Drumbeats for the cashless society

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Government actions against citizens are not public record in Australia?

It's actually kind of fucked up how and where court records are published here.


That's a sort of summary but it doesn't provide a complete picture as to the records and proceedings of criminal cases.
 
Australia:
Federal MP Bob Katter fired up the headline writers this week after a café in Canberra's Parliament House would not accept his $50 note as payment for lunch.

The north Queensland independent, and one of parliament's oldest politicians, clapped back at what he called "another example of a cashless society that gives all the power to the banks and strips you of your freedom".
...

https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/mar...lowing-bob-katters-café-cash-snub/ar-BB1hX0Of
 
BIS is keeping an eye on use of cash metrics:
  • The use of digital payment methods continues to increase, particularly for small amounts. In tandem, cash withdrawals and the number of small-denomination banknotes in circulation have declined.

  • Fast payments reached new heights and are a prominent driver of the digitalisation of countries' payment ecosystems.


19 page .PDF:
...
Due to the continued rise in digital payments, the volume of cashless payments increased markedly in 2022. The average yearly number of cashless payments per capita grew from 426 to 468 (+10%) for advanced economies (AEs) and from 246 to 291 (+18%) in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) (Graph 1.A). Except for in Argentina, payment cards were the most used payment instruments, followed by credit transfers. Cheque payments continued to decrease almost everywhere. On average, users in AEs made five cheque payments per person in 2022 (down from six in 2021). In EMDEs, where the use of cheques was already limited, the average fell to less than one. Overall, consumers and businesses in AEs made on average twice as many cashless transactions than those in EMDEs.

On average, the value of cashless payments as a percentage of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 4% in AEs and decreased by 2% in EMDEs (Graph 1.B). In both groups of economies, credit transfers continued to account for most of the payment value. While the value of e-money payments made up only a small share of the total, it grew most strongly, both in AEs (+15%) and EMDEs (+22%).
...

 
This one is a drumbeat for keeping cash.

ALERT! MASSIVE Cell Outage!! Why Gold, Silver & CASH Are SO Important

Feb 22, 2024


10:21
 
THE Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said P510 million worth of coins have been deposited through its coin deposit machines (CoDMs).

The BSP said the amount is equivalent to 145.5 million pieces of coins from over 134,000 transactions.
...
Since June 2023, the BSP has installed 25 CoDMs in the Greater Manila Area.

CoDMs allow customers to conveniently deposit their legal tender coins to be credited to their GCash or Maya electronic wallet accounts, or converted into shopping vouchers.
...
In cooperation with partner retailers and electronic money issuers, the CoDMs also promote a cash-lite economy with the adoption of payments digitalization.
...

https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/money/over-145-million-coins-deposited-via-codms/ar-BB1iOOXW

They got "coinstar" machines sucking coins out of the economy in favor of digital money. :paperbag:
 
This one is a drumbeat for keeping cash.

ALERT! MASSIVE Cell Outage!! Why Gold, Silver & CASH Are SO Important

Feb 22, 2024

10:21
Phone outages:

There is no more a Verizon network, AT&T network, etc.

They share. There is just THE network; and when it goes down, it's SOL for whoever depends on cellular phones.

Which is most of us.
 
From Australia - I don't know if it's real or not...



The bank replied to the tweet claiming the screenshot is a fake.
 

Cashless Compulsion​

Interesting little video I came across by accident. Talks about a cashless society and chips, RFID chips I guess. It's short, 9 minutes long.



There's hidden dangers and questions that need to be answered in regards to the move towards becoming a walking node.
 
Sounds like predictive programming.

Or, conditioning. Soften the sheeple up to it.

It still ain't gonna work. But then, any first-year nursing student could have told those great epidemiologists, that locking everyone up, wouldn't stop an epidemic, either.

Sometimes, the Smart Set understands, just because an idea cannot work, doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

That's how we got Affirmative Action, DEI, Woketardedness, Climate-Change regulations, battery cars, and a Kenyan ex-President who is now running proxies in the Deep State madness.
 
Aussies withdrew cash from an ATM 30,235,600 times in January (in seasonally adjusted terms), the greatest frequency since October 2022.

The total value of cash withdrawn was about $9.2 billion, which is the highest since July 2020, and the average amount withdrawn was $304.90, the highest since the reporting series began in March 2008.

This is in spite of the trend away from physical banks, with 11% of branches across Australia closing over the year to June 2023 according to APRA.

More than 164,000 Australians have now signed a petition from Cash Welcome calling for guarantees for "reasonable local access" to cash and banking services, and spokesperson Jason Bryce says this latest RBA data is proof that a cashless future is not what Aussies want.

