*****
Swedes are wary of going cash-free
Wed, 2018-04-04 06:46
#1
Swedes are wary of going cash-free
Wed, 2018-04-04 06:49
#2
See
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/being-cash-free-puts-us-at...
I think there's a learning opportunity here for Canada.
Wed, 2018-04-04 06:55
#3
Absolutely. Nowadays bank sites track even our tiniest spending and this information can be used to track people who have committed no crime. It is especially frightening for poor people who are always judged for their behaviour and choices.
Wed, 2018-04-04 11:18
#4
Not to mention, above and beyond privacy concerns, the issue of what happens when there's a solar flare/programming glitch and Interac goes down.
Wed, 2018-04-04 11:37
#5
progressive17
Canadian money is completely worthless whether you have it in cash or a database (read "bank account"). It is only the stupidity of the world which gives it any value at all. Which is about 77 cents US at the time of writing.
Go take a gander at the "Bank of Canada Balance Sheet" as punched in to Google. You will see that on the other side of the ledger from "Currency in Circulation" is Canadian government debt, denominated in the same currency as the "Currency in circulation" on the other side!!!
For our currency to be worth something, it has to have a value which can be converted into an external commodity, whether it is another country's currency or precious metals, etc, which is how it used to be as little as 15 years ago.
So this is kind of extremely funny. If there is no government debt, there would be no underlying value of the Canadian dollar. And you want to pay off the government debt? With what?
Since Mulroney's FTA, Canada has been looted. This is the end result. There is nothing left.
Wed, 2018-04-04 11:47
#6
Canadian money is completely worthless whether you have it in cash or a database (read "bank account"). It is only the stupidity of the world which gives it any value at all. Which is about 77 cents US at the time of writing.
Well, as worthless as Canadian money may be according to some reckonings, the fact remains that, for everyday purposes, if you have some, and you go into a store, you can buy things you need. If you don't have it, you can't buy those things.
And if you have it in cash form, it might be more difficult for some shadowy authority-figures to keep tabs on your spending habits, than if your using some sort of cyber-card where every transaction is recorded at a centralized database.
Wed, 2018-04-04 13:36
#7
Yes, if Canadian money were actually worthless or nearly so, one would need wheelbarrows of it to buy a few groceries, as was the case towards the end of the Weimar Republic.
Wed, 2018-04-04 17:45
#8
I'm not sure I'd be eager to get rid of cash -- nothwithstanding when we wisely ditched the penny -- but in some respects this reminds me of the pushback when various governments switched from an old-school gold standard to fiat currency. We're moving from "without gold, it's just paper" to "without paper, it's just ones and zeros".
That said, if babble had more contributors and users, I'd expect at least two or three evangelists here extolling the virtues of cryptocurrency right about now.