This twitter thread might be a bit extreme, but it raises interesting points ( https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083?lang... ). Basically, if you are not allowed to spend money (transact) then you are really not able to exercise your other rights. And if everything was cashless there is an actual risk of Gov or BigBank having the power to stop you transacting completely. It has happened in 1st world countries like Canada already, and without a trial or anything as per thread. Granted, it was kind of an emergency situation, but while I'd love to go cashless (I really really want to), this kind of thing makes me steer back into supporting the opposite side of the argument.
And I thought it may be worth pointing out, since 2014/2015, and all the way to 2018/2019. 95%+ HN comments were against cash. In the year where Apple Pay launched, the overwhelming of Tech and Silicon Valley support a cashless society. Apple made the claim Cash is old fashioned, Quote "cash will be dead for the next generation of kids".
I think most reading on HN should take a moment and reflect on that.
This isn't a problem with cashless, since cryptocurrency solves this exact problem. It's unfortunate that many critics are uninformed and don't understand this.
I would not it put it past governments to shut down some types of payments if there was another lockdown. "Oh sorry it doesn't look like that's an essential business wait just 14 days!"
I'd raise the opposite point: for every reaction there is counterreaction. Going cashless will inevitably become a major boost for crypto and will greatly help detach crypto from fiat, becoming a major facilitator of illicit transactions of all kinds, to the point that people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable, destroying the very notion of law and order.
People should be permitted to do lesser evil (go to the corner and buy a joint for cash) lest they will build a workaround so good there will be no reason to stop in expanding it's use until it consumes the very fabric of society.
> Going cashless will inevitably become a major boost for crypto
These are unlinked. Demographics using crypto loosely correlate with those going cashless. Cashless countries even more loosely correlate with crypto adoption.
> people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable
We have a long tradition of this with our 21-year drinking age. People can differentiate between the laws they can break and the ones they shouldn’t.
In any case, arguing crypto will undermine state power ignores the millennia of commodity money.
> We have a long tradition of this with our 21-year drinking age. People can differentiate between the laws they can break and the ones they shouldn’t.
Well, not really. It was originally 18 to drink.
Thanks to the federal government linking interstate funds to a requirement states support 21 drinking age is how they did that.
In some states, even 16 could drink beer prior to the feds fucking things up.
> In some states, even 16 could drink beer prior to the feds fucking things up.
That's one thing I always found funny when looking at the US as a european. When I had my first legal beer as a sixteen year old I remembered that I would only be allowed to do this in the US in five more years. Of course the actual first beer was drank when I was fifteen.
What I always wondered - In countries where beer is allowed at sixteen, people usually try it when fifteen, because doing forbidden things is obviously cool during this age. But in the US, do kids start illegaly drinking when they're twenty, or do y'all also start experimenting earlier?
EDIT: Also love the fact that 18 year olds in the US can join the military, yet aren't allowed to drink a beer until three years later.
I see, that does make sense. American kids must feel even more badass then, considering that they're doing something 5-6 years earlier than they'd be allowed to :)
18 year olds in the military can’t buy beer, absolutely nobody cares if they drink it or not. In the whole time I was in not a single person got in trouble for the drinking but for whatever stupid things they did while drinking.
And it’s because they make you follow the local laws, when we were down in Panama the officers all chipped in and bought us a shitton of beer on our last night there. There was another time at Ft Bragg where they were like “anyone not over 21 can’t drink” and then just walked away leaving us with another shitton of beer.
I'm sure that they do drink it, what I meant was the weird logic of a government restricting drinking to 21 but allowing military at 18. Essentially the US government thinks that beer is more dangerous to 18 year olds than the military?
I think the answer to this question depends on ones personal ideology. I don't think that this is my governments first goal or reason, but I also don't think that it's not doing that at all.
If you're more of a libertarian kind of person we will probably have different views on this, it also strongly depends on where you're from.
To make an example, the EU at least tries to protect it's citizens in regard to data privacy and ownership, so there's one example.
I think our government protects us precisely the bare minimum needed to avoid a general riot, and no more.
100% most definitely they don't protect us in any way wrt data privacy, but that's only because the average person thinks they "have nothing to hide" so they can get away with it due to general apathy/ignorance.
The only place I do feel they protect us is in consumer protections, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were plans underway to change those.
>to the point that people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable, destroying the very notion of law and order.
This is already the case in the tax brackets that are too far down there for most of HN to have any familiarity with.
