Cashless society disadvantages

The decline of cash is not without problems, however.

Friction when setting up accounts
Someone cannot use Internet services at home to set up Internet services at home for the first time.

Inability for minors and recent secondary graduates to participate in the economy
Banks require the primary holder of an account to be an adult and show government ID. This means that a parent must do all of a child's spending on the child's behalf. In addition, a recent graduate from high school[1] may not already have government ID. Someone not interested in learning to drive or whose parents don't drive may have little opportunity to obtain an ID, as some countries do not issue non-driver IDs for domestic use. Though U.S. states issue non-driver IDs, conversation with a British citizen in the Cireclinlin chat server on Discord revealed that Britain issues only driver's licenses and passports, and a passport is expensive.

Friction when accepting payments
Cashless payments require a connection to the Internet. This usually requires the buyer to own and carry an Internet-connected device unless the seller has a chip card reader. In addition, either the seller or buyer must subscribe to Internet access, and even if a buyer subscribes to home Internet, a buyer must often open a second subscription with a cellular ISP in order to make payments away from home. Card payment processors tend to take a 30 cent transaction fee plus 3 percent of the total, raising prices for everyone and making small transactions impractical; hence a $5 minimum purchase at some merchants. Furthermore, banks and payment facilitators tend to make person-to-person remittances more difficult than with established merchants. Ostensibly this is to curb tax fraud and terrorism financing. But it interferes with birthday or Christmas gifts, a child's allowance, or payment for occasional odd jobs that are not large or often enough to justify the annual fee for a full-scale merchant account.

Deplatforming by payment processors
PayPal has in the past terminated the ability of emulator developers to receive money. This is why, for example, NO$NES developer Martin Korth no longer takes PayPal. Nor do microblog hosts that espouse "free speech", that is, a policy whose ban on hate speech[2] applies only to incitement to violence. Credit card networks such as Visa are also known for deplatforming in some cases.

Citations for these are available on request.


[1] Or whatever a particular country calls its counterpart to high school. In the United States, "high school" is four years of secondary education from roughly ages 14 to 18.
[2] "Hate speech" is speech promoting bias against an ethnicity, gender, or disability.

Well personally I still use cash most of the time and I don't see myself stop anytime soon.

As for emulator authors not allowed to have paypal accounts, this seems like it could be easily circumvented, for example you use your pseudonym for the emulator and your real name for the paypal account.

Debit and credit cards most often do not require internet connections and have been widespread for ~35 years.

Similar to Pokun's experiences, it is extremely rare to see any types of cash at all around here. Pretty much the only time I've had cash has been from family members who don't know what else to get my for christmas, and I always end up holding on to that money for years because I'm literally never in any situation where I need, or even could have any use for, cash money.

It's kinda weird visiting other countries, especially places like Germany or the US where a lot of people still swear by cash.

Though the buyer doesn't need one, the seller does, particularly now that many card issuers have stopped embossing the digits for use with old-fashioned imprinters.


Do you have yard sales or garage sales or rummage sales? I have yet to see one in my neck of the United States that accepts debit or credit cards, largely because of the fee per transaction.

Stores, cafés and restaurants, especially in the centre or in malls, have begun refusing cash some years ago. It's almost impossible to pay your rent or other bills in cash.

I grew up in a family of market dealers so cash is in my nature, but society here is pretty cash-free at large, championed by the store clerks' union as well as the banks. Visiting Germany or Austria feels at home where cash is still a norm.

As a market dealer (which i still work as sometimes because of the family farm), your net income is partly in cash, especially when you're touring countryside markets where people still use cash much more frequently than in the cities - people go to the ATM prior to visiting the fair. You might as well use it directly once registered, except that sometimes you can't.

Getting your income into your bank is more fiddly than it should be these days. If you're over some fairly low threshold, you need to sit in an interview or fill out a lengthy form (i guess the intention is to protect against money laundering, but mostly i think banks are saving on minimizing staff), so you want to do it as seldom as possible. Bigger firms don't have this problem, but you do if your personal economy and private company economy is the same.

I bought my latest laptop with saved up cash, though.

Japan has 100-yen shops, Britain has pound shops, and USA has dollar stores. Sweden has Bubbeltian, a chain of 10-kronor stores. How much does the shop see of that when a card is used?


In such stores, how does someone pay for an order that totals 5 SEK (about 0.55 USD)? In the USA, which still uses cash for small transactions, a buyer can pay for a 50 cent purchase at a garage sale with two quarter dollar coins. But with a card, the bank will probably want about 0.30 USD or 3 SEK of that as its transaction fee. And a minor is unlikely to have a card to begin with.


The United States requires a bank to file a Currency Transaction Report when an account holder deposits or withdraws over 10,000 USD (about 90,000 SEK) in cash during one business day. Wikipedia's article about CTRs in the USA implies that the bank's software fills out most of the CTR electronically nowadays. Is the threshold in Sweden significantly lower than that? "Customer due diligence" on the English-language version of Sweden's Finance Inspection site implies that the reporting threshold is closer to 15,000 EUR or about 150,000 SEK.

