In Sweden, it’s fast becoming nigh impossible to pay for things with cash, particularly in places like restaurants, cafés and bars. If you have a business that deals in cash, banks make it almost farcically difficult to deposit said cash into your business account.
For example, in one town the largest bank will only accept cash through a deposit machine, outdoors, for one hour during the middle of the day. Oh and you can only deposit something like $1500 per day. Your only other option is to order pickups from a security company, which will cost quite a bit more than you’ll pay for card transactions most likely.
Granted, this example is from a smaller town (aprox. 12000 inhabitants, but LOTS of tourists from abroad that tend to carry cash) but even in a place like the capital Stockholm, you’ll have very particular cash handling restrictions. Some because regulation, but most because banks don’t like to deal with cash. It’s a very real security risk and requires manual labor – both of which are costly and like any business banks like to keep costs down. Most smaller (and local) branches these days don’t deal with cash at all, or deals in very limited amounts.
If you run a small shop that deals in cash, there’s a very real possibility that you’ll have to face the question of whether to pay a lot of money for secure cash handling, or just getting a safe and hope you don’t get robbed.
Sweden is an outlier (same things also happening in Denmark, where I am originally from)
But contrary to cash, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin can be traced fairly easily in fact, it's one of the most transparent currencies that's ever existed.
As color coins show it will be possible to trace the history of a coin and thus trace what's it's been used for.
This will potentially allow NGO's to recieve funding and track how they are used and make sure they can't be used for approved expenses all autimatic.
Cryptocoins are exactly what governments would want if they really thought it trough. The control they loose in creating the currency is gained in controlling the history of them.
That's another problem cryptocurrencies solve. You'd think that when people say governments and banks provide currencies, that they'd provide very basic services related to that, such as the ability to get currency into an account.
As any business owner can tell you, they don't provide these services. Which of course means that someone could step in, provide these services, and actually has a chance of success.
It sounds so incredibly absurd, but it's actually true: governments do not provide the ability to transact in currency. Only banks do, and only for hefty fees. Hell, the aborted attempt by Varoufakis to issue a tax-backed currency by the Greek IRS would have been the first time I've heard any state providing such a service.
One might think, in reaction, governments would be a little worried and then 2 reactions are possible:
a) governments could make sure these services are provided. Basic banking services, after all, are a complete necessity in todays world. In trade they'd get insight, maybe even a little control, and would make a LOT of people very happy, because the government is omnipresent, and a lot of people feel that banks exploit things (e.g. cashing checks in the US).
b) governments could punish everyone involved, AND threaten everyone until insight is, grudgingly and only after every option to obfuscate things is utilized to the maximum extent, provided.
Of course in the case of b), insight would be a punishment inflicted on businesses and people, and make it very clear to everyone involved that citizens and the government are each other's enemy, and therefore naturally everyone would be trying to make that insight as useless as possible.
Needless to say, every government on the planet has chosen only a single avenue, namely b).
Can I just say: may God help governments as soon as someone realizes a way to provide a cryptocurrency that can't be easily blocked over radio or ... because it will turn into an utter disaster for them very quickly.
Or perhaps I should say: the first government to issue a tax-backed currency with a government provided ability to transact, banks, the entire financial sector, and all other governments are in extreme trouble.
