We don’t need to try and hang on to cash. We need redundancy. Whether that is by design with legislation, or making communications providers liable for losses for outage is the question. Obviously they will pass on any costs so the question is also which will be better for society and which will cost the least.
Travelling back in time to stop the privitisation of Telstra
Privatizing infrastructure is not necessarily a bad thing. Competition in telecoms is a net benefit to society. However, there needs to be minimum service standards.
For instance, with telephones, there was redundancy for electric failure. However with nbn there isn’t. It’s especially a problem where you have outages like Optus where someone might rely on them for phone, internet and mobile service, in face being incentivised to do so. At least with mobile, there is redundancy of 000 calls through any network. We should look at how we can do similar. For instance, in the event of an Internet outage, a code could be entered into eftpos terminals to accept offline payments for 24 hours or similar. Sure, there is a higher risk of fraud for this period, but that’s better than no commerce.
If the infrastructure is publicly owned it won’t be seeking a profit or to please shareholders, only the Australian people, so prices will be lkw anyway. The it also has the possibility to be covered entirely by taxes (at least for some base level plan) since its now an essential service to the economy
Not necessarily. The passport office is publicly owned and we pay some of the highest fees for passports.
The nbn is publicly owned but seeks to make a profit.
Anything that is government owned is paid for by us all anyway, through taxes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, when things are more expensive to use, but not used by all, it’s fairer. However for essential service, spreading the cost by how much people can afford is also good.
It’s not a case of public good, private badz but there is nuance and pros and cons.
Hmm, I don’t want to lose my cash. How many chickens can I trade for my drugs? What if my government wants to introduce a tax for buying used goods like they do with vehicles? We could definitely launder the digital funds but cash is much easier.
Yes, cash is much easier if you wish to be anonymous. That also leads to more cash based fraud and tax fraud. I don’t think cash needs to be eliminated, but there are digital alternatives to cash if you want illegal things. So, again, we don’t necessarily need cash. We don’t need to rush to eliminate it, but we also don’t need to prop it up to prevent progress. Even if Australia alone eliminated cash, which I don’t expect, you could still buy drugs in US$, for instance.
There is no going back of you don’t want to go back. Otherwise…
Otherwise as a business owner you can go back to having to maintain a float, ducking down to the bank at lunch to pick up more dollar coins, “sorry I’ve only got fives, so here’s 7 fives and 45 cents change”, being wary of employees tickling the till, trying to reconcile said till with the receipts at the end of the day, carrying the day’s takings to night safes, and so on and so forth.
And as a consumer you can go wait at banks, or use that perfectly functional paywave card at an ATM for a bundle of cash that comes in $50 or $20 denominations, so no deal for you if you’ve got $8 in there and you want a can of baked beans and a half loaf for dinner. Or you can realise you don’t have $40 in cash for a taxi home tonight because you bought one $11 drink too many. Or miss out on the delights of carrying a kilo of shrapnel around in your wallet, and saying “wait! I can do this!” and counting out $4.35 in five , ten, twenty, and fifty cent pieces, while everyone waits for you.
What is needed is network redundancy and an offline mode for electronic payments. Bring back the rollers and the carbon transfer if you really have to. But if I can use my card and buy a $13 sandwich on a flight with no connectivity, I don’t see why EFTPOS terminals on the ground can’t store and forward Chip and PIN transactions.
You are absolutely correct, but that does not make it impossible to go back let alone using both at the same time. It also works the other way around too: Oh I dropped my phone, now I can’t buy anything and don’t get anywhere unless I walk. Or the battery just ran out. Or the network broke. Any such minor inconvenience can take everything down with it.
I could also say in the case against cash that I dropped my wallet , or my house caught fire and all that money under the mattress was lost, etc.
Anyway, I’m happy with both being available, pretty much like how it is now. Are electronic transactions more convenient 99 percent of the time? In my opinion, absolutely.
And in this incident it wasn’t “everything is broken Australia-wide”, it was whoever chose Optus (ahem, Australia-wide, I grant you) without having a suitable backup plan in place. That’s some 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses, so it’s no small amount, but still.
For most of those (notably “consumers”), that backup plan is simply “I’ll have do it tomorrow”. For businesses, their livelihood depends on it.
If you asked those businesses to choose between :
- a service will work for 99.9 percent of the time when you need it (8.5 hours downtime a year) for $100 a month, or
- a service that will work for 99.99 percent of the time when you need it (1 hour a year) for $250 a month.
The vast majority will choose the cheaper version and rationalise away the chance of losses… until they experience those losses.
I hope that those businesses who have lost out big time have looked at their planning and have noticed their single point of failure, and are busily working on ways to fix it. That can be cash, or EFTPOS on alternative networks, or IOUs or whatever.
Would be cool if they simply had a fall back network. But 5$ more? Nah.
Genuine question…
If we had a proper robust fibre NBN, how many business would still use 3rd party wireless/mobile options?
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