"The increasing number of cash withdrawals is being made at a decreasing number of bank-owned ATMS, contradicting the commonly repeated bank claim that branches and ATM closures are caused by changing consumer demands," he said.
...


l46CDHTqbmnGZyxKo.webp
 
There is quite a bit of debate right now about whether inflation’s effects will worsen again soon; or, whether the inflation threat has been minimized and “disinflation” will prevail. Don’t look now, but the specter of a liquidity crisis is looming in the background.

The situation is such that a liquidity crisis of epic proportions might overtake all of us in our arguments about the quantity and extent of inflation’s effects. My concern was heightened this past weekend when I drove to a small, local restaurant to pick up a take-out order.

 

UK Citizens Just Got a Brief Foretaste of the Inherent Fragility of a Cashless Economy

Unlike digital forms of payment, cash does not crash.

“Cash payments only.”

These are not words you’d normally expect to see adorning the tills of the UK’s second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, which has spent the past decade or so encouraging its customers to use (often card-only) self-service tills and has even experimented with “SmartShop Pick & Go” checkout-free stores. But on Saturday (March 16), Sainsbury’s stores were blazoned with improvised signs informing customers that cash was (in some cases, together with chip-and-pin card payments) the only payment option available.

The reason?

A massive outage disabling contactless and mobile payments across all of the chain’s stores, as well as at its subsidiary Argos. Sainsbury’s blamed the outage on a software glitch that impacted its online ordering system and contactless in-store payments:

More:

 
The National Park Service has been sued over its policy of accepting only payment of credit cards or debit cards for entry fees and refusing to take cash, a policy the agency that manages national parks, national monuments and other sites adopted last year.

Three park visitors, Esther van der Werf of Ojai, Toby Stover of High Falls, N.Y. and Elizabeth Dasburg of Darien, Ga., filed the lawsuit March 6 in the U.S. District Court of D.C., saying that they were prevented from using cash at national parks, historic sites and monuments across the country, including in Arizona, New York and Georgia.

They said that the National Park Service’s cashless policy violates federal law, citing a U.S. code that requires U.S. currency to be legal tender for all public charges. But the federal agency argues that accepting cash is costly and time-consuming.
...

 
https%3A%2F%2Fprod.static9.net.au%2Ffs%2Fddc4c85a-6760-47c5-b515-c6d21795c6d1


Pro-cash activists are expected to flock to ATMs to withdraw money next week in protest of Australia's move to a cashless society.

Dubbed "Draw Out Some Cash Day", demonstrators intend to take out sums of $20 or more on Tuesday with the hope of pouring cash back into businesses.

"Everyone who can, go to your banks ATM and draw out some cash," reads a social media post.
...

 

Brazil's Pix payments are killing cash. Are credit cards next?​

BRASILIA, April 2 (Reuters) - In just three years, Brazil's hugely popular Pix payment system has become the country's favorite way to pay, replacing cash and wire transfers in many cases and now threatening the dominance of credit cards in the booming e-commerce sector.

The instant payments designed by Brazil's central bank are a boon to online retailers, helping with cash flow in a sector with tight margins, while undercutting the legacy business of banks and fintechs built on existing credit card infrastructure.

"I think credit cards will cease to exist at some point soon," central bank chief Roberto Campos said nearly two years ago, discussing the potential for open finance and the Pix platform. "This system eliminates the need to have a credit card."

Market trends have since added weight to his forecast.

Use of Pix surged 74% last year to nearly 42 billion payments across the Brazilian economy — surpassing credit and debit card charges combined by about 23%, according to central bank data and industry group Abecs.

For buyers, the switch to Pix has been nearly seamless, as they simply scan a QR code with any banking app instead of reaching for their wallet. But for sellers, it has turned the tables on the traditionally lucrative card payments industry.

In online retail, orders paid with Pix surged 22 percentage points in two years to about a third of all purchases in December, according to e-commerce research firm Neotrust. Credit card orders slipped 5 percentage points to 51% in the period.

More:

 
This is making the rounds on Twitter\X this morning:

 
Can't comment as to the veracity of the article. Really don't know jack shit about oz except they have some neat beaches and good surfing.

War on Cash Down Under: Australia’s Fifth Largest Lender, Macquarie, Is About to Eliminate Cash From ALL Its Branches

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

From May 20 customers will also be unable to order a new cheque or deposit book. Instead, they’ll “be able to make payments digitally — a safer, quicker, and more convenient way to bank.”

