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by reaperducer 1175 days ago
Cash is friction.

Says someone who's never had to wait in line for 15 minutes waiting for the valets and customers ahead of them to figure out which apps they each have in common so they can exchange $5. Something that can be done in under four seconds with cash.

2 comments

Sounds for a ripe opportunity for government to enforce interoperable bump-to-pay. GooglePay<>APplePay<>Venmo<>Meta<>CashApp<>Zelle<>PayPal<>WesternUnion<>MoneyGram. A lack of interfacibility and the rise of silo'd private institutions vs public standard protocol caused this.

ACH was that. Instant distributed settlement would be nice.

People dislike cash to the degree that they're willing to juggle a bunch of apps to avoid it
Dislike!=friction/harder.

In other words people will jump through hoops to make something already frictionless into multiple orders of magnitude more steps to make the last step easier.

Banks did their utmost to perpetuate the idea that cash is harder. They make it harder.

The only thing you have to do with cash is add/subtract it yourself. Feel the need for an app? Calculator can do that!

It's not banks that convinced me to avoid cash: it's the annoyance of carrying it around, making rounding concessions all the time, and getting change back.

How much is this drink? $1.65? Okay, lacking a dollar, I can pay $2.05 and get 4 dimes back (no help) or pay $2.15 and get 2 quarters back (that's better than getting 3 dimes and a nickel), or just pay with a $5 and get back (in Canada) a toonie ($2-coin), a loonie, 3 dimes and a nickel.

That's a lot of metal bits I have to carry around for the next 8 or 9 hours to justify a drink of something in the morning.

I'd rather just beep my card, and it's not banks that convinced me to do it.