[mhh__]

We (west) already have a credit system that cash hedges against — a charity my parents look after woke up one day with no bank account, because the bank had not received a reply to a letter they'd sent to who knows where.

If I were a coffee shop I'd take cash just as an operational hedge against that kind of thing, let alone "the government has banned coffee shops" tail risk.

[Gigachad]

There was a multi hour outage for one of the phone providers in Australia which ended up impacting a lot of card readers. Businesses still accept cash, but the problem is that almost no one carries cash in Australia so it’s no use here.

The real backup seems to be having two card readers on different networks.