- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.ml
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Achieving a moneyless society after one big overlong network outage.
One EMP and ** Poof ** It’s all gone
More or less the opening line of Dark Angel, iirc
So is the water supply, food and electricity. I don’t want to think about it.
Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.
Totally. My petrol station allowed me to pay in seashells while everyone else were just standing around complaining, was kinda nice
I…
I have so many questions
Sand dollars?
More like it shows dangers of using only one provider for almost all IT infrastructure.
Not necessarily one provider but one point of failure. In this case it was the update system that allowed one company to push something to production on other companies systems.
There’s more to it. The mono-culture is one thing, but rolling out the update to millions of computers on the same days sounds like a bad idea.
Fun fact in 2008, with nuclear submarines, the mono-culture was not that bad yet.
It’s interesting to note the UK went with a Windows XP variant and not Windows Vista, which is marketed as the more reliable OS. The USA never made the same calculations: The American Navy runs on Linux.
Navy: “we use Arch btw”
No wonder those Navy touchscreen controls killed people…
I personally have never had good luck with Linux touchscreens…
sounds like they rather spend that RND on pocket lining over contributing to software dev.
…why not both?
Because cash doesn’t solve the problem. If the stores themselves rely on computers, and they do, it doesn’t matter what’s in your wallet. (In other words, you need more than just cash to have a reliable alternative. It’s certainly possible to do so.)
Also, some of the big problems were in airports and hospitals where payment was not the serious concern.
Because if everyone used cash, schedule systems, records systems, communication systems around the world, breakdown still.
If there’s a verity of software vendors used in these systems, and financial systems, you don’t get simultaneous global breakdowns any more.
Basically. Using cash won’t prevent this from happening. Using several interoperable software providers and systems will.
Using cash won’t prevent this from happening.
I mean yeah, that’s why I said both, not just cash. I carry some cash on me because you never know. I’d also like to see less monopolization of just about everything because it makes for single points of failure. Diversifying your payment methods by including the potential for cash also helps.
But cash has nothing to do with this.
It’s an entirely unrelated issue.
It could equally be a warning to floss every day for all they’re related.When the payment processor goes down, I can buy my groceries/gas/weed with cash, not by flossing my teeth. I don’t follow the point you’re making. Going fully cashless is a bad idea, and the recent outage didn’t affect every system used. I don’t see how having multiple methods of payment is possibly a bad thing. I’m not advocating for only cash.
The inventory and POS systems also go down. You still can’t by your groceries/gas/weed.
Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.
That’s not what I witnessed recently. Payment processors went down but local POS was fine. Inventory didn’t matter with the short duration of the outage. This is one of the reasons going cashless is a bad idea. Far from the only one, but it’s a factor, and I experienced it. Going cashless reduces diversity in payment options and makes the system more vulnerable.
Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.
It’s pretty clear this incident has highlighted a myriad of very important issues.
It’s likely more productive to discuss the other issues in their own threads - this thread is clearly focused on the cashless problem.
this wasn’t a problem with cashless infrastructure tho, this was a problem with monoculture. if the globe stopped using microsoft for gov and business, and instead threw their tax money towards open development; as in - the people, not microsoft, these kind of global issues wouldn’t exist.
Choice sounds like something people should not be fighting over :)
because cash is disgusting
Agreed. While I agree with the privacy and security arguments against cashless payment methods, I’m still for them for the simple fact that as someone who works as a cashier for a living (or some semblance of one anyway), I’m more aware than the average public of just how DISGUSTING cash actually is.
Is the money really filthy or what?
Oh gods yes.
I get so many bills that are dirty, but also you don’t wanna know all the germs that are on a lot of those bills. Another thing I learned from years of working in retail is that people are also disgusting as all hell. Many people don’t bother washing their hands after going to the bathroom, or they’ll hand you nasty sweaty bills they pulled out of their pocket after walking into a store or up to a fuel kiosk during a >80 °F (26 °C) day, or after working a shift in construction or a factory job or even simply just exercising. Some women will pull cash directly out from under their bra, as if I want to accept sweaty boob money. Yes, they could use a wallet. However, many people don’t. Rather, they just shove the cash directly into their pocket or bra and be done with it. Because fuck cashiers, I guess.