People there don't just think "oh it's the law, better blindly lick the boot" when they encounter a legal requirement. They think "what's the fine, what's the enforcement mechanism, is this a serious law or just a suggestion I can skirt as long as I am reasonable?".
If you never leave the "good school district" you bought into you'd never know.
In US, maybe. One thing i love about Europe is that people here tend to really follow law to the letter, and actually know it. And consult with lawyers in any case that seems in doubt. When vast majority of people are like that, it's no longer "boot licking", it's for everyone's benefit. It's only stupid when everyone else but you ignores the law.
That depends on the laws we're talking about. There is such a thing as a conscientious objector which you seem to not be familiar with, see Aaron Schwartz for a prime example.
This rigidity of computers is exactly why we must not let them control society.
Society is responsible for each and every member of it. Having 0.001% of population's lives ruined because of an error is not acceptable.
Humans may be slower and less efficient than machines (and require living wages), but humans are flexible and understand context. Replacing them with machines will only remove the useful human capabilities that we need so much in this society where most of the rules are still ad-hoc and implicit.
Imagine being assaulted by a robot policeman whose crime detection facility has malfunctioned, while you can't even complain to his robot colleague because it hasn't been programmed for malfunction of other robot policemen.
> Imagine being assaulted by a robot policeman whose crime detection facility has malfunctioned, while you can't even complain to his robot colleague because it hasn't been programmed for malfunction of other robot policemen.
To be fair, that's pretty much how it works with human cops
You can experience that every time you fill a form online. If it works, it's a joy. Saved time and energy. So much more efficient.
If something goes wrong however, there is no flexible human to fix it, give you an alternative solution, or perform a workaround. You are now in for a long and painful trip.
You can have cashless shit but don't take cash as an option for the rest of us. Another way of sayinf cashless is "tracked and logged payment transactions with regulated participation in commerce".
On a recent trip to London, I was surprised on the number of places that DO NOT take cash (some bars, major chain coffee shops). Family members explained that this was due to COVID. However if the server doesn't wear a mask, then this is a moot point.
Indeed. This is why a digital currency is only viable if you have the ability to make anonymous third party transactions. Until then, I remain a hard no. But even bitcoin doesn't truly offer that.
Even then, is your participation in that system regulated? Do you need a smartphone with government issued id as a requirement? And internet usage and access? With cash you just need the person to hand you the currency paper. Will there be physical representarion of the anonymous digital currency that can be used by anyone that posseses them without authentication?
It doesn't have to be that dramatic. Sure, abolishing cash is problematic from a civil rights perspective, but a simple thing like a payment major processor having a two-day outage would be disastrous in a cash-less society.
Many proponents of abolishing cash seem to think that one can avoid outages by simply requiring that payment processors aren't allowed to have outages. Unfortunately, outages tend to happen even when they're inconvenient. And that's just technical issues -- add the risk of cyber attacks, acts of war, or the Sun ejecting a load straight in the face of Mother Earth, and it's not a matter of _if_ there will be an outage. It's just a matter of when and how we deal with t.
Cash is a very good backup plan for such occasions.
Indeed. Or even just economic crashes. If you have cashless society, the average human cannot easily remove it from the banking system in case the gov pulls out a Greek plan.
I recently bought a roti on store credit when a major internet outage hit my city. The owner said he was out 1500-worth-of-sales for the day, recognized my friend as a regular, and wrote our names down in a book. We went back the next day to pay up.
New Zealand has gone largely cashless (and entirely chequeless). Everyone is paid by direct credit to their account. You pay your bills via direct credit / debit. I don't think any bank is charging fees (for customers) for electronic transactions via card, or direct credits/debits. They don't even charge a fee for using another bank's ATM anymore.
I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. NZ retailers moved away from cheques in the 90s due to their massive fraudulent use case (back when cheques were common, so was chequebook theft). The last banks that would accept cheques stopped doing so in 2020, IIRC.
You can use cash, but few people do. Parking machines have tap n pay. I really only need cash when the kids are having a bake sale or disco at school.
But as part of that shift, the Government owned bank ensures that anyone can have a bank account with no fees, no matter how spotty your previous track record.
Works for us. But I don't think we'll ever go cashless, there's no real desire to do so from anyone other than the people who have to pay to make the cash.
Same in Denmark (Northern Scandinavia) which has gone all-in on this. Denmark is an almost cashless society. It is seldom I see people paying cash in the supermarket. Cheques are no longer valid here: you cannot get cheques, you cannot pay with them.
