Google may start showing ads for pet food if you bought something at PetSmart. Your bank may start sending you car loan ads if you spend at the repair shop. Everything has a side effect.

Cash is great because it is very simple. I gave you money for product, no one knows anything else. Sometimes it’s nice not to be data mined for buying a cup of coffee.

I limit my credit card information sharing as much as the privacy preferences allow, but I'm not about to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars a year in value because Google might show me an ad I won't click on anyway.

The value of the credit card point is about 2% best case. Points exist to create a fomo attachment to the card.

I’d love to see a well done research paper to get a sense of the expected value of cash vs credit.

This is the reason that you didn't buy a $20 XBox game, you brought a game with 1,700 Microsoft points.

You don't buy this skin for a game for $14, that's way too expensive! Who would pay that! However when it's on sale for 3,200 Riot points? That's a great deal!

If you wanted to strike a death blow to the micropayments industry you'd just need to force them to put the actual monetary price against each loot box/gem bundle/whatever rather than obscuring it with a made up currency that nobody can evaluate cost against.

With cash I check my wallet, and think “that’s $50, I have $300, and need to go shopping and get gas later”.

Just the act of reconciling what I have on hand defers many purchases. And deferrals stop many from happening!

That said, I’m not a caveman and have a credit card. I just don’t use it without planning or having an emergency/unplanned event.

Before I only had smaller amounts on my debit card, so if I wanted to buy stuff online I had to first move money from another account. This extra step made me more conscious of my spending and I would imagine starting to use cash would have a similar effect.

Advertising is generally an attack on subconscious cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are famously nearly undetectable by the user of the brain even if they are aware of the bias, and, just as famously, brain users find themselves fully convinced that the bias must not be present if they cannot detect it.

We have all the knowledge to tell us that we are very unlikely to be an exception, that we are almost certainly being personally manipulated by advertising, and yet our experience so powerfully tells us that we are immune that we simply don't believe it.

Banks fought heavily against this law, of course.

https://lawpay.com/about/blog/can-you-charge-a-fee-or-surcha...

(disclosure: I used to work for a sister company of LawPay)

I’ve been lucky to be on some promotion where I can pay my rent for free using a credit card, so usually I just do that or buy prepaid Visa cards, which then isn’t tied to my identity when I transact with it.

From the fees that you paid them to begin with.

Things in general are more expensive. So over time usage of higher denomination bills will increase.

Eventually a $100 bill is equivalent to what a $20 bill was when I was a kid, and those were common then.

Cashier: "That will be $3.86"

Me: [hands over a $5 bill, a dime, and a penny]

Cashier: "..."

Cashier: "..."

Cashier: [hands back a dollar and a quarter]

Also, I travel on business frequently, I have my wallet and a passport wallet, and I keep some cash in each - in the passport wallet enough to get a cab out of the airport to a hotel, where presumably I can garner a room using my rewards points or have my company wire me money.

As the owner of a brick and mortar business (a bar), I can tell you that we do about 60% cash transactions. I just put in an ATM to try to up that number. I'm tired of paying close to 3% fees on cards.

We have had some cash theft from employees but to eliminate that would require 100% credit, which isn't an option for me. A big part of our clientele is service industry, and they're bringing in their cash tips and spending them.

(Makes total sense though that employees would be much more likely to do the stealing)

Cash is cheap. Losses were around 0.1% and costs were <1% when I did retail eons ago. Might be higher in risky environments due to insurance, worker’s compensation, etc.

So you're losing money on inflation, and your long term savings are in one of the most volatile assets on the market that derives its value largely from illegal and gray-market transactions.

I wish you luck. But frankly you'd likely be better off putting your long term savings in Boeing stock, and that's saying something.

Due to dollar cost averaging, this is actually a very good thing!

The other major question is what BTC's value is going to be in the long term, when they retire and transition from a net saver to a net spender.

Can’t say the same about most other hodlers, however

lol if poster above started storing money in Bitcoin in 2011 there's a good chance they are the wealthiest person in this thread.

At least your savings aren't losing to inflation, but this strategy has zero real growth and carries a tremendous amount of unsystematic risk[1].

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unsystematicrisk.asp

What I want is the ability to safely store value.

Saving money in a bank account wasn’t working for me, because monthly fees took literally my last pennies, which led to overdraft charges.

Saving money with bitcoin hasn’t just maintained and stored value for me, it has also grown tremendously in value.

In my case, it’s risky to participate in the traditional financial system anyway, so I don’t feel like experimenting with an alternative system is any more or less risky.

> What do you mean by “real growth”?

Stocks have real growth. It is "real" because your stock is a share of a company whose employees are trying new ideas, teaching each other, making customers happy, etc.

