Comment on You must have an internet connected smartphone to eat
drmoose@lemmy.world 4 days agoI don’t care about bandwidth but it’s clearly worse technology. Pointing to a physical target and exchanging physical tokens is straight up better technology. This is functional regression.
I like how Japan solved the cash overhead with automatic cash change machines everywhere - this is the right solution for payment processing and updating menus is easy.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 days ago
Dunno if it’s necessarily worse tech… I don’t really care if it’s physical tokens which get exchanged or virtual ones… Point is, it has to work and cover a wide array of use-cases. Has to work in edge-cases, for both residents and tourists, has to work when there’s surprise maintenance at the bank, when there’s an internet outage… We gotta easily pay $1000 for a hotel for 10 days and the rental car, or 73ct at the local flea market. I might need to pay for a bus ticket or gasoline in the middle if some forest where there isn’t any 5G coverage…
I think exchanging physical tokens is just absurdly good at that. I’m just not sure if it can’t be done any other way? I mean we obviously don’t have that hypothetical tech in the real world, because banks want to control the process and they always come up with some central way of doing it, with them in the middle. That’s kinda their business model. And the alternative concept is some convoluted approach which needs an internet connection and a decent amount of resources to do the transactions…
There’s some better approaches at digital cash like GNU Taler I think that one is pretty much like cash. And we only need one of the transaction parties to be online to prevent double-spending of the virtual tokens.