Businesses were hit hard during the Optus outage, with EFTPOS machines left out of action. As Australia moves further towards being completely cashless, experts say the outage isn't enough to see cash return as king.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.