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The New York Times has published an interesting article about what the author believes to be the upcoming cashless society:
I’ve spent the past few weeks using Apple Pay, the mobile payments app on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, as much as possible. I sought out every opportunity to press my thumb to the smartphone’s screen to make a payment at a store.
Apple Pay is revolutionary, but perhaps not for the reason most people think. It isn’t going to replace the credit card. The credit card has never been an annoyance, not to retailers, cardholders or the people behind them in the checkout line. (The greatest annoyance remains people fumbling with checkbooks at the last minute.) The credit card will stick around because it is integrated into Apple Pay. That tight integration is also one reason Apple Pay has a good chance of succeeding.
But the real reason it will succeed is that it will replace the wallet, the actual physical thing crammed with cards, cash, photos and receipts. The smartphone has a history of replacing other devices. It has killed or wounded, among others, point-and-shoot cameras, video cameras, tape recorders, MP3 players, GPS devices, wristwatches, daily organizers, maps, alarm clocks, calculators, flashlights and compasses.
Well, maybe. I thoroughly enjoy the anonymity of cash. My credit union or credit card issuing banks don't need to know what I buy or where I buy it. Will cash disappear in thirty years? I doubt it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday December 01 2014, @01:09PM
At least in America:
- There are millions of people without bank accounts, much less debit cards and smartphones needed to use those kinds of methods of payment. Those people are paying in cash, or not at all.
- US dollars in cash are the lifeblood of the illegal drug industry, which is somewhere around 3-4% of the entire US economy (making it larger than many some sectors of the economy, including mining, agriculture, and utilities).
To believe that cash is going away completely, again at least in the US, is to announce that you don't know any poor people well enough to know they usually do almost everything in cash and buy money orders for anything they can't pay in cash.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by curunir_wolf on Monday December 01 2014, @01:21PM
Add to that recent problems with identity theft (Target, Home Depot, etc.). A few weeks ago my card was rejected at the grocery store. Luckily I had another card with me, but some people don't carry multiple cards around, and if some smart phone app was all I had I would have been screwed. It turns out the bank had cancelled it because I had, at some point in the last 6 months, used the card at Home Depot (yea, they should have let me know ahead of time, but that doesn't always happen). I had to pull cash out of the bank to run until my new card showed up in the mail.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 01 2014, @02:01PM
because I had, at some point in the last 6 months, used the card at Home Depot
Could have been Target, you mentioned them, and they got owned.
I've been inside a walgreens when the power goes out, "Attention shoppers can pay with cash or come back later". In an urban area they'd just riot but this was suburb so it was downright civil with people helping each other and sharing flashlights.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday December 01 2014, @02:59PM
When the tornadoes hit here in 2006, nobody had power for a week. Most stores in this part of town stayed closed, even ones that hadn't been badly damaged or damaged at all.
One store did stay open -- they still had an old fashioned carbon copy sign with a pen card reader.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday December 01 2014, @02:46PM
Your ideas are sound but your numbers are bogus. There's no way illegal drugs outsell food. And you obviously have no idea how much coal, oil, natural gas, copper, gold, and other minerals are mined here.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 01 2014, @03:23PM
Oh really?
According to the US census figures for 2007 [census.gov], we mined about $413 billion worth of metals, coal, gas, oil, etc. Assuming some growth in the industry since 2007, a reasonable estimate would be $450 billion worth of mining, which is less than the $500 million worth of illegal drugs that are estimated to be sold in the US annually.
According to the USDA [usda.gov], all farming in the US produced about $175 billion worth of food. If you add in food processing and manufacturing, you get another $300 billion or so, which is still comparable to the size of the illegal drug trade.
That's not to say that mining or agriculture aren't important sectors of the economy, but it does give you some idea of how staggeringly huge the drug trade is.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Monday December 01 2014, @05:57PM
Not to mention the trillions(yes, with an 's') spent on 'the war on drugs'. That in itself should be an indicator on how large the drug trade really is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @09:55PM
> the $500 billion worth of illegal drugs that are estimated to be sold in the US annually.
That number is a wild ass guess. Rand thinks it is much closer to $100B. [rand.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 02 2014, @01:31AM
The drug trade figures math is faulty. They base the price of a ton of contraband on the drug's street price rather than like corn, where they value the corn at what the farmer gets. If they counted corn like they count illegal drugs, consider that when you buy a box of corn flakes, the farmer gets less than a nickle of your purchase. Count dope like corn is counted and it would be a fraction of how it's now measured. Like corn or steel, dope is cheaper by the ton, but government figures don't reflect that.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:04PM
Add to this businesses that don't take credit cards, much less ApplePay/mobile payments. Many tech people only travel to big cities and rarely go out into the rural areas. Once you do travel outside the cities you will run into many problems with mobile payments, and often credit cards. In my travels last summer in rural Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington, I found a LOT of places with zero cell signal. And I found some places that were cash only, and had no intention of moving away from cash. Gas stations, restaurants, etc. - not drug trade. To say the wallet will go away without first experiencing the full market is short sighted. Cash and physical wallets will continue for all but the earliest adopter hipsterss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @09:47PM
> There are millions of people without bank accounts,
And prepaid cards are rapidly filling that void. [consumerreports.org] Social Security now mandates electronic payments so if you get SS and don't have a bank account you get a prepaid debit card. In the last couple of years prepaid debit cards have gone from totally fucking over their users to being nearly on a par with a non-free checking account (which is the best type of checking account that a poor person could expect to qualify for). There are still shitty prepaid cards out there, but now there are some decent ones too. Walmart's cobrand with Amex is probably the best of them.
Us pro-cash people have a lot more to worry about from prepaid plastic squeezing us out than we do from flavor-of-the-day smartphone apps.