Brazil has Pix. Though if Bolsonaro wins the election he'll sell the financial system to the US, even though Brazilians love Pix.
These are not fringe payment systems, either. They're really big where they are.
EU is working on something similar, and I think it's launched in a couple of countries.
We're literally in the middle of the election Bolsonaro is winning.
If "the electronics" break down, shops usually can't accept any form of payment at all, because that would be illegal with their on-line cash registers being offline...
Col. Jacques Baud is living it right now. He's been cut off from his pension and bank accounts completely in Belgium and is prohibited from crossing borders.
So he can't even return to Switzerland.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/former-swiss-in...
Prophecy: some people here may argue that's a good thing, and we should differentiate between a good and bad debanking.
It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
Nevertheless it is certainly a good idea to think about fallbacks tho.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies.
But if we are going to view the government as the enemy in this context and thus cash is a way to avoid “control” it also follows that the same are espousing avoidance of paying taxes and the control government and taxes have over you as well.
It’s interesting to see folks talking about the “disadvantaged” such as immigrants (presumably illegal because legal immigrants have varying levels of bank access) who of course deserve to use cash as a moral imperative against the totalitarian government but then if someone says well I disagree with and don’t want to pay taxes (give me cash) because of that same anti-totalitarian point of view they’d be labeled all sorts of negative things like being a non-contributor or something similar.
We have to align on consistent moral claims. If you want to argue well so and so is part of the totalitarian government apparatus then all you are doing is creating an “other” who uses cash to avoid “totalitarianism” and in which case the so-called “totalitarian” apparatus is justified in its hostility toward entities which seek to destroy it.
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Cash is a good backup and is easy to give to someone else e.g. I recently moved house and my brother was driving my car (while I drove the moving van). I left £60 in cash in the cubby box, so he could refill. No need to mess around with apps/bank transfers, just leave the notes/coins in the compartment.