Although you can geat cheap modern solutions (like iZettle) that use internet connection, these things have been widely used long before the internet took hold. I'm not sure how they work, but I think they have a phone line or something. Either way, every single store in this entire country rely on them. I'm not sure what the supposed disadvantage is.


Yeah those will usually accept cash, but there are still a lot that refuse to take it. Nowadays no one would even consider going to a market like that without an app for mobile payments.
Consider the alternative - you go with no idea what you'll end up buying if anything at all. Do you take out $10? $50? Or maybe $500 in case you come across something like a Dodonpachi arcade PCB? And what do you do with that cash if you didn't find what you were looking for?

Most of the debate about these things ends up being silly, because the cultures are so different overall.

For example, your arguments make little sense to American culture. On saturdays during garage sale season, I go out with whatever cash is in my wallet (anywhere from $5 to $200), or if I know that my wallet is empty, I'll restock with a few hundred dollars. Normally garage sales are about cleaning out your junk, so everything is usually priced very cheaply. If you find something expensive, you can usually just ask the seller to hold it for you while you run to the ATM. This all makes sense because people here are comfortable with cash.

Oh I didn't mention it, but bills are the only thing I pay online, as paying them by cash requires to go to the post office but only elderly people does it that way. For the rest, I always use cash and I hope we'll continue to do so as I see few advantages in switching to an electronic form of payment. (Basically this increase charges for the seller, and he'll report them to the customer).


What do you mean by "market dealer" ? Something where you sell fruits or the like at the market ? Here "dealer" is a word used for people seeling drugs.


Same here, but I still had one misadventure where I was out cycling and stopped at a bar to have a beer. But my wallet was empty and there was no ATM around so I had to pay by card for ~$5 - the waiter scolded me but still accepted it.

There were a few franchises like these; göfabtian was one, but i haven't seen one that is true to the concept since maybe 2004, if memory serves me correctly. I remember that the school i went to at that time had a partnership with one of the local banks to provide every student with maestro bank cards (limited mastercards).

I googled and found one store named bubbeltian in borgholm, they've been closed since october but will reopen around easter 2019. We do have the franchise named dollar store here but their pricing may differ from the US? Prices vary a lot and are sometimes just below what you'd expect of an ordinary supermarket.

Anyway, super markets and franchises tend to have a better card transaction deal than small private stores.

iZettle is similar but their charge depends on your total monthly sales.
Swish (most popular pay by phone service here) will vary depending on your local bank office, but most banks allow for small businesses to process payments free of charge until you reach some threshold and get flagged in the system, at which point they may prompt you to upgrade to a pro subscription.

I think the franchises, however, just calculate that the small purchases are outweighed by the phenomenon that people tend to shop both more often and for more money when they don't see bills dissapear from their wallet. Plus there's a subscription fee for for the service of money transport and bank deposit, and cash-less counter registers are cheaper to buy in bulk.


These are the rules imposed on banks by finansinspektionen, but nothing stops a bank from being stricter. My bank allows for deposits or withdrawals without the extra processes up to 10.000 SEK, but i've heard people complain about thresholds even lower than that, as low as 1.000 SEK even.

Add to it that some banks will add fixed rate fees or refuse cash handling under their own defined circumstances, or just deny the service outright.


Yes, fruit at the market and the like. Or in my case, hardy perennials for your garden.

Ah, tepples. Never change.

We still have cash here, thank goodness. Hasn't stopped the banks (and everyone else, really) from closing branches like they're going out of style and refusing to provide basic services except via the internet... which for 90% of the country's landmass stops working whenever a cloud passes overhead, if it ever worked at all.

The Korean government incentivizes the use of cards by deducting one's spending against income taxes due come tax season. Each year, citizens can request a form from their bank that gives totals spent in a number of categories: general commerce, traditional markets, transportation, and one more, I think.

Although it is still possible to receive these tax write-offs through cash spending, it requires a the issuance of a special card from the tax office, and merchants are required to have the technology on-hand to utilize these.

It seems this system was implemented to motivate customers to demand their transactions be on-the-books, thus pressuring merchants to actually report them honestly and pay the due taxes on them.

Anyway, just background as to why I transitioned from using primarily cash to nearly exclusively card. Although I keep emergency cash on me in case of card failure, loss, etc. I haven't actually used cash to pay for something in a very long time.

Don't any of you cashless or near-cashless folks have concerns over banks and/or corporations that manage said devices disabling your access, or something erroneous happening digitally? Speaking for myself: I'm wary of putting my entire financial well-being into an exclusive digital medium.

