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July 19

Getting cash directly from the Internet

I got to thinking, would it be possible in some way to get cash directly from the Internet, by using one's bank account credentials but without using a debit card or going to a bank office to ask for cash in person? You would log in to your bank over the Internet, withdraw money, and have the money somehow physically appear in front of you in cash.

MikroBitti magazine published an article of a "home banknote printer" in the early 1990s as I recall. The article announced a new kind of home printer that would print cash. "Of course, the printer won't print cash out of thin air", the magazine said, "you have to go out and buy licences for it." But this was an April Fool's joke. Would such a machine actually work, by withdrawing money from your bank account over the Internet and then printing it out in cash? JIP | Talk 20:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's a term for printing your own money: Counterfeiting. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:40, 19 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Counterfeiting is not printing your own money, it is printing someone else's money. I can invent my own money and print it right now. As long as it is not a copy of an existing bank note, copying of which is indeed punishable by law in most places.

Personal checks, store credit coupons, lunch vouchers, local currencies and many others are scrip that promise to deliver goods and services, and are issuded by non-govermental entities.

We could invent a form of cryptocurrencies that can be printed out. Takes a bit of thiking though: how do you prevent them from being copied. Someone out there must be clever enough to figure it out, if not has alreadly done so. 85.76.35.183 (talk) 13:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can certainly print your own checks. That's routinely done in business. That's not the same thing as printing actual money. And printing "your own money" is not printing actual money either. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:05, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's also worth pointing out that none of those things are legal tender. No one is required to accept checks nor bitcoins as payment. And note that the OP said "cash". None of those things qualify. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:22, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Bitcoin was briefly legal tender in the Central African Republic. It is legal tender now in El Salvador.^[1] --Lambiam 11:54, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If a country wants to abandon its monetary system in favor of "vaporcash", they could do so. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:51, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not promoting it; I just felt it was also worth pointing out that your statement "none of those things are legal tender" is not entirely accurate. Also, something that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, becomes, by virtue of that quality, "actual" money. --Lambiam 22:16, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, a business can accept various forms of payment, including checks, credit cards, and even crypto if they want to. But that doesn't make it "legal tender" except for a country which has decided to allow bitcoins as such, for whatever reason. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:54, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DigiCash had a cryptographic protocol that would allow this. The "cash" was, as for bitcoin, a digital identifier, which could be represented as a conventional string such as 2ABA28C066F74CC8710ED3B22798255E, but for the purpose of home-printed money should be machine readable, as for example a QR code. As with any form of digital money, there is a potential problem of someone attempting to spend the same digital string twice. One solution is that a central system keeps a list of the unspent digital identifiers issued, validates a digital identifier when the money is used for a payment and at the same time removes it from the list. The DigiCash solution was decentralized; a malicious user could in theory spend a digital identifier twice, but this would reveal their identity. Otherwise, the user would remain untraceable. --Lambiam 22:33, 19 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]