What We Give Away When We Give Away Cash

A few minutes ago I ended a conversation of almost two hours with a very good friend of mine, who has lived in Sweden for more than 15 years, who has a small and successful business in that country, is in a relationship with a person born in that country, but who is increasingly thinking of leaving Sweden. One of the reasons is Sweden's restrictive decision to permanently remove cash from circulation.

Their decision and their strong orientation, but also blind at the same time, towards a cashless society, and even more, towards the implementation of RFID chips in the body of its citizens, through which they will carry out any financial transaction, and to take will replace their identity documents At the same time, it is a step forward towards the painful reality of the establishment of a world prison and our slavery.

Probably many of you haven't used cash for a long time, and even I have had periods when I hated paying cash, but that doesn't mean that it should disappear, or that it don't make sense, one of the reasons of owning cash being even the feeling of ownership and privacy. Why can't it coexist with the electronic money? ...

Why are more and more shops and restaurants, especially in Sweden, as this friend told me just now, refusing to accept cash, and what would be the agenda behind this trend? One of the obvious reasons would be the elimination of tax evasion, and a second, in trend with this pandemic, would be the elimination of the risks of transmitting viruses and automatically excluding cash registers, say obsolete, and the transport and storage of banknotes that seems to slow down the financial system.

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That is why it seems that the Swedes have decided to impose higher taxes on companies that accept cash payments, but is this the only reason why they do this, and the other countries that follow them? Certainly not, but as George Carlin put it, "people are always willing to exchange a bit of their freedom in exchange for the feeling, the illusion of security and safety."

My opinion is that when we give up the idea of ​​owning cash, in addition to those held in bank accounts, we really give up that little bit of freedom that George Carlin was talking about. The money deposited in the banks is not really ours, because if all the customers of a bank would decide at some point to withdraw all the money from the bank, it would not be able to make all these payments, and this is probably not a news for you.

Moreover, banks also have the audacity to hold you accountable for the way you decide to spend your money, and in this direction I would mention again the situation of my friend who tried to buy a Bitcoin using his account at a bank from Romania and was notified by this one that if he tries again, they will close his account. This does not seem to me to be financial freedom or security, and if we are to discuss the right to privacy, then by completely eliminating cash we can say that we are killing one of the last freedoms we still have on earth.

Going cashless means that a central entity is in control of the data compiled from many accounts held inside that entity, and that a bigger entity that has the power to enforce laws, such as governments, can get access over the smaller entity and its clients, and there is no privacy any longer that we can talk of. Calls can be recorded, and Edward Snowden talked about that in many podcasts, smartphone cameras can be accessed through special tech for sure, and the location of one user is no longer a hidden treasure that one must dig too much to find, there’s tons of apps that collect data constantly from our phones, and we even help governments knowing us with more info by posting daily events from our lives on social media.

What more freedom can we talk about when money is no longer in our hands, shopping and income being accessible to the authorities at any time through banks and payment services, and our online life is collected bit by bit ...? We don't have much to talk about, but very few people consider this theft of freedom when they give up cash.

Why does the bank, or an entity that has control over the banks, need to know that Joe bought a bicycle or a dildo for his wife yesterday...? "To protect Joe from viruses of course, thieves, tax evasion, and to ease the payment of his personal belongings?" No, they actually want this to control Joe completely and introduce him unwittingly into a Big Brother game, from which almost no one will be able to escape.

I remember two years ago reading about China and their system of creating social profiles and controlling the population though them with the help of their advanced tech, and it seemed simply diabolical to me. Look now, we have come close to this reality, being restricted in leaving our homes, and even the country, being forced to pay more and more contact less, in order not to transmit COVID-19 from one to another, putting our savings entirely in the hands of the villains called banks.

In conclusion, if the only exchange currency will be digital, and personal documents will be saved on a chip, and this chip will be mandatory to travel the world and to be able to make payments or earn our living, with what freedom we will be left with... What will prevent those who control these technologies from deciding what money we can spend, or not, where we are allowed to travel, or not and how much we can earn. It might sound weird and dated but I wouldn't ditch cash yet. Plenty of freedoms will get away with that paper money for sure and me likey not.

Thanks for attention,
Adrian