Two examples I've seen:

a) Albeit not quite the same thing as a bank doing it, is PayPal just suddenly deciding to reject your access to your account/disable people's cards, for whatever reason they see fit (sometimes political!),

b) Financial transaction system back-ends being completely down -- and by completely I mean 100%. Here's a recent example, and an even more recent one. Not every vendor has access to multiple transaction providers (in fact, I would say most companies/places of sale in the US only do transactions through one).

In general I think everyone's views are going to be slightly different given their geographic location. Things here in the US are not quite like that of the EU countries or east Asian countries, nor vice-versa. I think this plays a bigger role than what's been alluded so far.

I think this also comes down to the country. The US is backwards and under an iron fist of the payment companies. In AUS PayWave/PayPass is a system set up for auto payments below $50 or so. We also have BPay. I do kind of get odd looks when I use cash in some places, but everything will take and handle cash, it is illegal for them to not, but there are some stores that don't take cash due to crime which is pardoned by the police. However there are quite a few "Cash Only" stores, mainly in Sydney at the Asian restaurants as the underpaid Asian students have been known to skim cards/take details..

It hurts the Church though, which might really put the breaks on in the US https://au.news.yahoo.com/churchs-tap-g ... 35601.html

"What if holder of my money doesn't give me my money" is no different of an argument now than it was in the 1800s when it was "trust bank vs mayonnaise jar of cash." But having lived in the US and experienced American banks' predatory practices, I'd say a mayonnaise jar is the better option.

I trust either my bank to have my money or the government to insure the bank. I keep emergency cash if bank is temporarily unavailable. There's essentially no paypal here. Even private transactions are handled with instant transfers via online banking, which are feeless.

I don't feel foreign at all in societies that "still" uses mostly cash like Germany, Switzerland, USA or Japan. Sweden used to be like that as well, and that's the Sweden I grew up with. It's a fact that it was only a few years ago that this cashless society thing started, no matter how much some people try to pretend it's always been like this. So this whole "the culture is so different" kind of talk is just ridiculous, as there is no truth in it.

Being in Japan I'm very relieved how smoothly cash is still handled. Cash exchange machines are common (almost extinct in Sweden), and you can still pay with cash on the bus. In Stockholm the bus/train not only stopped accepting cash, they don't even take credit cards. You need either a prepaid ticket (which of course visitors usually don't have) or download a bloated smartphone app with included spyware to buy the bloody thing (which again foreigners might not have). This means if you live in the outskirts and your prepaid ticket or commuter pass has been used up/expired, you will have to plead to the bus driver let you go to the station so you can buy another frikkin ticket. Sometimes the bus driver don't let you, and then you are f***ed. Their defence is that they are afraid of robbers so they can't handle cash anymore (no explanation why they can't handle credit cards). SL are just a bunch of pussies all of them.

When I was a kid banks used to have a coin machine that you emptied your piggy bank in. But now they don't anymore. What good is a bank that doesn't even want money?


Yes this the main reason I'm against making internet services the only option. I'm all for internet services where it makes sense, I pay all my bills on the internet in Sweden while in Japan I have to use up my free time whenever I need to do something bureaucracy-related. But when they cancel offline services so that you always depends on a working internet at all times (for not mentioning cutting off elder people not comfortable using a computer or smartphone), you are going too far. Sweden is very good at this (making more online services available) but also very bad at it (going too far sometimes).

I don't remember having an ID was ever a problem in Sweden as you could always get a passport (which isn't very expensive) until you are old enough to get a driver's license. But getting a credit card usually requires you to be 18 years old. It was no problem when I was a kid because, the cashless society just didn't exist back then. I have no idea how it is being a kid nowdays.

A law that prevents sellers from taking transaction fees was made in Sweden. In fact I think that the cashless society took off around this time. Probably things became smoother for the seller as well during this time, or else the cashless society wouldn't work at all.

In the United States, the word "passport" means an internationally valid passport with visa pages, which costs about 200 USD, as opposed to a domestic ID. The several states provide the latter for generally 10 to 15 USD but are required to provide one without charge to eligible voters if a state requires ID to vote. Britain does not issue domestic ID at all; it issues only international passports and driver's licenses.


If "Pocket money apps aim to help kids in cashless world" by Kelvin Chan is any indication, a child needs a parent to buy him or her a smartphone or tablet on which to run a wallet application. The article mentions "prepaid cards", and last I checked, prepaid cards not tied to a traditional draft/checking account tended to be loaded with annual fees, balance inquiry fees, outbound transfer fees, and the like.


If the seller must not pass this cost through to the buyer, then when who absorbs the fee that the bank charges? If the law requires the seller to absorb this fee for any order amount, than anyone with more time than money could perform a denial of service on a seller by repeatedly placing orders with small totals (circa 1 USD).

