peer-to-peer and not have some way of revoking your access to it? If so, you’re absolutely nuts, LOL.
Define “worked” in this context. You mean their own infrastructure didn’t crash? You certainly didn’t pop down to the store and buying anything useful with Monero 😂
Not that day I didn’t, but I have bought Domino’s several times this month, and I bought my groceries at the beginning of the month.
So do you use some kind of payment app that does a conversion or do you have to manually convert from Monero to fiat currency?
Most retailers don’t accept crypto at the point of purchase so I’m curious as to how this would be convenient enough to use regularly.
There are businesses that specifically sell gift cards to retailers for Monero and when possible I search out and purchase from retailers who accept Monero. Https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com help with that.
Define “worked” in this context.
You can still exchange funds as normal because no necessary components or intermediaries were affected by the outage. Only conventional banking systems.
My point was more that using Monero as an example is probably not the best way to cryptobrah an illustrative point.
I don’t see how you were making that point.
Because you can’t just go and buy real world goods at will as with cash. If there’s ever a Carrington Event, your Monero is worthless in an emergency.
You can use it for all the same things you can at any other time, as I said. Still not sure what your point is.
Lol. How is your crypto gonna work without global peers and internet, friend?
That is not correct, either. The outage even took out decentralized platforms.
Which decentralized platforms did it take out?
Achieving a moneyless society after one big overlong network outage.
A cashless society is so stupid beyond words. In order to create one you must also create a full surveillance society to protect it, and even that would be ineffective to stop it from being hacked.
Just to be clear we are a mostly cashless society and the majority of currency is not physically in existence around the world and somehow it manages to be protected by and large.
The difference is that if someone decides to freeze your cashless bank account they can by a mouse click and you’re destitute. Whereas if that happens in a cash-based society they have to come and get it from you.
well that is sorta my point. I keep some cash on hand but the majority of my money gets auto deposited and debited from there when I pay bills. If someone steals the majority of my money and I have somelike 1 to 10 percent its not a much better situation than them stealing all of my available funds. I mean it is which is how come I do keep a bit of cash on hand.
Good thing jobs pay in cash, oh wait, only shady jobs do that.
How many hacks that generated infinite money have you seen?
Get a conservative business-focused person into the government and watch them give infinite money to business in the form of subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks.
All presidents since at least Reagan and Prolly all of them but FDR has been pro corporate welfare and each one rewarded his oligarchs with generous subsidies…
Call it chips act or aca or covid relief etc… These are transfers from us treasury to the owner class.
This is not a party politics issue, this is the regime policy
Just 1, but it seems to repeat ad infinitum:
Be born rich.
deleted by creator
If you’re against cashless you’re a criminal or a tax evader, which is also criminal.
Like drugs have never been bought on card, and money washed through banks…
It may be the case that people do not want every single step they take to be monitored as it currently is.
You might not have a phone or be charged per use of card.
What a horribly flawed opinion to have.
Amazon didnt pay a penny in taxes where i live, theyre giant criminals yet they dont need to use cash to evade taxes.
Or someone that does not trust a centralised solution as it is easily used to suppress people.
Just pay up, doucher
No
The ability to pay with cash is great just in case a country’s cashless system(s), especially the one you use the most, goes down for any reason. Gives a backup just in case you need to pay for stuff locally like at a store but your digital money is essentially in limbo until the system(s) is/are fixed.
How often does that happen though?
Or… what if the power goes out, you can’t pay with cash or card.
Honestly if this is the best reason to carry cash then we should be cashless.
Why wouldn’t I be able to pay cash without power? If people did it in BCE, I can certainly do it now.
Because the equipment used to record sales uses electricity.
Do you really think the 12yo cashier is going to get out a pad and pen and rithmatic your purchase?
12yo? What’re your child labor laws? Arithmetic? We’re talking simple addition here. I manned a cash register before, it’s doable even without the computer. Just takes a wee bit longer.
I’m biased. I hate digital money for stalkerware.
