Bums?

re cashless society. it's sort of a meaningless concept.

the medium might change, (ie bytes instead of paper) but all the attendant issues will remain the same.


(initially there will be some pluses and minuses but they'll balance out in time. money is an expression of something else, it is not inherently valuable (unless it's made of 100% gold )

eth0 wrote: »

The fact that there are transaction fees at all is a massive problem. It could all be decentralised and free.

If you have one massive company like paypal taking a cut out of every transaction or what have you then eventually they will own 100% of the money. Once their monopoly is secure they'll cut their staff level to the bare minimum and spend very little

The problem is finding someone to fund the infrastructure, payment processing is an international business now so there's no obvious reason for national governments to invest. Irish banks still charge mad money for international payments.

I think if we do go fully cashless it'll be a long time from now but it'll soon be unusual to use cash. AIB already charge for every ATM withdrawal, making it cheaper to use a credit card day to day.

Credit cards are currently inconvenient for small purchases because if the time taken to enter a PIN and wait for authorization, when Wave & Pay comes along you won't need to enter a PIN for every transaction. With better broadband speeds it should be possible to process PIN payments quicker as well.

Cash is expensive to accept because it's hard to secure and transport and it takes time to count, it also had to be counted almost every time it changes hands.

eth0 wrote: »

'wave and pay' is also terribly insecure. if the terminals are easy to get then a few well placed ones could be picking up cards and charging small amounts that would go unnoticed for quite a while.

banks have been charging for atm withdrawals since the year dot. maybe there will be a successor to bitcoin or something that will run without dedicated infrastructure. it has to be possible but i don't think bitcoin the way it is will be it since theres a lot of problems with it

The terminals themselves will probably be relatively easy to get, but you'd presumably need a valid merchant account to get connected to a payment processor and deduct payments.

It'll be interesting to see if someone can come up with a way of picking pockets over the air.

I haven't used bitcoin but it would need some way of handling face to face payments to take off in daily use.

The banks have always charged for withdrawals but they always waved those charges for most customers, getting charged €20-€40 per quarter will be new to most people. Although they'll probably charge 20 cent a pop for Wave & Pay as well.