This is the main reason I get $2 bills instead $1 bills from my bank now. The latter is a lot more useful for picking something up from the corner store or for a small tip, simply because the value of the dollar bill has gone down.
What's the motivation for a store to not accept cash? Is it possible that cash has a > 3% "fee"(or whatever stores pay for cc processing) when you roll in cash registers, armored car services, employee handling time, theft, etc?
From the article: "Businesses are experimenting with going cashless, hoping to speed up transactions, combat theft and create a safer environment for their employees."
As the owner of a brick and mortar business (a bar), I can tell you that we do about 60% cash transactions. I just put in an ATM to try to up that number. I'm tired of paying close to 3% fees on cards.
We have had some cash theft from employees but to eliminate that would require 100% credit, which isn't an option for me. A big part of our clientele is service industry, and they're bringing in their cash tips and spending them.
I never thought about cashless places doing it because they were worried about theft from employees. I assumed it was to prevent thieves from coming in and robbing the place.
(Makes total sense though that employees would be much more likely to do the stealing)
Indeed, some of those things are fixed costs, that might be hard to justify if cash has dwindled to a small percentage of sales. You still have to maintain (i.e., probably rent) a cash register, even if it contains no cash.
Cash is cheap. Losses were around 0.1% and costs were <1% when I did retail eons ago. Might be higher in risky environments due to insurance, worker’s compensation, etc.
Yeah, exactly. I take out $400 at a time on an ATM and then use it at farmers markets and stores over the next few weeks. I only use my credit card for refilling my transit pass, online ordering, and medical bill pay.
No one needs to have a full record of every purchase I make in real time.
There's another commenter below confirming this. The article mentions criminals switching to crypto, which misses out those with an increasing mistrust of financial institutions who prefer crypto.
I wonder if the criminal use case has not been reduced that much by crypto, as I imagine cold hard cash that's acceptable anywhere globally is preferable. Crypto may be good for some transactions, but cash will be king for a long time yet.
That part of the article made no sense. Most crypto currency is entirely traceable. It's literally an immutable distributed ledger of every transaction ever made. Sure there are things like tumblers that try to redistribute coins, but who knows how well they actually work.
Depends on how you use it. If you own your own private keys and aren’t transacting from a hot wallet like Coinbase then yes your transactions are public but your identity is not tied to your address
I closed my bank accounts in 2011. Cash is my currency of choice for most things. I use bitcoin for long term savings. Cold storage is safer than a bunch of cash under the mattress.
There is a strong use case for that, for my personal spending and utilities it would be very inconvenient for me to convert cryptocurrency to cash without an intermediary bank account.
but business-wise many of my vendors have been able and willing to take cryptocurrency especially in the last 3 years.
I've executed many legal agreements paid in crypto. Its made it extremely practical for Americans to have offshore corporations again since the bank account part became difficult but is no longer needed for international commerce and asset holdings.
Yeah, those routine inflationary / deflationary episodes that can see the Bitcoin-denominated price of your services (just to use an example) rise and fall by 400% in a year, easily? Very practical! These intermediate bank accounts will soon be a thing of the past.
> the Bitcoin-denominated price of your services (just to use an example) rise and fall by 400% in a year
Yeah its a bad example because thats not whats happening at all. Criticisms are possible but yours are so far off that I guess these are called weak strawman arguments? I don't think this was intentional as its seems more like a precompiled argument that isn't really a response to this situation so I will tell you my experience with international vendors:
When legal contracts are executed a payment method and pricing index is determined. The payment itself does not take a year and there is usually no catalog of goods and services that are "bitcoin-denominated", for our agreements. When the actual payment occurs we use the agreed upon index to use the dollar price, paid in crypto and this takes a few seconds to execute and even in the volatile crypto markets usually nothing is happening in this time frame.
The cryptos typically involve:
Bitcoin most frequently using Tradeblock's XBX index, or CME's index, or Coinmarketcap
Ethereum most frequently using Coinmarketcap, and lately Tradeblock's ETX index
random token that one of us has large consolidated ownership of
stablecoin like DAI, USDC, Tether
This is conceptually no different than any legal contract that use shares for payment. You get a glimpse of this common transaction method when companies are acquired for "cash and stock". For the recipient, it is all about the tolerance of liquidity.
There is a curve of liquidity for different asset classes, with US treasuries and non interest bearing dollars being the most liquid on the planet, and a different velocity of liquidity needs for recipients.
