Digital discrimination is a reality whereby cash is no longer king

As with any form of discrimination, you are deprived of choice, and the right to choice is a human right.

The “cash is king” society is being replaced with digital money. What this means is that a large mass of individuals are marginalised because they don’t have money in the bank, but they may have money in their wallet.

Ha, you say now, it is only criminals which have something to hide? Well then that places me in a class of criminal in your mind: as I count the pennies in my wallet, -hoping that I have got a salary this month, to pay the faceless mr Taxman as much as I can, and take the rest out in cash- so I have enough money to pay for food for my family to survive.

When I first stepped into these new clothes of, what feels like a fugitive, I found that in Sweden, I couldn’t pay for the bus or buy a cup of coffee. Although I am learning to find out how to make it work, it is complicated. Hence I needed to work out out how to survive without money in the bank, even if I had cash in my wallet. I have opened my eyes up to a whole new world whereby cash is not king, whereby if you don’t have cash you are marginalised. Sweden is pretty advanced on the ‘cashless society’ vision.

It got me thinking again about bitcoin, not through my privacy eyes, but through the eyes of a marginalised individual, as a means as an alternative to money because ‘untraceable’ is built within its DNA, which I guess (as a non bitcoin guy) makes it an acceptable alternative to money.

Clearly bitcoin is a preferred currency for criminal networks because of this, and there are efforts to find a way to make bitcoin traceable to combat money laundering, and other shady stuff going on.

My marginalised hat hopes they don’t succeed. I hope that there is a future when the world is completely digitised that it is possible to survive when you have no money in your bank account. Today I can still find a coffee shop, and purchase metro/bus tickets at main stations, but tomorrow, I can’t imagine how it will be for those marginalised individuals and their families in a cashless world.

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