Wow that was expensive. In Sweden the fee for a internationally valid passport is 350 crowns (about 39 USD) and it currently lasts 5 years. You can get a domestic ID, but really there is no reason to do so as it has no use other than being an ID. A passport can be used to travel with and a driver's license of course you can drive with besides doubling as an ID. Many young people in Stockholm don't have a driver's license nowdays though as you hardly need it in town, these people might be getting a domestic ID. I never had a domestic ID as I got a driver's license.


In Sweden there is this spyware-infested smartphone bloatware called "Swish" that FrankenGraphics mentioned. I don't know if underage can use it though.


I don't really know how it works, but I guess the power that promotes the cashless society somehow made things easier somehow, maybe they absorbs the fee in some fashion.

Depending on how severely you are talking about here, my answer ranges from "not really" to "having cash on me doesn't change that".
I mean banks as they are, are already completely 100% in control of my economy, and that of everyone else in the world. If they wanted to break me off from my money, and were able to get away with it, they could do it. And me having some cash wouldn't make a difference. I mean, if I needed to get cash to pay for whatever, I'd still rely on the bank to even take out the cash in the first place, right?

As for just moment to moment issues with payments, I've relied entirely on cards for the past 19 years of my life, and never had any problems, so I don't really see any reason to worry.
Of course minor issues do occasionally rise, but they rarely have consequences.

The problem when an influencing group changes something is that at first it just feels like a forced change, but then 30 years later, it ends up being geniunely "the culture is so different". This might be sad or disgusting but the very fact you use "still" means people are thinking their new way is "modern" and thag going back to what was previously used (in this case, cash) is unthinkable.

The same could be said for many so called "modern" things, such as gay marriage, lagalizing drugs, or whatever. At least this doesn't lead to world standardization and unification, as almost everything else leads to.

Yeah people (read: young people that grew up in big cities) are proud of it, thinks it's modern like you said and looks down on countries and people that mainly use cash. I just think that's stupid because I don't see so many advantages with a cashless society while I do see a lot of disadvantages.

I'm not against electronic money at all, I've been an avid user of cards, Paypal etc for a long time and I do see a great advantage in the fact that you can use cards almost everywhere in Sweden nowdays. Even in Japan things have become better and foreign cards are more often accepted which is just great when you don't happen to have enough cash.

What I'm against is that the cashless society tries to remove cash as a payment option (see the rest of the thread for a list of all the disadvantages). And now suddenly there are places that stops accepting cash and only takes card. There are also places and situations when cash is still required but they are getting rare. When people comes to such a situation they are baffled by the fact (no matter how many times they come) and claims that it's the first time they've seen something like that (liars).
And when people try to keep pressuring me into installing bloatware like "Swish" I get irritated, I see no advantage in that over cards, it just slows down my phone.

One obvious disadvantage with cash is the fact that coins are heavy, and having too much coins on you is a hassle. The current smallest coin in Sweden is the 1 crown coin (1 SEK) and it used to be quite heavy for how much it's worth (the SEK has weakened quite fast). But lately all coins except the 10 crown coin has been renewed for a smaller much lighter one so coins are no longer heavier than Japanese coins (which are very light). So this one disadvantage is now pretty much gone.
By the way the renewal process was another big fiasco where people weren't given enough time to exchange in their old coins and bills for the new ones, and as banks refused to accept cash it was chaos. When criticized that the time wasn't anywhere near enough for an operation as big as this they just came with excuses and insisted they'd given enough time. Making you think the ones taking these kinds of decisions are five years old.

To be honest if you know to use them properly, coins are not a problem at all. The problem is that many people don't know how to use them.

Let's say you have to pay $12.65 and you only have a $20 bill and some coins in your wallet. Most people are going to pay with the $20 bill only. What you're supposed to do is look at your coins, and see if you can give the extra $0.65 with your coins. If you can, then give the $0.65 and the seller will return you $8 hapilly. This is much simpler than if he had to return you $8.35.

Also in most of europe, they have €0.01 coins which are annoying, in Poland they also have those 0.01PLN coins. Here the minimum is 0.05 CHF which is annoying, but still less worse, as 0.02 and 0.01 CHF coins have been removed in the 1960s.

I understand people prefer to pay without cash, but I could never understand if anybody refused to take cash as a mean of payment. That seems like to be annoying on purpose.

I still found 1-centime bouncing around when I visited in 2006, albeit almost entirely as novelty items. It looks like they were only officially removed from circulation in 2007.

I also found 5-Franc coins to be so heavy as to be hard to justify carrying. (and less pretty than 10-franc notes)

"We don't take cash" might be code word for any of these:

- Our customers' average order is large enough that the time and service cost of cash handling exceeds the fee that our card processor charges
- We prefer that customers make large orders
- We don't serve unbanked poor people [whisper]such as ethnic minorities[/whisper]

In any case, under U.S. law, in order not to take cash, a business has to make only prepaid transactions. This is because a postpaid transaction (such as paying after a restaurant meal) incurs a debt, making the business a creditor, and authentic coins and paper money are "legal tender", or an offer of payment that a creditor isn't allowed to refuse.

