The WAR on CASH isn’t coming...
it’s already here.

By Charles Chang

The war on cash, or the drive to a cashless society is a real movement and it’s here today, arguably to stay. Like many things that involve the loss of liberty this one definitely snuck up on people. It’s here and people don’t realize it because like many of you, you have a few bucks in your wallets. You pull out your wallet or purse and look in it and you might have fifty, a hundred, or even a few hundred bucks in it. This is called walking around money.

But if you think about it, the money you spend day in and day out is with credit or debit cards. 90% of how we move money these days is digital. Money transfers between investment accounts, auto debits, or direct deposits from your employer all act the same.

The Illusion: Cash is available but it really isn’t.

The cashless and/or digital society is already here. Now, I he same things mentioned above and am no different but this cashless society does have some implications. For instance, the amount of cash in circulation is $1.3 trillion; however, the entire money supply is nearly ten times that amount. Which means the US dollar is a digital currency for all intensive purposes and as I mentioned earlier, we may keep a few paper dollars in our wallets from time to time but the vast majority of financial transactions are conducted digitally.

However we must always remember we work and get paid with currency. Out true wealth is our time which we trade away moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, and year by year for currency that is sometimes printed as pieces of paper or struck in worthless alloy coins pumped into our economic system and backed by absolutely nothing.

In a federal reserve system such as ours in the US banks are only required to hold a fraction of their assets in cash. Some banks are required to hold 10% while others are only required to have 1% or less. So literally, on a 10% requirement, a bank would only have to keep $100 if you deposited $1000 just in case you wanted to pull out some cash. This means if people who demanded their deposit in physical cash because they fear the bank may be insolvent, there wouldn’t be enough cash in the system to fulfill the rightful requests. Banks would quickly run out of cash, close their doors, and fuel a panic that would spread like wildfire.

History repeats itself.

Something similar just happened in Greece. The loss of confidence in the Greek government, fueled by the fear of the fold, pushed people to withdraw their hard earned money from the banks. So much money was withdrawn that the European Central Bank (ECB) had to provide an emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) because Greek banks were days away from financial collapse. Even though the Greek government assured it’s citizens that everything was normal and their bank deposits were safe they still imposed capital control.

From the US in 1933 to Cyprus in 2013 to the most recent example we just saw in Greece, governments have been known to declare a bank holiday and then impose some sort of penalty on cash withdrawals while they figure out how to rescue the economy on the backs of its hard working citizens.

A Cashless Society is the perfect setup for negative interest rates.

Another way to think of a cashless society is to set up the world for negative interest rates. What are negative interest rates you ask? Basically if you put $100,000 in the bank at a -1% interest rate you’ll come back a year later and have $99,000.

Instead of giving you one, two, or five thousand dollars back in interest, which is what USED to happen (remember those days?), the bank takes away part of your money as negative interest rates. This is designed to get people to spend their money because if you spend it the bank is not going to take it away but if you don’t you pay the negative interest rate. It’s a way to force you to spend your hard earned money to get the economy moving. But, as you probably guessed, this doesn’t really work. The economy has more structural problems but that is the general idea behind it.

To be clear, banks and governments are setting you up for negative interest either to take your money or to induce you to spend it. However, in order to do that they have to get rid of cash.

In theory there is nothing wrong with paying your banker if they are protecting your value and providing you with a real service but as you probably already know, banks are actually wired to take your hard earned savings and make a few extra bucks on the side. In fact they have a history of making often absurd loans and over- leveraged bets using your money not theirs. This is why it’s so insulting to pay them interest. Think about it. You’re paying them to gamble with your savings. Its’ obscene.

Now, there’s also other factors such as the war on drugs and the war on terror. Both “industries” are funded with cash. Governments always take it too far and say “we’re not against everyday citizens but we’re just trying to stop these bad drug dealers and terrorists and that’s why we’re putting these restrictions on cash.” Safety at the loss of liberty is no liberty at all.

But why should anyone hold cash?

For one, it’s their right to hold cash. Other than that, you might have a cash intensive business or want cash for emergencies. If you live in an area with hurricanes and power goes out NO ONE is processing a credit card and ATM’s don’t work.

The war on cash is designed to set us up for negative interest rates, confiscation, capital control, and encourage people to spend their money. But also, it creates a fake wealth effect forcing people into inappropriate and risky investments. This system allows banks and other investors to go out, borrow cheap money, buy houses and stocks, bid up the price of assets, and as a result create a false wealth effect. At the same time, this makes people FEEL richer where people want to spend their money and get the economy on a self- sustaining path. In order to do reach scale and get masses of people (including you) to do that you need to herd people into big banks, condition them to digital wealth, and get rid of cash.

Has this happened before?

In the 1890’s, if you had to pay for something you reached into your pocket and pulled out a gold or silver dollar coin. People literally carried around solid silver and gold coins even until the 1950’s. A quarter or dime was still solid silver until the 1960’s when the government debased the coins by adding copper, zinc, and a few other alloys to make the coins worthless.
Now the question is, how did they get people to get rid of gold coins?

The answer is very simple, with 400 ounce gold bars and I’m not talking about after Franklin D. Roosevelt made gold illegal. Before that from 1910-1914 the government said you could have gold but what they did was take all the coins out of circulation and put them into 400 ounce bars. Nobody is going to walk abound with a 400 ounce bar gold or silver bar in your pocket. I can hear it now, “hey is that a gold bar or are you happy to see me?” These bars are not light. Weighing in at a good 30 pounds it’s like lifting a dumbbell.

So, by turning the coins into bars you needed a whole lot of money to own a bar and even if you owned one you sure weren’t going to carry it on your person. You were going to leave it in the bank vault. This process was done gradually of course and people didn’t seem to notice the government was substituting gold coins for paper money without making gold illegal all at once. The government successfully created these gold bars in very large quantities and got rid of gold coins in one fell swoop. Later in 1933, when they made gold illegal, not many people were using gold coins because the majority of citizens had already switched to paper money. When these same citizens tried to exchange their paper money for gold they found out they couldn’t. Surprise!

Nowadays, the government is herding people into banks, that is a small number of institutions, and make it less and less convenient to have the old form of money (cash) and more convenient to have the new form of money (cards). However, the new form of money involves some form of government control and people don’t seem to notice it until it’s too late. I hope by reading this you are not one of them.


Written by Charles Chang
Charles is the CEO of GolVerCard. The world’s first cryptocurrency backed by 100% gold AND silver. To learn more about GolVerCard go to www.golvercard.com.