Hello, LBI'ers. Today we look into why cash is king over contactless and chip&pin payments and how crypto even when centralized is so much better.
You have seen that right, cash is king in the physical world and trumps using your debit/credit card by a mile. It might sound old-fashioned as we move into a more digital world but people 120 years understood money and what it was when they voted against creating the FED. 50 years ago your money was backed by precious metals. 30 years ago you paid for everything with cash backed by a government promise. Today, we pay for things with numbers and taps.
It would be almost impossible for anyone to use only cash because most of our purchases are done online but when you're filling the car up with petrol, popping into the shop to get some bread and milk and shopping in brick shops, it's best to use cash.
Cash is a physical thing and when you pay for something with a £50 note, the vendor gets £50. He can use that £50 to pay toward overheads. A £50 note will always be a £50 note worth £50 and it could belong to hundreds of people over it's lifetime.
When we pay with a card, the vendor pays a small fee to be able to accept that payment. These fees average around 3% of the transaction up to £3 in the UK. And we all know that we pay for these fees in one way are another. If a vendor is doing 100 £20 sales a day, 6 days a week, they would be paying £360 a week to the bank/provider to accept payments. That's over £18,500 a year. We're paying for it for sure.
When using cash I go into the shop, I buy some food and pay with a £20 note. The shop takes that £20 and pays his employee with it. The employee uses the £20 note to get some lunch at a local pizza shop. The owner uses the £20 to pay his delivery driver. The delivery driver puts it into a birthday card for his niece. You could the idea, £20 is £20 no matter how many times its used.
When using a card I go into the shop, I buy £20 worth of food and pay with a card, the shop owner gets £19.40. The shop owner uses it to get a haircut and the hairdresser receives £18.19. The hairdresser uses the £18.19 to buy new scissors and the people selling them get £18.25.
You can see that after only 3 transactions using a card, the £20 we started with is now worth £18.25 with banks scooping £1.75. Here is the result after 50 uses starting at £20 changing 3% each transaction.
You can see that 75% of the starting £20 now belongs to the bank for mostly doing nothing. I think thats 49 transactions because we dont count #1. Im being picky, haha.
You wanna stick it to the banks?
PAY WITH CASH WHEN YOU CAN
Covid has finished! (pretty much)
Why Crypto is so much better
Simples, gas fees go to people that run nodes and on most blockchains that have smart contracts, users decide how much of a fee they pay depending on how fast they want the transaction to complete. It's not monopolized and if it is, a 51% attack could happen and the blockchain would fail. Even centralized blockchains operate in the same fashion even if they have control voting controls worth of nodes.
Sure there are big centralized crypto mining businesses running nodes, but that is all they are doing. They are competing and are rewarded randomly the same as everyone else on level ground.
For a blockchain with no fees like HIVE as an example, transactions are paid for with RC's that a user earns from having some HIVE POWER. You power up $10 of HIVE and you get free transactions to an address that is a username and not a line from the metrix code that takes 3 seconds, that's all the end user needs to know and cares about
HIVE if it were stable would make for an excellent currency. Apart from being pretty much free to use and it's being fast, HIVE can also execute alot more transactions per second than most other cryptos and even Mastercard.
It could be a long way off before we are using crypto to pay for the weekly grocery shop but im sure it will arrive in some shape are form. Chances are it will be some government-issued crypto where they can track everything to spend money on and have it on their blockchain servers to use against you whenever they need to. The future of crypto could turn into the opposite of its purpose and be used as a way to control people.
So use cash for as long as you can because when it's gone, it's gone!! and when they switch us over to 100% digital currencies, they will announce it, give us 12 months' notice and then the cash is gone, worthless, a memento of the last thing that gave us any power.
Once all the money is 100% trackable, it's game over. I'll be buying land with gold in Thailand and going off-grid.
With money, the old the form the better. Today we have trackable numbers on a screen, 30 years ago we were using bits of paper that were untrackable, 50 years ago we were using paper backed by gold, 200 years ago we were using coins made of precious metals and before we had coins we bartered, swapped and traded actual things. How do you think the future looks?
What do you think about this subject? Is cash still king or is it just dirty bits of paper we push around?