Or in a mostly cash-less society, it could easily be:
- the time and service cost of cash handling isn't worth the profit from the tenth of a percent of customers we'd lose otherwise

So it's not just me, then? PayPal won't take my money. Never has. No idea why.

I was unable to contribute to the last NesDev fundraiser because of this.

It is not just you. This happens to **many** people. The stories all vary:

- Won't allow people to make an account for various weird reasons
- Allows people to make an account but won't allow them to add a particular back-end system (bank account, credit card, etc.)
- Downright rejecting a particular back-end payment option despite it being OK/functional (almost feels like "bank/credit card company blacklisting")
- Account verification process results in rejection for unknown reasons
- After account creation, PayPal follows up with the user to request more information -- wanting certain things that they actually do not need. I've had personal IRL friends experience this one repeatedly. They don't just ask for "other forms of ID" (i.e. they are not trying to confirm identity), but they start asking for other financial-related things and sometimes even things like proof of weddings or employment status or whatever else
- Locking people's accounts permanently, and then not allowing them to get their money (i.e. PayPal is literally holding on to all money in their account, no matter if the lockdown was caused by a single transaction or not). This is probably the most common one I've seen reported. Getting PayPal to relinquish your funds is EXTREMELY tedious and difficult, and in many cases can take up to something like 6+ months depending on the circumstance, and in other cases I've read, *never* relinquishing the funds (I don't even know how this is legal, but it really does depend on their terms of service)
- General support problems -- getting a response from Support is painful, and in cases of the above, they often will take however long they want to "review a situation" and then give you an answer which you can or can't repeal (depends on the situation). They operate a lot like how a state's unemployment department would, it's very weird

I don't want this to turn into a PayPal bashing session or get off-topic. But FWIW, I've had a PayPal account for 19 years (I chcked) and I've run into literally *zero* problems with them and do a LOT of PayPal transactions. I've been super happy with them. But I am always sure to keep my account balance at $0.00 with them because I do not trust storing my money there. I use them solely as an "online payment option/processor", as I don't like providing E-commerce sites with my direct credit card number for security reasons. I also used them for Parodius donations (separate from my personal PayPal account), which was super easy to set up and PayPal gave me no trouble.

My point is that PayPal acting this way is a perfect example of why US citizens tend to defend use of cash -- it may be tender the government prints, but it's something accepted nearly everywhere, and it *works* even if a system is down. And furthermore, you ABSOLUTELY can survive living purely with cash (stockpiling it somewhere in a safe, etc.) and holding a full-time job (no direct deposit etc.), though it does help to have a bank or credit union account.

You kind of sound like all the people going "why can't you just call someone you want to talk to?" back when text messaging starting becoming a thing on phones.

Yeah maybe one reason some people hate cash is because they can't count coins properly. This skill will be a lost art, and when young people come to a cash country they will get into trouble.
In Japan it's essential that you do it like you explained or you will end up with lots of 1 yen coins that, while extremely light, can't really be used for anything, vending machines usually doesn't take lower than 10 yen coins. 5 yen coins are useful in shrines though.

But really the coins in Sweden was much too heavy until the recent renewal. We used to have smaller coins called öre (1 öre = 0.01 SEK). When I was a kid the 1 and 5 öre coins were already out of use but 10, 25 and 50 öre still existed. The 1 crown and bigger coins were expensive and therefore large and heavy. Now the crown is cheaper and the öre coins are all gone. The 1 crown is the smallest coin left while still being very heavy until recently.

Yup, that's me. I don't even want to make an account, just pay for something with my credit card. I'm perfectly happy not giving them my money, since they clearly don't want it, but some sellers don't provide any other payment option.

And that's my beef with the "cashless society" - people can unilaterally exclude you from it.

I pay in cash when I buy stuff at the store.

Cashless would be many problem, whether they exclude you due to purpose or by accidently, or surveillance.

Another problem when paying electronically is that you loose track on how much money you spend easily. Paying with cash you get a feeling how much you spend from all your ATM withdrawals, but when paying with cards I have no idea how much I have left. Therefore I pay only with cards when I'm low on cash.

The biggest advantage with the cashless society is that the line to the ATM has become a lot shorter.

The possibility of the financial industry deplatforming buyers and sellers has been anticipated since the first century AD. In The Bible, Revelation 13:16-18 tells a story about having no way to buy or sell goods without taking the mark of the beast. Google Search for cashless 666 returns numerous conspiracy theories about the connection between expectation of cashless payment and the rise to power of enemies of all that is loving and good.

So long story short, the rise of the cashless society means the end of the world draws near? I knew it!

Tjena mors!

For me, Swish actually solves the problem of wanting to lend or give money to someone when there's no cash at hand. A typical scenario for me would be "swishing" my GF when she's paid for a big haul of food at the supermarket. I also use it a lot for Tradera (sweden's take on ebay for the non-swedes). Makes compulsive retro game hunting a lot easier!