> ... it has also grown tremendously in value.

Bitcoin had a lot of initial growth[1] indicating it was undervalued, and there was a ton of speculation. If you got in early and weathered the storm, congrats, but the market should have bitcoin correctly priced by now.

In general, a currency doesn't grow in value any more than a lump of gold can grow in value.

That it looks like it does is nominal growth, it means your benchmark, e.g. USD, is losing value.

Your bitcoins will get you more USD in 10 years, but the prices of goods and services in USD will increase as well, so it's a wash in terms of spending power.

[1]: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history

Keeping your money in bitcoin may be a poor idea, but any reasonable long-term investment strategy isn't going to be FDIC insured, so that isn't really part of the calculation.

You can insure cash with most homeowner's policies, though.

FDIC is meant to protect deposits in banks. If I don’t need to trust a bank, why would I need FDIC?

Edit: silliness aside...

When I get paychecks, I have to either get them cashed at the bank that issued the check, at a grocery store, or through a friend or relative who has a bank account.

I request cash for payment, when possible.

I didn’t learn about bitcoin until 2015, and even then, I had very little disposable income to experiment with. Still don’t have much income. Definitely no salary.

I started with bitcoin in 2015.

The main reason my life savings is almost nothing is because it came from almost nothing. $50 here and there isn’t much, but it’s more than zero

but business-wise many of my vendors have been able and willing to take cryptocurrency especially in the last 3 years.

I've executed many legal agreements paid in crypto. Its made it extremely practical for Americans to have offshore corporations again since the bank account part became difficult but is no longer needed for international commerce and asset holdings.

Yeah its a bad example because thats not whats happening at all. Criticisms are possible but yours are so far off that I guess these are called weak strawman arguments? I don't think this was intentional as its seems more like a precompiled argument that isn't really a response to this situation so I will tell you my experience with international vendors:

When legal contracts are executed a payment method and pricing index is determined. The payment itself does not take a year and there is usually no catalog of goods and services that are "bitcoin-denominated", for our agreements. When the actual payment occurs we use the agreed upon index to use the dollar price, paid in crypto and this takes a few seconds to execute and even in the volatile crypto markets usually nothing is happening in this time frame.

The cryptos typically involve:

Bitcoin most frequently using Tradeblock's XBX index, or CME's index, or Coinmarketcap

Ethereum most frequently using Coinmarketcap, and lately Tradeblock's ETX index

random token that one of us has large consolidated ownership of

stablecoin like DAI, USDC, Tether

This is conceptually no different than any legal contract that use shares for payment. You get a glimpse of this common transaction method when companies are acquired for "cash and stock". For the recipient, it is all about the tolerance of liquidity.

There is a curve of liquidity for different asset classes, with US treasuries and non interest bearing dollars being the most liquid on the planet, and a different velocity of liquidity needs for recipients.

In a different use case that uses stablecoins there are no price fluctuations and no index price negotiations involved.

Its been more convenient for some of our non-US businesses because it is difficult for banks to open bank accounts when the beneficial signers are Americans. This is due to FATCA and the high compliance burden for non-US banks, as well as FBAR filings for the US person. But the whole concept of bank accounts have been leapfrogged and international commerce continues unabated.

Ah, so unlike the person using it for savings that you're replying to, you're basically just paying someone for the overhead of getting that money to a real bank account, through a novelty payment mechanism, to avoid regulators.

I mean, that's a step up, at least. Good luck with FATCA Mk II, Cryptocurrency Edition.

we'll comply with any applicable regulation. if we have to start filing FBAR's for on-chain or off-chain custodial cryptocurrency holdings we'll do it, while also seeing if there is an applicable exemption, while also having our lawyers write to the Treasury during the comment period to suggest they not pursue this route

The most anonymous way is cash. Cash is King.

Where would that be? On every trip to the US I have exchanged cash, EUR to USD, resulting in mostly $100 bills which I've used everywhere, sometimes even for rather small purchases, and there's been no frown upon that (after few purchases I also get my hands on smaller bills which are also more convenient).

No one needs to have a full record of every purchase I make in real time.

I wonder if the criminal use case has not been reduced that much by crypto, as I imagine cold hard cash that's acceptable anywhere globally is preferable. Crypto may be good for some transactions, but cash will be king for a long time yet.

It may also be harder to be swindled out of your money by telemarketers, if you ditch your credit cards. And dealing with anything online or on a phone can be physically laborious and error prone for the elderly -- then you have to re-learn it when it changes.

For me, cash is actually a hassle. As a part time musician, I occasionally get paid in cash -- often a $100 bill, preferably but rarely more -- and then I have to deal with the bills and coins until it's finally spent.