What about property tax?
As I’ve noted before, we have a little something called “The First Amendment” in this great nation. There’s nothing illegal about marching for change.
Cite that this actually happened?
I don’t buy the “it will reduce crime” argument. Bernie Madoff and the other Wall Street cheats dealt in electronic currency, not singles and twenties.
Besides, how am I supposed to tip someone at the nudie bar while using a smart phone. 
Like many government programs, it targets the poor criminal and leaves the rich criminal untouched. 
Hell for allowances with kids. We moved my kids to cashless allowances, they have check cards - but they are tweens - wouldn’t have worked at 8. Also, I have a few hundred boxes of girl scout cookies in the basement. I’m not sending out six year olds with credit card machines.
Just wave your phone with an inch of her hoo-ha and it’s automatically debited from your account.
trinkets - or tradegoods, however you want to look at it.
a baseball card, a baseball cap, a t shirt, a bracelet charm, stuff you can buy with your plastic.
I think we’re being unfair to the OP. Digitizing currency would wipe out pickpocketing, just like digitizing music wiped out illicit dub CD’s & saved copyright holders a lot of headaches. Compared to stealing a wallet & whatever cash was in it, it should be, oh, a thousand times harder to steal a debit card off someone’s person & hack his identity for all his money. And there would be no need in a digitized-dollar landscape to keep foreign hard currency or bullion in safety deposit boxes as a hedge against grand theft. And this would in no way take power from the average citizen & put it in the hands of banks & hackers. Anyone who’s against this just hasn’t thought it through.
Bizarro-Idiotsonepoundfivepee #252, who doesn’t think this is at all the same kind of glib thoughtless gullibility in the face of malevolent sophistry that props up the Fair Tax movement.
Nope. It would just change from blue collar crime to white collar crime.
I see no reason why white collar criminals will increase their crime rate just to keep the averages up. 
Total crime will be reduced, especially the kind involving violence (or threatened violence). This is a good thing, even if it doesn’t solve all of our problems.
That’s because our federal regulators were asleep at the switch, not because Madoff’s fraud wasn’t easily discoverable.
Wouldn’t work. In prison, access to cash is restricted. So the economy works in cigarettes, which acquire a value much greater then they would have outside once they become the medium of exchange.
In the early days of Australia, there was a period when there was no sensible currency - unsuccessful attempts were made to remint Spanish dollars, and so on. For a significant period, the currency was rum.
Druggies use department store gift cards as currency here. I imagine that is what would become black market currency if there was an attempt to defeat crime this way. THat, or casino chips. I can’t see gambling working with touch cards, so I expect there will always be chips.
Which is a pretty heavy blow dealt to the privacy of honest people, too. Not everybody wants The eMoney Company knowing exactly which books they read; where they’re going; or where they were on day X at time Y and so on. Especially if The eMoney Company is the government.
While it’s true things become trackable, right now there is a huge problem with companies not bothering to track. I got my wallet stolen and around $2,000 was charged. The credit card company simply wrote it off. Did they look for the thieves? Probably not.
I ordered $250 from JC Penny and they said, my package was at the door, I never got it. I called JC Penny and in 2 minutes they issued me a refund. Amazon did this TWICE for things I ordered and never got. They just issued me a credit.
Did they bother to look for the person who took the package? I doubt it.
The problem is it’ll most likely drive up prices as companies aren’t going to pay people to look for theft as long as it’s small. They’ll write off any suspcious charge and make it up by jacking up interest rates
Then there is the whole issue of identity. People are so paranoid on this.
Some people don’t want to make it known they are renting porn or buying Depends.
It’s a nice thing to look at but simply never do-able. And if something isn’t do-able it’s just fiction. It’s like saying, we could lower the crime rate by asking everyone to simply stop committing acts of crime. That would work, but it’s not do-able.
How about asking everyone with HIV to stop having sex, never share needles, not have babies, not have give blood, etc and in a generation or two AIDS would die out.
It’ll never happen.
People like cash. And remember whatever can be PUT INTO an account can be reversed. So the person really has no control over his/her money. You can make all the laws saying banks or cards have to be accessable 24/7/365 but if the bank doesn’t, then you’re out of luck.
Why should I have any faith in amendments considered the way they’ve been gutted lately?
Or are “Free Speech” zones, NSA security letters, sneak and peak “warrants”, DMCA fines for academic research, and the like the intended results of these amendments?
China has guaranteed free speech too, but god help you if you say anything “subversive”. Apparently it doesn’t cover that. I don’t see what value American Free speech has if any movements to preserve or reestablish it can be bankrupted with a tyrant’s click.
Let’s say I wish to reveal that if you have a copy protected pdf with security features, that allows printing you can create a virtually identically file through this procedure. Maybe you’d like to encode the file for text to speech or braille output for blind or visually disabled people, or simply enable clipboard access for a datable you’re working with.
Install an XPS print driver.
Print the PDF to an XPS file.
Then print the XPS file to a PDF.
All the data, and data structures will be preserved. This means if the originally PDF had text the new PDF will too, as will images. However file metadata will be lost. You’ve made a nearly duplicate file that has no copy restrictions. You will have circumvented a copy protection scheme as defined by the DMCA.
This post commits the same crime Dmitry Sklyarov of ElcomSoft was arrested for.
Clearly if this post is illegal than I don’t have a legally protected freedom of expression, but a prvilidge of expression on government regulated ideas.
That’s the snipped version. In the full version I saw zero indication it was rejected based on the Bill of Rights, but of the law it’s self. Clearly American Free Speech has limits defined by the American government. Not much of a guarantee.
Okay maybe my initial claim was a bit much. However what happened is still pretty bad.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_montgomery_bus_boycott_1955_1956/
Let’s say the Wisconsin Union Busting law gets passed, and public workers decide to meet in secret to establish union functionality anyway. Meetings cost money, communicating between members costs money. They won’t “collective bargain”, but they’ll all not show up unless certain conditions are met for everyone.
Why should the Wisconsin tyrant governor be able to bankrupt their efforts with a click?
All coins and currency in the US are still valid and still would be. This would probably make private minting a business and be a windfall for numismatists, of which I am an amateur. I’m all for it.
Blalron elaborated on the OP thus,
The reality is some company would issue currency, or another nation’s currency would become the standard. The US is in a great position being able to issue currency, and have its debt in US dollars. That would disappear. You would also have credit card companies and banks skimming a few percent from every transaction.
Why bother with private minting? If you need to get paid off under the table, you could just use a foreign currency which hasn’t gone all electronic, like the euro, the yen, the ruble or the rupee. It isn’t illegal to accept foreign currency as payment; I understand that there are some shops in New York and other places that accept euros.
Hey, it might get gold and silver circulating again.
I’m inclined to believe that the whole idea has problems nobody has thought of yet - but it’s a nice plan in theory.