That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.
Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.
Lest also forget the Crowdstrike drama where many supermarkets simply went dark, in some instances for nearly 24 hours, despite working communication links. But I digress.
So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike.
When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve.
As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back.
You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1].
Looting only ever happens when areas hve started being evacuated and most shop owners + law enforcement are elsewhere.
I often wonder if we should leave energy/telecommunications in a state where they can and do fail with some degree of frequency that reminds us to have a back up plan that works.
I had thought that the (relatively) recent lockdowns had taught us how fragile our systems are, and that people need a local cache of shelf stable foods, currency, and community (who else discovered that they had neighbours during that time!)
For something like this, a local electricity generation system (solar panels, wind/water turbines, or even a ICE generator) would go a long way to ensuring people continued to have electricity for important things (freezers)
If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.
And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this?
Why will the US allow this, eventually?
In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd.
In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.
That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
Nahhh - some banks have some parts of the infrastructure in COBOL. Specifically larger retail banks often have their ledgers in COBOL. Most of them want rid and are actively getting rid. Most places have had programs to root COBOL out since before 2000, but there are residual implementations remain. The ledgers are the hardest place to deal with because of the business case as well as the awkwardness. Basically there's not much of an advantage (or at least hasn't been) in modernizing so keeping the thing going has been the option. Now people want to have more flexible core systems so that they can offer more products, although not so sure that customers want this or can consume it. Still - it supports the idea of modernisation so not many people are keen to challenge.
The most common big implementations I come across are in Java.
