For example: in Canada, the bank accounts of those who protested were literally frozen (for simply speaking out or being critical) and talks of potential CBDCs (aka. used to deduct funds from one’s account as a fine) whilst considering on abolishing cash altogether.
The alternative (for now at least) may be Crypto (online) until they consider that “illegal” in the future penalizing those who are using it, framing that as money laundering or tax evasion, whilst pushing their propaganda of “tap & go is safe & convenient”.
The answers are divided between:
- “Cash is King” (it allows anonymous or “private” transactions between you and the merchant)
- “Contactless” (convenient, but your purchases & transactions are monitored by the state)
Cash is apparently the last bastion of “anonymous” transactions where it doesn’t appear on one’s statement and one gets to keep their money without the state deducting it from their account since a nation’s central bank has monopoly over CBDCs and one’s funds.
That’s not even the end of it: them trying to make BTC or equivalent illegal by making CBDCs the default replacing gold overnight, it would mean all those bills you have are worthless. At this point, the only payment method is CBDCs that are linked to one’s digital ID.
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It is not the anonymity that is important.
It is not having to ask someone permission to spend money like with a debit card, credit card, and even fucking crypto need institutional permission to have access to your power to spend yo money.
anonymity ain’t shit.
Not even just permission, especially given most of these systems are made to operate on your phone rather than through a physical card.
Oops, your phone died? Sorry, no groceries for you! Did your internet connection stop working on your phone? Sooooooooooorry, you’re not gonna be able to pay your bus fare.
deleted by creator
Most can, but they still rely on your phone getting an internet connection later, on your phone being trusted to send data over itself, and of course still require your phone to actually be charged. (Can change if it’s a regular card depending on the issuer though)
Also, if you’re just generally curious about stuff related to offline payments, there’s actually a major security hole that Visa refuses to fix, which allows a device to pretend to be an offline-only card reader, then charge any value to someone’s card, and get away with it, even if their device is locked.
Not really a point in favor of my original argument though, since CBDC infrastructure would require replacing or updating all the readers anyways, and implementing the standards to prevent such an attack, like MasterCard has used for a while now.
Only if the store you’re paying at has Internet.
This is way less of an issue then your making it out to be. In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery or losing wifi?
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable. Its still permissioned, but you’re not buying shit on the street with direct crypto transfers anyway (at-least in the West, outside of crypto enthusiast merchants/restaurants).
In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery
Not too regularly to me, but it happens frequently to most of my friends, and some street performers I know who don’t always have good access to a power outlet, or the money for a portable charger.
…or losing wifi?
I and many other people regularly experience complete cell dropouts when at my local grocery store. No service. (Works fine outside and slightly down the block) We are in a city, not the middle of nowhere either.
There have also been internet dropouts for my local store’s machines, meaning people paying with cash could go instantly, whereas people who only had cards or phone payments had to wait in a massive line since every transaction took 2 minutes to go through.
You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable.
Sure, but at that point I could just get literally any card. I was only commenting on CBDCs, though I suppose the same critiques could apply to direct crypto transfers.
At the end of the day, CBDCs tend to rely on phones to work, and thus can’t work if your phone doesn’t, unlike cards, and especially unlike cash. (given cash relies on nothing but you and the person you’re transacting with believing the cash is real, vs phone payments or even just cards still requiring an internet connection at some point, and power to the reader, plus permission from an external gatekeeper as the cherry on top)
Yeah, both of those things happen to me on a regular basis. If I’m using my phone, it might only last a few hours into the day.
I know the OP asked the hypothetical, but CBDC’s don’t have to replace cash altogether. Also, a CBDC account can be tied to a card. It doesn’t necessarily have to be solely internet-based in principle either.
To your points about internet connectivity: I get it, but most people and merchants are using credit card terminals or tap-to-pay at this point anyway. Even in these rare scenarios where the merchant lost connectivity, you could still send the money over to the person on your battery powered phone with a digital transfer.
My point is that you as an end-user won’t notice much change if the federal government were to transfer their treasury systems to a national blockchain instead of centralized servers and payments via VISA. The issue is in the implementation, and I’m almost certain they will fuck it up and/or have some shady company (re)build it.
As Metallica said, sad but true. Ok, you have all your money in your bank account, but those are literally just 0 and 1s, our economy depends literally in non tangible numbers, and that’s it. And you cannot pay unless the bank explicitly allow it, so your "money’ isn’t your money now.
fuck Metallica
You wouldn’t download a bank
oh yes I would
You canny rascal
In the same way you need permission of your regime to leave the country.
You will not get a passport/ID or whatever if they don’t allow it.
Especially with things like cyberattacks (institution losing access to your accounts), scamming (you lose access to your accounts), power failures (everyone loses access to their accounts), etc.
