Cash is not long for this world

published Oct 18, 2021

Why its demise might refute the negative connotation of "a cashless society".

Cash is not long for this world

In this day and age, it's clear that societies are becoming more and more cashless — paying with cash is becoming harder.  It's also very clear that assholes from States and businesses licking the boot of the State are doing everything in their power to hasten the death of cash.  We call this phenomenon "a cashless society".

"Cashless society" has two ordinary meanings:

  1. A society that prevents you from paying with cash — coins or bills.
  2. A society surveilled to the gills, in which every economic interaction is spied upon, thanks to the privacy and control exploitation possibilities that State-encouraged non-cash payment methods permit.

It's commonly understood by anyone with two neurons to rub together that the aforementioned assholes want eliminate cash to get us all closer to a total surveillance society — with the attendant increase in control that the assholes get from that.

But there's something the assholes didn't consider.  "Cashless" does not imply surveilled.  It does not imply controlled.  It doesn't even imply State-encouraged.

In fact, let me go one step further and suggest this: eliminating cash would be an absolutely awesome thing for everyone on Planet earth, if elimination entails replacement with a money that isn't controlled by the assholes, isn't minted by the assholes, isn't surveilled by the assholes, and isn't diluted by the assholes.

This state of affairs already exists.  There exists sound money, which you can use today.

Think of the Lightning network, or the various privacy-enhancing Bitcoin wallets, or even Monero.  All of these technologies implement:

  • sound, auditable money,
  • controlled by the people,
  • hard to surveil,
  • impossible to censor...

...and otherwise equivalent to cash in every real sense of the word "cash" — save perhaps for the cellulose content.

Heck, you can of course mint your own IOUs — literal cash — to be redeemed at a later date in cryptocurrency form, and if the market says it wants this, then you have all of the benefits of cash plus actual cash.  (The legality of the last idea might be debatable, but that's a legal/metaphysical discussion for another time.)

In this sense, you should be very ready to embrace the cashless society that's already online.

What are you waiting for?