Taler is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen
Can’t remember which one but credit cards were offline for a time with something and places that still had the carbon paper roller things stashed away took them out and used them. They should keep those things around.
Not sure how much good that’ll be… A lot of banks are giving out cards where the numbers are only printed, I haven’t had one with raised numbers in years.
You could just write down the numbers.
That’s against the rules for PCI compliance
Under no circumstances should you copy a card
are they not allowed now. The thing im thinking about was definately post 2000 but maybe not 20teens
Shop I worked for in 2005… I think … ran cards when the connection was down and took card impressions, and I think the transactions were all auto submitted when the connection came back up.
did they do something special. most places I have been to when the network is down it just does not work.
Serious privacy issues around copying cards. That means the store has to retain a physical copy of the full embossed card number.
There were boxes full of them in the backroom.
Do people still have embossed credit cards? All mine are flat now.
good point. I think embossing went away about when wireless became ubiquitous with it. So they would need to be doing that again.
My friends and I used to call those machines ker-chunkers. 😂
I’ve heard it mentioned as a “fly swatter” in my mother’s tongue.
Knuckle-buster was the industry term, and they were already obsolete 20 years ago…
What good is cash gonna do if the networked cash register doesn’t open anymore?
They have paper and pens that they can track their transactions until the system is fixed.
Somebody’s never worked retail. Yeah, there’s no way they’ll do that. Maybe at a small independently-owned store? Otherwise, there’s no way they’re even allowed to do that!
How are you getting change?
Use exact change?
If we’re going cash only, I’m bringing those coins too.
Simply not allowed for a lot of businesses in my country, either by the government or corporate.
They can do that anyway. It’s called credit.
I’m not in favor of a cashless society but looking at how Apple and Google are pushing their wallets (and how practical it is) you guys need to come to piece with the fact that cash might die with the millennial generation. Most Gen X don’t have / want a physical wallet and money needs to be digital.
With that said, I believe this Crowdstrike fiasco just proved that the biggest threat to IT lies inside the companies themselves and on the managers who decide to use this kind malware without properly understanding the risks. Yes, I’ve said it and I’ll say it again Crowdstrike is malware, anything that messes with Windows at that level is malware, there’s no other description and shouldn’t be allowed by Microsoft to exist.
Im the Xer type with no smartphone and prefers the wallet. I remember so many shows or street people with paranoia would have the horror of government trackers but I find the horror of corporate trackers to be much worse and far to real now.
Yeah, those same people totally paranoid about govt tracker are now carrying smartphones around no problem, how ironic isn’t it? :)
I carry cash and so do many of the younger people I know. It is handy sometimes and happens to be private.
Industry standard solution that protects companies against malware is malware? Any proper AV will have unrestricted access to system. Only other option is for companies to completely lock down your device.
Here’s the thing, malware protection is supposed to deliver protection and one important aspect of that is making sure there’s business continuity… what they did was to completely fuck over their customers in that aspect, they become the problem and I bet that most companies running their solution would never suffer any catastrophic failure this bad if they didn’t run their software at all. No hacker would be able to take down so many systems so fast and so hard.
Yes. It is.
Any system with this level of access to the system should be opensource and tested against actual workloads before shipping updates to prod.
Something like ebpf would make more sense too.
It would be fine if not everyone had the same exact setup. Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Yes, but “cashless society” means one devoid of cash payments. Some countries are talking about getting rid of cash entirely. Cash payments and digital payments both being used in concert is what we have now, there would be no need to “transition to a cashless society” from that to that again, the difference is they want to end cash, entirely, all of it, gone, only digital payments. Thus making “cash” and “cashless society” quite mutually exclusive, actually.
I don’t want a cashless society. That’s a European thing for the most part.
I want a debit card alternative that doesn’t have the same draw backs. I want a solution that doesn’t require proprietary banking apps to use.
I agree, the more widely accepted alternatives both physical and digital the better imo. I’m just saying, when people say “cashless society” they’re talking about that not about what we want.