I mean, I literally have a small stash of money in the closet (some 20’s and a bunch of smaller notes), so that if a semi-major disaster hits, I can still buy any supplies I can find that I need - gas, water, food, a couple nights in a hotel, whatever. Plastic is a great backup system, but it relies on me having my card, my card having enough money free, the merchant having power to run the card, the merchant’s communications working, the system they link into having power and communications, etc. With cash, it’s just “here, take this” and it’s all good.
Definitely, cash is critical
The only private alternative to cash that im aware of is monero. Nothing else is as private as cash.
quantum money lol
Bitcoin and Ethereum both have private L2s.
Yeah but then you have to transactions on the L2. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I know this isn’t the case for RAILGUN on Ethereum, but I’m curious to what the bitcoiners are up to.
There’s this:
If you get your cash out of an ATM, the machine could (I don’t know if it does, but I suspect at least some do) scan every serial number of every bill it gives you. To counter that, you’d need to “launder” it though some other person, the more times and the farther away the better, until it gets spent back into the system, where it can be, once again scanned.
If you get your cash out of an ATM, and then turn around and stick it in a bill receiver at some self-checkout machine, that could possibly be tracked. I don’t think this is hypothetical, I just didn’t find any evidence in a quick search, but the site above shows it happens somehow.
Yes, cash is much better than a card that tracks every purchase, but it’s not completely anonymous, either. And, it takes effort to ensure it’s anonymous. It’s not a given.
Hmmm. Since defacing a bill isn’t a crime, marking out the serial number of every bill you receive would break the chain, except that you’d be one of the very few doing it. That would need to become widespread for it to have any real impact. Oh, but probably the machine would reject a bill with a marked-out serial number.
Even if the bill was scanned when you withdrew it at the ATM and again when you spent it, there’s no way to know if the bill changed hands in the meantime through unrecorded transactions.
The hypothetical tracker doesn’t need to know 100%.
The kind of data analytics that would be used to track serial numbers to determine the parties involved works perfectly fine with probabilistic/incomplete information. The goal isn’t to create evidence for a courtroom, it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
it’s to build a graph of the people that you interact with so further intelligence collection could be planned.
It’s the Finding Paul Revere analysis, and it can get scary.
Coins dont have serial numbers. Time to pay for everything in quarters.
Sounds like pulling cash at a grocery store/gas station may bypass that serial number logging from traditional ATMs?
Not to mention no ATM camera recording the transaction
Those limits tend to be pretty low and on top of that we now have all this footage of you stopping all of these places and not acting like a normal customer. Classic case of looking sus at that point
If you rub out the serial number, I wonder if that would void the “valid for all US debt” designation on the bill… I mean, yeah the bill is damaged but it’s not like you can’t use damaged bills. I wonder how the legal argument would work here.
However, I think they could redesign the next years bill to print serials much larger / several times / encoded some other way. They could probably do it so that there will always be a readable serial, unless you completely destroy the bill.
It’s illegal in the US for sure and it would be worthless but I don’t think a random cashier would enforce it. In Canada you can’t mess with the coins but there’s no law protecting their plastic/paper money
The withdrawal can be done by using another person’s card (instead of your own) making it look like they did the transaction (think of skimming devices implanted onto ATMs that are compromised). However it’s a grey area.
That’s just theft. I mean, how could I use a stranger’s card to withdraw money from my account? How would I get a stranger’s card?
I mean, more of a friends of friends or room mate (not a complete stranger). Like the memes equivalent to “kid uses mom’s CC to spend on fortnite skins” but it’s more on your own circle, withdrawing large sums is too obvious. So, an individual will only make their own family members or friends withdraw small amounts at a time at separate intervals (every few months).
Why is this a question?
“Should people be allowed to keep their rights?” – this is usually intended to spark discussion, but discussing from this pov helps those who want bad things more than those who dont.
Because some people have a tendency to question the validity of things that don’t make sense to them. I could see someone asking, “why even have physical money anymore when everyone uses banking or credit?”
The same deal with privacy, “why should I worry about internet privacy if I have done no wrong and have nothing to hide?” There are always people left out and harmed in pursuit of some form of purisim like those lines of thought.
Yes, absolutely.
Cash is not 100% anonymous though. Vendors see you, cameras record you, you may even have to sign and present id for some transactions.
Bills also have serial numbers on them
Even with cash we’re at the mercy of a country, if they fuck up their economy and hyperinflate it, money is gone anyway.
The only way forward is to carry around stuff that has intrinsic universal value. The currency of the future is potatoes, start stocking up.
And 9mm
Much more durable and portable than potatoes too
They’re harder to eat
And sometimes they decide that the cash you have in hand to be worthless.
Paper products and commodities are a good bet. And though you jest, food and potable water.
