Cash Will Always be King

Yesterday, millions of Australians were cut off from their normal world when a major telecommunications provider – OPTUS – failed because their network suffered an outage. Setting aside the disastrous way in which this was handled by the current (probably not for much longer) CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, the outage was more than a mere inconvenience. It created losses of billions of dollars in one day and caused major problems for businesses, banks, and other institutions. Most of all, it quickly reminded us of how reliant and therefore how vulnerable we all are to the vagaries of technology.

Of course, the OPTUS customers who were able to navigate their day with much less inconvenience were the ones carrying cash.

There are those that have scoffed at me when I mention cash is king because cash is currently being phased out. However, I believe cash must be saved at all costs as a legitimate form of currency. Because of the sheer convenience of card and digital transactions, it is easy to become complacent and overlook the key reasons why we must keep cash in the monetary system:

1. It is broadly untraceable and for those of us who are wary of the increased level of monitoring of our every movement, it provides a level of privacy and protection from continuous prying eyes, protecting people from the increasing level of cyber-crime, including data hacking, fraud, and identity theft.

2. There are no fees. This is a big one. There are no transaction fees, inflated credit card interest rates & merchant fees all eroding the value of the dollar spent and received. The bottom line is card transactions feed the global corporates and take money away from those that have earned it.

3. You over-spend less. Cash in your wallet and the amount you withdraw from the bank is the limit of what you can spend at one time and enables you to control your budget, control your spending, and maintain a buffer from increasing debt.

4. Cash is accessible to everybody in society without excluding vulnerable groups such as the disabled or elderly who can often find digital transactions daunting.

5. It allows for a level of independence from increasing levels of government control and will protect the population from future government and corporate overreach as digital currencies eventually become linked to individual digital identification numbers, loaded with personal data including medical status.

Technology can fail and moreover, whether we like it or not, can be controlled by those who do not have society’s best interests at heart. We are at a tipping point in human history where the next decade will usher in AI as a standard tool, global companies bigger than countries (controlled by the few to deliver our food, medicine, technology, media, energy, and anything else that we rely on for our standard of living) continuing to dictate how we live our lives and a global system of control under a one world government becoming a distinct possibility.

One small way we can preserve our freedom and fight back against this strengthening of global and government tyranny is to maintain cash in our economic system. Even if it creates another parallel economic system to allow those who wish to stay out of digital currency, the ability to do so.