Not to mention that the majority of bills out there have at least some trace amount of cocaine or other drugs covering it, though you may not be able to see it.
So, in short, sorry for the ramble but, yes, people are absolutely disgusting and so is their cash.
Retail. has. fucking. ruined me.
/rant lol
This
What good is cash gonna do if the networked cash register doesn’t open anymore?
They have paper and pens that they can track their transactions until the system is fixed.
Somebody’s never worked retail. Yeah, there’s no way they’ll do that. Maybe at a small independently-owned store? Otherwise, there’s no way they’re even allowed to do that!
How are you getting change?
Use exact change?
If we’re going cash only, I’m bringing those coins too.
They can do that anyway. It’s called credit.
Simply not allowed for a lot of businesses in my country, either by the government or corporate.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.
Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.
The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.
Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.
The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.
In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.
The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No, that is not correct. Global outage shows the dangers of centralized systems would be a better headline. Monero Worked all day throughout the entire outage with no problems.
… And if the systems you actually interact with go down, you can get fucked as well.
If you want to buy food with Monero and the payment processor for the local shop doesn’t work, even if it’s a local machine sitting in the back office, you still can’t buy anything.
A local machine sitting in the back office, acting as a payment processor, is much easier to access and fix than the Visa Network.
Not for you. And certainly not for the staff working in the shop.
Currently, you’re bartering with copious amounts of copium.
That is not correct, either. The outage even took out decentralized platforms.
Which decentralized platforms did it take out?
Define “worked” in this context. You mean their own infrastructure didn’t crash? You certainly didn’t pop down to the store and buying anything useful with Monero 😂
Not that day I didn’t, but I have bought Domino’s several times this month, and I bought my groceries at the beginning of the month.
So do you use some kind of payment app that does a conversion or do you have to manually convert from Monero to fiat currency?
Most retailers don’t accept crypto at the point of purchase so I’m curious as to how this would be convenient enough to use regularly.
There are businesses that specifically sell gift cards to retailers for Monero and when possible I search out and purchase from retailers who accept Monero. Https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com help with that.
Define “worked” in this context.
You can still exchange funds as normal because no necessary components or intermediaries were affected by the outage. Only conventional banking systems.
My point was more that using Monero as an example is probably not the best way to cryptobrah an illustrative point.
I don’t see how you were making that point.
Because you can’t just go and buy real world goods at will as with cash. If there’s ever a Carrington Event, your Monero is worthless in an emergency.
You can use it for all the same things you can at any other time, as I said. Still not sure what your point is.
Lol. How is your crypto gonna work without global peers and internet, friend?
Monero isn’t bad but I don’t think it is great for easily buying things. At the end of the day trying to use two different currencies is hard. Also Monero gets a bad name because it is used primarily for illegal transactions. It is simply two complex and has no accountability
The fact that it’s used for crime means that it actually does what it’s supposed to do and keeping people private. Shoes are also used by bank robbers and we don’t ban shoes. Monero is a tool the same as a hammer or a shoe or a car or a gun.
Even central currencies can work if you can make offline and peer to peer payments.
Not easy to pull off cryptographically, though.
True, but do you really expect them to let you use a central bank digital currency peer-to-peer and not have some way of revoking your access to it? If so, you’re absolutely nuts, LOL.
Does Taler do this?
deleted by creator
*global IT outage shows dangers of monopolies.
Why do you hate the “free market”
Agreed. I would love to see a law requiring businesses to accept cash where possible. That sort of law already exists at state and local levels in the US, would like to see it adopted in the UK.
There already is a lawyer in the UK that says that.
Interestingly, the EU is moving in the other direction, with many places requiring that you accept card payments, with cash being optional.
One would think that there would be more than just one lawyer who says that… Oh well… :)
Bitcoin wasn’t down. Hasn’t had a single hour of downtime since it started in 2008. No bank holidays. Clear and transparent supply, 100% open source code. Not run by any single government, corporate board, or CEO. Sends money across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees, all you need is a phone. Powerful stuff.
I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.
It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.
