The whole time I was reading this all I could think was "man, this reads like a bad advertisement."<p>Then I noticed the disclaimer (horribly placed; I skipped over it the first time because it looked like a caption text for the banner image): <i>Editor’s note: Simon Black is CEO at London-based Sage Pay.</i><p>edit: So, this is a long-form advertisement for a payment processing company. Why do people still read tech crunch?<p>Also, biometrics for payment? Christ, because payment processing hardware/support/service isn't expensive enough already! And has the past decade of massive privacy violations by both the private and public sectors taught us nothing?
> Why go to the hassle of carrying loose change when you can swipe a card to make a purchase within seconds?<p>- Because cash is anonymous, and card transaction violate my freedom.<p>- Because credit card companies charge 2-4%. And therefore raise the prices for everyone.<p>- Because only cash is legal tender.<p>> A further benefit for us is that it will give us peace of mind as there will be less concern over having money stolen.<p>I one steels my purse, I only lose the cash I have at hand. But if one steels my credit card, they can rob my complete bank account. Also credit cards are insecure by design, compared to EuroCheck cards. You do mot even to remember a 4 digit PIN to use them. The card number and expiration date is enough to rob me.
I hope cash will last for 50 years or so (at looking at how legacy systems are maintained it is realistic).
One less point of identification - one less point of attack on a person. And I'm not even paranoid, massive spying on people using metadata and selling it to the highest bidder is already real today.<p>And situation of leaving stuff due to lack of cash is actually good for majority of people - you either a) monitor for finances before starting activity that involves payments, and then you do this regularly everywhere. Or b) you learn to discard and don't buy most useless products on the market. It's a win-win.
From the article:<p>"By removing cash, you reduce the chances of becoming a target of crime"<p>Reality:<p>"By removing cash, you increase the chances of becoming a tax criminal"<p>My suspicion is everyone will be a trivially detected tax criminal by design, but if you just vote the right way and keep your head down and avoid offending anyone in power and stay out of politics unless invited, that punishment will never be unleashed. It'll be a form of control. I can do without increased .gov control, we have enough, thanks.<p>Furthermore I predict we'll pretend the database is closed and private even though it'll be wide open to all .gov and by extension .com. Go to the wrong person's yard sale (perhaps an ex employee), HR will make sure you never get an interview, etc.
This approach - giving your identity to prove you're going to pay for the item - seems overly careless in the age of privacy violations. Another system - where you can only give the proof, without the identity - would be better, but it's unclear at the moment how that could be reached.<p>Besides, putting an item on the shelf in case you don't have enough cash has another nice feature - an opportunity to think twice if you really need that item in the first place. If you pay too easily, it's harder to save.
I hope the author is correct, at least for more advanced forms of payment by plastic. I'm skeptical for the US though. Contactless cards are hard to come by and several issuers stopped sending them even though the terminals are present. We don't even have widely-available chip-and-PIN (and the few issuers of those cards almost entirely make them default to chip-and-signature).