A Cashless Society?

Once upon a time, there was this stuff called money. It was made of something called rag paper and was very nice to handle when fresh. It also came in round metal discs called coins made of silver, copper and later, zinc. Sometimes the metals were layered like sandwiches. This made the coinscheaper to produce, so it cost the government less to produce the coins than their face value. If you could make a quarter for nine cents that was good.

Bank notes, or bills were even cheaper to produce. Special paper and dyes were required, and high speed printing presses. Many notes could be printed at once, each bearing a different serial number. At first, the ink was made from the powdered wings of a South American butterfly. This made it waterproof and smear proof when dry. Even today, with modern inks, you can't wet a bill and smear the ink. If you can, it's counterfeit!

Long after money came along, companies and banks started issuing credit cards. Credit had been around since before the country began, let alone our money. But it hadn't been so organized before. Now, if you had a job, you could get a credit card. The card would let you buy things and pay for them later. Sometimes you would make multiple payments on one item, but usually, credit cards were used for everyday items, and each month you would pay some of the balance off, trying to get the debt down to a level you could manage.

Some people were very good at this. Many were not. They ran up huge debts at department stores, or restaurants or during the Christmas season. And they struggled to pay off these extravagances. Checks, which came along before the credit cards, would go into the mail box and off to the company or bank owed. Check were tied directly to money you had placed in the bank, and you had to know how much money you had avoid “bouncing” a check.

Then came ATM, check, and debit cards. ATM were tied to your accounts and allowed you to draw money out of the bank twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You could draw as little as five dollars from the first machines, but that soon changed and now most machines dispense only multiples of 20. Studies of consumers found that most people used 20 dollar bills for transactions.

Check cards were used to guarantee a vendor that if you wrote a check to him, it would be paid by the bank, even if you didn't have quite enough in the bank at the moment. This also prevented “kiting” a check, which was writing a check, and anticipating a deposit before it came due. There were heavy fees to pay the bank if you overdrew your account, but you weren't put on a list of bad check writers.

Debit cards were the successor to ATM and check cards. They allowed you to draw money from your account, but also worked at vendors. You ran the card through a scanner, and seconds later your purchase was approved or declined. If approved, the money was drawn from your account immediately, but if declined, no money moved, and you didn't owe a fee, but you had to pay in cash if you had it.

All this convenience, everything connected, buying at the supermarket or buying stuff online, paying bills, parking meters, parking tickets, airline tickets, your dry cleaning and car payment and mortgage.

It seemed as if the cashless society was only moments away.

Then the cyber-criminal was born. Scam artists, con men and computer hackers started to multiply exponentially in cyber space. Soon after all the Nigerian finance ministers were fired, a new threat emerged. There were programs called malware, and computer viruses, and bot-nets and zombie machines. All these attacked machines and networks that had inadequate security or were fooled by the attack. Sometimes unwary users downloaded something that seemed okay at the time, but later found their system compromised or corrupted.

The first big wave of virus and malware attacks were directed at corporations and organizations that has sensitive data or deep secrets to keep. But there was little money to be had in selling that, so banks were next to get hit. Money transfers into secret accounts, a slow trickle designed not to be noticed right away could take those fractions of a cent in interest, siphon them off from every account in the banking network, and that amounted to some serious cash. And now they're hitting vendors from fast-food places to supermarkets to department stores. It seems our cashless society is not such a Utopia after all.

I have often thought of how our lives have come to depend on little things; keys, electricity, gasoline, and money. And how interconnected we are through phones, tablets, and computers. The world wide web is real, and technology is advancing at an alarming rate. They don't offer instruction manuals with most high-tech devices because no one has time to read them, and most of the users already know how to manipulate them. It's learn by doing, and if you screw up, it isn't serious and you can start over; reboot, turn off and back on, back out of a website, do a system restore or reset.

If the internet was once a safe place to play, now we need a cyber cop on every corner, watchdogs that guard our systems and companies dedicated to finding and defeating threats. It's up to us to keep our eyes open, trust but verify, and never, ever, open an email from someone you don't know or a company you haven't done business with. I get notices, supposedly from UPS or FedEx, about a delivery of something I didn't order, I still get ads about Viagra, and loan offers and classes online and software of questionable provenance and usability.

Companies that keep information about us and hold credit card information, social security numbers, dates of birth and such need to do a better job of safeguarding the information. It's impossible to buy from Amazon without opening an account. Same with most online vendors. Some places though, don't store any information other than a username and password for your account, no credit card records, no bank info, nothing that can tie to your money. Sure, one-click shopping is fast, but it's not as secure as entering your credit or debit card number manually every time.

The most secure thing is still cash at a physical store. It's not as convenient and maybe it's more time-consuming, but it is safer. Some cyber-criminal can't grab the info from the chip-enabled credit card in your wallet if you don't carry it everywhere. And cash is welcome almost everywhere. It used to be the case that you would check to see if they took your credit card before buying. Now they're surprised by cash, and delighted at the same time.

Once upon a time we used to have something called money. Now it's all ones and zeroes in a computer somewhere. But you can still get cash, if you really want or need it. That isn't going away any time soon.