Cash is king. Always use cash when possible. I do, and I love it…
I don’t see the benefit for the average person to get rid of cash. If it’s digital it’s trackable, can be hacked and more easily controlled by other parties. Also it allows for banks to charge more service fees.
Cash is not anonymous. The serial numbers are being used for tracking.
If I get cash in change from a vendor who doesn’t know my identity, and spend it at another vendor who doesn’t know my identity, what is there to tie the serial numbers to?
Nothing, they’re blowing it out of proportion.
However, if you put them into a banking machine or deposit in your bank, then serial tracking can become something you should at least be aware of.
Some of your bills in your pocket may come from the vendor A, some may come from an ATM. So the bank knows some of the bills you got.
Vendor B might go shopping somewhere, or deposit his cash in a bank. Or put it in a sorting machine that scans the serial numbers.
You pay B with some bills from A and some bills from the ATM. And now the bank can connect all three dots. The transactions aren’t completely transparent, but aren’t truly anonymous anymore.
At best, B’s bank knows that B had some bills that once passed through your hands. But they have no way of knowing if you actually spent the money at B’s or if there were other transactions in between.
No serials on coins!
In the 80s, my grandmother bought and entire house worth of furniture in quarters stashed in carboys.
There are individuals who “copy existing bills exchanging those for legitimate ones with different serial numbers” (counterfeit) and that actually happens, like for example: North Korea is infamous for producing convincing clones of US$100 bills that look believeable.
Monero XMR is the last bastion of “anonymous” transactions. The issue is actually obtaining it privately.
They’re going to tax/fine you however they want. This is already reality. Its no different from having a bank account or making transfers via Paypal or Zelle. Our currency is already heavily digitized and centralized by governments. Transitioning to CBDCs would just be making the back-end more robust, which I’m personally in favor for. The technology for this has been worked on for about a decade now.
A CBDC would give the government more control over your money. They have a lot of control now, but there is at least a middle man that the government has to compel to comply. With a CBDC, the government would be able to allow/disallow any transaction. Right now, they would have to convince Paypal or Zelle to invalidate a transaction. The on/off ramps to Monero and Bitcoin are the only locations with which the government can exert their power over those currencies. While Bitcoin is not private, it can be a good tool for privacy if used correctly. Cash, however, is still the most private. So I’ll just keep slipping quarters in the keyboard to pay for my online purchases.
Bubba, any intermediary is going to instantly comply with the government laws. They can already allow/disallow any transaction, freeze your account etc. Shit the banks and payment companies we use are likely way more compliant and strict than if it was directly operated by the government because the government is being defunded and breaking down.
So you’re betting your privacy on government inefficiency. You do you.
You’re already giving up your privacy by having a banking account. There’s already no privacy if you’re using paypal, cashapp, zelle, etc or any tap-to-pay. You have to go really out of your way to avoid KYC in 2026.
I agree
Not any intermediary. You can still buy/sell crypto and goods using darknet markets and dead drops. Worst case scenario, you’ll be hiding Tide laundry detergent in public restrooms.
I meant payment processors like zelle or paypal, or banking apps. Obviously you can just use crypto. That’s not going away.
Transitioning to CBDCs would just be making the back-end more robust
What exactly “transition to CBDCs” means is kind of ambiguous, but the way it’s looking is that what we’re going to get is licensing of privately issued stablecoins, which then increasingly get used behind the scenes in payments infrastructure. They passed a regulatory framework for this last year in the US and things have been progressing since then.
I don’t know because no major central gov has made one. Stablecoins arent CBDCs.
Don’t they fill the same role? What would the practical differences be? They compete for basically the same market anyway, so it’s worth thinking about what system is likely to become the standard.
My bad, I think I misread your comment, but yeah for the end-user it would be basically like what we have now already with digitized USD, perhaps more useful, since payment processors could allow you to send it on a blockchain and pay with VISA. The way I’m viewing CBDC’s is a hopefully more robust upgrade on SWIFT.
Biggest difference is it would be a currency actually printed by the treasury on a blockchain instead of backed by dollars held by a mysterious company based in the carribean (Tether) or an American FinTech company (USDC), or algorithmically pegged by the native blockchain token (USDS/DAI). If public, it would mean money printing would be a lot more transparent, but I seriously doubt a CBDC would be on a public blockchain. It might be easier/faster for banks to do REPO loans and crediting accounts in emergencies. Theoretically, it makes UBI feasible too.
To be honest, I’m far more interested in what a BRICS CBDC would look like. The Unit would end the petrodollar.
I think they will stick with companies like USDC and just keep a leash on them. These stablecoins have freeze functions, the government can take charge of those if they want, and it’s potentially a major source of demand for US treasuries in an environment where US debt keeps looking like a worse bet to everyone, since the legislation mandates full reserves and specifies what those reserves can be denominated in.
