Internet of Things + Cashless Society

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Many of you must have read the article where the CEO of Bank of America said: “We want a cashless society”.

There are big dangers attached to a cashless society (one currency only) in combination with the so called internet of things.

If the internet of things combined with a cashless society will be supported by governments globally, the physical flow of produce together with its financial money flow will be tracked and controlled by the authorities from producer to consumer.

This would be the biggest threat to our freedom and the way of governments to fully take control.

What are your thoughts about this? Looking forward to hear your opinions!

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A cashless society using SafeCoin or something like Monero would be perfectly fine.

Banks would be still needed for people who cannot manage the risk and costs of making irreversible mistakes. Or insurance companies could offer insurance for such issues and eliminate the needs for banks altogether.

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I am more optimistic. Sooner or later SafeNetwork will be born and democracy will live. Just need technology on top of the network to digitize and scale trust.

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You can combine IoT with a cashless system? So you’re saying that cash could be paired with things? Like you can’t buy items without having a certain currency? Or just the things you buy – regardless of what currency is used (to buy them) – will be tracked: by an Internet placed inside the Things you buy, thus making for uncontrolled-by-the-consumer tracking grid for populations? Not sure I follow entirely, since I haven’t researched much about Internet of Things.

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Hi Audity, in a cashless society we could still use cashless alternatives to buy products.

Though in a world where control starts at production level thru iot systems and government is able to keep benchmarks of what supposedly must be produced by company x in business sector y, while everything must be paid for with one global coin, it will be close to impossible to spend alternative cash.

I hope this clarifies it.

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I don’t believe in the existence of a cashless society. I think there will always be some people who will need cash to stay under the radar, for whatever reason. I think there will always be someone with an interest to print it, probably among the big ones. There will also always be people without access to any digital form of money, and these will keep using physical means to work out their exchanges.

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How is the govt going to make clandestine cash payments to people they can’t have on the books without cash?

/s

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maybe cash be connected to a “crypto” coin? like safecoin

so banks would have some safecoin for cash transactions so you dont have deflation by division of money by banks and governments but by having in the “wallets” of banks safecoin. maybe someone will make an international bank with freedom in mind that will exchange your safecoin for cash anywhere in the world

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Had some thoughts about Safecoin recently. Might be an appropriate post to share them in.

Someone please correct me if I’m technically completely missing something here, I’m not a coder and I am just going on my own understanding of the way the currency will work.

Currencies have always been pegged to… nothing, since maybe the time of bartering, when some amount of goods was strongly represented by the currency being used (historians, please correct me?).

Gold, silver, dollars, euro, bitcoin, whatever else, has all been valuable because… humans believed it was valuable. In a different sense than that which made bartering-currency valuable: gold came to represent a value in itself, as have dollars and bitcoin.

Safecoin will be directly imaginable as a certain amount of extremely precious goods, always. The certain amount of goods in this case being your pictures and films and books and music and writings and thoughts and memories and your ability to get and share and create more of these things.

What difference would it make to human society if we had a medium of exchange that directly represented a certain definable amount of things important to humans?

Would, for example, putting a massive apartment building up for sale at a price which only makes sense if the purchaser is going to invest in extremely expensive apartments be universally decried as socially violent behaviour?

Or have I missed something? If not, discussions about cashless societies seem to be slightly outboxed by the possibility that humans might be about to see what happens to human societies when there is an anonymous and secure and straightforward and possibly sanity-inducing currency readily farm-able.

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I think you’re almost there. The basic principle is money is worth what people will give for it. Backing=Demand is derived partially from belief, partially from access to value, and partially from coercion (e.g. taxes). Supply can vary.

Gold is unique, because it has the highest stock to flow ratio of any commodity by a large margin, and is thus not pegged to its industrial use or it’s mining cost… reservation demand is the most important factor. It has unrivaled trust because it has thousands of years of being a Schelling point for value. There is no coercion to own gold, thus its value is purely based on a long tradition of global belief. On the supply side, there is little in heaven or on earth that could change the inflation rate from approximately 1.5% (deflationary in terms of world population), but it is still prey to demand.

Bitcoin mimics gold, adds much less friction in trade and transmission, but unlike gold requires constant economic input to remain (POW). Bandwidth and liquidity are far below gold. Inflation is known and always decreasing. In the end, the utility that bitcoin provides comes not from an economy, but from uncensorability. Fungibility (blacklisting) may play the ultimate role here.

USD is unique because owning it gives access to the widest array of goods and services and there is reason to believe this will continue. It also has coercion power in that the base demand is driven by the necessity to pay american taxes. But it suffers a flaw in that it is arbitrary (fiat) and supply can blow out. Taxes are a huge thing for demand and liquidity though and the coercion aspect can also add the US military.

Safecoin has properties from both worlds. Maximum inflation is known. Supply is based on actual cost to provide/maintain the network. There is no coercive power, so in the end… If the economy that SAFEnet offers has real utility, then demand will be there. If SAFEcoin proves to be secure and with use value, then you have the supply restrictions of crypto/gold, with demand driven by access to value (real value, not hoping for future exchange value). Then we are actually into something new under the sun.

