What is digital cash?

Getting paid in cash just feels great! Counting the bills gives you a feeling for the value that you received. To hold the physical cash in your hand means that you got rewarded for your work.

In the digital world this feeling of saftey gets replaced with risk. There is a risk that someone used a stolen credit card to pay you and you end up without the money and without the goods.

Even more worrisome, payment providers like paypal and banks are increasingly using their power to censor speech and freeze peoples accounts without due process.

So the legacy electronic payment sytems and fintech apps are not digital cash. They behave very much unlike cash.

Is there an alternative?

New financial instruments like Bitcoin and other crypto currencies came into the limelight recently. But with these new technologies, new risks appear. Out of technical necessity all of the transactions are open to the public in these new systems.

This opens up the ability for bad actors to cause harm with the information that is now publicly accessible. It also creates new legal liabilities for recipients that have chosen to accept these financial instruments as payment.

Because of the open nature of these systems, the recipients have the duty to investigate the transaction history of the money that they received. They need to make sure that it was not intentionally mixed to hide its origin.

There are also addresses that got sanctioned by the US government. Interacting with those is a criminal offense for US residents and citizens.

This means Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are not digital cash. They behave very much unlike cash.

Only Monero is digital cash

What makes cash special is that you can't tell one 100 dollar bill from another. This 100 dollar bill has no history that might affect its value. This is very much unlike Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. Because all Bitcoin transactions are public, every coin has a unique history.

Monero is the only financial technology that takes this problem seriously and solves it by implementing transaction privacy at the base layer. You can't tell one Monero coin from another. Monero behaves just like cash.

This property is called fungibility. Fungibility sets Monero apart from Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, as well as the legacy electronic payment systems. Monero is not a crypto currency. Monero is digital cash.