Tjena mors!

People borrowing money from me will normally get it in cash. I don't borrow from other people if I can help it, but if I really have to it might be a problem if they don't have cash. They might have to pay the whole sum for me.

A cashless society will likely be a very tough adjustment for people who are in difficult financial situations. When everything is cashless, everything is tracked, and you cannot hide. People in financial predicaments count on being able to hide, at least a little. In the US, if a creditor has a judgement against you for an unpaid debt, your entire bank account can be sucked down to $0 by that creditor (assuming your balance doesn't exceed what you owe). The law in most states also allows creditors to directly garnish your paycheck before it gets to you, but only up to 25% of it. Most people in this situation avoid depositing their paycheck into a bank account to keep what they can. In a cashless society, your check would need to go somewhere; probably into an account. While it's true that you should honor your word and repay your debt, people need to be able to physically survive. If you have $0 in the bank, you can't buy food. And if you have creditors after you, your credit is shot, so you can't borrow money to buy food. There are millions of people in situations like this, and they count on cash to survive.

Also, a cashless society would likely end up adopting some sort of cryptocurrency, which would involve the use of smart contracts. In today's society, when you agree to terms such as repaying a loan or paying rent for an apartment, you are signing a paper contract where you pinky-swear that you will pay on time. Of course, this gives you room to break your promise. Smart contracts are designed to prevent that from happening, and enforce the terms of the contract using code. Going cashless, companies would surely opt for the use of smart contracts to enforce their terms. Essentially, everything would be on automatic payments. If rent is due on the 1st of the month, you will automatically be charged for your rent on that day. If that transaction fails, the terms of the contract say "if you don't pay, you'll be locked out of your apartment", so a smart contract would run code could in a split second that renders your apartment key useless (assuming a "smart" electronic lock of some sort is installed). Granted, the apartment management company could choose more lenient terms, but they will choose to be as strict as is legally possible.

My personal opinion is that there are a lot of loopholes in our legal systems (including the tax code) that need to be figured out before everything switches to smart contracts and cryptocurrency. Because I'm a gambler, if I followed the tax code exactly like I'm supposed to, every time I win a quarter on a slot machine, I would be required to add that to my "winnings" for the year, and add that to my adjusted gross income (AGI). You can sit at a slot machine for hours with all the times it gives you a quarter back, and only end up spending like $20 in the end. Technically, I could win and lose a quarter tens of thousands of times throughout the year, but I'm expected to document the winnings (and just the winnings, not the offsetting loss) and add it to my adjusted gross income. While I can deduct my losses on another line and reduce the amount I'm taxed on, eligibility for tax credits and student loans is based on your adjusted gross income, before losses are deducted. This means I could have won and lost a quarter a million times, and I would be required to add $250,000 to my AGI, basically eliminating my eligibility for student aid. Thankfully, these transactions are all handled with cash today, so I can "forget" to tell the government about these micro wins. In fact, nobody reports these micro wins because the concept is ridiculous. In a cashless society, this would be reported automatically via smart contract, and I would automatically be screwed.

Wow this is awful Celius ! This is basically, mathematically speaking throwing your money out of the window. You're a good guy, you should stop gampling ASAP.

LOL, I appreciate your concern. We all have our vices. Gambling is my vice, rather than drinking or smoking. I am pretty good at math, so I understand that the house has the edge and that you lose money in the long run (and often in the short run). Have a reasonable budget, go for entertainment (you can meet people, socialize, and make friends at the casino; some of my closest friends I've met at the casino). Every now and then, you'll recoup some losses, and even recoup enough to purchase something you would never have saved money for. Go to the bar, you can do all the same stuff, but you never get your money back, and slowly contribute to declining health. Many don't understand how gambling could be entertaining, but that's OK. I don't understand how drinking is entertaining. To me, it's stupid, and it's a waste of money. And that's also OK.

Well I don't know but I find it ridiculous to think that if you weren't gambing you'd be automatically be drinking, smoking or something else. This is just not true. And there's plenty of people who are gambling, drinking and smoking. And we have to feed those idiots with our taxes.

That sounds very strange. Are you sure you wouldn't just have to report the total sum of your wins, as in what you actually walk away with? I'm a swede, so I don't know how it works over there in the US, but that sounds really strange. Are the rules for gambling investments different from stocks or is it the same there?

I know one person who is sufficiently good with statistics that he knows how to 1- identify which games have an expected positive return and 2- how to adjust playing to minimize the element of chance. As I understand it, he gets a special tax form for gambling winnings, and has to pay capital gains on those winnings, instead of treating it as ordinary income.

I would imagine that would be the end of all sex shops.


This.


Really? Which ones? What casino gives the player the edge?

