I'm thinking that the streets of 2029 will be covered by cameras and scanners with ubiquitous recognition and tracking capabilities, and financial transactions will be much easier for government officials to access and monitor. Can a person like Waymond get by in an urban area like Oakland? I'm not seeing it.

Maybe, like you say, living as a 1919 homesteader in the middle of nowhere is possible, but that's not an option for people who need access to employment, family members, etc.

I’m thinking the streets of 2029 will be quite a lot like the streets of 2019. I don’t expect a massive change in surveillance or technology. I wouldn’t be surprised to see fewer cars (especially outside America). I expect the social problems would be different but I can’t guess how they would be different.

I think we’d be surprised what is already here. You can’t drive a stolen car through a medium town in Kansas (Lenexa) without the police chasing you down before you get out of town. Kansas!

You can drive a car with an illegitimate foreign license plate down I95 through some of the most authoritarian parts of the northeast without being bothered.

There's a lot more luck involved than the people selling the dragnets would have you believe. That said, I still am not a fan of all this surveillance.

So, ah, you can't just leave us hanging...

Quebec doesn't put registration year stickers on their plates so there's no way to tell without running the plate whether it's valid. If you just need to get a shitbox that moves under its own power from A to B it's a pretty cheap way to do it.

Do you think the streets of 2019 are similar to the streets of 2009?

There will be more potholes and falling bridges

Ah, well, I grew up 60 miles from the closest town, and 10 miles away from the closest neighbor, and the house didn't have a phone until I left for school at 15, so I guess my standards for acceptable-levels-of-existence are not up to the modern urban standards. I mean, all we did was grow our own food, and sell some of the excess to pay for land taxes and energy/fuel. And, no, I am not a boomer.

In 2029, with cash no longer accepted by major vendors including government, and with ubiqutous tracking of individual's physical movements and financial transactions, so most people won't want the repurcussions of dealing with you even if they could, how are you going to be able to sell any of your food and use it to pay for land taxes?

> Pre-paid debit cards

One major problem is that all your transactions with that debit card are now linked together. If you buy a cell phone with that card, all your calls, texts, and Internet activity get linked. If you buy a cab ride or bus ticket or subway pass, your travel is now linked. It would be extremely inconvenient and expensive to buy separate debit cards for every transaction. (Expensive because (a) there might be a card purchase fee and (b) you'll end up leaving residual amounts on each card after a single purchase per card.)

Furthermore, how would you pay for the pre-paid debit card? With cash of course. But as cash is becoming rarer, it's likely that the only way to buy a pre-paid card will be with a transaction from another card or account, linking it to other digital accounts. So you'll have a small degree of privacy with a pre-paid card, but nothing close to true anonymity.

There seems no way out of the surveillance universe as cash is marginalized.

I find your predictions of the death of non-digital fungible currency to be unlikely, but, who knows! We'll see, I guess.

It's started in a few places. Whether it will end up widespread remains to be seen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422422

"I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer.

I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).

When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.

Utopia my ass."