Exactly. All the talk about fees misses the point because accepting and securing paper money is also very costly.

And the provocateur's stunt in the article also misses the point, because electronic payments for groceries aren't a dystopian tyranny no matter how loud he screams about it.

And the crypto skeptics are missing the point when they say you can't buy a coffee with bitcoin, because buying coffee is a solved problem, tap to pay with a bank card works just fine.

And the crypto advocates are missing the point when they say that lightning or solana or something else will solve the coffee-buying conundrum because that's not a problem that needs solving.

The real point about cash payments and crypto is whether people should be able to make large person-to-person payments that are not trivially surveilled or controlled.

In a free society, should people have this capability? Or are the dangers of illegal transactions so great that this freedom must be eliminated?

Europe has mostly free and mostly instant SEPA transfers which are one answer. Large payments are easy and cheap, though they are not secret or untraceable. Perhaps that's a reasonable trade-off.

The US payments system is a mess by comparison, where we have no privacy paired with extreme inconvenience. Try to buy a $20,000 car from a private party on a holiday weekend to see how well that works.

I’m not convinced that spur-of-the-moment, trustless private-party $20,000 transactions are a significant problem.

Every system has edge cases.

The FCBA coverage, on the other hand, has some real value. That said, even though I have used it a few times, I doubt it has saved me as much as I've spent in CC fees.

Furthermore you get a lot more than just writing a few bits with a credit card transaction. You can bypass the cc companies and cash logistics costs by taking checks. But certainly the revealed preference is to not do that.

It is much cheaper for the bank and customers to use cards, but where I live the banks own a payment network that does not involve visa and mastercard so the cost is much lower and there is no rent seeking so card use have no fees.

We also have an app for sending "cash" for free to friends, family and businesses that under the hood are just instant bank payments between the accounts.

And derisking is illegal, so you have to provide a bank account and cards to anyone who wants. The high risk customers just need more follow-up on terms of AML.

Also, I wasn’t able to get a debit card until I was 12, but perhaps that has changed over the past few decades.

My kids got a card at around 5, but they are older now. Not with visa/mastercard of course :)

With respect to closing accounts, there are extremely few cases where people can be denied a basic account with the largest banks, but most smaller banks are not required to provide a basic account, and other account types can be denied at will, and most people have other accounts types (there are something like 7 million basic accounts).

However the homeless problem is virtually non existent in this country, same with the lack of id.

It's just so much more convenient to use digital payments that almost nobody use cash anymore.

Unbanked people is more concerning, as unbanked people include political enemies of the state. The centralisation of power that digital payments allow is concerning.

The other thing which isn't mentioned in this comment chain is that a reason credit is cheaper is that your transaction data is harvested.

Most banks here don't handle the actual payments themselves except the biggest ones.

The small "savings banks" like the one I work in doesn't have shareholders either, they are owned by the depositors. Almost every small town and community here has one.

Alternatively, they were counting the time they spent cash handling as a business owner as zero cost, which isn’t really true.

Someone willing to take the risk of the severe penalties for dodging taxes would not be deterred from offering discounts for cash payments because they broke another law by doing so. They can also avoid the law by not taking card payments at all. I have found that many people in businesses traditionally took cash payments do not take cards but are happy to be paid by bank transfer (which is usually free on both sides in the UK if the sender is not a business).

The value of the time spent on cash handling may be very low. What is the opportunity cost of the time if it can be done in otherwise dead time? It is worth what value they attach to it.

Most small places not declaring cash want to stay off the radar, they use tricks like using old cash resisters that don't have trackable invoice ids.

Food places are rife with it as they can claim excess food was thrown out as spoiled.