Canada is not nearly as cashless as the article makes it out to be, it is amusing how much the article ignores the rest of the world.
The people hit by cashless are not the poor ones, but old people who have trouble learning to do things a new way. This also applies to communication with hospitals and docters which also is done online today in Denmark. So the cash problem is not special.
Cashless is better for the homeless as it is much harder to rob money from a cashless person. Digital payments can be traced (it took a few years for robbers in Denmark to learn this).
Banks in Denmark are required by law to give you a simple account and debit card. Governments pay out money by transfering them to your bank account. You tell the goverment which bank account you want to receive money on, like a default shipping address.
We have a very good domestic version of paypal which makes it very easy to pay other people (just type in their phone number and you can send them money). So it is easier to pay friends using this system than to use cash!
In the US checks (cheques) are used mostly for significant transactions, because it acts as a contract. As a consumer you can easily get away with using electronic or credit/debit transactions for almost everything. However, some transactions over $5-10k are worth using checks. If you get a car loan, you don't need a check, but if you pay "cash" then a check is most likely preferred by you and the dealer. For house down payments, cash is illegal (note that it says DEBTS public and private) in the US, but checks are accepted and ACH/wire transfers are most common.
By using a check and filling in the note properly you can create a legal requirement that a service or product be delivered on payment (which is different from asking for your money back from a bank or card company through their resolution procedure), if you need to go to court.
I'm sure there's a grandma out there using checks at the grocery store, but it's quite rare. And except for very small grocery purchases ($1-5) cash is pretty rare too.
Japan seems like the most culturally cash based (and China the least) place I've been. Europe and US are in the middle. South America may still be fairly cash based, but I haven't visited recently.
Payment via bank transfer is also a contract, the dispute resolution is no different. I don't see how a promise note on a piece of paper somehow protects you better than an electronic transfer that is visible to you, the other party, the bank, and to authorities.
Agree. It's like Stockholm Syndrome. It comes across the same as when someone from the US tries to argue that putting the month before the day actually makes sense in dates because then the max values go from lowest to highest (12/31/9999+).
I've been using that format too for the same reason, without knowing about 8601. Day/Month/Year is great for a person (I'm in Aus) since we, as human beings, intrinsically know what year it is, and probably know what month it is if we haven't been on a bender. But string sorting is so much easier using yyyyMMdd format.
US and non-US date styles are equally wrong. It’s just personal preference or what you are used to. The only “correct” option would be Year Month Day, and the only argument that needs to be made for is look at how your clock arranges time, or how you write it down.
How is the dispute resolution process different with a cheque vs other forms of payment? What do you have to put in the note line that makes this legal requirement? and how is this different than a regular sales contract? I don't know what you would buy for $5k+ that doesn't already have some sort of sales contract which would be legally binding. It's not like you can show up to a dealership with $20k in cash and just drive a car off the lot without signing anything.
I hate using checks. I have little trust in a flimsy piece of paper that you often have to mail to be the method of transaction.
It boggles my mind how checks are still so prevalent. When we have tools like Venmo, Zelle, ACH Transfers, Apple Pay etc.
The few times I've had to use a check (and a cashiers check at that) its been to sign a new lease on an apartment and it is one of the most nerve-racking days I have.
I would absolutely prefer to transact exclusively through digital transfers of any kind.
> I'm sure there's a grandma out there using checks at the grocery store
Someone living in San Francisco excitedly! told me just 1-3 years ago that they could now use some 'photograph your check' feature on their mobile - not 100% sure where the checks were used, but said person was not used to using checks where they came from.. sounds kinda widespread.
I still pay my rent every month per check, and only per check (the landlord insists, I don't mind). I also do occasionally receive checks for very insignificant amounts of money in the mail, e.g. few cents back from insurance or stuff like that. That's always a bit funny.
>> And except for very small grocery purchases ($1-5) cash is pretty rare too
Not in my neighborhood. Only half of the self-checkout machines take cash and there is often a long line for the ones that take cash while some of the ones that only take cards sit unused.
I am in that group but for me it is less about biological age and more about experience.
I have had many experiences with ATM's and ATM networks being offline. Card processors being DDoS'd while I was trying to buy something at the store. Card terminals being hacked and "offline for maintenance". Card terminals offline but nobody knows why. Many of the card terminals here are dirty and won't read the chip. It is not my card, many people have these problems. I have to explain how to clean the readers to the clerks and their managers. When traveling cross-country this is not just an inconvenience, it is a road-trip stopper unless one has cash. Cash does not go offline.
