Would a cashless society mean the end of illegal drugs and other crime ?

bitcoin is not untraceable and you're an absolute idiot if you think it is

It wouldn't wipe it out completely but it would make it a lot more difficult for them, especially if they're not tech savy. I haven't used cash in ages. I don't miss carrying all the small change around. In China you can actually pay for items with your face now.

They literally could not. By law Revolut, n26, etc etc have to be transparent to the government.

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It's only a matter of time before society goes cashless as most young adults don't use cash, so it'll be much easier to implement in time. The pandemic has also accelerated this as more and more transactions in general are cashless. A cashless society will not mean an end to organised crime, in fact it could lead to an increase in crime.

Genuine question - what happens when IT systems go down (like the Ulster Bank debacle of a few years ago)?

In relation to the specific question, No. Bitcoin (which I still can't get my head around to be honest) seems to be the new choice of currency for certain large scale criminal enterprises albeit governments around the world seem intent on legislating its use albeit proving very difficult. There's also I suppose the uncertainty around its viability. Large scale Traffickers have proved quite resilient in coming up with creative ways to operate.

I do think however areas such as the Black economy will be curtailed substantially as we move more and more to a cashless world with every financial transaction verifiable as such.

Online / Digital banks have tightened up also becoming far more rigorous in monitoring large transactions.

Certainly the day to day lower ranking street dealers will thankfully find it more challenging and that's not a bad thing.

and you know what's completely untraceable? CASH changing hands. The average criminal will not know how to make a bitcoin transaction untraceable.

You have this mindset that cash and crypto are somehow competing when in reality they have their own separate purposes. With crypto you can transfer millions and millions of currency easily over countries and borders, something you cant do easily with cash. Cash might be good for low level criminals and dealers, but at the high level they're using cryptocurrency.

So yeah it just depends on your operation, and how savvy you are with modern ways of circumventing laws. The 'average' criminal is an idiot, but a very smart one will know how to hide their trail through cryptocurrency.

This is priceless. You don't like handling cash for fear of getting a disease yet you have no problem punching in your PIN code into a keypad that hundreds of people have also touched that day. If viruses can adhere to cash so easily they can adhere to any damn surface you touch in the course of your daily activities. Door handles, counter tops, a book/magazine in a bookshop, items of clothing in a shop that have been picked up and put down again, every fcuking item in the supermarket that has been, you know, put on the shelves BY HAND. A super spreader of viruses 🤣

Mostly every post on this page of the thread is flagged, any random can do it.

I've accidentally done it when the site started back up, I though it'd be like the mod cards and it'd link to a whiny mod post but nope I just accidentally added a second spam flag to someone who's post didn't seem like there was anything wrong with it.

Can't even tell who's a mod anymore.