Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say

It highlights the dangers of a mono culture as well.

Most importantly though, I remember my history professor who always said, "follow the money!" Do the CEO and the board have to pay (either in money out of pocket or time served in prison) for these problems (outages / oil spills / global warming / what not)? If not, what incentive do they have to make the likelihood of these problems dial down to zero?

I like this article

https://archive.ph/1ekmk

Amen.

Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added.

Cash is also the only payment system I can think of which is truly “private”. I think this is important too.

Cashless societies are dangerous purely for reasons of privacy and freedom. The ability to trade without government oversight matters. I am appalled to see government run services, hospitals, and stores near me start to refuse cash. That shouldn’t be legal.

Not to mention, cashless systems like Visa and Mastercard and PayPal are subject to private overlords that may scrutinize or ban your transactions.

It highlights the risk of a fragile infrastructure.

The things do not fallback but rather propagate causing an avalanche. The only alternative to electronic payments which always boil down to some form of VISA or Mastercard card, is cash.

I found this page [1] interesting in regard to cash supply in Sweden, as it is a country always reported with a high affinity to online payment and statistics [2] (from 2019) seems to support that statement.

[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...

[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/17307/paying-with-cash-europe...

I still use cash at a few small businesses who don't take cards because of fees and management overhead.

Perhaps if we capped fees and made accepting cards (or any type of electronic payment) more of a utility then it wouldn't be so cumbersome and costly.

Hear, hear! There are no outages, hacks, etc... when using cash. I use credit cards as much as anyone else but also use money at every opportunity. Shops need to use collect on delivery as a form of payment too.

It certainly shows the dangers of non-rigorous testing before transmission and non-rigorous testing before acceptance, but first-to-market and ignoring technical debt will remain the business mantra.

The cash is subject to inflation and poor central banking decisions. To be really safe, let’s just go back to a barter system. Just bring five eggs to the pub and get a pint.

Actually the ultimate fallback is force.

So to really diversify you should stock up on weapons and ammunition and gather a group of likeminded people and train together in a fortified location.

Of course, that is likely to have its own issues.

Shows the dangers of infrastructure running on Windows. There are ways to build resilient systems that can survive shit like this. Look at the internet. Look at the phone system.

People always have to learn it the hard way.

For a lot of people new to HN or may not remember, from 2014 - 2018, the whole Silicon Valley and tech industry, included but not limited to HN were ALL for cashless society. Pages and Pages of comment on HN were all about how great cashless society would be.

And Apple wanted to be a big part of this. In 2015 Tim Cook said he wants a cashless society by 2025.

>"Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society"

No shit Sherlock. It takes pure genius to guess that we've had, and will always have technological / infrastructure failures.

For our particular case politicians who are pushing for elimination of cash are either criminals or brain dead imbeciles. Not sure which case is worst.

The bitcoin network managed just fine.

Tick tock next block.