3 days ago I had to help a friend that was stuck at the store with no cash and their card was not working. Their account was fine but the card system was offline for unknown reasons. I gave them cash and we were on our way. Now they know to keep cash on them.
Adding to this is the way ACH/wire transfers work gives me exactly zero confidence in the banking system. Sure, I might be able to eventually get my money back. Banks have the security of a high-school locker sitting in a dark alley as very little information about me is required to empty an account with zero interaction on my part. This information is leaked by online websites from every sector all the time. I just use banks as a small caching/broker system for online transactions and I watch my accounts like a hawk. If banks want to hold more money they need to entirely redesign that system and I know I am definitely not alone in this way of thinking and it isn't just people age 50+. Many in the hacker communities that work for banks are also aware of their vulnerabilities. I was part of that community when I worked for a bank.
>I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques.
Banking in the US is like going back in time 20 years. Even when I flew through Dallas and LAX during the height of COVID I had to hand my credit card over for someone to swipe, then pickup a pen that thousands of others had touched to sign a piece of paper. I've been tapping to pay exclusively for years and forgot about all that ancient stuff.
I think that backwardness is now a thing of the past.
Most developed countries I'm familiar with made cheap/free wire transfers the most fundamental banking product decades ago. The change was driven by the banks, because handling checks was expensive and there was too much fraud involved. The US never made the change, probably because there were too many banks that could not agree on anything. That doesn't matter much anymore, because online card payments and ACH transfers (which are technically not wire transfers) are prevalent.
Another thing that contributes to the perception of backwardness is that American credit card issuers never adopted chip and PIN like the rest of the developed world. Elsewhere, banks wanted to reduce fraud and accepted the need to remember PINs as a small price for that. In the US, banks could afford more fraud due to higher fees, and they chose convenience instead. But today, cards have chips without a PIN anyway, and swiping is used mostly as a rare fallback mechanism. And apps such as Apple Pay and Google Pay (or whatever it's called this week) are quickly removing the need for physical cards.
> I think that backwardness is now a thing of the past.
It's really not.
Just the other day, I had to pay for gas at a station that still used swipe rather than chip, and then ate at an outdoor café where I had to give my card to the server, who took it away and brought back a sheet to sign and a pen.
A lot of places are updating to handle chip and tap-to-pay, which is great, but until swipe entry is completely obsoleted and non-portable terminals for restaurants are banned by the payment processors, there will still be some who hold on because that's what they have and what they know.
> then pickup a pen that thousands of others had touched
Bring your own pen. It is presumed that you bring around a few essentials.
Edit: on the other hand (pun unintended), some operations of electronic money transfer here require people signing on tablets through pens that are of common use and will more hardly be replaced by an owned item.
> Much of the western world [...] // I ... so rarely these days that ... reverted back to year 6 level
Don't blame it on the "West". I have rights to blame my rage on the "west". There are no rights to blame what you are not forced to (in this case, e.g. that you abandoned doing math and solving through state-of-the-art "wits hand stick and surface").
Nonetheless, we were talking about signatures.
> «Essentials»
With «essentials» of course I meant something that you carry around because you know you may need it owing to the environment - not a absolute personal need (as in "I will take notes"), but a relative contextual need (as in "either I bring mine or I will have to share").
Wow, that's pretty rare. TTP and chip are basically required now. Unless your card fails, I don't know many places that would have desire or even equipment to swipe. Even square doesn't do it now.
Even at restaurants? You don’t have them bring you the bill, you put your card in and then they bring you back the paper to fill out for the tip and sign? there are some places where they stand at your table and wait for you to punch in a tip, but that’s rare.
Most places in the US accept Apple Pay now. I think it's harsh to judge the whole country based on a few exceptions. The US is also huge which means some people are going to stick to the old way of doing things.
Uhh no that is not true in lots of places. Probably highly region and demographic dependent tho. Also apple pay alone is not a solution, no way am i paying for some overpriced iphone bc "oh were cashless now and only take apple pay".
Many countries in Africa are probably leading the way. Central and up uses phones as a virtual card, they send cash around with their phones using different types of sms/digital technologies.
In the south such as South Africa a lot of people have some form of bank card (apart from the people on the very bottom of society). As such those people on the bottom are affected by being cashless, because for example people might no longer carry around cash to hand out to the needy on street corners etc.
