Do you book and pay for hotels with cash?
I don’t think this topic should be treated as a strict binary, it ultimately depends on your threat model. Personally, I prefer going mostly cashless, but there’re definitely situations where cash works well, eg. for services/items that come with a warranty or money‑back guarantee. In those cases, I can confidently pay in cash while still maintaining privacy. Beyond that, when there’s no legal protection or consumer‑friendly policy behind the transaction, credit card* is the better tool. The ability to dispute charges gives me meaningful leverage that cash simply doesn’t offer. Gift cards also exist as a way to stay cashless while maintaining a degree of privacy.
* Doesn’t apply to debit cards, since they’re essentially the same as cash, just with worse privacy and security
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I’ve never done that. I just use cash for everything where it makes practical sense. So for me that’s 99% of my IRL purposes. Anything online I will use Monero if it’s accepted.
That would almost certainly depend on local culture. In SoHo, New York City, there’s probably very little downside to going cashless. It would break a street market in Shkodër, Albania.
Small businesses love cash usually just because it helps them dodge taxes.
People love E2EE usually because it helps them hide criminal activities.
Not comparable - cash is usually worse for businesses in almost every way except there’s no record they received it, so they can get away with underreporting their income. Otherwise, it’s more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to handle.
I’m not complaining because it’s better for my privacy, but let’s not be naive here.
Completely agree with this statement. There are advantages to using cash and cards and it’s beneficial both remain prevalent in society to serve different purposes. I also agree with OP’s sentiment that we definitely don’t want legal tender to go away as all that would do is reduce the options we have available.