But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher tech and more convenient, but it can have significant privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way, but sadly it's probably never happening.

Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking about food.

Does it? What about weather that stops the ATMs being refilled? Takes a lot of weather to bring down satellite internet...

I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.

It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.

We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.

Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.

Going to the US feels like going backwards in time in many ways. Banking, public transit, healthcare, education.

A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said “it feels half finished”

Yeah I had the weird experience in 2020 of using tap to pay at several places where the server had never seen it used before.

Haha, right. I was using tap to pay at the petrol pump in Botswana in 2016.