personally i would like to be able to have a physical money to access rather than solely a n electronic or ledger note.

To avoid the problems described, heavy monitoring of virtual (e.g. internet) and physical interaction would need to be implemented. I doubt the gains would outweigh the costs.

http://baldwinsworld.com/2010/04/28/get-rid-of-cash-and-coins-save-our-country-money/

That depends what you mean by “totally”.

Properly implemented, it would make all of those things impossible (for some definition of “impossible”). Of course, governments would never allow a proper, secure, implementation.

Which is funny since in virtually every Star Trek episode there’s a failure of technology, a crime, and considerable poverty.

http://www.cfr.org/bios/1637/benn_steil.html

He’s with the CFR, but I’ve just watched this video

http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6102

and both of them are quite good, almost Austrian (especially the latino guy). Sorry for OT, but I thought it might be interesting for other Misesians.

He mentions the technology of the 21′st century.
Is it the marvleous technology of Diebold machines? First of all who will program these e-cards? Microsoft? What technology is he talking about! A look at Windoze Vista is enough to reduce one to tears. The intrusiveness, the disrespect of people’s privacy, common with almost every tech company out there ( except Open Source and Linux of course ).

Second he mentions the cost of printing money and coining. Something like 800 million a year. Well what would the cost of these e cards be. One still has to produce them, it is a hundred times more expansive to produce these “tech gadgets” than to print or coin,. what would the cost of maintaining them be, upgrading their security to protect from threats etc, upgrading servers, satellite equipment etc.

Third the issue of privacy. He mentions paying through you cell phone, i have seen such a thing in japan. Anybody with basic knowledge on technology would tell you that cell phones are the least secured gadgets on the planet. In fact anything like an e-card would interact in the same way with military owned satellites in space. Every single transaction would be scrutinized, as i said the technology does not exist to secure something totally, something which is essential to money.

Than is the economic issue of storing money. How would one store money if everything you own exists in a chip in your cell phone or your e- card guarded by Mr.Norton, or by Windows defender and firewall, software that can’t even protect against script kiddies.
Money needs to last, it should have the property of being stored with ease, and be secured.

The article is a boring fantasy of an overgrown child. Speaking of fantasies. I bet you if we ever are to find any civilization out there, no matter how technologically advanced, we would probably find them with sachets of gold, silver, hanging from their belts, or maybe some other rare metal fused in the latter stages, unknown to man yet. Their first words would not be ” Live long and Prosper ” but ” How much in gold for the goat ”

Private individuals used gold, but they also invented the use of paper, as a cost-saving measure, increased security (for some types of transactions) and general convenience. Banks and other institutions moved to electronic transfers for the same reasons.

With that in mind, I think any push by governments to encourage electronic money is not so much an argument for market efficiency, so much as a way to more easily tax, inflate and steal people’s wealth.

So I think a more apt statement would be: In the hands of the state, the true purpose electronic money becomes the destruction of privacy.

The true purpose of electronic money is the destruction of privacy. People who want to do business without state intrusion need a currency that is (a) safe and (b) private. Paper notes satisfy that need now, which is why it’s the currency of the non-statist economy. But if paper currency were to disappear, people would need something else that is reliable and difficult to counterfeit.

That’s gold.