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Although this is true to a degree, having a legal definition of "money" and a legal framework surrounding it makes a big difference.No system of money works outside of just a societal belief that it does. Same goes with all rules, laws, etc. Belief is the ultimate (and only true) enforcement of anything "working."
Australia is different. Many situations have popped up in recent decades where businesses try to refuse cash and our government steps in and restates the laws loudly and clearly so that everyone understands."As it stands, businesses throughout the UK are free to choose what form of payment they accept.
There's no Bank of England rules or laws governing what they have to accept - that's why, since the pandemic, some cafes, restaurants and retailers no longer take physical cash whatsoever, they're not obliged to.
We have laws around that too and businesses can refuse payments made in such a way as to be "vexatious". In other words they don't have to accept hundreds of dollars worth of 5 cent coins. Or, they can accept the payment but charge the payer for the time it takes to count said coins.Seems to me some time back I heard about a defendant who lost a lawsuit and chose to pay the plaintiff in change. Awkward....with a hefty amount of money due the plaintiff.
No system of money works outside of just a societal belief that it does. Same goes with all rules, laws, etc. Belief is the ultimate (and only true) enforcement of anything "working."
If everyone would finally, suddenly just wake up tomorrow and stand firm that they alone should decide their worth and what everything else should be worth, everything about money systems would crash.
Stocks are even worse because that's nothing but "projected worth" that happens to get "insured" by a financial institution to back it up. Literally all of the numbers of up and down worth that you can see daily with stock markets are seriously just what people do or don't believe it's worth from one minute to the next.
Worse is when you realize that the only folks who enforce (with guns, badges, authority, etc.) any forms of class and wealth...only do so because they are getting "paid" to do so.....meaning that they have bought in hard and believe it more than most. Those are the most dense and most dangerous of them all - those who enforce the nonsense. All of it coming down to the core fact that the elites believe no one else will do any work (for them - that benefits primarily them) unless there is reward (being forms of profit - ie...money). It's nonsense, though. Humans are inherently bound to always do something out of stress in the first place, and if the depression and struggle of class systems and wealth ladders would go away, a crap ton of depression, struggle and negative stress would go away resulting in people actually getting out and doing more. It's incredibly simple. If you want people to work...doing anything at all...don't make them hate it. You still want folks to know what they're doing and talking about correctly, of course, so there would still be proper learning, but do away with debts, stress, class systems and elitism to even be able to do whatever job, and I contend most everyone will want to do them. You want more teachers? Don't make them lower than a doctor. You want more true leaders? Don't make a system full of mistrust, back stabbing, lying, cheating, popularity contests (voting/campaigns) and then some to even partake. Etc. Etc. Etc.
It's really, really stupid, and yet the few of us who hate it are still forced to abide by it because of the masses who like to claim how woke they are...and are honestly just in comas. It's among the greatest insults to intelligence and therefore among the greatest of annoyances.
Most Aussies have a Debit Card, not a credit card. It works the same as a credit card in most cases, websites recognise my card as being Visa, but there's no line of credit attached to that account, it's just a savings account. We don't pay any fees or surcharges for using these cards either, our banks tried that one on early in the 90s and got pulled up short over it.
Here we have all the same protections for debit cards as we do for credit cards and if a dispute looks genuine the banks will credit that money straight back in to your account then investigate the situation properly afterwards.I don't have one and will never have one because my legal protections are slim to none if someone steals my card or my account number and withdraws money from my bank account. You can kiss your money goodbye.
It's just weird.
I had a "friend" a few years ago who was always borrowing money from me. Somehow he seemed to never get around to paying me back. I chided him once about always "stealing my lunch money". After that, I stopped carrying cash, figuring that when he asked to borrow, I could honestly say I didn't have any on me. After that happened a couple of times, he actually asked if he could borrow my debit card!! I never got back in the habit of carrying cash.But even before that, barely any use of actual paper cash for many years now.