Thursday, February 9, 2017

LOOK MA! NO CASH!

    From time to time we hear about a "cashless society." It's about not using any form of physical money.

    I heard an interview a few days ago with someone who was advocating for a cashless society.

    He had a few main points and then all kinds of examples.

    Now his first main point is that physical money is incredibly dirty so diseases are spread and it costs money to treat diseases.  His other point was that it is extremely expensive to produce coins and paper money. There is much forgery of paper money which really isn't paper anymore as it's made so that it's hard to counterfeit.

    Now he went on to give all kinds of examples of how cash would be replaced and what would be used. He also gave information about the present day use of cash.

    In the Scandinavian countries only 2% of people use cash. Many businesses have signs that they do not accept cash. So at this time much of the trade is done with credit cards , debit cards, phones, checks or other methods such as bit coin which I don't understand.

    In Canada , we've got rid of the penny and now the talk is to get rid of the nickel and if you get rid of the nickel the quarter isn't much good. So you can see where we're going with this. In Canada only 20% of the people use cash.

   Now some people think that trading electronically is exceedingly traceable and so privacy is an issue. Now we can't look at anything without an ad appearing mysteriously to advertise the product. I'm looking at a trip to Fiji so my computer screen always has an ad for Fiji. Things are very traceable now.

    I think that the cashless society is coming very soon. There are some more technical and electronic issues to solve and then they're ready for no cash.

    What do you think? Would you like a cashless society or do you still want to have the money in your hot little hand?