You know, once when I was young and naive and influenced by the upbeat socialist sci-fi literature available in my country (which is in stark contrast with the very pessimistic sci-fi emanating from the West), I thought that no cash was a good thing. Why do you need to carry cash when you can have a machine that could identify you "somehow" (I did not work out the details at that time yet) and fetch all the information about you from some central database and transfer the money behind your back. That was long before I found out about credit cards

Mind you my idea was much more futuristic than a humble credit card. I imagined a single ID card or, even better, some kind of biometric identification, so you would not need to carry anything. And the central database would know everything about you. So it could be used not just for paying for stuff, but also for traveling (no passports), job applications (it would know all your academic history), entry to restricted areas... you get the idea.

Now, several decades later, I am no longer convinced it is such a good idea

Indeed, age brings wizdom. I do remember reading similar novels when I was younger.

Now, as it happens the people and organizations fascinated with this idea currently are just the same that would own the said database. What a coincidence

Absolutely, handling physical money is an expense tp the Banks. They dont want it, and are trying to make it costly for shops to accept physical money.

Yes there is a physical cost to having hard currency....
but the money is in one's hands...

The benefit of all the various current paperless currency and methods of saving, spending or sending monies is indeed a modern blessing in many ways.
But dumping all hard currencies ...well...

who has control over your money when it is all digital?
who controls the medium of delivery?
or of storage?
or of security?
it isn't you and me.
It will be corporations and government (at best)

And that frightens many many people.

short term, long term, and far into the future...
I see the benefits ...
But I am wary of the true costs

This is part of the more general trend, "do what is more convenient for the provider, not for the customer". The customer will abide.

I found it ironic, growing up behind the iron curtain, to see the "our customer, our master" slogans on display in shops. It felt more like "our customer, our puppet" (an effect achieved in my language by adding a few letters). Now I feel exactly the same way. The communist ideas of the almighty central control and a dispisable individual have prevailed.

Computers are neutral and the ultimate tool to achive a positive form of anarchy.
We do not need states anymore to manage our lifes, we need all kind of interfaces and agreements to communicate with eachother directly and organize ourselfes on the ground of common standards.
We do not need coorporations. we need cooperation.
Problem is, most people are not prepared for anarchy and its implications because we depend on others in vital parts of our life. For convenice, out of incapability or simple lazyness.
Also we would need to be much more "giving" to include the weak.
What we experience now is the remedy of introducing only selected parts of said possible anarchic utopia into our oligarchic (insert your favourite *ism here) world.

The basic conditions are not met to introduce a cashless or materialless financial system for the reasons you all mentioned above.

Like you need only one instruction to build a turing complete system, i would accept any kind of financial subsystem if everyone would play after the one basic rule to abreviate all interactions from:

Do not steal.
Not someones dignety, nor time, or chances or ...

Enough of the gibbrish, sorry but that topic triggers me.
I have to add OT to not steal your time.

I am going to donate my spare n900 to the competition.
Technically it is perfect, only used for some weeks.
It has some dents and scratches from the only fall and unlucky hit on tarmac though.
Currently i am travelling much so it will take some time until i can collect the accessories and possibly even the box from multiple crates down in my dungeon.
Does it even make sense or is a ~50€ donation prefered?

Wow. Donating N900! That's rich. I cannot part with mine. Been using it since december 2009 and still my main phone.

I decided to donate a small amount of euros. Pathetic, I know, but maybe it helps a little.

Updated the banking details page

Is this still a valid method of supporting the site? Besides money itself are there other ways to help keep the maemo websites up and running?

-l

Are these still valid?