Not that any of this is especially a good thing imo. The value of crypto is permissionless money, stablecoins are not that and have centralized controls, at least the popular ones the law approves of.
Practically, I agree with you but the definition of a Central Bank Digital Currency is a currency issued by the country’s treasury. Maybe they come up with some hybrid scheme where the Fed will credit Circle’s accounts and then they print more USDC, but that would for sure require legislation and be an immense responsibility given to a private company.
DAI/USDS are what you’re looking for in a permission-less stablecoin, but unfortunately the founder has back peddled to chase making money over principles. I believe folks have been turning towards a project called https://www.liquity.org/ but its no where the size and pedigree that MakerDAO was.
actually obtaining it privately.
Seriously have you considered mining it? You mine Monero with CPU, not GPU. The algo is literally designed so that GPUs and ASICs offer no cost advantage.
You can mine in a decentralized, distributed pool with distributed payouts… from the GUI wallet , no less!
Yeah I want to, and been discussing it with my FIL, but I’ve been having a hard time finding what hardware would be best. I used to mine Ethereum back in 2017.
Monero is best mined on a Ryzen CPU
They want to keep track of everything so people pay their taxes…I mean a certain portion of the population that is.
Cash in the United States is not as private as it seems. Eventually the bills will be scanned at various points through the financial system and the serial numbers are logged by these authorities. It may take some time to collect the data versus being able to view a blockchain, but cash isn’t as anonymous as it appears. And with a vastly decreasing amount of cash in circulation, it makes it a lot easier for the Govt to track its usage. It’s still the best option even considering cryptocurrencies.
Another reason for the decline in cash is that as the U.S. debt increases, the economy will have to inflate along with it, and it’s much easier to manage increasing inflation in an economy without physical currency. If things get really bad and conditions exist that would cause a bank run, well, good luck doing that if you can’t have cash. Run off with a copy of the database or something.
You are wrong about debt leading to inflation, that’s monetarism and has been thoroughly debunked.
I’m so tired of hearing people spout QTM bullshit. Good on you, stranger, for calling it out.
I know we’re meant to be discussing this from a privacy perspective, but my first thought whenever the topic of eliminating cash comes up is that, at least where I am in the US, it’s tantamount to euthanizing the homeless. The vast majority of unhoused folks I know (which is a lot, including myself for a terrible but thankfully short period of my life) get most of their necessities (particularly food) by buying them with cash they’ve earned through various means, rather than charities, food banks, soup kitchens, etc. And only a very small percentage of them has any sort of bank account and/or a device to manage digital currency.
But also privacy, yes. Cash is king.
Who needs cash when you have bottle caps
the entire money system of fallout boy doesn’t make sense; surely making the bottle costs more than the caps alone.
Caps in fallout are backed by water. It’s not about how much it costs to make them. It’s like how the dollar used to be backed by gold.
wasn’t nixon also a president in the fallout universe? would he too not divest from the gold standard in universe?
I’m not crazy brushed up on my fallout lore but I know that the general timeline is the exact same as the real world but the fallout universe splits when (in real life) the microchip was invented, instead of that (in the fallout universe) they focused on atomic nuclear energy instead of making computers smaller. I think it’s generally the same even after as far as presidents go, there are mentions of Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, etc. but it might be similar to the Elvis case in universe where there’s not much information left on these people so it’s hard to learn about and the average person in the wasteland probably barley understands what a president is
… he average person in the wasteland probably barley understands what a president is
it tickles me pink that the kind of general ignorance that bethesda baked into the 22nd century fallout world is already manifest in the 21st century real world. lol
I’m not saying the dollar was/wasn’t backed by gold in fallout. That was the case in real life up until they separated them at some point. I’m just saying that’s how caps work in the fallout universe. Their value is based on a specific amount of water you can trade them for.
that seems to imply that there’s sources of water under centralized control/record to that can speak authoritatively to price of water per bottle cap.
does that exist in game universe?
Here’s some links if you want to read up on it.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Bottle_cap
The Hub merchants selected bottle caps because of two factors: First, the technology to manufacture them and paint their surfaces had been mostly lost in the Great War, which limited any counterfeiting efforts: The paint used, machining, and metal type all have to be very specific in order for a bottle cap to be genuine.[8] Second, there is a limited number of bottle caps, which preserves their value against inflation to some degree.[9] Finally, the Hub merchants in New California could support it as a common unit of exchange by backing it with water.[10]
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hub#Guarantor_of_bottle_cap_currency
With who?
One of the towns in the earlier games. I only played the ones after 3 so I don’t know for sure if it was part of the game mechanics but it’s in the lore.
Fallout boy?
another senior moment. lol
