We should totally go the way of In Time, maybe without death, though.
We should totally go the way of In Time, maybe without death, though.
Because one catastrophic event is equal to all of them right? Because your ability to spend wasn't impeded in one event it never will be? You're not accounting for the fact that there are people who live in areas outside of major cities. Was I inconvenienced in my major city? Not really, but people in smaller areas could have been. Also the fact is that most of the stuff that I needed I could get from a business which was right up the street. If I needed something that they were out of I would have had to either barter with physical goods with someone that had what I wanted or give them physical currency.
Also as someone who lives in NY currently Sandy wasn't nearly as devastating to the local way of life as say ... Katrina in which there was mass looting, huge shortage of supply for basically everything, etc.
I always pay for everything with my bank card, but I understand that there are more people than criminals that rely on cash. :/
Yea.. people would get paid in "real" currency such as silver or gold coins but you could take it to the bank and buy electronic currency for it for online shopping or to use with your credit card. Carrying a purse with gold around wouldn't be very convenient and safe after all. And yes, gold coins would be the most valuable obviously.. there's also silver and if the smallest silver coins are still too expensive, I'm sure there are less valuable precious metals to make the smaller coins from.
The benefit from this to people is fairly obvious. Right now, lets say you have $1000. The economy is bad, country is in dept, so the powers that be decide they will print 10% more money. Thats a real practice by the way and done often. Maybe not that much at once but still. Now your $1000 is only worth $900. You still have the paper bills or the same number in your bank account but it can buy 10% less. If there is war or a disaster, that money could be worth less than toilet paper.
But if you had 10 gold coins worth $1000 now, they'd still be worth roughly $1000 no matter what happens.
Last edited by mmocc089ef6a74; 2012-12-22 at 09:38 PM.
Cash allows tax evasion, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.
"In this day and age"?
You should try travelling. The world is very different from US.
How many purchases people do in the world using plastic cards? 1%? 0.5%? Most likely even less.
There are many disadvantages of moving to FULLY electronic currency. One day you can wake up and realize that your "money" were blocked, and your friends would not be able to transfer money to your blocked accounts. This could happen for various reasons. Blocked by bank because of unpaid credit, blocked by technical mistake, blocked by your government.
Electronic currency means serious breach in privacy. All of your payments will be visible to a lot of people. To banks, to government, to your wife that was curious about your mistress, to your wife's lawyer that convinced the court that evidence of your infidelity can be found in your payment log, to a random hackers, etc.
If you like electronic currency you can use do it right now. But world is not ready to switch to strictly electronic payments yet.
That's as ridiculous as saying electronic currencies are needed as backup in case of a fire.
---------- Post added 2012-12-23 at 12:06 AM ----------
If you were in, say, Hurricane Katrina or your home was demolished in the Japan earthquakes, there was no cash left in your home... and if there was it certainly wasn't accessible. In fact, your only savior would have been if you kept it with the bank in electronic form.
How's that for irony?
---------- Post added 2012-12-23 at 12:07 AM ----------
If you're so concerned with privacy, there's a private sector solution for that.
We need to switch our national currency to bottle caps, or solid gold Spanish doubloons. Maybe a combination of the two with a conversion rate of 10 bottle caps for a doubloon.
2014 Gamergate: "If you want games without hyper sexualized female characters and representation, then learn to code!"
2023: "What's with all these massively successful games with ugly (realistic) women? How could this have happened?!"
I'd call that justice, personally.
At any rate, the sentiment that a vast number of people in the world don't deal in (and don't have the infrastructure for) electronic currency still holds true. Moreover, hackers being more easily able to steal vast sums of money (as their will be a greater incentive to do so,) or fabricating money out of thin air and injecting it, would be a major problem, in addition to "acts of god" like hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, tornadoes, and the like wiping out power for extended periods of time, preventing people from purchasing things because, in essence, their money no longer works.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Tell me, what Would make the world go around then? How would you get food? Nobody would produce, well I'm sure some people would still work but a majority would do nothing. And the world would end up even more selfish than today.
But let's pretend everything went on as usual.. How Would you decide who has the right to products?
Personally, I'd like a personal jet, how would we be able to cope with demands for things without pissing off someone else and then avoid anarchy.
Last edited by mmoc2cd64d3072; 2012-12-23 at 12:31 AM.
A big reason would be because it would be near impossible to transfer funds between persons. Any business off the grid would not be able to accept money. Strip clubs would not work - or any place where frequent tipping is customary. Privacy disappears.
Penalties would likely be incurred to alleviate some of those problems. I dunno, I just don't think we're ready for a system like that on a personal level. For businesses, sure, why not! But they're already at that point.
I use cash to buy things like below $5 and use my card on everything else.
Flaw in your logic, Drug dealers and Cartels use Electronic Money all the time. Some even pay taxes, it helps legitimize the money. Say you are a drug dealer, you would be smart to own a business as well, the business makes a profit based on drug sales, but on paper it is the service provided. It is very hard to prove that the money is earned from illegal methods.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
The better question is why do we even have currencies at all in this day and age? Money is simply a game that people choose to play. A small portion "wins" and gets to be at the "top" and the rest struggle to be in the middle or at the bottom.
Money causes more issue's than it fixes (famine, crime, poverty, power, greed, death, ect..). The problem is people are raised with money and don't know any other way of existing, So it's easier for them to stay with the current way of things.