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Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 21 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

When the payment processor goes down, I can buy my groceries/gas/weed with cash, not by flossing my teeth. I don’t follow the point you’re making. Going fully cashless is a bad idea, and the recent outage didn’t affect every system used. I don’t see how having multiple methods of payment is possibly a bad thing. I’m not advocating for only cash.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    this wasn't a problem with cashless infrastructure tho, this was a problem with monoculture. if the globe stopped using microsoft for gov and business, and instead threw their tax money towards open development; as in - the people, not microsoft, these kind of global issues wouldn't exist.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    The inventory and POS systems also go down. You still can't by your groceries/gas/weed.

    Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    That’s not what I witnessed recently. Payment processors went down but local POS was fine. Inventory didn’t matter with the short duration of the outage. This is one of the reasons going cashless is a bad idea. Far from the only one, but it’s a factor, and I experienced it. Going cashless reduces diversity in payment options and makes the system more vulnerable.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That’s not what I witnessed recently.

    Now you're bringing personal anecdotes to rebut global systemic hypotheticals.
    We're not having the same discussion anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Your global systemic hypotheticals are flawed in that they don’t match what actually occurred. Every electronic system didn’t crash. Using cash to buy things was still possible at many places, while people who only had cards couldn’t.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.

    It's pretty clear this incident has highlighted a myriad of very important issues.

    It's likely more productive to discuss the other issues in their own threads - this thread is clearly focused on the cashless problem.

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