In a different use case that uses stablecoins there are no price fluctuations and no index price negotiations involved.
Its been more convenient for some of our non-US businesses because it is difficult for banks to open bank accounts when the beneficial signers are Americans. This is due to FATCA and the high compliance burden for non-US banks, as well as FBAR filings for the US person. But the whole concept of bank accounts have been leapfrogged and international commerce continues unabated.
> When the actual payment occurs we use the agreed upon index to use the dollar price, paid in crypto and this takes a few seconds to execute and even in the volatile crypto markets usually nothing is happening in this time frame.
Ah, so unlike the person using it for savings that you're replying to, you're basically just paying someone for the overhead of getting that money to a real bank account, through a novelty payment mechanism, to avoid regulators.
I mean, that's a step up, at least. Good luck with FATCA Mk II, Cryptocurrency Edition.
its not really avoiding its just more convenient as the private sector itself has made it more difficult since they don't want the compliance burden of opening accounts for American signers
we'll comply with any applicable regulation. if we have to start filing FBAR's for on-chain or off-chain custodial cryptocurrency holdings we'll do it, while also seeing if there is an applicable exemption, while also having our lawyers write to the Treasury during the comment period to suggest they not pursue this route
Funny thing is, FDIC is insuring you against the bank collapsing, not your bank accounts from theft. I don't think you can even do that, since protecting your deposits against theft is supposed to be the service your bank provides.
You can insure cash with most homeowner's policies, though.
FDIC insurance only counts towards bank accounts. You aren't going to get any reasonable interest rate in an FDIC insured account.
Keeping your money in bitcoin may be a poor idea, but any reasonable long-term investment strategy isn't going to be FDIC insured, so that isn't really part of the calculation.
I wish I had known about bitcoin back then. It would have made things a lot easier.
I didn’t learn about bitcoin until 2015, and even then, I had very little disposable income to experiment with. Still don’t have much income. Definitely no salary.
When I get paychecks, I have to either get them cashed at the bank that issued the check, at a grocery store, or through a friend or relative who has a bank account.
What do you mean by “real growth”? No interest earned?
What I want is the ability to safely store value.
Saving money in a bank account wasn’t working for me, because monthly fees took literally my last pennies, which led to overdraft charges.
Saving money with bitcoin hasn’t just maintained and stored value for me, it has also grown tremendously in value.
In my case, it’s risky to participate in the traditional financial system anyway, so I don’t feel like experimenting with an alternative system is any more or less risky.
(Disclaimer: you should talk to a CFP for personalized advice.)
> What do you mean by “real growth”?
Stocks have real growth. It is "real" because your stock is a share of a company whose employees are trying new ideas, teaching each other, making customers happy, etc.
> ... it has also grown tremendously in value.
Bitcoin had a lot of initial growth[1] indicating it was undervalued, and there was a ton of speculation. If you got in early and weathered the storm, congrats, but the market should have bitcoin correctly priced by now.
In general, a currency doesn't grow in value any more than a lump of gold can grow in value.
That it looks like it does is nominal growth, it means your benchmark, e.g. USD, is losing value.
Your bitcoins will get you more USD in 10 years, but the prices of goods and services in USD will increase as well, so it's a wash in terms of spending power.
So you're losing money on inflation, and your long term savings are in one of the most volatile assets on the market that derives its value largely from illegal and gray-market transactions.
I wish you luck. But frankly you'd likely be better off putting your long term savings in Boeing stock, and that's saying something.
The $100 bill would obviously be more popular nowadays. For a lot of people on here, since they were kids, the purchasing power of that $100 has fallen to about $50. You have to carry twice as much currency to carry the same amount of purchasing power around.
Every time you swipe your credit card innumerable processes and algorithms begin to parse and reevaluate your personality profile. Every purchase you make changes their opinion and assessment of your shopping habits and needs.
Google may start showing ads for pet food if you bought something at PetSmart. Your bank may start sending you car loan ads if you spend at the repair shop. Everything has a side effect.
Cash is great because it is very simple. I gave you money for product, no one knows anything else. Sometimes it’s nice not to be data mined for buying a cup of coffee.
Yeah, but I get paid for that in a combination of cash back and points.
I limit my credit card information sharing as much as the privacy preferences allow, but I'm not about to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in value because Google might show me an ad I won't click on anyway.
I had the same concern and tracked it. In my family’s case, making cash our primary spending vehicle reduced our 2018 spending 7% vs 2017 when we were card focused.
