> Why do people keep saying cash is inconvenient, as if saying it makes it true?
I know I enjoy arguing about whether the cash I have is too large for the other party to conveniently make change for. I especially enjoy my wallet bulging with coins and wads of paper. I love the thought of having the week's grocery money ready to be lost and stolen - or even better, carrying my whole pay packet about until I can put it somewhere safe.
Why are you sitting on piles of cash (digital or otherwise) such that NIRP would hurt you? It's much more sensible to keep your long-term savings in non-cash vehicles. And your short-term, liquid holdings (rainy day savings fund) doesn't need to be so large that a -1% interest rate will hurt a lot.
I made a coin holder out of index cards and duct tape that fits in half my wallet and holds 24 coins. I can always either pay with exact change or minimize the number of coins I receive in change,
I routinely dip into the spouse's in-vehicle change-hoard tray to refill it, because apparently some people can't be arsed to fish a penny out of a giant pile of coins when their drive-through total is $X.01, and would rather dump $0.99 in coins into it--never to be spent--instead.
In theory, you should never need more than four $0.01 coins, never more than one $0.05 coin, no more than two $0.10 coins, and not more than three $0.25 coins, per cash transaction. If you have those 10 coins, you can always provide exact change. If you do not have those exact ten, you can always spend some of your coins, such that you get fewer than nine coins in your change. In practice, I need more coin slots, because I am spending coins that do not originate from my own transactions, and need to spend as many small coins as is possible, rather than maintaining an efficient working set of coins in my wallet.
If no one else is filling up a change jar at home, your coin holder only needs to hold ten coins (in the US). It will fit in the same space as a paper note folded in half.
Well I'm glad at least a few people on HN still appreciate the finer things cash provides! Try worrying about muggers with other forms of payment!
What's interesting to me is how far ahead some poorer societies are than us in the cash department. Such as in Africa. They have gone all mobile payments and eschew the local currencies.
Criminal can drain your whole account (plus credit limit) by applying force to you. They can only have whatever you are currently carrying n case of cash.
Well you can have the same restrictions applied in the app as an ATM.
Or claim to.
I take your point though. The inconvenience to the mugger to force you to travel to an ATM may be much greater than making you send a larger amount with your phone. After all, with physical cash it was very believable you didn't have more money that can be extracted. Now that you can move more, the mugger can force you to move more.
BUT then you can reverse it later. Unless you can argue that the mugger would be more likely to kill you afterwards than before, as a result of the sum. But then you could have the reversals happen anyway, and the muggers would know that's the default. All that remains is proving it was a mugging... all the transactions could be reversed based on that (we are not talking about bitcoins here, but systems of credit so the mugger might go into debt if they spent the money already). The idea of banks etc. instead of bitcoin actually helps in a libertarian type system because the money can be yanked back and the mugger doesn't want the inconvenience of never having a bank account. Plus if his other property is all interconnected, then crime really won't pay, and there would be less need for incarceration. We just have to somehow have fair systems of proving it was really a mugging. Maybe along the lines of the DMCA... someone could claim a mugging and then you'd have some time to respond, both sides would present evidence, and there would be a global reputation for both true and false claims of mugging.
Anyway I think in practice there have been less muggings now that cash is digital in Africa.
I know I enjoy arguing about whether the cash I have is too large for the other party to conveniently make change for. I especially enjoy my wallet bulging with coins and wads of paper. I love the thought of having the week's grocery money ready to be lost and stolen - or even better, carrying my whole pay packet about until I can put it somewhere safe.