Sure, it's convenient for now. You never know what turn society is going to take somewhere down the line. The government is in a much better position to dictate rules for all of your commerce. Whether that happens in a few years or decades from now is anybody's guess, but the temptation to excercise that power is all the more likely.
Just like cash, people ignore the benefits of checks.
I remember buying a house and receiving about 3 notices of rampant wire fraud when you send closing costs. Realtors or even worse title organizations and crappy security meant you needed to double, triple check the wire details, because once you send that money - it's gone.
Instead of that silly game, I went to bank, got a draft made out to the title company, and stay with me here hand delivered the check. No worries if some Russian criminal org stole my money or if they go it in the end.
In the UK when you set up bank transfer the legal entity names are verified and displayed back tot he user and asked to be matched. This helps reduce wrong account detail transfers. Not full proof but does help.
Walking on eggshells is what built the human society since like forever. You can complain about fantasy wokeism online as much as you like, but in the real world a comment like the above would have gotten you punched in every corner of the world.
My biggest fear is not cashless society, it's humanless payment processing.
If you think losing access to your Google account for unspecified terms violations is bad, what about a payment processing computer malfunctioning?
A few years ago my debit card refused checkout at a supermarket. After the cashier rebooted the card reader machine, it ate a hundred bucks from my account without confirming the purchase. When I called my bank they said it's all automated, couldn't do anything about it, and would fix itself in two weeks. If that hundred bucks would've been my last food money, I'd gone hungry for half a month while the entirely humanless, supportless, automated, blackbox financial system "sorts itself out".
- People's account getting skimmed without much recourse
- Bank/Wallet service being unavailable/down for hours
- Money being debited into a black whole when transferring or paying, taking days or weeks to be refunded.
Resulted in people being stranded, not being able to go home, not able to go to work, not being able to afford groceries, meal, medecine, rent...
Absolute nightmare, removing cash will impact the poorest the most, it already does.
I've witnessed the same situations in France. Many people i know don't have a bank account, have a negative balance due to bank shenanigans, can't pay online with their cards... or on the other side of the spectrum, asylum seekers credit cards can't withdraw cash and have to be used in approved venues (eg. supermarkets).
Just my two cents to point out that this is in no way specific to a region or specific bank/government. This is a widespread problem when we let government/banks have control over our lives and means of survival.
The ATM in Cuba ate my VISA on a Friday night while on vacation. That was a fun diversion getting it back.
And on an actual disaster scale that ranks pretty low, as we had a second card (with a low limit) and still some amount of cash, so we weren't even completely out of money. Maybe it's better if you're somewhere close to home... but on the other hand if everyone is cashless, who could you borrow money from? Maybe a prepaid card that your friend would fill up for you... No, I'm a really huge fan of cash, at least as valid backup payment - even though, of course I enjoy the usual ease of use of card to tap payments.
Is giving money to capitalists overall that much better?
Giving money to an international corpo which dodges paying taxes by parking their money in a tax-free country while selling overpriced products produced by third-world, low-wage workers(including children) seems wrong as well, yet most of us do it very frequently without thinking about it.
Signed, someone living and working in a capitalist society.
A while ago, a larger German bank double processed all withdrawals occurring around the end of the month - rent and associated costs for many people. I know a few folks that ended up stranded with no access to funds due to that.
This is the real reason of crypto currencies. When cash is eventually being removed we lose all our rights, and the process has already started now with the introduction of the green pass. It just takes a while before the masses realize what's actually happening.
With a crypto currency I can transfer value straight into your wallet without anyone in between, instantly, from anywhere in the world.
Don't be blinded by the crypto scams and so, scams are everywhere around us, it's not bound to crypto. Do you realize how many scams there are with banking and cash?
I am certainly not pro-cashless, but the points this article makes are lackluster at best.
In an entirely cashless society, the problem isn't that "not everyone is included", the problem is surveillance. You can solve inclusion easily enough... Replace cash with prepaid cards (an idea posed in the article), or issue small, purpose-built digital wallets (equivalent to a low-power smartphone, except only for managing your digital bank account), or any number of other solutions. An even better idea is to just legally require businesses to accept cash (although this goes directly against the concept of cashless).
Digital (non-"crypto") currencies could do a lot of good when applied properly. I just don't think any government or institution would apply it properly.
You're overlooking a couple of things: person-to-person transactions, and the disabled/impaired.
Among those who protest the most against a cashless society are interest groups for the elderly and the handicapped. The blind need their money amounts to be tactile, well ... because they need almost everything they interact with to be.
