But surely you must realize that there's more to money than just paying bills. Japan still has a strong cash culture, but even there people put their money in a bank. A cash society cannot be resilient to an evil government if you consider that said government could theoretically freeze funds at the bank level. In fact, this scenario sort of happened in Brazil in the 90s, and that's a country that had a very large portion of the population that was unable to transact digitally (because credit cards/ApplePay/etc weren't really a thing back then and a lot of people were poor to begin with).

If you want to argue for a world where said attack vector isn't possible, then you're implicitly arguing for a world where people literally stash money under their mattress as a standard model of security, but that implies constructs like mortgages can't exist. Point being, how money is represented has a big impact on how society is able to function.

There is a distinction between freezing someone's accounts and ability to open accounts for the long term vs. them beginning to starve within days because they don't have any way to pay for anything immediately.

> them beginning to starve within days because they don't have any way to pay for anything immediately

I mean, if that's the only scenario you care about, you can just carry more cash in your wallet.

But when you said "a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button", that sounded like you were worried about more than just not having enough money for groceries for the week.

> It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.

One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now.

The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same.

Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan.

Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%.

The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around.

How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.

How do you even pay for rent or utility bills with cash?

I'm 39; so maybe too young to have experienced that but how does it even practically work? Did your landlord pop round once a month? For utility bills, did you go to the bank and ask them to transfer cash to a utility company; or maybe at a post office? Or did the utility company send someone around to collect cash payments?

You're here because you're an engineer, right?

I have a bank account. You give me £100 and tell me to send £100 to 00273 00338435. Done.

As other posters have said, in many countries this is a Service(tm) but generally, unless you've gimped payments anyone can just do this.

Good way to clean some dirty money

Rent - Drop cash off at the Real Estate Agent/Property Manager

Bills - Pay in cash at the Post Office

In Australia I still see people in Post Offices waiting to pay their bills. Some simply haven't got out of the habbit yet..