Comment by safety1st
21 days ago
How are you going to buy things when you leave home?
In the country I live in, which is a highly online and highly mobile first country, a sizeable minority of businesses no longer accept cash. A few no longer even accept cards.
At these businesses, there is only one way to pay, which is to pull out your phone, and initiate a transaction through your mobile banking app, you scan a QR from the vendor and approve the transfer.
Mobile banking is so ubiquitous that often these businesses don't even have signage outlining their payment policies, or it's tiny and hard to find.
Some banks do not have an online banking website, the only way to access your money and make a payment is to use the Android or iOS app on an unrooted device, or physically go to a branch or ATM.
You go somewhere, you buy, at the end of your meal or whatever they tell you phone only, no card, no cash.
It's prevalent enough that being outside of your home without an unrooted Google or Apple operating system physically on your person is a significant impediment to buying basic things, like a meal.
Apple and Google will, through a variety of technical changes, seek to make this the case in all of the world, and in some countries they'll succeed. So the important question now is: how will it go down in the next 10 years in your country? How far under their control is your society going to fall?
Banking, money and payments. Limiting those in the name of security is how they will get you on everything else.
They will take away cash and cards and there will only be payment apps, on approved secure OSes which you can't "tamper" with (aka install "unauthorized" software like VLC or a Youtube alternative on), or else the payments apps stop working.
They will take away SMS OTP and there will only be TOTP, because it's more secure. Then they will replace the OTP with a facial scan, because it's more secure, people were being social engineered into giving someone those numbers over the phone, etc.
This is all in process. They don't even hide it, they just say it's for security. It is already happening in countries that are highly online and highly phone-centric.
> You go somewhere, you buy, at the end of your meal or whatever they tell you phone only, no card, no cash.
Note that this is likely illegal, even though I'm sure it's very common in certain places, and arguing about legal tender laws is not how you want to spend every meal of course.
But, in principle, in most countries at least, businesses and private citizens are obligated to accept the country's currency to discharge debts. They're free to have an upfront no cash policy, and refuse to do business with you if you try to pay with cash, for example making you leave all your groceries at the checkout counter. But if they claim that you have a debt to them, such as a meal you've already eaten and now must pay for, they must accept any form of the country's currency, such as cash, as a means of you paying that debt off.
It's not illegal where I live. Besides, laws can and do change. As an example of one common misconception: I don't live in the US, but there is nothing in the Constitution, nor in federal law, guaranteeing that you have the right to use cash.
That battle will likely come down to the likes of Apple and Google fighting against one state government at a time. Many will fall.
> I don't live in the US, but there is nothing in the Constitution, nor in federal law, guaranteeing that you have the right to use cash.
They have the right to use cash, even if the vendor chooses not to accept it.
I learned this by trying to pay a fine with coins, which are NOT legal tender like cash is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender
> Each jurisdiction determines what is legal tender, but essentially it is anything which, when offered ("tendered") in payment of a debt, extinguishes the debt. There is no obligation on the creditor to accept the tendered payment, but the act of tendering the payment in legal tender discharges the debt.
I'm sorry for your loss if the Internet ever turns out not to be as resiliant as we thought.
The modern banking system is entirely built on the Internet. Every electronic transaction is verified by Internet calls, and in the past Internet outages have made payment in some cases literally impossible.