If your phone breaks or you lost it, if there is no connectivity, if apple decides to cancel your digital existence, then what?
And it means everything you buy is associated with you and recorded forever to be sold to endless advertisers (and worse) and the transaction may be blocked by third parties.
If you pay cash it works without a depending on anything external (no internet, no electricity), it is not traced, it can't be blocked by third parties.
Cash is the optimal payment mechanism for nearly everything. It only is inconvenient for very large payments, but for anything day-to-day, opt for cash.
Cash is only optimal for privacy, not convenience or availability or speed or security.
If my credit card is stolen, I get my money back (so long as I reported it in time, and didn’t surrender to them my pin). Not so with cash.
Cards take a second or two to process payments on average. Not so wish cash.
My bank account / credit card limits always have enough to cover my purchases, whereas my physical wallet might be low/empty and require a trip to the ATM / bank for a withdrawal.
Re internet/electricity outages, this is so rare enough to not be a concern. POS can also do offline transactions just fine if you have power but no internet. And a lot of retail and critical infrastructure places have both wired and cellular Internet links for high availability.
There is definitely still a place for cash, but it’s not a big thing for a lot of people anymore.
The last time I used cash it was because my kid threw up in a taxi and I needed to quickly make it up to the driver. Yes I could have paid card as well, but seeing the physical cash was likely more meaningful to de-escalating the situation.
> Cash is only optimal for privacy, not convenience or availability or speed or security.
Security == privacy. And cash certainly wins availability by a long shot, it can't be blocked by any kind of outage. Convenience is arguable I suppose. I'd rather hand over cash than deal with anything electronic that can fail.
> If my credit card is stolen, I get my money back (so long as I reported it in time, and didn’t surrender to them my pin)
Credit cards don't have a PIN, that's a debit card. But yes, you get the money back from fraud with a credit card, that's true.
> Re internet/electricity outages, this is so rare enough to not be a concern.
Depends where you live I suppose. In many areas electricity outages are a daily occurrence.
> In many areas electricity outages are a daily occurrence.
I’ve lived in 4 continents, never had daily, weekly, or even monthly outages.
> Security == privacy. And cash certainly wins availability by a long shot, it can't be blocked by any kind of outage.
If you don’t have enough cash in your wallet then you don’t have any availability. If you have a internet outage your debit/credit cards still work offline.
Also security does not equal privacy. If you are living in a state where this is true, you have bigger issues with the entire system than ATM skimmers.
> Credit cards don't have a PIN, that's a debit card.
Everywhere I have lived bar the US has PINs on all card types. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes ubiquitous in the US too.
Generally in Europe, when a card is inserted into a terminal for a chip transaction, PIN entry is required. There is no particular delineation between whether it's credit or debit like this. Contactless transactions have a small percentage chance to request PIN, but contact transactions always do it, as all european cards (AFAICT) have put the PIN CVM ahead of the signature CVM, or just dropped the signature CVM entirely, for around 20 years now.
I wasn't aware that Chip+Signature cards even exist in europe.
Whereas the US is all over the place with different methods for different cards, and mag stripes still in use, sometimes requiring you to enter a PIN alongside that, all largely driven by retailer reticence to update their hardware.
No connectivity for the retailer's device, not for the customer device.
There are also quite a few payment terminals that still do dial-on-demand to get authorisation from the merchant service provider (Chip&PIN/NFC Contactless).
I still see those in the UK especially at independent fuel stations. The additional delay waiting for the terminal to dial and connect sometimes makes me think it has failed - had a few occasions where the line was busy and the terminal redialled several times before it finally made it!
Offline transactions are available in many systems up to certain limits defined by both th card and the terminal. They get reconciled later.
Merchants not having connectivity is a rather small problem in this day and age really, with ubiquitous mobile data connections. (Yes, I am aware someone will be along shortly to tell me they have yet-another-edge case where it doesn't work for them. I don't really care, for the vast majority it is a massively convenient way to conduct business.)
And it means everything you buy is associated with you and recorded forever to be sold to endless advertisers (and worse) and the transaction may be blocked by third parties.
If you pay cash it works without a depending on anything external (no internet, no electricity), it is not traced, it can't be blocked by third parties.
Cash is the optimal payment mechanism for nearly everything. It only is inconvenient for very large payments, but for anything day-to-day, opt for cash.