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I could also say in the case against cash that I dropped my wallet , or my house caught fire and all that money under the mattress was lost, etc.

Anyway, I'm happy with both being available, pretty much like how it is now. Are electronic transactions more convenient 99 percent of the time? In my opinion, absolutely.

And in this incident it wasn't "everything is broken Australia-wide", it was whoever chose Optus (ahem, Australia-wide, I grant you) without having a suitable backup plan in place. That's some 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses, so it's no small amount, but still.

For most of those (notably "consumers"), that backup plan is simply "I'll have do it tomorrow". For businesses, their livelihood depends on it.

If you asked those businesses to choose between :

• a service will work for 99.9 percent of the time when you need it (8.5 hours downtime a year) for $100 a month, or
• a service that will work for 99.99 percent of the time when you need it (1 hour a year) for $250 a month.

The vast majority will choose the cheaper version and rationalise away the chance of losses.... until they experience those losses.

I hope that those businesses who have lost out big time have looked at their planning and have noticed their single point of failure, and are busily working on ways to fix it. That can be cash, or EFTPOS on alternative networks, or IOUs or whatever.