[livueta]

An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible.

This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.