The value of the credit card point is about 2% best case. Points exist to create a fomo attachment to the card.
Not the commenter but I had the same experience changing from debit card to credit card. Even though I always paid off everything at the end of the month, I'm now buying more things simply because it's so easy.
Before I only had smaller amounts on my debit card, so if I wanted to buy stuff online I had to first move money from another account. This extra step made me more conscious of my spending and I would imagine starting to use cash would have a similar effect.
It's pretty obvious and well known that if you disassociate the cost of something from the actual monetary value, people find it harder to conflate the two.
This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.
You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!
If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.
I only care about meeting the bonus spend requirement. Chasing even 5% on certain category spend usually just incentivizes overspending.
I’ve been lucky to be on some promotion where I can pay my rent for free using a credit card, so usually I just do that or buy prepaid Visa cards, which then isn’t tied to my identity when I transact with it.
Here in Brazil is legal for companies to charge a bit less for products if you pay in cash, because they don't have to pay 5% of the transaction for a bank when you're paying in cash.
In the US, Visa & Mastercard now allow a merchant to have a surcharge for card purchases (their policy changed in 2013), but whether you get hit by this will vary by state. And of course a merchant may build this surcharge into their prices so you don't see it. I have seen small restaurants (usually pizza places, for some reason) offer discounts for cash. If it's a local business you can always ask if a discount for cash is available.
Google is busily collecting all the world's money in advertising profits while everyone tells themselves they have an individual immunity.
Advertising is generally an attack on subconscious cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are famously nearly undetectable by the user of the brain even if they are aware of the bias, and, just as famously, brain users find themselves fully convinced that the bias must not be present if they cannot detect it.
We have all the knowledge to tell us that we are very unlikely to be an exception, that we are almost certainly being personally manipulated by advertising, and yet our experience so powerfully tells us that we are immune that we simply don't believe it.
In terms of data mining: credit card companies seem to be the lesser of infinite evils. At least I can see what data they collect and they pay me for my data. I would still prefer they didn't do anything with my data, but at least I can opt out at any time by paying cash. A lot of companies take my data, I don't know, and I get nothing for it.
Where would that be? On every trip to the US I have exchanged cash, EUR to USD, resulting in mostly $100 bills which I've used everywhere, sometimes even for rather small purchases, and there's been no frown upon that (after few purchases I also get my hands on smaller bills which are also more convenient).
Maybe it depends on where you are making your purchases, but I've rarely seen a $50 bill unwelcome at retail in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or the office park neighbourhoods of California.
>>>> One recent study, by a pair of economists in Asia, found a link to aging populations. It seems that older folks — perhaps because they’re less inclined to trust numbers on a screen — have a greater affinity for cash.
It may also be harder to be swindled out of your money by telemarketers, if you ditch your credit cards. And dealing with anything online or on a phone can be physically laborious and error prone for the elderly -- then you have to re-learn it when it changes.
For me, cash is actually a hassle. As a part time musician, I occasionally get paid in cash -- often a $100 bill, preferably but rarely more -- and then I have to deal with the bills and coins until it's finally spent.
After hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the blackout lasted for months. I assume no one was getting any money out of ATMs or using credit/debit cards or Apple pay or anything like that. You don't have to distrust the financial system to want cash on hand. You just need to have a rudimentary understanding of the fragility of the current system. I simply cannot see a cash less society ever existing while the only alternative is powered by electricity. Electricity can fail way to easily.
Also, I travel on business frequently, I have my wallet and a passport wallet, and I keep some cash in each - in the passport wallet enough to get a cab out of the airport to a hotel, where presumably I can garner a room using my rewards points or have my company wire me money.
I keep a few hundred with my hurricane supplies. After Hugo, I was without power for 10 days (which is nothing compared to what PR went through), and having some cash on hand would have made that time easier.
After the hurricane, for the next 2-3 days there were no working ATMs (that we found) in San Juan. Luckily, we had around 120$ in cash handy which we carefully spent. After that we had to queue up for 1h+ in the torrid sun at one of the few ATMs which had any cash. If I remember well there was a limit of 100$ withdrawal.
Paying for various expenses with apple pay feels downright magical. I love it and use it constantly. But I don't want currency to go away outright. There are definite perks. The biggest one for me is that I'm much more cognizant of much I'm spending when I have a physical representation of my money in my pocket. I'm less inclined to overspend when I have physical cash.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadThings in general are more expensive. So over time usage of higher denomination bills will increase.
