> Ken Brown[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Anyway, no-one has yet come up with a convincing reason for me to want > to carry any kind of electronic wallet for small transactions. Anything > under, say, 50 dollars American, is more easily done in physical cash > money. If nothing else the irritation that you'd go through when you > lose one and have to get another makes it not worth it. If I lose coins > I lose the value of the coin and nothing else. If I lose a bank card > it ruins my day. Even if the card was only good for 50 quid I still > have to jump through hoops to get a new one. > > Obviously smart cash might make sense as public transport tickets, or as > a prepaid hotel bill (to hotel owners at any rate), and smart-card > applications for these things have been developing for decades. (We > certainly were issued with something like them at the hotel for the 1989 > Eastercon in UK - which I only remember because it was the last I went > to for some years, they might have been around much earlier) But in > general street use - why bother? Even if these putative electronic > wallets were as easy to get hold of as cash (walk up to a machine any > time of day or night, stick in some id, type in PIN, walk off) you might > as well just use cash. > Ken, when was the last time you paid for a call from a UK public phone with coins?
Iirc, most British public phones no longer accept coins (unlike in the US, where you have to search for one with a card slot). As the saying goes, 'follow the money'. Handling cash is expensive. It's usually dependent on hand counting and manual change making. These are error prone operations. There is also, in retail situations, the problem of the help pocketing part of the take, not to mention that cash presents a security problem not present with electronic book transactions. The presence of cash means that you have to buy/maintain/use safes, security services, video systems, etc, as well as pay higher insurance premiums. Vending machines have to be heavily engineered to be resistant to theft. Night clerk at a convenience store or gas station is one of the most hazardous jobs available in America. I've heard that security for cash is a major expense item at the retail level - over 10% of it's value in some cases. A system which does not place acculmalate stealable cash has clear advantages to everyone (but at the cost of privacy and anonymity!). Going to a cashless system would save the vendor money - perhaps several percent. If they passed on part of this in the form of lower prices, the consumer could be motivated to accept a 'smart wallet' of some kind. > I suppose they could be of benefit to the operators of ATMs. The one at > the all-night filling station round the corner from me seems to be have > someone using it every ten minutes or so in the late evening. So, at a > wild guess, the stock level might be between 5 and 10 thousand pounds. > That's getting towards where it might pay someone to use heavy machinery > to get it out of the wall. Even if it splurts itself with ink (there > are a lot of stupid criminals out there) that is still very inconvenient > for the building owners. > This actually *is* one of the ways ATMs get attacked, and the newer ones have quite impressive engineering to hold them in place. A smart card based system would actually eliminate ATMs - without the physical security required for cash, you could as easily fill up at any terminal. > But there's nothing in it for the user. An initially valueless smart > wallet might be less attractive to muggers, but they just have to wait > for you to activate it. Or point a knife at you till you do. And the > more faffing about you need to do (PIN, setting authorisation limits, > pointing the thing at the reader) the more old-fashioned cash would seem > simpler. > There's nothing in it for the consumer until (1) some vendors go cashless, and (2), they pass along part of the cost savings. > Now, using a mobile phone as money might sell. People seem determined to > use them for everything else. If there was a way of transferring prepay > directly between SIMs it would be used by teenagers (and drug dealers) > to settle small debts. Maybe they already are and I haven't noticed. > > Ken Brown > Peter Trei
