Will the Future Global Society be Cashless? -- War on Cash

Cashless payments are on the rise. They are fast, easy, and convenient. Worldwide, cashless transactions have become the norm. All over the western world, banks are shutting down cash machines and branches. They are trying to push you into using their digital payments and digital banking infrastructure. Sweden Is On The Verge Of Going Completely Cashless. India and China are following the trail. The Swedish central bank, predicts that cash transactions will make up less than 0.5% of the value of all payments made in the country in 2020 Now in China, in places like food courts and some McDonalds, you cannot use cash. Welcome to Atlantis Report. A Cashless society is a vision for the future. With the rapid increase in technologies ranging from debit and credit cards to technologies like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, hard and fast cash is becoming redundant and thus a day is not far when we will do away with cash and checks. And thus this society which doesn't use cash is also termed as check-less society. Talking a bit further, the obvious advantages are:- Firstly, we would able to track our money right to the last cent, penny or paise which we find cumbersome with currency notes and coins. Finally you won't lose 25 paise buying a commodity which costs ₹ 75.75.( Americans and Europeans won't mind that much as they are still able to use their cents and pennies but still who hates convenience) Secondly, convenience. It's so liberating to not desperately counting your money in front of the shopkeeper. Safety. You don't risk losing your money and in case even if you lose your debit card or phone, no one can misuse it without your pin code or even better fingerprint(maybe even without your iris). And even better you can simply block your cards promptly and thus no one can use the cards even if they are hackers. You can obviously not block someone from using hard cash. Go green..! Not just green it would free up quite a bit of man power and natural resources which are utilized in minting money. Disadvantages- One would sorely miss the smell of freshly minted notes and the reliability and comfort hard and fast cash provides. Sure, physical cash is just a vessel of the perceived value we as a society have agreed upon. There is nothing stopping us from doing the same with bits of code stored in data centers. It might be difficult in societies like India, China, Brazil, where lots of people still only accept cash, but that will change soon enough. Mobile paying in the US is a hippie’s toy. In China, it is the main currency. So yeah, cashless is viable as long as all parties of the transaction agree to it as an excellent method of accounting for and transferring value, just be careful not to be too eager and eliminate 10% of your cash currency overnight as India did, let adoption spread naturally as it does in China . In China, there is no complete cashless status, but a cashless system is approaching. Nowadays, Chinese people are shopping, saving money, and transferring money, and all these behaviors have no cash participation. Instead, they are using Alipay and Wechat. In China, fund flows in the two digital ecosystems mentioned above that integrate social media, business, and banking, and are operated by two of the world’s most valuable companies. This contrasts with the United States, where many companies are charging fees for the payment process and handling the payment. Western bankers and credit card company executives are facing the same anxiety: Without banks and credit card companies, payment may be cheap and easy. Payment Apps such as Alipay and WeChat have rapidly become omnipresent forces in China’s consumer economy, with 520 million and 1 billion monthly active users. According to the data of payments consultancy AIT Group, the two systems jointly traded $2.9 trillion in transactions in 2016, accounting for half of all consumer products sold in China. Alipay has signed agreements with a number of payment processors in the United States. Some taxi drivers in New York are offering passengers this payment option. Alipay said its expansion aims to help Chinese tourists, but few in the payments industry believe it will stop there. In addition, Chinese consumers are saving more money on payment apps. In 2013, Alipay began to provide money market accounts. By last year, it had built the business into the world’s largest money market fund with a total value of about $243 billion. For the U.S.bankers, this is another pain point. They have always held customer savings and used the funds to make external loans to make a profit. If U.S. consumers follow Chinese people, banks will have to find other (and possibly more expensive) sources of funding. In short, even in China, money is not from Alibaba or Tencent; it must be loaded from a bank account. Although the threat is real, U.S. bankers have enough time and choice to implement it. Banks need to try to integrate their payment systems into social media platforms and e-commerce platforms instead of having technology companies do all the work and get all the rewards. We're almost already there, at least in most Western countries. Coins and notes are mostly just physical tokens that represent a virtual currency, they're no less dependent on electronic systems than a credit card, or PayPal is -- a few big electromagnetic pulses in London, New York, and half a dozen other places (well, trickier than that since the critical data's all shielded and redundant, but you get the idea) and the cash in my pocket isn't worth anything more than what's in my bank account, on my credit card, etc because it's not backed by anything. That's not really a problem, fiat currency doesn't need to be backed by anything more than the country issuing it, but it highlights that the coins and notes are unimportant -- we only keep them for convenience and familiarity. As we've seen recently in Greece (and to a lesser extent elsewhere over the last 7 years), for short term problems (a few days or weeks) it's essential to be