> dumb grubby pieces of paper

This is a flaw of implementation, not of banknotes in and of themselves. Some countries moved to plastic banknotes[0] already many years ago: Australia, Romania, Vietnam, just to name a few. They don’t get grotty like e.g. American dollar notes. A cool feature is that if you are at the beach and have nowhere to leave your valuables, you can just go swimming with them inside your pocket.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote

They're cleaner, that doesn't mean they're clean. But they're still suffering from all of the rest of the logistical and security problems. You need to have change on hand; you need to have armored cars; you need to visit ATMs. These are flaws of banknotes in and of themselves.

What exactly does the word “clean” even mean in this context?

Certainly, that cash isn’t going to get you sick. It also is unlikely to be covered in dirt/mud/some other substance that will visibly rub off onto you.

What ritual must it undergo to purge it of its ungodliness?

The card industry has zero incentive to create a card like this. Card issuers collect 1.25-3.5% of every payment made with a card. A global sales tax paid to a small collection of companies. This is fantastically profitable. I suspect if a card was created that would mean less revenue for the card issuers it would be embraced then extinguished.

Who said anything about a card industry?

Digital cash needs to be implemented by the government with zero transaction fees.

This needs to be something run by the government, in the same way the government runs printing physical cash.

This has nothing whosoever to do with MC/Visa/etc.

This is already in progress, at least in the UK https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

> This is already in progress, at least in the UK https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

Does this enable completely anonymous payments, or is this another step towards more surveillance?

> anonymous payments

Surveillance most definitely will be a feature. We are talking about the UK government here.

Who do you think the government would contract to provide card services?

I couldn't care less as long as the government is paying for it and it's going to the lowest bidder according to its specifications.

Might be MC, might be a bank, might be a startup backed by investors.

It doesn't really matter at all. But the point is that it doesn't matter if existing card providers like it or not.

And if the government created a network for that, and asked for 0.1% fee instead of 1.5%, 3.0%, people would act as if this was the beginning of Stalinism.

I get the feeling the commenter you responded to would more or less agree. They specifically mentioned zero transaction fees.

zero fees is unrealistic, any such system has costs.

The government generally funds its projects via taxes; zero fees is perfectly realistic.

So, in the end you pay the same, but indirectly. And then this needs to dispute for funding with a bazillion of other government programs in the politically charged environment of budgetary allocations. Wouldn't it be better to have this program directly funded by its users? wouldn't it be more transparent?

Mind you, I am not sure I am right and you're wrong. I am just pointing some concerns I have. And on the other side, your proposal makes sense also in the point that the government always financed the cost of the whole coins and banknotes stuff from the general budget.

But who are we fooling here? The lobbying power from the payments industry is mind-boggling, maybe bigger than the one from the Defense Industry. They would never allow a government payments program that eliminated their role as middleman.

I'm not sure what your objection is; this is a solved problem.

You don't get charged $0.05 per paper bill by the government every time you go to the ATM. Similarly, you don't get charged by the fire department if it puts out a blaze in your home. So:

> Wouldn't it be better to have this program directly funded by its users? wouldn't it be more transparent?

Absolutely not. This goes against the entire ethos of government, which is that we collectively pay taxes, progressively, for the services that benefit society as a whole.

And if supplying and managing cash isn't a core government service, then I don't know what is. Even the most extreme libertarians and anarchists are going to agree on that one.

I do not agree. Making coins of known weight and purity or metals is a role of government. Supplying cash is not. Cash is a poor substitute for money. Cash is no different than monopoly money.

Norway and Denmark have national card schemes (BankAxept and Dankort) which are used for virtually all PoS transactions. They cost a fraction of the transaction costs that Visa and Mastercard charge. These arose by banks agreeing to a standardized solution.

Was there ever any attempt to do something similar in the US?

Doubtful; the card processors would probably lobby hard against it, and given our current state of politics would never pass

I'd love to see a digital option not tied to identities, but I think that is never going to happen due to the KYC (know your customer) laws in place. I hate bring cryptocurrency into this, but even with "distributed" currencies, we are seeing KYC laws preventing true, anonymous payments (like Monero not accepted at large exchanges).

IC cards in Japan, like Pasmo and Suica, kind of work like this: originally intended for transit passes but also accepted at lots of retailers, usually for smaller purchases. You buy a card and load it with cash at a machine, no KYC required. It's really convenient and I'd happily use such a system in daily life in the West.

In theory correlating the card purchase with location or camera data would be possible, but even that's a win as it moves transaction surveillance from dragnet to bespoke.

which would've been bitcoin, if it wasnt so volatile and unstable.

I'm skeptical that this would be an improvement over credit/debit cards in the ways that matter most to the people who are most concerned about this: privacy and anonymity.

Cash is anonymous and (largely) untrackable by its fundamental nature. Once you introduce anything digital into the system, it becomes easy enough to add a tracking layer that I think it very unlikely any such system would remain free of one for long, no matter how it started out.

I mean, if it's not tied to a bank account or identity, then what's the problem?

It's not like physical cash is untrackable either -- every bill has a unique serial number. Just like Bitcoin keeps a record of every transaction.

If you want it to be private and anonymous, that's up to you to make sure you don't tie anything about your identity when you acquire a particular physical card for use/storage. The exact same way you have to be careful when acquiring Bitcoin, for example.

Sure; every bill has a serial number—but that serial number isn't going to be recorded automatically by every single hand it passes through simply as a matter of how the technology works.

It's not at all far-fetched to imagine a particular bill passing through dozens of hands in multiple states without any unique record of it being recorded anywhere.

A cash card, on the other hand, requires some kind of connection to a central authority to verify what it has on it—otherwise counterfeiting on a grand scale becomes all too easy. So every single transaction at least can be logged, whether or not it is by default—and there's no way for us as regular users of the technology to tell that it's not if the government says it's not. And given that it is a cash card, it will need to be loaded periodically if it is to remain useful—either that, or you'll just have to keep buying new ones with physical cash, which drastically decreases the convenience factor compared to either physical cash or a debit/credit card. It also drastically increases your risk footprint if you are attempting to remain below the radar.

So while anonymity is theoretically possible, untrackability is not—and the moment your identity is associated with even one use of the card (whether by a security camera, or correlation with cell phone location data, or loading it from a debit or credit card, or whatever else), the entire history of that card is at least potentially linkable to you.

> but that serial number isn't going to be recorded automatically by every single hand it passes through

You'd be surprised. The ATM knows the serial number of every bill it dispenses, and all those 20's spent at a retailer tend to go straight to the bank where serials are again scanned in.

But yeah, if you're trying to hide your activity from the government, you're going to need a complicated strategy of cards and transfers. This is no different from Bitcoin, or trying to spend cash you stole from a bank.

Digital cash is perfectly fine if you don't want to be tracked by algorithms trying to build profiles of everyone.

If you're trying to hide yourself from the police when they're trying to catch you personally... I mean, good luck. Even with paper currency.

> If you're trying to hide yourself from the police when they're trying to catch you personally... I mean, good luck. Even with paper currency.

I mean...frankly, I agree with you there. But there's a significant contingent—including around here—that seem to think that this is not only possible, but highly desirable. (Perhaps not necessarily "hide from the police when they're trying to catch you", but "avoid letting the government have even one iota more information on you than is strictly legally necessary", at the very least.)

And let me use some kind of TOTP to pay with it, then whoever's issuing the card doesn't need to have a crazy amount of insurance against stolen cards.