VISA takes its War on Cash to US Retailers

Forget “legal tender.”
 
“We’re focused on putting cash out of business,” Visa’s new CEO Al Kelly said on June 22 at Visa Investor Day. Pushing consumers into digital and electronic payments is the company’s “number-one growth lever.” Visa has been dogged by the stubborn survival of cash and checks, despite widespread government and corporate efforts to kill them off.
 
Globally, check and cash transactions totaled $17 trillion in 2016, Visa President Ryan McInerney said. Confusingly, that’s up 2% from a year earlier.
 
So today, Visa rolled out a new initiative on its war on cash. It’s designed “for small business restaurants, cafés, or food truck owners,” and the like. In this trial, it will award up to $10,000 each to 50 eligible businesses (online businesses are excluded) when they commit to refusing cash payments.
 
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/07/12/visa-ta...retailers/
 
Are Countries Moving to Digital Currency?
 
In other countries, cash is under outright attack. In France, cash transactions over €1,000 are prohibited. Other European countries, such as Germany, are also considering cash restrictions. The cash restrictions have been met with resistance in Germany because of privacy concerns. Politicians that condemn the cash control efforts in Europe argue that the measures are attacks on privacy and security. Konstantin von Notz, a German Member of Parliament, tweeted that “Cash allows us to remain anonymous during day-to-day transactions. In a constitutional democracy, that is a freedom that has to be defended.”
 
Consumers have legitimate concerns about the privacy of their private financial information. Unlike cash, which cannot be traced, noncash payment methods, such as digital currency, always leave a trail. There has even been a push for increased privacy in the world of cryptocurrencies. Companies now offer virtual currency “mixing” services in order to add an additional layer of anonymity to the publicly visible blockchain. For a fee, mixers receive virtual currency from their customers, commingle it with virtual currency from others, and then disburse it back to the original owner.
 
https://www.americanexpress.com/us/conte...new-trend/
 
In a cashless society, the cash has been converted into numbers, into signals, into electronic currents. In short: Information replaces cash.
 
Information is lightning-quick. It crosses cities, states, and national borders in the twinkle of an eye. It passes through many kinds of devices, flowing from phone to phone, and computer to computer, rather than being sealed away in those silent marble temples we used to call banks. Information never jangles uncomfortably in your pocket.
 
But wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you.
 
At various points in the chain, all transactions squeeze through bottlenecks created by big players like Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal. These are the choke points for which Operation Choke Point is named.  
 
The choke points are private corporations that are not only subject to government regulation on the books, but have shown a disturbing willingness to bend to extralegal requests—whether it is enforcing financial blockades against the controversial whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks or the website Backpage, which hosts classified ads by sex workers, and allegedly ads from sex traffickers as well. A little bit of pressure, and the whole financial system closes off to the government’s latest pariah. Operation Choke Point exploited this tendency on a wide scale.
 
A cashless society promises a world of limitation, control, and surveillance—all of which the poorest Americans already have in abundance, of course. For the most vulnerable, the cashless society offers nothing substantively new, it only extends the reach of the existing paternal bureaucratic state.
 
As paper money evaporates from our pockets and the whole country—even world—becomes enveloped by the cashless society, financial censorship could become pervasive, unbarred by any meaningful legal rights or guarantees.
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...ty/477411/
 
 
 

 

Credit card swipe fees take away from the merchant. All those fees go to the bank. This will also encourage the younger generation to accept credit cards thereby incurring more debt on the population.

Couple it with a biometric database and every single man, woman, and child can be taxed for every breath taken on planet earth. Without the mark of station no one will be able to drive a car, open a bank account, ride in a plane, enter a Federal building, attend sports and music events, and the list goes on and on....

India has been gearing itself towards a cashless society. By looking at how a cashless system works it's a good idea to look around the planet to see how it's working in different societies. Large and small.

 

SURVIVING Economic Collapse and Cashless Society In India
 
In this video Luke Rudkowski takes you along on his travels as he is broke like a joke in Goa India after the latest currency reset. We show you the current situation on the ground and cover the latest economic, social and political changes that occured in India.
 
https://youtu.be/EHc1Gitiq-s