able to have enough cash to live off if there's (for example) a run on a bank -- however the cash is only worth anything during that period because it's expected that the economy will survive that blip. I cashless society is possible but not desirable. It is a cold hard reality that the solar storm in 1859 (when there were 1.5 billion people in the world) brought down the newly created telegraph network as sparks were shooting out at operators. Such a storm would cause trillions of dollars in damage, far worse than any cyclone or hurricane. In 2012 (when there were 6.5 billion people in the world), a similar size solar storm as 1859 missed the Earth by six days. The loss of ability to conduct routine transactions even for a week in a modern urban area would make a lousy situation nearly catastrophic. There is actually a kind of competition between the USA and Euro Zone to increase the value of circulating banknotes. €380 billion: banknotes of 12 national currencies in the year 2000. $564 billion: Circulating USA banknotes in the year 2000. €681 billion: Initial Euro-zone production of banknotes. €806 billion: Circulating Euro banknotes at the end of the year 2009. $942 billion: Circulating USA banknotes at the end of the year 2009. €1,171 billion: Circulating Euro banknotes at the end of the year 2017. $1,571 billion: Circulating USA banknotes at the end of the year 2017. Although the ECB has elected not to include the €500 banknote in the new series, they have ordered more than enough €100 and €200 banknotes to replace the € 500. Many people believe governments are trying to reduce the value of circulating as it is easier to track what their citizens are doing, but in reality, only Sweden and Norway are reducing their circulating cash. so Should societies go cashless? We ordinary citizens do not make these decisions.they are made in dark smoke-filled rooms then the order is passed on to the media to make people think they asked for the action. Highly-paid spin doctors seem to have control of the thinking of the masses. If you pay attention to this thing they call trending we have millions who live by the code of monkey see monkey.It is a little late to worry about the future as you have minimal effect on your future. I am deeply suspicious of this whole notion of going entirely cashless. Think about this from another angle. What if the power grid fails? If even from a natural disaster or terrorist attack. How is a cashless society going to handle that? Think about how social media platforms have progressed. Everyone has been enthralled by this newfound power to connect to the world and share ideas and have new ways to do business. But; Have not the creators of these fantastic new tools thrown us all under the bus, so to speak, by abusing their newfound superpowers by making banks by selling our private information and data? What makes you think for one minute that a utterly cashless system is safe? And then there is AI, artificial intelligence. This technology is already progressing at an alarming rate, and we have never had the necessary conversations about the regulation of it. A cashless society will also become a society where government plays a more prominent role as tracking bribes, and illegal payments will be impossible. In a country like India, where cash is still the king, struggles to control corruption, the move to a cashless society would mean a massive changeover. In a country like Sweden, where much of life has become cashless, it becomes increasingly difficult for merchants and people still wishing to live in a cash-payment society to even receive banking services. Not surprisingly, Swedish banks are slowly turning cashless. What we are now saving and investing are now binary digits. In a world, however, where even the most secure sites, like the NSA or Yahoo, are not above being hacked, the prospect for a new and much more dangerous type of digital crime is obvious. Cashless depend on IT for handling payments. In a world without cash, everyone needs to use services provided by banks and credit/debit card companies. Thus, secret service agencies can monitor and observe all money transactions. If you go shopping, you‘ll need to use some sort of banking/cash card or a smartphone with a payment app. Obviously, IT security would become an even more critical issue. All payment service providers would probably charge their customers for each money transaction, but shops may offer to cover these costs to attract consumers. We all will be dependent on (central) banks and governments. For example, if the FED decides to introduce negative interest rates or a bank decides to charge a new fee, nobody can avoid this problem. Hence, politics needs to introduce new laws and regulations to ensure trust by all parties and protect customers. Another example might be the limits of how much money you can transmit in a payment. Since every financial transaction is based on cashless payments, it is much easier for the individual to keep an eye on all her expenses and incomes. But if your smartphone battery were empty or you forgot to take your cards with you, you‘d face a severe problem. Thus, biometrics will become an essential technology that enables a customer to use biometrics for authorization and authentication instead of digital means. Today, some small shops, single entrepreneurs, or shop owners cannot afford to provide cashless payment to their clients. It will also make their life much more complex, which is usually not an issue for big(ger) companies. The government may regulate the market to address this challenge, such as limiting fees and costs. Supermarkets or gas stations will automate their shops so that all items are electronically identified and charged. Let us pray that there is no issue with the transaction software. It might be challenging to deal with system errors. Who really wants to live in a world where Russian hackers have invaded the financial system? This was The Atlantis Report. Please Like. Share. And Subscribe. Thank You.














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