That may be how things will work for cultures paranoid about government surveilance, but that doesn’t apply to most Norwegians.
Ask a Norwegian kid today if they have a need for cash and they’ll have trouble coming up with a single example. Give your buddy 20 bucks? Phone app. Street vendor doesn’t take any electronic payments? Screw him, move on to the next. Even flea markets are now being pushed towards accepting payments through various phone apps. Even my close to retirement colleagues are asking if I can’t start accepting phone app payments for our weekly wine lottery, since they never carry cash any more.
Now there’s still cash, and I would be surprised if the drug dealer on the corner accepts electronic payments, but by the time there’s so few legitimate exchanges of money that the average consumer doesn’t want to pay the cost of acquiring cash, any private alternative is going to have an uphill battle to be anything other than a very costly way to show that you’re up to something nefarious.
Sure we do, and that’s a hazard, but we’re already at the point where that’s an issue. The average Norwegian does not have cash at hand to buy groceries tomorrow if their debit card doesn’t work. And stores in general don’t work if they don’t have power for their cash registers.
Ditching the costly cash system would give a clearer incentive to make the electronic systems we’re actually dependent on more robust.
This makes no sense. Poor people don’t have any money, I guess that’s true. These are just numbers on pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, and what once had considerable purchasing power just gets nuked at the grocery store or anywhere else.
I seem to recall the largest bill in South Korea is the equivalent to about 8 bucks. Everyone runs around with endorsed checks from banks and uses those for large purchases or somesuch.
More robust, or more restrictive? The whole thing looks to me like an Orwellian system to eliminate all kinds of financial transactions outside the technology furnished by the banking cartels, and forcing everyone to become their clients, which they already restrict to the chosen classes.
Individuals, organizations, entire countries, could be arbitrarily excluded from the system, with no oversight, and huge masses on the outside looking in. Sorry, your dossier on my computer screen shows that you are disqualified from owning a cell phone.
First, get rid of all coins. Coins are now obsolete. Everything is now rounded off to the nearest dollar. If it’s not worth a dollar, fuck you. Electronic payments can keep track of whatever fraction of a dollar they want, but if you want cash you’ll take a dollar and like it. Because let’s face it, a quarter today is equivalent of the penny 100 years ago. When I get change back at a coffee stand I look around for the nearest bucket to throw away my change, because I don’t want that shit.
Also, get rid of the $10. We just need the $1, $5, $20, and $100. Simplify, man! Change the colors. $1s are weak-ass yellow. $5s are lame pink. $20s can keep the classic green, since that’s 90% of the cash that most people deal with nowadays. And $100 gets an upgrade to cool black with white engraving. It’ll be bad-ass. Something along the lines of this: http://www.orangeinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/darth-vader-100-dollar-bill.jpg
Anything else? Get yourself a debit card. Agreed about the need to fix the banking problem. In lots of countries the post office doubles as a subsidized bank of last resort for people who just want a checking account. Yeah, it’s socialized banking putting mom and pop check cashing and payday loans out of business. Good.
Coins: kill the penny and the half-dollar. Keep nickel, dime, quarter, dollar. Add a $2 coin.
Bills: kill the $1 and $2 bills. Keep the $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. Add $200 and $500 bills. Make all the bills the same size, but different colors.
An Untoaster. Turns already toasted bread back into loaf bread. Don’t leave it in too long though, or you’ll have dough. Why, yes, there do be a pun there.
My idea:
Coins in $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and 100 denominations.
Bills in .01, .05, .10, .25 and .50
Sorry, but this “sensible” part is worse than the silly part.
The US is one of the few countries in the world which has never dishonoured its currency. (Britain, Canada and I think Australia have also never dishonoured.)
That’s a US record for monetary stability and security that reaches back over two centuries. It’s one of the factors which contributes to the full faith and credit which people place in the US dollar, not just in the US but also abroad. People know that those Benjamins are good, even if they’ve been buried in a coffee can in your backyard for 20 years.
That safety and security in turn contributes to the US dollar being the primary reserve currency. It’s one clear example (amongst many) of a long-standing US commitment to a stable and secure currency.
Why would the US voluntarily damage the reputation of its own dollar, simply because of a currency re-design?
Sure, require the banks to pull any old notes as they come in, ship them off to the Fed, and destroy them.
But when Granny comes in with the notes that she’s hoarded for decades because she doesn’t trust banks, she gets new notes at face value, no fuss, no muss.
ETA: if I remember correctly, when Russia dishonoured the old Soviet ruble, it caused bank runs as people rushed to the banks to exchange for the new notes. That in turn contributed to distrust of the banks, another hit to public confidence in the monetary system.
But “more robust” can never be perfect, right? Nor is a robust system for the cities likely to equally serve every place in the hinterlands.
It seems to me that if your present state of dependence is problematic–many Norwegians unable to conduct any commerce whatever without electronic support–the answer is to support diverse pathways. Not to bet even more eggs on the infallibility of a single basket of future technology.
After 15 months in Sweden, on my last day there, I found a place where I could not pay by card. It had to be cash.
A public toilet in a gas station.
Who the bloody hell came up with the idea of charging 5 krone for peeing, in a country where you only get such a small coin by specifically asking for it? Amounts like that get rounded automatically! I’m still traumatized!
Go to the supermarket and run 50 item through the scanner. Round each one up to the next whole dollar. There went 25 bucks. Times 52 weeks, $1,300 a year. Oh, but wait, half the products would be rounded DOWN to the nearest dollar. Dream on.
You round the TOTAL to the nearest dollar. Not each item.
And yes, rounding down is an option. Countries which remove the small coins from circulation usally mandate rounding to the closest coinage available and to show both the unrounded and rounded total on the receipt. Easy peasy.
Some card that does the math for us. In the US a constitutional amendment requiring that the government is required to instantly replace such a card without any burden to the citizen legal or illegal alien or tourist, or any other person.
More robust. Such as requiring backup power solutions and two separate telecom-providers.
Everyone in Norway already has a bank account. This is not due to some Orwellian attempt to eliminate certain transaction, it’s because it’s convenient to the users. If you want to be paranoid, every element of society restricts your freedom and creates powers with a potential for abuse.
That’s a valid sentiment, but there’s a cost/benefit analysis. We can increase the robustness without that much cost, the increase from having double infrastructure can be compensated by reducing the capacity of both. Having a completely separate old fashioned cash system if hardly anyone uses it as a backup on the other hand is a huge cost. It’s comparable to keeping herds of horses and warehouses of wagons as a backup for our current technology dependent transportation system.
As someone has already pointed out, that’s not how it would work, and it’s not how it works in the many countries where the smallest denomination coins have already been eliminated, step by step. In Denmark the smallest coin is the 0.50 DEK (50 øre), previously it was the 0.25. Norway has a similar history, but has now eliminated all coins below the base unit. That doesn’t mean things can’t have fractional prices though. The single cheapest resistor I found right now costs 0,0499 NOK, and unless I buy 20 of them or pay electronically I’ll slightly overpay.
