With the
increased use of 24 hour teller cards as debit cards, this
concept of record keeping is happening right before our very
eyes today. You can go to Wendy's, Ralphs, Lucky, AM/PM
Mini-mart's and a number of other merchants without cash and use
your teller card as a debit card and deduct the amount from your
account through EFT. Think of this...They know who you are,
where you are, when you were there, and what you bought just
from using your Debit card at the point of sell. And, when you
get cash from the teller machines, they ("They" being who ever
wants to know in the government agencies) also snap your picture
with the camera at the unit itself.
In U.S. News
and World Report Dec. 15, 1983, an article titled "Time to Throw
Away Your Checkbooks..?" This article brought forth information
about the increased use of EFT. It stated "Not quite yet but
sooner than people think, a single card could replace most cash
and checks. Welcome to the cashless society - today, New Yorkers
who keep their money in the Chase Manhattan Bank can withdraw
cash from any of 2000 automatic teller machines, or ATM's
located in 47 states. So can 15 million depositors at some 1200
financial
institutions that belong to the national network called PLUS...
Scores of other banks and merchants are at the forefront of an
almost frantic drive to replace paper money with the electronic
kind.
Bank of
America offers it's customers with the same options, and Home-Banking
which is the use of a customer's home computer through a modem
to the bank computer system, to pay bills and transfer funds
from the comfort of their own home.
I want to take a brief moment here to put in
a side note... In the April 27, 1998 issue of TIME Magazine with
a cover title of "The Future of Money" an article titled "The
Big Bank Theory and the Future of Money" it stated... "Paper
Money is, in its way, amazing stuff. It is, for instance, easily
transferable and widely accepted. You can pay the baby sitter
without even thinking about the complex financial dynamics
underlying the transaction. Cash-especially the U.S. dollars-is
also portable, storable and exchangeable. (Just ask the
thousands of Russian Mafiosi who pay for nearly everything with
crisp $100 bills) And it holds up pretty well, If you're afraid
of banks, you can still grab a coffee can, dig a hole in the
backyard and have a pretty secure deposit. But paper cash does
have some awful drawbacks. Lose it and it's gone; sit on it and
it may lose its value overnight: think about what just happened
in Asia, or earlier in South America.
"Enter electronic
cash. The idea of digital money is simple enough: instead of
storing value on paper, find a way to wrap it in a string of
digits that's more portable and (most important) smarter than
it's paper counterpart. Smart money? Well yes. Because digital
cash is endlessly mutable, you can control it more precisely
than paper money. Think about the $2000 check you send to your
daughter at college for expenses. How is the money really spent?
Books...or beer? Electronic cash takes that relatively simple
transaction-passing an allowance-and makes it into a much more
intelligent process. And one that hardly requires something as
old-fashioned as a bank.
"For starters, you can send the
money over the Internet encoded in an E-mail instead of sending
a check. This saves you the trouble of balancing the checkbook
at the end of the month, and it gives you the option of
transferring the money from whatever you want: mutual fund,
money market, even an old-fashioned checking account. Your
daughter can store the money any way she wants-on her laptop, on
a debit card, even (in the not too distant future) on a chip
implanted under her skin..." Implanted under the skin? Sounds
like Revelation 13:16-18 to me.. the Mark of the beast!
