This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sure, but if a cyber attack knocks out your credit card systems in a targeted attack, chances are they're taking your cash machines down as well.
And who carries enough cash around to be useful any more? I know I don't. I might have a £20 note tucked in my phone case at a push.
Yeah, considering how bad banks and other financial institutions are at IT security and the fact that there's no incentive for a capitalist financial institution to fix that problem, it's not a good idea.
Not to mention total monetary surveillance
Hmm, I don't anticipate the government to have many issues with that part... But if they have access, then enemies of the state may also gain access, which is the real problem they care about here.
Though having cash is not enough. The stores also need to be able to accept cash without internet usage. I think we had a case in germany a few years ago, where some supermarkets could not sell anything, because the servers, to which the local payment system connected (also uses for cash) didn't work. Not sure, if that was because of a security incident.
Really? I would imagine stores could keep paper notes to record transactions and recheck inventory once internet access is restored.
I hoped for a second they meant moneyless.
Something we can thank the Russians for and hackers everywhere.
Yup, good things can happen for bad reasons.
The netherlands are already looking into it: https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/
The project could be used via paper trail, as far as I understand it.
Woot! It's been a while since I looked into Taler, but I've long held that we should be using it or something like it for digital transactions. I'd love a browser extension that compensates creators for removing ads, for example, and I think this would be a fantastic way to do it. But having it at a national level is even better!
Yeah, I think so too. It should replace bank transactions completely.
I hope someone posts here when/if they decide to adopt it, because I'd love to hear more details about it.
The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.
But there is also the risk of bad actors, which could also be e.g. Russia, getting access to decades of payment history through a hack, if everything is digital. Having that data for every citizen of a country could enable efficient profiling of people in the country using big data analysis technologies.
The kind of thing you could find out with the transaction data is who are working in the military or security police, who is sympathetic to Russia and at the same time vulnerable to work with foreign governments, and potential blackmailing material relating to people in these or other groups. I'm sure the analysts working for the bad actor can come up with even more useful things to look for in the data.
There are of course a lot of other data sources that bad actors are interested in and that are easier to hack, but the financial history seems more comprehensive source of information than most other ones.
Yup, I keep a fair amount of cash on hand at home in case there's some kind of mass outage so I can at least get essentials to last until power is restored. Oh, and I also use it for my kids' allowance and for baby sitters, but I have larger denominations as well in case of emergencies.
That said, I have been considering using cash more often because I really don't like all the tracking that already goes on, and I certainly don't want the government having that data as well. But cash is super inconvenient because of small change, so I haven't made the switch yet. If we could get rid of the small change and just round prices a bit, I would seriously consider going back to cash.
It already happened in Ukraine during the NotPetya attack by Russia in 2017
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Ukraine_ransomware_attacks
Having that data for every citizen of a country could enable efficient profiling of people in the country using big data analysis technologies.
You don't need an external actor for that, a government can very well do that to their citizens...
The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.
Or entities. The USA had a brief oil crisis recently because one of the major pipeline companies had their billing system hacked. Since the company couldn't verify whether someone had paid, they just didn't supply any oil.
Couple that with some misleading news stories and social media panic, and it blew up into a proper shortage from people hoarding all the petrol, and leaving none left.
Do you have any more info about this?
