When society completely transitions to cash-less, what happens when the power goes down? End of the world?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I mean, it kinds seems inevitable to me. Books has become e-books. Cash is becoming digital transfers. China has done it. The west is mostly doing card-swipes. One day, that transition will be complete, and cash would be phased out.

What happens then? Think like the power outage in Spain recently. Some people had cash. But in 20-40 years. There might not even be any cash in existence. What then?

What if, instead of a few hours, its a few days? Or weeks?

I guess riots break out all around the world?

(Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this? Where are the backups? Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?)

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trinsec@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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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  - then_three_more@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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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  - CHOPSTEEQ@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    As if money would be people’s biggest concern of the power wentout everywhere for two weeks.
    
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  - Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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  - Guidy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    This is silly. Absolute worst case, we go back to bartering for goods and services. There will never be a need to panic.
    
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jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I guess riots break out all around the world?

I feel like this idea that people are just going to riot and do mass violence is some right wing fear.

Most people, most of the time, are pretty social cooperative creatures.

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- exposable_preview@slrpnk.net ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I disagree and think it depends on where you live
  
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yournamehere@lemm.ee ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
look at sweden…hands out papers telling you to have cash for week…but doesnt accept cash anywhere. we all can learn from the dumb nations.

no cash means government controls who you can give money to. beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed. if you cant get a phone, you cant have money. if you dont have a home or money you cant sign a phonecontract and so on…

cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.

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- throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  beggers,homeless ppl, panhandlers… are all doomed
  
  In China, they have Wechat Wallet that people can give money to homeless people. Even homeless people have phones.
  
  cashless societies are nothing but a nasty techbro dream.
  
  It is nasty and dystopian, I agree. But its not really a fantasy anymore, its real, the dystopian future is on the horizon. Soon, it’d be too late to stop the dystopia.
  
  At first, mass surveillance cameras is only in China, but then even supposed “democracies” like the UK have millions of cameras. Then China became mostly cashless, that will also eventually happen to western countries.
  
  The dystopia is coming. You can’t stop it.
  
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  - octobob@lemmy.ml ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I visited Australia last year. There were surveillance cameras just about everywhere. Even on rural highways to catch speeders
    
    www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/safe-city-cameras
    
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  - yournamehere@lemm.ee ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    heard that china pandler story too often by now. durinf sleep ppl tend to dream but reality will come they will wake up. maybe we are a cashless world by then…i wont stop it…but reality will. in a world of nations fighting each other digital money cant work.
    
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daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
In Spain credit cards still worked during the outage.

And the proposal for digital Euro already contemplate an offline mode for transactions.

As long as the power loss doesn’t last days and batteries die out there would not be a problem with that.

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- catch22@programming.dev ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Living in Spain here… How? Internet, Cell Phone Towers, Everything was down, no one was accepting credit cards in my nieghborhood. The only thing they were accepting were IOU’s (if you knew the store owner) and Euros.
  
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  - daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Center spain. Until 6pm we didn’t had internet or electricity. But most TPV still worked.
    
    Here is an article explaining why: xataka.com/…/resolviendo-grandes-incognitas-apago…
    
    Basically there’s two ways. The SAI of the supermarkets keep them going. Or they had the advanced models that accepted offline transactions.
    
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Manticore@lemmy.nz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What happens when an abused person has to escape a partner/parent who controls all the money? Where do they go, what food and board are they getting?

How do small traders set up garage sales and marketer stands, especially if they don’t want to give cuts of their money to Edtpos and Visa?

How do those with impulsively/memory issues (such as ADHD, dementia, and teenagers) manage the abstraction of their money, leading them to accidentally overspending/overdrafts?

How do you spot a stranger in need a bus fare home?

How do we support the street artists and buskers?

…I don’t like the idea of cashless. My country already uses eftpos and visa as the norm (so ofc we all pay those American copies their fees). But while wide accepting of the card is good and useless, true cashless has issues of usability. It’s not just ‘something something government tracking spending’.

Vulnerable people fall through the gaps, and it means people make a lot more consumer transactions and a lot fewer personal ones.

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- theblips@lemm.ee ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Cards destroyed so many lives but if you say it out loud people think you’re a tin foil hat nutjob
  
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  - Manticore@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Cards themselves have been very useful. They’re much l8ghter and harder to steal money than carrying hundreds in cash in your pockets.
    
    It’s cashless that is a concern, not the existence of cards.
    
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- throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The answer is: We’re fucked.
  