Not everyone is ashamed of buying stuff at sex shops. Lots of people I know are pretty open about items acquired in sex shops.



Wait... So you're against gambling, unless your chances are better than average?

True, you do not have to do any of those things, or you could do all of those things. Pretty much everyone I know does at least one of those things (mainly, drinking). Most people have a vice, or bad habit, that another would consider a waste of money. I certainly don't condone people spending government money on any of those things. I've seen a lot of people who are drunk, smoking, and gambling, literally talking about how they are spending their welfare check (government assistance in the US) at the casino. It truly irritates me, because I know people who are struggling financially who don't smoke/drink/gamble, and they don't qualify for that assistance. I support myself and am in a higher tax bracket, so I don't really feel guilty about gambling a couple times a month for a little bit. Are there smarter things to do with my money? 100%, guaranteed, yes, certainly.

It would make sense that you would just need to report your net gambling income as one item, but it's not the case. In the US, you calculate something called adjusted gross income which includes all your winnings, then you subtract out deductions which can include gambling losses, which results in your taxable income. It could look like this:

AGI:
$50,000 in regular income
+ $100,000 in winnings (this could be this high from winning 25 cents thousands of times)
= $150,000

Deductions:
-$100,000 in losses (immediately after you win 25 cents, you spend it back because who cares)

Taxable Income:
$150,000 (AGI)
- $100,000 (Deductions)
= $50,000 (Taxable Income)

If you won 25 cents and lost 25 cents 400,000 times in a row, you would have $0 in net winnings or losses, but you would report it as shown above, even though at no point did you ever have an extra $100,000. When you go to apply for a school loan, you'll have to tell them your AGI was $150,000, and they'll wonder how you "blew through all that money". It's a terrible system, so people work around it by not reporting micro wins (like when you win 25 cents, don't report it, even though you're supposed to).


Gambling is not really an investment, because you don't own anything in exchange for your bet. Thus, it is not treated as an investment in terms of taxes.

It is indeed possible to do this, but it's very difficult, requires a huge bankroll, a huge amount of patience, and attention to detail. Many people play video poker with a "perfect strategy" and actually do make a profit, but you really have to know what you're doing. There are instances where the best choice of what to hold is not obvious, and where one choice has a super tiny advantage over the other. If you make the wrong choice, you can really set yourself back without even realizing it.

From my experience, if you win over $1200 in a single play/win, you get a W-2 for that amount, and you report it as "additional income". It doesn't get taxed differently than regular income. You're also supposed to report gambling winnings that don't have a W-2 associated with them, but like I said, no one does. You just report the winnings with a W-2 associated, because you know that the IRS knows about those.

It's not a casino that gives the player the edge, it's specific games, which are pretty hard to find these days. Certain variations of video poker yield a positive ROI when played with the perfect strategy, but you pretty much have to be a mastermind to actually execute that strategy. Most people who gamble are indeed idiots, and the house makes money on their garbage "strategies", while losing a little to the masterminds.

LOL, I have a friend who says, "gambling is only a problem when you're not winning."

That is an accurate summary of him, yes

No sex please, I'm british.


Of course! The problem with gambling is, you always end up losing. But if I can play a game that actually has a positive return then I'm all for it. Who wouldn't be?

You might find this article interesting. It explains the perfect strategy for playing "Deuces Wild", a version of video poker widely available in US casinos (the trouble is finding a machine with the right paytable, i.e. the table showing how much you win for a given result). Also, that whole site is very interesting, and I've learned a lot from it.


There are a lot of people who are against gambling for other moral reasons. People who are very religious and see gambling as "sinful" tend to frown upon it due to the greed factor. Their idea is, you shouldn't think you can just walk up to a machine and get a bunch of money for doing nothing. If you want money, you should have to work for it. I don't really want to have to work, so I'm not one of these people. I'm all for people who want to gamble for a profit. The house sure as shit isn't going to suffer. Think of it like you're transferring money from people who were willing to lose it to people who are willing to gain it

Well, even if you could play a game with positive return (something I'm extremely dubious/suspectful of), it only makes sense if the ratio between income per hour and effort you have to make is higher than working.

If playing that game with positive return requires more effort than working, or if it pays less per hour, or both, then you're actually better off working than playing this game, despite the claim "heh I'm not working but still making money".

I've recently learned the joy of pachinko. I'm not really a gambler (nor do I smoke but I like to drink with good company, which is an important skill in Japan BTW) but I have fond memories of as a kid playing the slot machines on the ferry to Denmark and Finland (slot machines are illegal in Sweden but are common on ferries when going away from Sweden) and winning lots of coins. Pachinko are similarly hardly interactive gambling machines, but I now understand the joy of gambling a bit more. I only play them in my spare time when walking around in town though, being careful of not getting addicted.

