I mean, it kinds seems inevitable to me. Books has become e-books. Cash is becoming digital transfers. China has done it. The west is mostly doing card-swipes. One day, that transition will be complete, and cash would be phased out.
What happens then? Think like the power outage in Spain recently. Some people had cash. But in 20-40 years. There might not even be any cash in existence. What then?
What if, instead of a few hours, its a few days? Or weeks?
I guess riots break out all around the world?
(Seriously, has none of the politicians ever thought about this? Where are the backups? Are we just going full “YOLO” on the reliance on the power grid?)
In Spain credit cards still worked during the outage.
And the proposal for digital Euro already contemplate an offline mode for transactions.
As long as the power loss doesn’t last days and batteries die out there would not be a problem with that.
And outage of days will bring so many problems that cashless society might be the less of them.
We can return to a primitive society to avoid dependence on electricity, but do we want that?
I think the best option is just people be prepared with food medicines and offline entertainment for a week in case of a big power loss.
Spain here… How and what area are you referring to? Internet, Cell Phone Towers, Everything was down, no one was accepting credit cards in my neighborhood. The only thing they were accepting were IOU’s (if you knew the store owner) and Euros.
Center spain. Until 6pm we didn’t had internet or electricity. But most TPV still worked.
Here is an article explaining why: https://www.xataka.com/servicios/resolviendo-grandes-incognitas-apagon-que-algunos-datafonos-funcionaban-red-otros-no
Basically there’s two ways. The SAI of the supermarkets keep them going. Or they had the advanced models that accepted offline transactions.
