[chrisfarms]

> Why exactly Australians need a peer-to-peer payments system isn’t exactly clear...

Probably as the first steps towards removing cash. Cash must be such a pain for a government, I'm surprised it is still around.

[cyphar]

Which is a shame, because of how incredibly authoritarian the tracking of credit cards is. Credit/debit cards are a proof of ID in Australia (40 points) and so with every purchase you are uniquely identifying yourself to the seller.

Unfortunately making cash digital is quite hard (you could argue that zcash and zcoin will solve this problem but I'm not so sure).

[mod]

> Credit/debit cards are a proof of ID in Australia (40 points)

Can you elaborate on that? I'm curious what the points are.