In August 2023, Australia’s “Big Four” banks — Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corporation, ANZ Group Holdings Ltd, and National Australia Bank Ltd — claimed a major victory in their war of attrition against physical money: more than a billion dollars worth of cash had disappeared from circulation in the previous financial year, marking the first time the number of notes in circulation had officially declined since dollars and cents were first introduced in 1966.

A month later, Macquarie Bank, Australia’s fifth largest lender, unveiled plans to phase out cash and cheque services altogether across all of its banking and wealth management products from January to November 2024, thus becoming a bank without any physical money in its vaults. It looks like the lender is well ahead of schedule, having announced that as of the end of this month (May 2024) its customers will no longer be able to use cash at any of its branches as part of its transition to a fully digital model. From news.com.au:

Read the rest:

 
... Really don't know jack shit about oz ...

Really makes me sad to read about what's happening there. Maybe @chieftain can share a first person perspective, but it seems like their government is full on chasing the Chinese social credit system dream. A while back they sent reps to China to learn about their system. They've been trying to install elements of it peacemeal style ever since.
 
This episode has different root causes.

The major cash carriers, Armaguard, Prosegur and there's one more I'm missing for years were moving the cash for the banks and other businesses for a small margin. Of late their insurance costs* have gone through the roof obliterating any profit. As they went to pass on the costs to their customers, they got a lot of pushback and as it turns out, they were on rather cushy rates hence the outcry. Coles the supermarket chain has resorted to limiting the amount of cash customers can withdraw at the till as a means to recoup these new added cash handling costs.

They may well want to bring in a Chinesium-spec social credit system, but the cash economy is far larger than they realise. Not only that, there is a resurgence in the use of cash in the past 12 months; businesses that thought they were being progressive by being "card only" for payments have had to backpedal and revert to accepting cash. Bear in mind that they were breaking the law by refusing to accept cash.

* The insurance price increase has nothing to do with being held up, they lost a lot of guards due to death whilst on the job.
 
More on the Australia news:
Macquarie Bank, one of the largest banking institutions in Australia, is changing its paradigm to become a digital-only institution. Macquarie, which has a market capitalization of over $77 million, has stopped offering cash and cheque services to its customers, meaning they won’t be able to make deposits or withdrawals using cash or cheques in the bank offices starting later this month.

Also, the bank announced that it had already discontinued its automated phone banking services, suspending the possibility of making phone payments. ...
...
Macquarie’s actions follow a trend in the Australian banking sector, as several banks have already taken similar steps. ANZ, a top Australian bank, recently communicated it was also dropping cheque support. Bankwest, another banking institution, decided to go digital only and is prepared to close 45 branches by October.
...

 
From the link:

At a time when the dominant narrative around cash is that its demise is all but inevitable, as well as broadly desirable, the 2024 payment report by Sweden’s Riksbank may offer a cautionary tale.

In October last year, in More Good News for Cash in Europe, More Bad News for Digital Dollar in US, we reported that recent developments suggest that the trend away from cash and toward purely digital-only payment systems may not be quite as smooth or as seamless as some may have wished or expected. One of the developments we highlighted in that report was growing concern among central bankers and politicians in Sweden, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, about the unintended consequences of driving cash out of the economy:

 
...
But now the country is beginning to realise that an almost exclusively digital payments system comes with significant risks, especially at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. In time-honoured fashion, the article in the UK Telegraph began with a spot of fearmongering about Vladimir Putin.

“People started to realise that it is very easy for Vladimir Putin to switch everything off,” Björn Eriksson, a retired police chief, former head of Interpol and leading cash advocate, told the Telegraph. “At first we were arguing for vulnerable people, the elderly, women in abusive relationships who rely on cash… Now we are talking about national security. And it’s not only Putin, it could also be organised crime.”
...

... or a natural disaster (flood, earthquake, tornados, etc.) or central authority malfeasance or any number of risks. This was the essential point I was making in the Seventh Characteristic of Money article.
 
Imagine this: One card for all your expenses. "They" are moving forward with their plans (jm2c.)

Changes from Visa mean Americans will carry fewer physical credit, debit cards in their wallets​

NEW YORK -- Your wallet may soon be getting thinner.

Visa announced major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S. in the coming months and years.

The new features could mean Americans will be carrying fewer physical cards in their wallets and will make the 16-digit credit or debit card number printed on every card increasingly irrelevant.

More:

 
... Visa will also start implementing biometrics to approve transactions, similar to how Apple devices use a fingerprint or face scan to approve transactions. ...

No thank you.
 
What that means is, I no longer carry Visa.

Visa anything.

If there's no alternative, then I'll just use a MasterCard. If both do it, then cash.

If cash is banned...well, we all gotta die sometime.
 
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