I’ve heard about this; is it possible? Would it really stop all crime? Would it be a good thing?
It would not stop all crime.
It might switch some crime from muggings to embezzling, thus a possible reduction in assaults.
There have already been cases where people without cash are forced at gunpoint to the nearest ATM to withdraw money. That would probably increase if more people were cashless.
And Bernard Madoff committed his crimes without cash – didn’t seem to bother him. (And I believe that the amount he stole is probably more than all the muggings & street robberies of cash in the whole country, all year long.)
Don’t we mostly live in one now? I only use cash for very small (under $5) purchases, and for tips.
You can get mugged for your mobile phone, your iPod, your shoes, and your credit cards. One suspects that a wallet of cash is viewed as a bonus rather than the main game by most street criminals.
Proper crime - i.e. organized, might still prefer the anomimity of a bag of cash, but I imagine that they have long since moved onto much more sophisticated money laundering mechanisms to move money about. Selling drugs might be interesting. I can’t imagine many casual users being prepared to put their cocaine habit on a credit card, or direct debit.
And as above. The really serious crime doesn’t involve cash at all, and never did.
Going cashless does make the black economy harder. Doing jobs cash in hand to avoid tax gets more difficult. So if you count petty tax evasion by self employed tradesman as a crime, then that one will be hit.
I resisted the cashless lifestyle for years. I finally broke down and got a debit card, because I like shopping online. Usually, I put the tip on the bill, which I pay with my card.
I used to take out a certain amount of money each week, for walking around money. I still spend about the same amount of money…but I haven’t withdrawn any cash for a month, and I still have about half the cash from last month’s withdrawal still in my wallet.
My bank recently sent me (unsolicited) a new debit card. This one has a gizmo (to use the technical term) which allows me to pay sums less than £10 by just waving the card over a sensor. No PIN, no signature, just a millisecond scan of the card. I haven’t used it yet, because I’ve yet to enter a shop fitted with the sensors. But that’s just a quibble. At some point relatively soon, I’ll be able to conduct pretty much every transaction I ever make without handling coins or notes, if I so choose.
Alternatively, users of London Transport have an Oyster Card. Again, it’s a sensor-read card that you just wave over the right spot on the ticket barriers to pay your fare. Although it can be pre-loaded with a monthly season ticket, many people including tourists use the pay-as-you-go option: you load it with cash which is steadily deducted as you travel. The point is, most newsagents and corner-stores in London already have the facilities to put cash *on *the cards - it would presumably be a very simple matter to reverse that and take cash *off *the cards when buying e.g. newspapers, pint of milk, lunchtime sandwich.
So I can see two different means by which I would utterly abandon cash in the near future. Whether that’s a good thing is a different matter. A lot of people at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale are reliant on cash, and if there’s less of it flowing around, that’s going to be bad for them. For example, homeless people selling the Big Issue are going to find themselves struggling for custom. And I doubt they can get themselves card-readers.
I do that sometimes, but generally I leave cash because I want to make sure that the server actually gets paid; I don’t trust restaurant owners not to rip their employees off.
There are already small convenience stores around where the in-store sales are just a front for the under-counter sales of drugs, cash for food stamps, etc. Those stores would be glad to charge your debit card for ‘groceries’ that are actually your drug of choice.
Except that it would leave a record, so they’d have to declare that income on their taxes. As opposed to the current cash-only sales. They’d probably charge an extra tax-reporting fee for non-cash sales.
[Locally, tow truck operations used to be a cash-only business. The legislature finally passed a law requiring them to accept checks & credit cards (they fought it tooth & nail). So now they do, but they charge an extra ‘convenience’ fee for that. Many people say that’s a fee to cover the extra cost of having to actually report this income on their taxes.]
It’s another way for the banks to make money off every transaction, not just their existing card services. You may still pay the same, but the business will have another little bit snipped off their margins by the banks… I’m not surprised they want all transactions to go through their systems!
What about businesses that don’t want to pay the fees associated with credit card or debit card purchases? Or businesses for whom it is not practical to switch over to a cashless system?
There are fewer and fewer of those every day.
Mostly on topic, if a bit technical, a cashless society could also potentially allow negative interest rates. We’re hard up against the zero lower-bound with interest rates, but we theoretically wouldn’t have to be with a fully electronic currency. The idea has been thrown around in the last year, but it’s not going to be implemented anytime soon.
You obviously haven’t looked at a credit card bill lately! And since those are the people with the infrastructure, that is what would be used for a ‘cashless’ society. And I’m sure they would figure out some way to stick fees & charges into the process.
Casual transactions would be a lot more difficult. How do you make a five-dollar bet with your buddies on the football game in a cashless society? And what if I forget my wallet at home and a friend spots me for lunch: Presumably, he hands the cashier his card for both of our trays, but how do I pay him back?
One possible way: As cell phones gain more functions and features, maybe synch up your phones to make the transfer using the sensor read technology that **amrussel **mentioned upthread.
They might have an app for that. 
Sure, but they still exist. If I want to go buy some strawberries from a farmer in a rural area I better bring some cash because he can’t take a credit card. Or if I’m going to the state fair and want a corny dog.
The businesses who don’t want to or are unable to switch over to credit and debit cards will lose their customers to businesses which are able and willing to switch.
Eh, you just buy him some beer, Mountain Dew, or Cheetos, depending on what he likes, and call it good. Or buy his lunch the next day. My husband, daughter, and I all swap money around in our accounts, but we don’t incur any fees or other charges for doing so.
Presumably, if we did go cashless, there would be some method of transferring cash for such situations. Perhaps a “transfer machine”, insert two cards and tell the machine how much you want transferred from one to the other. Another option would be to do it online, as in a web site where you enter the number of each card and what you want done. I don’t think being homeless or getting paid under the table would be an issue, as some people have mentioned. It would be something like the gift cards widely used today, except they’d be universal and not limited to one store. You could have any number of cards with any amount of cash on them, or you could take multiple cards and transfer the balances to your perma card.
Okay, so, Tamara, did you mean cashless, or moneyless?
Cashless? Hell no. I mean, I can still steal your iPod or your car. Seedy deals would just move to bartering. It might be a little more difficult, but it’ll happen. You might even end up with a few things subbing in as a de facto currency.
Moneyless? Still hell no. I think it would reduce crime–after all, moneyless implies that basic necessities aren’t barred by cost–but it still won’t change human nature. And some things are inherently scarce; those things will remain valued, and at risk for theft.
That’s the whole point of the idea - those MPs want to go around confiscating and destroying X% of everybody’s money each year, without dealing with the hassle of finding out where the owners hid it.