Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.

I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.

That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfei...

Good we have a lot of payment options here. :)

... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."

People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.

It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.

So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.