Eventually a $100 bill is equivalent to what a $20 bill was when I was a kid, and those were common then.
As the owner of a brick and mortar business (a bar), I can tell you that we do about 60% cash transactions. I just put in an ATM to try to up that number. I'm tired of paying close to 3% fees on cards.
We have had some cash theft from employees but to eliminate that would require 100% credit, which isn't an option for me. A big part of our clientele is service industry, and they're bringing in their cash tips and spending them.
(Makes total sense though that employees would be much more likely to do the stealing)
Cash is cheap. Losses were around 0.1% and costs were <1% when I did retail eons ago. Might be higher in risky environments due to insurance, worker’s compensation, etc.
No one needs to have a full record of every purchase I make in real time.
I wonder if the criminal use case has not been reduced that much by crypto, as I imagine cold hard cash that's acceptable anywhere globally is preferable. Crypto may be good for some transactions, but cash will be king for a long time yet.
but business-wise many of my vendors have been able and willing to take cryptocurrency especially in the last 3 years.
I've executed many legal agreements paid in crypto. Its made it extremely practical for Americans to have offshore corporations again since the bank account part became difficult but is no longer needed for international commerce and asset holdings.
Yeah its a bad example because thats not whats happening at all. Criticisms are possible but yours are so far off that I guess these are called weak strawman arguments? I don't think this was intentional as its seems more like a precompiled argument that isn't really a response to this situation so I will tell you my experience with international vendors:
When legal contracts are executed a payment method and pricing index is determined. The payment itself does not take a year and there is usually no catalog of goods and services that are "bitcoin-denominated", for our agreements. When the actual payment occurs we use the agreed upon index to use the dollar price, paid in crypto and this takes a few seconds to execute and even in the volatile crypto markets usually nothing is happening in this time frame.
The cryptos typically involve:
Bitcoin most frequently using Tradeblock's XBX index, or CME's index, or Coinmarketcap
Ethereum most frequently using Coinmarketcap, and lately Tradeblock's ETX index
random token that one of us has large consolidated ownership of
stablecoin like DAI, USDC, Tether
This is conceptually no different than any legal contract that use shares for payment. You get a glimpse of this common transaction method when companies are acquired for "cash and stock". For the recipient, it is all about the tolerance of liquidity.
There is a curve of liquidity for different asset classes, with US treasuries and non interest bearing dollars being the most liquid on the planet, and a different velocity of liquidity needs for recipients.
In a different use case that uses stablecoins there are no price fluctuations and no index price negotiations involved.
Its been more convenient for some of our non-US businesses because it is difficult for banks to open bank accounts when the beneficial signers are Americans. This is due to FATCA and the high compliance burden for non-US banks, as well as FBAR filings for the US person. But the whole concept of bank accounts have been leapfrogged and international commerce continues unabated.
Ah, so unlike the person using it for savings that you're replying to, you're basically just paying someone for the overhead of getting that money to a real bank account, through a novelty payment mechanism, to avoid regulators.
I mean, that's a step up, at least. Good luck with FATCA Mk II, Cryptocurrency Edition.
we'll comply with any applicable regulation. if we have to start filing FBAR's for on-chain or off-chain custodial cryptocurrency holdings we'll do it, while also seeing if there is an applicable exemption, while also having our lawyers write to the Treasury during the comment period to suggest they not pursue this route
You can insure cash with most homeowner's policies, though.
Keeping your money in bitcoin may be a poor idea, but any reasonable long-term investment strategy isn't going to be FDIC insured, so that isn't really part of the calculation.
FDIC is meant to protect deposits in banks. If I don’t need to trust a bank, why would I need FDIC?
I started with bitcoin in 2015.
The main reason my life savings is almost nothing is because it came from almost nothing. $50 here and there isn’t much, but it’s more than zero
I didn’t learn about bitcoin until 2015, and even then, I had very little disposable income to experiment with. Still don’t have much income. Definitely no salary.
Edit: silliness aside...
When I get paychecks, I have to either get them cashed at the bank that issued the check, at a grocery store, or through a friend or relative who has a bank account.
I request cash for payment, when possible.
At least your savings aren't losing to inflation, but this strategy has zero real growth and carries a tremendous amount of unsystematic risk[1].
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unsystematicrisk.asp
What I want is the ability to safely store value.
Saving money in a bank account wasn’t working for me, because monthly fees took literally my last pennies, which led to overdraft charges.