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And the AU government is planning on introducing legislation as soon as they can to make Australia cashless. Do not know if their plans are for 2 years or 5

Hopefully they get the royal finger from the public and get kicked out before they can do it

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A cashless society is a great concept, the problem is when the cashless systems are centralized (like everything else), the same with “cloud” storage and computing.

So far I haven’t found any crypto candidate, other than the SafeNetwork, that could -in principle- truly become a digital cash.

Blockchain projects that dream about becoming the next cash replacement, are completely nuts. They don’t seem to grasp the gargantuan volume of transactions are there in the world in cash.
It is fundamentally impossible and impractical to become digital cash with a blockchain (regardless of being pow or pos).

These projects typically compare with stats from Visa, but then they seem to fail to realize that they are comparing with payment processors, not with cash.
Oh, so you can process about as much as VisaNet (56K transactions a second)? Congrats, now, can a blockchain process 2 billion transactions in the same instant?
Let me see how you “scale” that up on a blockchain, because that is minimum amount of transactions that happens globally in cash.

Without a truly ledger-less distributed and decentralized network, it is impossible to have a crypto alternative to cash. And the properties of cash are to be anonymous, instant and fee-less.
The only project that covers those characteristic is the proposed SafeCoin on the SafeNetwork.

On the SafeNetwork there should be zero bottlenecks by simultaneous transactions of any order of magnitude as every user would have their own quorum of close groups, in a true P2P fashion. I still can’t believe that people are failing to see this crucial aspect and that there are still people out there insisting on blockchain based solutions (for cash-like uses).

The SafeNetwork would solve in one strike every problems derived from the centralization of services, while keeping the convenience of “cloud” systems.

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Think about that figure and realise there are 7 billion people on the earth. Honestly I think even SAFE might have issues and definitely require a large global network.

I am ignoring forex trading and other trading platforms since they are doing their own thing.

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That number includes babies, infants and kids; and as far as I know they aren’t actively participating directly in the economy :wink:

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My point was 2 billion is way high for cash/fiat transactions per second for only 7 billion people which includes babies/children

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The promise of 2 bilion transactions is real, because we trade using cents every day, but there is something else, the amount of identities, documents,prgrams, games, videos, pictures… which a blockchain could never fulfill safety for! A blockchain would be just another banking system controlled by governments, which is already happening by the KYC/AML policies…I don´t think bitcoin will live long…

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Hi @andreruigrok I am working for a hardware appliance firm which are releasing an IoT device and in my previous role I worked for Bosch working again with hardware and they too released IoT products whilst I was there and I can tell you realistically IoT infrastructure is only in its absolute infancy both the companies, users and also the governments are still figuring it out.

I see anything the government has control over as dangerous however you have to understand that the governments are mostly incompetent and many of the people are lazy (at least in the west) and so any danger usually comes from that point and not from any sort of Orwellian goals. We will see what comes. And we should be pushing for systems and processes that benefit us, the people.

In terms of what they can do today, I can see what they will do is ask online merchants, retailers and suppliers to provide transaction data which they already do and they will likely ban certain types of crypto-currency and threaten people with heavy punishments for even hosting the software or wallets. There is not good way of them auditing crypto transactions and so bans will be there method + random audits of individuals and companies.

SAFE could be well prepped for this if we focused on it more. But as I say the keys will be getting around their legal frameworks, not technological.

Which raises the point of having an easy wipe option for all SAFE software in case of flights, travel etc.

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I think we have been in a “cashless” society for some time.

The biggest fear I have for a cashless society is devaluation of my earnings via money printing.

That’s already happening. We have a cashless society with paper tokens.

Cashless, private, resource based money like SAfECoin is a step in the right direction.

Hard assets like land and precious metals can not be printed. If you can’t afford to buy a property outright then you are still open to market or government manipulation on the currency you earn to pay your debt off and the debt itself… should aim to buy tiny bits of physical metal that you can hold in your hand.

I’m pretty sure, priced in gold, food and goods prices have remained more or less stable… yet, the 1989’s 50pence that could buy be a can of coke, some sweets and still have change for the bus home buys you nothing!! Have you seen the price of a bus journey these days? £2.00 for a single ticket.

Bank interest does not make up for this silent theft that people just blindly accept as part of life. It scares me.

Got to add, with this devaluation, numerically prices of things go up - my main complaint is property. Say the average house price is £100,000 a few years down the line the average increases to £800,000 , it important to note this is the average, which means all house prices have gone up - by either % return battery farming of the population, or devaluation of the currency. Yet, it’s the same property (especially relative to the general market) and somehow you are in a higher tax bracket and having to pay more, or risk being thrown out of a property thats even 100% owned by a loved one who passed on, but you must pay tax on some imaginary increased price.

It’s just that… you are told your property price has gone up… but if you sell it, what can you buy… the same value propery, the same average house. All that’s happening is that you are no eligible for more government tax on your paper tokens you think is money.

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I think safecoin can not go through exchanges because KYC/AML policies will have a map who owns what… we need a real anonymous cash! It will be best to transact in safecoin only within the system…

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You can get it from exchanges, but once you withdraw it, that would be the end of the trail.
So there is no need for avoiding exchanges.

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