You don't have to imagine - Wells Fargo was down for several hours earlier this year and no one could send or receive any money.

People couldn't pay bills, transfer money and some couldn't even buy gas.

> some couldn't even buy gas.

How culture changes perspectives! Over here in Europe I was thinking "doesn't sound so bad". Then I realised over in the US, gas means petrol, and without petrol America doesn't work.

I'll reply to any replies after I've taken the electric train home.

You're not being fair to Europe's very impressive contributions. After all, European companies lead the way in the production of rolling pollution machines, aka ICE vehicles.

Besides, the US has cleaner air than most of Europe, thanks to the intense diesel particulate pollution across European cities. Who can forget the infamous Paris smog photos from a few years ago (which is still an ongoing problem)?

Don't worry though, the US invented the modern electric car, twice, in the form of GM's EV1 and Tesla. We'll lead the European automakers out of the dark ages - underway right now as they all chase Tesla - and take care of the problem of the ICE automobile that Europe was heavily responsible for. In the process cities like Paris will be smog free again, finally.

I don't think he meant to offend you. Moving around in many if not most European cities without a car is a lot easier than to do so in the US. The US also has higher cars per capita: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...

Don't twist an arm patting yourself on the back like that...

I would say cash is used much less often in Canada than it used to be and most people just tap or swipe their Interac debit cards. Outages happen from time to time, usually during the mad Christmas shopping season, but life goes on.

Yeah. It happened a few times with Monzo in London. Nobody could pay for a day or something. Life went on.

It's really only gone down for short periods of time here- maybe a couple of hours at most, but it's usually just limited to one of the major banks or retailers (like all the Walmarts in town).

Anecdata is always funny because I hardly know anyone that uses debit. Credit all the way.

In Canada though? Because in Canada it is definitely rare to see cash now except in boomers. Even a lot of places don't accept cash like gyms for even purchases like drinks or towels.

If you frequent small (generally Asian) restaurants, it's quite common to see signs saying they only accept cash in Vancouver. Otherwise, if they take credit, they may attempt to incentivize paying with cash via discounts.

Same, here in Toronto. My favourite Asian fruit market only takes cash, and a lot of the corner stores have a minimum purchase for cards.

But any business with any sort of margin (as in, I’m not buying grapes for 99¢/pound) takes contactless payments. My gym would look at me like I’m crazy if I tried to pay with cash, and Billy Bishop airport has been cash-free for years.

Why is that? What's some advantages of having a credit card versus a debit one?

Customer protection- credit cards allow you to reverse charges on defective or fraudulent purchases if you are unable to find recourse with the vendor. They usually side with the cardholder as long as a basic paper trail of a good faith attempt to resolve the issue with the vendor is included.

Also, credit cards often include insurance on purchases. For example, one of my cards will reimburse my hotel/car rental/plane tickets in certain cases of trip interruption if I purchase those items on that card.

There are similar protections on debit cards/chequing accounts here in Canada thanks to our strictly regulated banking system.

Failure condition - your conceptual exposure and, at least in the US, legal exposure is more favorable in the face of fraud.

Would you rather have someone thieve a dollar from your wallet or fraudulently assign you a debt?

Ignoring the obvious one that you can pay for things you don't currently have enough money for (bad idea in general), I pay for almost everything on a visa card for travel points.

Not hard. My bank's had the occasional (twice in four years, IIRC) debit/credit swipe outage of a couple of hours. It happens.

And? That’s why cash exists.

In NL cash transactions of 10k+ already needed to be reported to the authorities.

But a new law will forbid any cash transactions higher than 3k.

In Greece it is forbidden by law any cash transaction higher than 500 euros.

whats the reasoning behind the new law?

It looks like an attempt to prevent money laundering

https://nltimes.nl/2019/07/01/dutch-govt-ban-cash-payments-e...

The revenue service is unaware of cash payments/purchases made by private parties and so cannot tax such transactions. Unless those private parties volunteer the information.

Has there ever been a major bitcoin or ethereum, or stellar outage?

This is basically the point of decentralized systems. Foor bitcoin to work it relies by protocol on whoever is online, so effectively everyone using it would have to go offline for it to fail. Additionally, bitcoin really doesn't get updates that would dramatically change how things function enough for their to be an error introduced that would take things down. In comparison, FB and friends rely on a handful of servers that typically can be taken out by one poorly planned software upgrade.

This is a gross simplification, but the basic idea is that more servers and diversity of the servers (which you get from decentralised protocols) should lead to crashes not taking out the whole network.

Facebook's more akin to an exchange for Libra, isn't it? There's 28 companies partnering up for the system.

They have one wallet. But there is no reason for a wallet to depend on facebook being online, and presumably there will be 100 points of failure for the ledger on launch

Nope, that's the beauty of decentralized network, it never goes offline while there at least some clients connected. You could disrupt the network with other ways though.

I can answer that. For money! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiJPsOI61qE

(quote from a tv show where the anti-hero destroys an intergalactic empire by setting the value of all money from 1 to 0; in the scene is the alien "white house" having a discussion what to do without money)