Saving money with bitcoin hasn’t just maintained and stored value for me, it has also grown tremendously in value.
In my case, it’s risky to participate in the traditional financial system anyway, so I don’t feel like experimenting with an alternative system is any more or less risky.
> What do you mean by “real growth”?
Stocks have real growth. It is "real" because your stock is a share of a company whose employees are trying new ideas, teaching each other, making customers happy, etc.
> ... it has also grown tremendously in value.
Bitcoin had a lot of initial growth[1] indicating it was undervalued, and there was a ton of speculation. If you got in early and weathered the storm, congrats, but the market should have bitcoin correctly priced by now.
In general, a currency doesn't grow in value any more than a lump of gold can grow in value.
That it looks like it does is nominal growth, it means your benchmark, e.g. USD, is losing value.
Your bitcoins will get you more USD in 10 years, but the prices of goods and services in USD will increase as well, so it's a wash in terms of spending power.
[1]: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history
So you're losing money on inflation, and your long term savings are in one of the most volatile assets on the market that derives its value largely from illegal and gray-market transactions.
I wish you luck. But frankly you'd likely be better off putting your long term savings in Boeing stock, and that's saying something.
Due to dollar cost averaging, this is actually a very good thing!
The other major question is what BTC's value is going to be in the long term, when they retire and transition from a net saver to a net spender.
Can’t say the same about most other hodlers, however
lol if poster above started storing money in Bitcoin in 2011 there's a good chance they are the wealthiest person in this thread.
Cashier: "That will be $3.86"
Me: [hands over a $5 bill, a dime, and a penny]
Cashier: "..."
Cashier: "..."
Cashier: [hands back a dollar and a quarter]
Google may start showing ads for pet food if you bought something at PetSmart. Your bank may start sending you car loan ads if you spend at the repair shop. Everything has a side effect.
Cash is great because it is very simple. I gave you money for product, no one knows anything else. Sometimes it’s nice not to be data mined for buying a cup of coffee.
I limit my credit card information sharing as much as the privacy preferences allow, but I'm not about to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in value because Google might show me an ad I won't click on anyway.
The value of the credit card point is about 2% best case. Points exist to create a fomo attachment to the card.
I’d love to see a well done research paper to get a sense of the expected value of cash vs credit.
Before I only had smaller amounts on my debit card, so if I wanted to buy stuff online I had to first move money from another account. This extra step made me more conscious of my spending and I would imagine starting to use cash would have a similar effect.
This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.
You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!
If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.
With cash I check my wallet, and think “that’s $50, I have $300, and need to go shopping and get gas later”.
Just the act of reconciling what I have on hand defers many purchases. And deferrals stop many from happening!
That said, I’m not a caveman and have a credit card. I just don’t use it without planning or having an emergency/unplanned event.
I’ve been lucky to be on some promotion where I can pay my rent for free using a credit card, so usually I just do that or buy prepaid Visa cards, which then isn’t tied to my identity when I transact with it.
Banks fought heavily against this law, of course.
https://lawpay.com/about/blog/can-you-charge-a-fee-or-surcha...
(disclosure: I used to work for a sister company of LawPay)
Advertising is generally an attack on subconscious cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are famously nearly undetectable by the user of the brain even if they are aware of the bias, and, just as famously, brain users find themselves fully convinced that the bias must not be present if they cannot detect it.
We have all the knowledge to tell us that we are very unlikely to be an exception, that we are almost certainly being personally manipulated by advertising, and yet our experience so powerfully tells us that we are immune that we simply don't believe it.
From the fees that you paid them to begin with.
Where would that be? On every trip to the US I have exchanged cash, EUR to USD, resulting in mostly $100 bills which I've used everywhere, sometimes even for rather small purchases, and there's been no frown upon that (after few purchases I also get my hands on smaller bills which are also more convenient).
The most anonymous way is cash. Cash is King.
It may also be harder to be swindled out of your money by telemarketers, if you ditch your credit cards. And dealing with anything online or on a phone can be physically laborious and error prone for the elderly -- then you have to re-learn it when it changes.
For me, cash is actually a hassle. As a part time musician, I occasionally get paid in cash -- often a $100 bill, preferably but rarely more -- and then I have to deal with the bills and coins until it's finally spent.
Also, I travel on business frequently, I have my wallet and a passport wallet, and I keep some cash in each - in the passport wallet enough to get a cab out of the airport to a hotel, where presumably I can garner a room using my rewards points or have my company wire me money.