They say pachinko machines used to be more generous (and the old ones required more skill as you had to load and shoot the balls manually using a spring-loaded lever), and you could win a lot if you worked hard all day and focused on one machine with good odds. Nowdays the government have put more pressure on pachinko companies by raising taxes, so they are forced to have smaller margins. So nowdays pachinko machines are quite scary and may make you spend a lot of money in a short time if you are not careful. I play mostly for the enjoyment, and for seeing all the different types of machines, as I'm seldom winning.

I'd like to try and program a pachinko mini-game some day.

Well if it's anything like Sweden (or Japan to an extent) there are high taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gambling so people who spend a lot on these are actually paying the society for their bumness. Addicted people that doesn't has a job is a big problem for the society though. In Sweden alcohol and gambling are limited to government-owned companies with monopoly (which really sucks when you need some cheap beer for a party and the only alcohol shop isn't open on weekends or after 17). In Japan it's also expensive but you can at least buy beer in about any convenience store 24/7. And Japan has nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink) which is very cheap for an inherently alcohol-resistant Swede.

Hence why I haven't pursued this. Most machines that yield a positive return are low denomination, meaning the game credits are worth 5 cents rather than say, $1. It's takes way to long to build money. And even on a low denomination, it still requires a huge bankroll to play professionally. Not worth my time.

But one thing I should mention though is that most casinos allow you to play with a loyalty card that gives you free slot play on a weekly basis, and something like .1% cash back for all of your wagers, so this would increase your expected return slightly. Most people get something like $20 a week in free slot play from the casino they go to most often, but they look at how much you spend and adjust accordingly. The way the slot play works is you load it into a machine, and it must be played, but you keep what you win. I think people who play professionally really count on the loyalty rewards as part of their expected return.

Fun story about loyalty rewards. One of my really good friends is a huge gambler, and he racks up really nice rewards on his loyalty card. Since he spends and makes so much (at his business he owns), they're basically nothing to him. He actually lets me keep his card and go take the rewards off of it if he doesn't plan on using them, which is most of the time. During the summer this last year, he was getting something like $100 a week in free slot play on his card, for 3 months straight, that he wasn't using. I would take his free play and download it into a video roulette machine. I would bet $47 on red, $47 on black, $3 on 0, and $3 on double-0. If the ball landed on red or black, I would win $94. If it landed on 0 or double-0, I would win $105. These are the only two possible outcomes when betting this way. If you look at it, you're basically guaranteeing that you get 95% of your bet back every time you play. Now why would I do this? Because remember, the slot play must be played, but you can keep the winnings. So in one play, I would turn $100 in free slot play into $94 or $105 in cash, which I cashed out and kept. So yeah, I did that all summer and probably made about $1500 for doing basically nothing.

No, it's not about effort, it's about enjoyment. A lot of us have hobbies that take a lot of effort and are a net loss, but provide enjoyment. I happily work on homebrew that makes me only a tiny percentage of what my other contract work pays, and is the same amount of effort.

I think he meant under the assumption that you're just doing this as your only job. Some people do this full-time as their sole occupation. Otherwise, I agree; it's not always about how much you make. If you enjoy it and benefit from it even if only a little, have at it.

Well, no matter whether you like it or not, the cashless society's definitely happening. Everyone's doing their part: Sweden's close to achieving it according to this article, Singapore's doing their best to follow suit according to this article... Plus, other forms of money and payments are appearing, such as cryptocurrencies; even the real estate market is preparing to be transformed by the blockchain and other similar technologies!

Just because something is happening doesn't mean it's either good or inevitable.

Also it's really far to happen everywhere it seems.

Blackjack for people who count cards.


The effort of working includes the effort of finding a job and relocating to where the job is. I had trouble with that for a long time.

In the era of the internet there are a lot of jobs you can do without the need to relocate.

Talking with some Swedish people I learned that the seller have to absorb the full fee themselves after all. This law has only made it worse for sellers, and some sellers are also very grumpy about the cashless society which is also only making things worse for them.
I'm not sure if it's possible to perform a denial of service by repeatedly buying cheap things though.

Seems possible. My local grocery store refuses card transactions below 50 SEK / 5.25 USD. Whether supported by laws or not, noone is raising an eyebrow.

Or you can just calculate the average monthly cost of the transaction into the price of your goods, or charge a crown extra for plastic bags..


Recently, banks started having a firmer approach to wether a small business is using private or business plan accounts for iZettle (mobile card transactions) or swish (cardless phone number tied transactions), meaning there's smaller chance to escape the fee. They're also pushing having a "private business" account as opposed to a personal account, though you could do either according to law as long as the bookkeeping checks out. For your own sake, it's easier to have a business account. There's usually a few tiers of yearly fees in exchange for additional services.

I'd say it's the exact opposite. People expect you to easily find jobs and relocate abroad, or employers expects to easily hire someone from another part of the world if they feel (s)he's better or cheaper than people available at home. In the end you were less likely to relocate long ago than you are today.