Credit card network Visa has an interesting proposal for small food businesses across the country. It will give as many as 50 of them $10,000 each to upgrade their systems, especially to accept contactless mobile payments. The catch is that they have to agree not to accept cash anymore.
Visa’s War on Cash is a thing
You may not have known this, but Visa has declared war on cash. That makes sense, since cash is its main competition as a network for credit and debit card payments. The $500,000 set aside to help merchants quit cash is just one front in this war.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the company’s new CEO, Al Kelly, has a particular interest in eradicating cash.
“We’re focused on putting cash out of business,” he told the company’s investors in June. Globally, payments by cash and check are actually increasing. Americans still use physical dollar bills in 32% of transactions, and Visa wants to change that.
The Pros & Cons Of Going Cashless
One small restaurant in New York City told the WSJ that its manager saves 23 hours each week worth of work by going all-cards. The main downside: having to pay transaction fees on all of the money that it takes in.
The National Retail Federation takes a pro-cash stance, noting that fees take an average 2% bite off the top of business, and the percentage goes up for merchants that are smaller. The trade group has also pointed out in the past that expenses related to taking cash — even the risk of robbery and theft — are still lower than credit card fees.
Ultimately, it’s customers who will decide which method of payment we prefer, and the percentage of payments made in cash is falling. 40% of consumer transactions were in cash in 2012, and that fell to 32% in 2015.
Notably, while Visa says that the $10,000 payments will help food vendors and restaurants with their payment systems and marketing costs, you don’t really hear anything about a discount on those interchange fees.
One way that these cashless restaurants could avoid both interchange fees and dealing with crumpled bills would be to accept blockchain currencies like bitcoin, assuming that interested customers have devices with bitcoin wallets in their pockets. Visa, however, is not going to help them set up for this. As far as we know, the payment network doesn’t have any cryptocurrency payment acceptance products in the works.
Source: Consumerist
https://consumerist.com/2017/07/12/visa-will-give-50-restaurants-10k-each-to-upgrade-payment-tech-if-they-ban-cash/
This should be a boon for bitcoin and virtual currencies.
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Yeah they're definitely not in it out of love of small merchants. A lot of merchants don't even realize that if someone selects "credit' on their POS the merchant is charged much more than for debit, even if the customer is using a debit card.
Paying them $10,000 up front, Visa obviously realizes that the multiple of this that they're going to get back in transaction fees is massive. I am sure they know exactly how many days or weeks on average it will take for them to make that $10k back for every business they reach out to.
What they don't have that cryptos do is privacy and untraceability, well, among other things.
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Cash has this as well for the most part.....I think this is becoming the underlying issue. if you also have to obtain cryptocurrencies with a credit/debit card then there is a starting point for big bro.
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Yeah good point. Have to say I may be involved in internet and mobile marketing and now cryptocurrencies, but I have a wide Luddite streak in me. Part of me never wants to part with good ol' cash. Maybe it's something about stacking all my coins as a child. I used to love to put all my money into stacks by denomination and write down the totals. And I feel safer with a bit of paper money in my pocket. Probably in a generation or two no one will remember that feeling and we'll go completely cashless.
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VisagoogleamazonyahooverizonattmediacomibmmicrosoftsimonmallswholefoodscvswalgreensupssafewaydowbayermonsantoglaxopfizerFbiciansaepafdausdadia.
Follow the money!
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Thanks for sharing.. Will the government be able to tax Bitcoin profits?
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They will if the merchant wants to. Otherwise I don't see how. How would you tax something that everyone can plausibly deny having received?
Unless they disclose their merchants BitCoin address, so the IRS can monitor and tax it, there is no feasible way.
But then again, if you are a merchant, they may force you to only accept payments to this particular address. You never know who your customer is.
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In the US they have already set sort of a guideline....you just have to move the crypto to USD first.
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Great post! It's not just Visa either, even governments like India are trying to make cash illegal. I just seen an article where Australia wants to chip bills to keep seniors from saving. It seems like every other day you hear more cases proving that there is a very real war on cash. I think its Bill Bonner that says to horde bills because there are so few of them now, that if credit cards fail, the value of the bills will skyrocket. Guess I'll be screwed if this happens, because everything I have is in silver and crypto!
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Then you're one of the few who won't be screwed..
And, yes, there is a war on cash. Within the fiat system, cash is the least controllable.
The system is losing grip of several things at the moment. The corporate media is losing terrain on the public opinion front, the central banks are losing terrain to crypto, if just little, but the terrain lost they can't recover. It is to be expected that they will tighten the screws in order to counteract the development. It's going to get ugly. Be prepared.
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