[LINK] NYTimes - Starbucks and Square to Team Up

[Frank O'Connor]

Mmmm ...

Cash is far too useful in the businesses of tax evasion, crime, illegal gambling, drugs, pornography and other low end financial purposes to ever be completely abandoned. Cash is effectively untraceable, a bearer instrument of unparalleled financial power, extremely private and secure from prying eyes, and probably the most negotiable of any means of value exchange that has ever been invented.

Cash allows you to purchase goods and services with impunity from whomever you like, wherever you like, whenever you like ... with no questions asked.

Tax authorities, governments, police forces and the like would love to see the demise of cash ... because then their investigations and enforcement arms would simply have to do the data matching rather than the laborious investigation, research and information grubbing that they have to do nowadays to build a case.

Cash allows us to be imperfect and human, to make mistakes and not leave a record of same for posterity, to operate on the fringes outside the sphere of banks, financial institutions and Big Brother.

Cash isn't all bad ... from an individual perspective it has a lot of things to recommend it. 

Cash allows you to circumvent intolerable laws (for example euthanasia/suicide laws), to investigate non-sanctioned alternatives, and to live outside many of the very real constrictions of the State. (Fundamentalists of many different ilks seem to be proliferating in politics nowadays.)

To give cash away and fully embrace cards, digital and other cash alternatives would be a loss of an alternative that has served us well for thousands of years. Ask a refugee, or an otherwise displaced person, how they would have done without cash, and I think you'd find they have a very different perspective to those who advocate the death of negotiable physical currency.

As Roger said ... the naivety of the NYT journalist is unbelievable. (But maybe the banks, government and law enforcement agencies sponsored the article.)

Just my 2 cents worth ...
---
On 08/08/2012, at 4:38 PM, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:

> At 22:21 -0700 7/8/12, Scott Howard wrote:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/technology/starbucks-and-square-to-team-up.html
>> *"SAN FRANCISCO - Cash moved one small step nearer to its deathbed with the
>> announcement on Wednesday that Square, the mobile payments start-up, would
>> form a partnership with the
>> Starbucks<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/starbucks_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Coffee
>> Company"
>> *
>> 
>> I'm sure Roger especially will have some comments about this part :
>> *
>> "But when Starbucks uses Square's full GPS technology, the customer's phone
>> will automatically notify the store that the customer has entered, and the
>> customer's name and photo will pop up on the cashier's screen. The customer
>> will give the merchant his or her name, Starbucks will match the photo and
>> the payment will be complete."*
> 
> Not only that, I'm astounded that a writer in the NYT could be so naive.
> 
> If any country ever tried to kill of cash (in its current sense of 
> notes and coins), it would be re-invented within minutes, using 
> whatever token was convenient to the people who wanted to exchange it.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
> 
> Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
>                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
> mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/
> 
> Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law               University of NSW
> Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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