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Posts: 6,445 | Thanked: 20,981 times | Joined on Sep 2012 @ UK
#11
Originally Posted by juiceme View Post
Banks are lobbying really hard to end use of physical currency for once and for all; one of the stated reasons is fighting against organized crime but I kind of suspect it also has something to do with the cost of handling physical money objects which is not trivial...
You know, once when I was young and naive and influenced by the upbeat socialist sci-fi literature available in my country (which is in stark contrast with the very pessimistic sci-fi emanating from the West), I thought that no cash was a good thing. Why do you need to carry cash when you can have a machine that could identify you "somehow" (I did not work out the details at that time yet) and fetch all the information about you from some central database and transfer the money behind your back. That was long before I found out about credit cards

Mind you my idea was much more futuristic than a humble credit card. I imagined a single ID card or, even better, some kind of biometric identification, so you would not need to carry anything. And the central database would know everything about you. So it could be used not just for paying for stuff, but also for traveling (no passports), job applications (it would know all your academic history), entry to restricted areas... you get the idea.

Now, several decades later, I am no longer convinced it is such a good idea
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