  People were warned of mass surveillance, and here we are, cameras everywhere, over the entire world. Everything is tracked. Same thing will happen to paper money and coins.
  
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  - Manticore@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Cash is expensive for stores to manage, count, and sort. That’s the actual reason they want it gone, not tracking. Sure, we’re being tracked, but that’s not the point. Thanks to our phones, our personal lives have already been completely disseminated.
    
    Cashless is about making things easier for businesses that struggle with handling cash. A cashless society acts like consuming goods from those businesses is the only reason money exists, and that’s wrong.
    
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mmddmm@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
People will adjust. What happened on Portugal and Spain was caused by excessive centralization of the power grid, not by digitization. If somehow we can’t keep the centralized grid running anymore, we will break it down, and bear the extra costs for that.

Also, the sequence of a catastrophe is almost never a riot. Where do people get the idea of riots? People just go and do the right thing.

Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this?

The technicians did.

Where are the backups?

You mean generators? Lots of people have those.

Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?

I would understand this question if you lived in 1925, but by 2025 you should know the answer already. Are you so blind about everything that needs electricity that you think disaster would come from the lack of money?

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Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Microgrids with solar panels on every residential home is key
  
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- MoonlightFox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Tbh, I heard it caused the UK government to actually revise it’s plan for such a scenario as well.
    
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rayyy@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
A cashless society means your overlords will have COMPLETE control of your lives. Of course the oligarchs will have secret avenues of cash for themselves.

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untakenusername@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
solar power and batteries exist too you know

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- jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Solar panels are enough for power during the day.
  
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- qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Cashless requires power all the way from PoS to wherever the servers live.
  
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  - CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Not 100% true: I know some places in Norway that have unreliable internet connectivity, where 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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qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Books has become e-books.

To some extent — but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.

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kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
even if you have cash, what you gonna use it for when tax registers are electronic ? nobody is going to sell anything

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- GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  fun fact, businesses operate without power by using battery operated calculators and inventory pads.
  
  every minute a business isn’t in operation is a cost to the business.
  
  I worked at Super Walmart decades ago. power went out for the whole town. the main HV lines collapsed after a tornado.
  
  mgmt marked all the ice cream down 80% and we were still checking customers out on generators.
  
  reduce risk, increase profits, mitigate losses. the only bad opportunity is the one you ignore.
  
  by god we sold almost every tub of ice cream in an hour.
  
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  - kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    this is kinda hilarious lol okey understood
    
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MoonlightFox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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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- jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  This is bullshit. Everywhere I was in Scandinavia, you could buy with cash. If one shop didn’t take cash, you just went across the street to the other that did.
  
  Even Scandinavia isn’t stupid enough to become 100% cashless
  
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  - MoonlightFox@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Oh, I must have explained wrong.
    
    Yes, everywhere is legally required to accept it still. But the usage is really low, and there has been talks of removing the requirements of accepting cash.
    
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jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
This happened in Ukraine when they were attacked with a cyberweapon (NotPetya) by Russia in 2017

If you want to know what happens, I highly recommend listening to this episode of Darknet Diaries

darknetdiaries.com/episode/54/

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- KingJalopy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I know nothing of or even care about IT stuff but I fucking love this podcast.
  
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Grappling7155@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Debt and ledgers.

Anthropologist David Graeber made a compelling case that this was the system in many different societies and places before cash. There’s nothing stopping us from doing it again. His book talks extensively about how each society handled repayment, the role of violence, interest, social hierarchies, etc.

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it_depends_man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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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- Grappling7155@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  For some reason it’s become commonplace to think that barter is what preceded and/or would replace cash if we ever lost cash.
  
  Anthropologist David Graeber has written a more compelling account of history with examples in a variety of societies showing that debt and ledgers are what came before cash and I’m thinking a system based off of them would probably be strong contender for life without cash.
  
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
If society collapses, what good would physical cash be other than toilet paper?

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seeigel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Cigarettes and other things of value will become cash again.

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- Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Luckily, there are Nuka-Cola bottle caps…
  
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jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Fortunately this would never happen, for the reason you listed. Cash is king and always will be.

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It won’t ever go 100% cashless. There’s too many coins and paper money floating around.

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- scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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vane@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Technically in countries with fiscal memory devices you can’t buy anything from store that have no power today becaue of taxes.

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makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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

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- Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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)
  
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thisfro@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Why do you think everything will become completely cash-less?

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- Yermaw@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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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  - jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    That will never happen
    
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BilboBargains@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
In that case we have to rely on Elons white power.

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- Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The power isn’t infinite, but it’s enough.
  
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