Is it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt?
All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.
Is it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt?
All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.
yeah, it's worse.
Someone trips over a cable and now your region of the world can't recognise that you have any wealth of any kind.
Or, you can get debanked by the state. :)
Hard to do that with coinage- but you can have your coinage destroyed in a fire (or via theft, of course).
I respectfully disagree, but each with their own personal annoyances.
Strips of paper and metal coins have a huge problem with forgery. Metal coins in particular can get very heavy very quickly.
Goats have this issue that they can get sick and die. They also need to be fed. Goats have a massive advantage that while heavy, they can move around on their own. Not easily fractionable though.
Salt is probably the best one in that list. Easily fractionable, not easy to forge. Can be used as seasoning and to dry things. It can get wet though.
You can disagree, that's fine.
But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed.
The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".
But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.
History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks.
A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.
It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.
I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less physical money.
> A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.
If you live in a place where you can be financially screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot more problems than if money is physical or not.
Also, you are disproportionately overstating the issues with digital money (I am still to see an example of a city being screwed because of Internet outage or programming issue). And you are also disproportionately shrugging away issues with physical money (it makes forgery and criminal activity much easier in many levels, to huge damage to society).
fair enough that you prefer it, but personal preference isn't really the point is it?
you said you're "still to see an example of a city being screwed because of an internet outage or programming issue"- so let me help you out there.
july 2024: CHAPS goes down in the UK. that's the system that moves about £345 billion per day between high street banks. same week, crowdstrike takes out banking systems globally. two separate issues, one week, absolute chaos.
2018: visa has a hardware failure across europe. 5 million transactions just.. fail. ten hours. nothing. people standing at tills with money in their accounts and absolutely nothing to show for it.
square, fiserv, tsys - all had outages in the last few years, each one leaving tens of thousands of merchants dead in the water.
last i checked, payment outages cost US retail alone something like $44 billion a year. not a theoretical risk, just tuesday.
oh, and there's currently a ransomware attack on a payment processor called bridgepay that's knocked out card payments for multiple cities in texas, michigan, wisconsin.. still ongoing. https://cybersecuritynews.com/bridgepay-ransomware-attack/
you're right that i'm overstating nothing. these things happen constantly, and when they do, the blast radius is enormous compared to your wallet getting nicked.
the forgery point is fine, i already said physical money has problems too. but a forged tenner affects one person. a downed payment processor affects a country. those aren't comparable problems and treating them as such is what i'm pushing back on.