The only crypto that is kind if useful is Monero and that’s because it is really private and anonymous. The problem with private and anonymous is that is ends up becoming a tool for crime.
I really like Talers approach with protecting the buyer not the seller. From a mass surveillance and advertising perspective they only see half the picture which makes the deep surveillance hard. Also it keeps businesses honest and supports rule of law.
I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time
With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don’t make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.
The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.
The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it’s not free. A single on-chain tx an open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are “taxed for the use of their own dollars” in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.
It can’t scale
In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.
Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity.
Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it’s political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It’s not purely scarcity.
naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit
And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.
Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.
The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables
Yeah, that’s bullshit. First of all, 1% of energy use for a network that serves a few million transactions per day is really bad. A single 1kW node in Visa’s datacenter churns through that in an hour.
Second, it’s not renewables. It’s everything they can get for cheap. And that’s often enough coal, gas, oil. Also, they’re driving up power demand as a whole, which means fossil energy is actually needed longer.
Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.
Bitcoin lightning is Bitcoin. It’s a smart contract on the Bitcoin main chain. You move Bitcoin “into” lightning by sending it to that smart contract, you move it “out of” lightning by having that smart contract close. It inherits the security of Bitcoin main chain while getting the transaction speed of off-chain.
Agree to disagree about the rest. Energy use like carbon footprint is about “where you draw the box”. Off-peak demand is the cheapest power available, and it tends to be renewable. That trend continues to escalate.
Oh yes, it is also feels so good that the richer have priority on transactions because they can pay exorbitant fees while you sometimes need to wait more than a month for a transaction to be confirmed.
I had to make a transaction to a private tracker and I don’t want to go through it never again.
There is so much wrong with that firehose of nonsense you just said I don’t have time to correct it all. So I’ll focus on this one point:
Bitcoin may not be run by “a single government” but it is run by a small group of billionaires. You’re a fool if you believe widespread adoption of it can improve things for regular people.
“under a second for pennies in fees”
LOL you either kidding yourself or had never transfer Bitcoin.
At a high demand time, it could take hours to complete a transaction (if it even went through at all) and with an outrageous fee up to dozens of dollars.
Bitcoin has never been known for time efficient nor competitive fees (except for maybe in the beginning when nobody uses it).
As long as you ignore its problems it’s great. I’m sure you do.
Meanwhile the rest of us who don’t live in cloud Cuckoo land have to deal with your shitty system that takes 45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction. So we can see it is probably not a good idea.
This is why Taler was created. It is a payment system not a payment form
45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction.
Don’t listen to people who are critical of a thing if they clearly don’t even understand the basics of how it works. On main chain, a Bitcoin transaction can take up to ten minutes (the time between blocks). It can take longer if you set a super low fee, but you can guarantee your payment goes into the next block by paying an average fee, usually around $0.75. Your wallet does this all automatically. On lightning where most transactions occur these days (secured by main chain) transactions settle fully in under a second. Do your own research.
Besides, we all know Bitcoin only takes a single rainforest per transaction, it’s been that way since the great rainfork which is ancient history at this point.
I’ve had bitcoin transactions that literally took several days to process. This was also using an average fee. The more people using bitcoin, especially to handle common every-day transactions, the worse this problem would get.
I use Bitcoin regularly, this has literally never happened to me. The only way that happens is if you pay an average fee right before a massive fee spike, in which case, you can do a “replacement” transaction by upping the fee or just wait.
You can open a lightning channel with a single on-chain transaction. That lightning channel can stay open for years and process trillions of transactions, instantly, for pennies in fees. If you need a transaction done quickly, you shouldn’t be sending it on main chain to begin with.
Long-term the vision is for folks to be using lightning or other L2s for everyday transactions, not main chain. Most Bitcoin transactions by transaction count are already on lightning. Lightning has been out for 5+ years now. It works well and gets better every year.
Crypto won’t scale
The computational requirements are high and its value fluctuates way to much. Also bitcoin isn’t even private and you are basically shouting to the world every time you make a payment.
