Every bill has a unique identifier on it. Every time you withdraw from an ATM, those IDs are associated with your real name. Every time you purchase something, the retailer deposits those bills right back in a bank. Occasionally, bills may be passed around privately before landing in a retailer's hands, but this actually enables data miners to determine with whom you financially associate. Cash is no panacea of privacy.

Imagine a graph in which accounts are the nodes and transactions are the edges. Cash tells the Feds who owns every node. BitCoins tell the Feds (and everyone else) about every edge. The latter information quickly loses its value when nodes are popping up willy nilly with no real names attached to them, and faster than anyone can pin names to. You just have to programmatically keep your BitCoins at a recent node, ahead of the wave of nodes that have been identified.

You are absolutely right, but abandoning pseudonymity based on this reasoning reflects a common misunderstanding about how data mining works. Please don't give up so easily. You see, organizations that scrape and aggregate data from the web can only probabilistically connect all your aliases. That is, they only know with 97.3% certainty that YouTubeTrollKing7 is the same person as osu-neko, and they only know with 98.5% certainty that osu-neko is Brian Nekomori who attends Oregon State University (I made that up, by the way). That may not be the kind of privacy you would prefer, but it buys a lot of freedom, especially if everyone does it. You see, the Internet is kind of big, and man-hunts involve skewed data. (That is, most people are not the person they are looking for.) Since false-positives create big headaches for data miners, they tend to set their thresholds very high. For example, if they set their thresholds at 99.5%, those pseudonyms will not be recognized as connected to you.

So, what does this buy you? Well, it's not enough that you can go around committing crimes and expect the FBI to never find you. But, on the other hand, they're going to have a hard time achieving a conviction if they cannot find any other supporting evidence. Furthermore, people just don't seem to understand the power of exponential decay that occurs with probabilities. The more pseudonyms you use, the more the probabilistic connections among them decay into the low 90's, making it extremely cumbersome to link them all together. Imagine having to filter through the 0.01% of Internet posts that happen to falsely connect with your pseudonymns with high probability! No one wants to do that, so guess what, you have some privacy.

So, don't give up on pseudonymity. Yes, data mining is real, but no, it is not omniscient. Pseudonymity doesn't defeat it, but it makes them pay a dear price for finding you. Make them pay to know who you are. If everyone does it, the whole industry stops being so lucrative. The very reason data mining pays off so well right now is because of people who take the attitude that "it doesn't matter because they know anyway". So, stop it!

Taxes pay to print cash. They could pay to run the transaction system.

Cards could carry a monthly fee that covers up to some number of transactions.

Transactions consisting solely of splitting or combining cards could be made free while transactions consisting of the purchase of goods or services continue to carry a fee.

There are any number of ways to set up the system where one activity or another carries no fee. When I write a check I pay no fee. The bank makes its money off me other ways.

He can't help it, the leads were weak.

Maybe. Certainly with today's approach.

So a guy walking around with an artificial leg, a plastic heart valve, dentures and google glass ISN'T a cyborg? What is?

Seriously?

By the parent using the parent's bank card. By the kid splitting a larger card so he can give some amount to his buddy or combining several cards he got from his buddies.

I'm against a cashless society but not because there's any practical obstruction to it working. There isn't.

Shame you don't understand logical fallacies.

"Appeal to consequences" means an argument that something must be false because the consequences would be bad. I made no such argument. I said, "we'd better be damn sure we're right" before undertaking an effort with such negative consequences.

Unproven is not the same as false, nor is disputing unfounded conclusions the same as calling the conclusions untrue. This is one of the central fallacies that the alarmists have been perpetrating: that anyone who says, "hold on, it looks like you should investigate this a little more thoroughly" is a "denier" claiming that the hypotheses are false.

Climate alarmists may yet find sufficient scientific evidence to justify drastic action. I claim only that the ringing of the alarm bells is premature and I even suggest a form of acceptable evidence which, if found, would sustain the yet unproven claims.

Unfortunately science only works when scientists are at liberty to try as hard as they can to demonstrate counter-examples to your theory. The whole "denier" politics discourages folks from asking the questions scientists must ask in order to sustain or refute the hypotheses on the table. Your politics have gotten in the way of actually proving whether you're right.

Not exactly. When someone with good credit pays off his "cash back" card at the end of the month, the bank passes on a portion of the merchant fees. That's the "cash back."

Of course, if you use your card as an unsecured loan for longer than the billing cycle then you pay interest. And if you're late paying you pay late fees. You're a fool to do that in anything but a dire emergency, and your parents, friends and colleagues have warned you about it all your life, but you're free to live your life any way you want to.

What would we like about the dollar coin? Except by sight it's nearly indistinguishable from a quarter worth, well, a quarter of what a dollar is worth. And when we see it... it's ugly. I want to see George Washington on my dollars, not obscure companions of explorers however worthy they may be.

I do think it'd be reasonable to replace the penny and nickle with a better designed $1 coin and a $5 coin. Then the new system of cash transactions in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths of a dollar would make sense and the universe wouldn't end because of it.

Pre-paid debit card.

Unless you like carrying a smartphone in your hands all the time in crowded places, or like leaving your smartphone on the table where it can get lost or stolen, the smart watch is better. Nothing beats a watch for quickly checking something. Constantly fishing a phone out of your pocket, unlocking it, checking stuff and putting the phone back in your pocket can become extremely tedious quickly.

Can't say I've ever left mine anywhere. And I have no problem getting it out of my pockets. Meanwhile a watch is fucking uncomfortable to wear, and tends to break within a few months as you accidently bang it on things. I cried tears of joy the day I realized my new cell phone meant I'd never have to wear a watch again. I think taking it out of your pockets is a problem only about 1% of the people in the world have, everyone else seems to prefer the phone.

There's a few other things in the hardware that would bring up issues:

*Battery- smaller form factor, smaller battery, less life. People complain about that already
*camera- is there any place to put a camera on there that isn't going to be blocked by write hair or inconvenient to take a picture with? Can you see the screen to see the image? is it easy to hold your arm steady enough?
*Text input- voice recognition isn't there yet, and even when it is you don't always want to be public with your messages. How do you type on one quickly?
*Is there enough physical room for everything?
*Heat- if we do all that in a watch, how hot will it get? Will it become a safety hazard or uncomfortable to wear?
*Power- even if everything works, a phone can have the same stuff and more, due to form factor. So why would you limit yourself to the watch?

Two seconds in a year!?! That means in a mere 30 years you'll have to adjust it by a minute. In your life you'll have to adjust it 3 times! DO you know how much effort and time you'll save by buying a $10,000 high end mechanical watch? You'll only have to adjust it once- that's got to save you 2 minutes over the course of your lifetime. Isn't 10K a small price to pay for that?*

*Math void if anything heavier than a feather ever touches it, as it may break the delicate alignment of gears.

Even more real answer- I'm in the subway. I'm not getting that call/text because the signal isn't reaching me through 10m of solid earth.