The timing of retiring supreme court justices may fall in their lap, which is lasting, but again that's not due to anything they've achieved.
It's that cash is the simplest thing that might work.
No declined cards.
No network delays.
No broken electronics.
No waiting on transactions to clear.
...And even better, it segments the market against people who want demand more than doughnuts for dollars.
For example, pulling in to buy petrol because their displayed price is good. You don't know how much you have available in the transaction account, but you have cash.
I have a bank app. It's simple and works. Before that, they had a website. It's easy to check a balance in the morning and use that to guide you.
Before the internet was widespread, banks had a number you could call to get your balance. Heck, I think my current bank still has this, despite me being in a different country now.
Once you are in a situation where these aren't as helpful, you are probably in a bad life situation (speaking both from experience and observation of folks I know).
Cash makes my budgeting easier too. I find it harder to overspend cash I don't have on my person. The cost is more tangible (as every debit/credit tap "feels" like the same amount). Consumers have been shown to spend more when using electronic payment methods too. As to the coins, those get tossed in a jar to be rolled later, then eventually taken to the bank and to a rainy day fund.
Cash is fuckin' excellent.
"I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut; I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut."
Are they the same owners of Carlson's Donuts in Severn? They are also cash only.
It'd be like putting an Indian scammer call center in charge of the telephone network because there are some dropped calls. Or electing a guy who spent a career committing fraud at every turn President because the price of eggs went up a bit. Or solving the problems of the American healthcare system by putting a guy in charge who...
Oh, wait. We're definitely going to do the crypto thing. Dammit.
>The proximate reason is obvious. If it were to accept credit cards, Carlson’s would have to pay an interchange fee to a network, for the privilege of selling doughnuts. These fees run roughly between one and two per cent, sometimes higher, particularly for smaller retailers like Carlson’s.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. We all know this is to avoid tax, right? Why are we pretending otherwise?
They take card for everything else. This is just some tax-free pocket money for the owner.
Of course. More correctly, to evade tax.
Perhaps more importantly, consider the following design document for donut transaction software a la Mitch Hedberg:
"I'll just give you the money. You give me the donut. End of transaction."[1]
Cash achieves this out of the box. You could have John Carmack and a billion dollars seed money and your cc terminal would still need to be rebooted in the middle of a transaction on at least a bi-weekly basis.
Stablecoins like cash or other cash transfer schemes don’t offer any form of reputation of transactions for any reason. If you lose your money to theft, to a fraudulent merchant, whatever, the money is gone.
This being said, the interchange structure -is- inefficient as there’s been a lot of middle men accumulated over the years. A simpler interchange could be achieved with much lower fees for the merchant and higher rewards for the consumer. Only a major processor like stripe to accomplish this but they are too absorbed with stable coin malarkey
*They force the participating banks to offer...
You think MasterCard or Visa hand over a single dime to you? When you issue a chargeback, the money comes from the merchant bank, not from the network. Quite the opposite: the payment network penalizes the merchant bank with an additional chargeback fee.
> It’s not because of the complexity or avarice of the payment system providers,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks3wP1nlg6U
50% profit margin
This is not a competitive market.
yawpitch•5d ago
Kind of ironic this particular article is behind a paywall.