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by BatteryMountain 1 hour ago
I'm starting to come the the same conclusion, but not for practical reasons. My thinking is about privacy. If I buy some chocolates from retailer X (with or without their loyalty system), these parties will know what I purchased and where: The retailer, the bank, the merchant (visa/mc), wallet provider (Google/Apple/Samsung). Any upstream 3rd parties for analytics, big data warehouses, ai companies (fraud detection, spending predictions), marketing companies, research companies, manufacturers. Then there are bluetooth beacons, microphones, cameras, facial recognition, keyboard/screen capture (Gboard, Samsung Keyboard, Whatsapp texts). Then there is sms and popup notification on device that gets ingested by x amount of systems too. So the whole pipe just exists to gather as much as possible data to sell me more stuff. Having a card will take some of them out of the loop or less rich metadata than using a digital wallet.
1 comments

A card is a good step to reduce that. I want to go farther and pay cash as much as possible, but it's not trivial to manage when all I have is a pocket full of coins. Is there a 3D printed wallet with slots sized for European coins so you can quickly identify and extract the coins you need instead of rummaging through a mixed pocket?