Crypto won’t scale
And yet every year, for 15 years, the transaction capacity has continued to increase. Networking protocols (TCP/IP, SMTP, etc) also didn’t scale to “internet scale” in the first 15 years. They just kept adding new layers to the stack and optimizing it until it did. Just like Bitcoin added Lightning to improve scaling.
In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. None of that requires an on-chain transaction, none of it required high fees. It works. It scales. It continues to improve. Lightning has capacity for trillions more transactions because capacity is not tied to chain space.
Also bitcoin isn’t even private and you are basically shouting to the world every time you make a payment.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. If you make a wallet, nobody knows you own that wallet unless you tell them (or a third party like an exchange), but the balance and transactions on-chain are visible. There are ways to make your transactions more private, like coinjoin, you can have multiple addresses with multiple coins.
With lightning, transactions are opaque except to you and any nodes you route through, because lightning transactions don’t go on chain. This also means nobody knows your current balance. If you make a transaction between two lightning nodes that share a channel, nobody knows that transaction was made outside of those two nodes. Privacy continues to improve, see BOLT 12 for the latest upgrades in this area.
It would be fine if not everyone had the same exact setup. Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Yes, but “cashless society” means one devoid of cash payments. Some countries are talking about getting rid of cash entirely. Cash payments and digital payments both being used in concert is what we have now, there would be no need to “transition to a cashless society” from that to that again, the difference is they want to end cash, entirely, all of it, gone, only digital payments. Thus making “cash” and “cashless society” quite mutually exclusive, actually.
I don’t want a cashless society. That’s a European thing for the most part.
I want a debit card alternative that doesn’t have the same draw backs. I want a solution that doesn’t require proprietary banking apps to use.
I agree, the more widely accepted alternatives both physical and digital the better imo. I’m just saying, when people say “cashless society” they’re talking about that not about what we want.
A cashless society is so stupid beyond words. In order to create one you must also create a full surveillance society to protect it, and even that would be ineffective to stop it from being hacked.
How many hacks that generated infinite money have you seen?
Just 1, but it seems to repeat ad infinitum:
Be born rich.
Get a conservative business-focused person into the government and watch them give infinite money to business in the form of subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks.
All presidents since at least Reagan and Prolly all of them but FDR has been pro corporate welfare and each one rewarded his oligarchs with generous subsidies…
Call it chips act or aca or covid relief etc… These are transfers from us treasury to the owner class.
This is not a party politics issue, this is the regime policy
Just to be clear we are a mostly cashless society and the majority of currency is not physically in existence around the world and somehow it manages to be protected by and large.
The difference is that if someone decides to freeze your cashless bank account they can by a mouse click and you’re destitute. Whereas if that happens in a cash-based society they have to come and get it from you.
Good thing jobs pay in cash, oh wait, only shady jobs do that.
well that is sorta my point. I keep some cash on hand but the majority of my money gets auto deposited and debited from there when I pay bills. If someone steals the majority of my money and I have somelike 1 to 10 percent its not a much better situation than them stealing all of my available funds. I mean it is which is how come I do keep a bit of cash on hand.
Can’t remember which one but credit cards were offline for a time with something and places that still had the carbon paper roller things stashed away took them out and used them. They should keep those things around.
Do people still have embossed credit cards? All mine are flat now.
good point. I think embossing went away about when wireless became ubiquitous with it. So they would need to be doing that again.
My friends and I used to call those machines ker-chunkers. 😂
I’ve heard it mentioned as a “fly swatter” in my mother’s tongue.
Knuckle-buster was the industry term, and they were already obsolete 20 years ago…
Serious privacy issues around copying cards. That means the store has to retain a physical copy of the full embossed card number.
There were boxes full of them in the backroom.
That’s against the rules for PCI compliance
Under no circumstances should you copy a card
are they not allowed now. The thing im thinking about was definately post 2000 but maybe not 20teens
Shop I worked for in 2005… I think … ran cards when the connection was down and took card impressions, and I think the transactions were all auto submitted when the connection came back up.
did they do something special. most places I have been to when the network is down it just does not work.
Not sure how much good that’ll be… A lot of banks are giving out cards where the numbers are only printed, I haven’t had one with raised numbers in years.
You could just write down the numbers.
