Businesses were hit hard during the Optus outage, with EFTPOS machines left out of action. As Australia moves further towards being completely cashless, experts say the outage isn't enough to see cash return as king.
Yes, cash is much easier if you wish to be anonymous. That also leads to more cash based fraud and tax fraud. I don’t think cash needs to be eliminated, but there are digital alternatives to cash if you want illegal things. So, again, we don’t necessarily need cash. We don’t need to rush to eliminate it, but we also don’t need to prop it up to prevent progress. Even if Australia alone eliminated cash, which I don’t expect, you could still buy drugs in US$, for instance.
Yes, cash is much easier if you wish to be anonymous. That also leads to more cash based fraud and tax fraud. I don’t think cash needs to be eliminated, but there are digital alternatives to cash if you want illegal things. So, again, we don’t necessarily need cash. We don’t need to rush to eliminate it, but we also don’t need to prop it up to prevent progress. Even if Australia alone eliminated cash, which I don’t expect, you could still buy drugs in US$, for instance.