You can't use prepaid cards for person-to-person transactions, but there are various types of smartphone apps. But then you are back to the original problem in the article. And you need to have good eye sight to use those too, so you can't be too old. And a good signal to the nearest tower, which rules out rural areas.
My contactless payment (GPay with my debit card on it) on my phone works without a cellular connection. It literally just physically acts as a card. This phone has had the SIM removed, airplane mode on with wifi shut off, and only the NFC functionality active. It exists solely as my contactless payment method. The only real issue - you have to keep it powered.
A bit of a rant. By January 2022 I hadn't used anything but Apple Pay for three years.
But then my home country starts a war (which is terrible), and since the war was not approved by countries controlling the cashless technologies, immediately all my cards stop working, I am not allowed to get a new one anywhere in the world, my foreign currency bank accounts and retirement savings on brokerage accounts get frozen indefinitely.
Make sure you keep enough cash and cryptos for a rainy day.
This is the problem I have with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and any other international service taking over transaction responsibilities. Especially if they're based on puritan countries like the United States where opinions on products like adult entertainment and certain medical procedures can influence a company's ability to receive payment.
Almost any modern smartphone has an NFC chip to do contactless payments. Banks should have the capability of leveraging that through their own services instead of depending on Apple's/Google's pinky promise to always make payment available.
Banks can do contactless payments quite easily on Android so in my opinion they should have their own apps. I'm fine with them also offering GPay for customer convenience, but there should be a national fallback.
If you buy Apple, you're locking yourself in. My opinion is that this is a fault with Apple's ecosystem, though an argument can be made that this is what Apple users chose when they bought their iPhone. Regardless, the end result is the same and your capacity to send or receive payment can now go down the moment your government gets sanctioned.
Sure, the invasion of Ukraine is reason enough for sanctions in my book, but the American government has a reputation of manipulating the world to suit them best. No other country should rely on American companies to do basic things like payment, just like the USA shouldn't rely on foreign services to accomplish the same.
Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits:
Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier the ticketing fuss was to public transport but all of a sudden you start using it a lot more.
Small conveniences based on cashless payment start appearing everywhere. I've noticed cashless vending machines for really rare use cases have started to appear where i suspect they'd be too low value/high maintainance if they required cash. I'd put electric scooters/bikes here too. Some things wouldn't work or be as successful without cashless systems. Lot's of these examples but i don't need to list them all out.
Taxation. You may argue this is a negative. I think it's a positive that it's harder to cheat the system. I like fairness. You can argue that there should be lower tax but i won't support any argument that it's OK for some to skip tax while others pay.
Safety. The tea lady at the station is now 100% cashless so simply can't be robbed (well kids might steal snacks off the cart but that's minor).
No more wallets. Australia has phone based drivers licenses and with no cash It's normal to carry a phone and nothing else. One less thing to carry and worry about.
I get that a cashless society would be worse under a totalitarian dictatorship than a cash based society under a totalitarian dictatorship. I'd rather work to avoid the totalitarian dictatorship part than the cashless part though.
This idea that surveillance and centralization[0] are mainly dangerous in a dictatorship is quite harmful, and I've heard shallow dismissals based on this, along the lines of "we would have bigger problems then". To be fair, these arguments were originally from well-meaning advocacy, and these tendencies would make a classic coup d'etat easier, when you want to take full control of key places and paralyze any opposition.
But the main consequences of central control are universal to any political system. Law enforcement and organizations in general are corrupt everywhere to varying degrees. You're probably more likely to be harassed because some random employee doesn't like you (or "likes" you too much), for a random reason, and not because of some large political intrigue. Consider this in a system with no recourse and accountability, and where you cannot know that you are targeted or why (see getting explanations for bans from banks or internet corporations).
For example, currently payment processors seem to have a reputation for being pro-consumer. I'd be interested in how this persists long term in a truly cashless society.
[0] I came to avoid the word 'privacy' for basic rights discussions, because it also seems to facilitate trivialization.
And the next time there's a major network outage, whether because of incompetence (like the recent national outage in Canada), natural disaster, sabotage, or even war, access to all of those conveniences will be frozen solid. One won't be able to purchase so much as a stick of gum.
James Burke, in the series Connections, warns of the "technology trap", where our dependence on various high-tech systems becomes so heavily ingrained that any significant outage leaves the workings of society lethally nonfunctional. Certainly something to consider...
A quick check suggests that offline credit card payments can "expire" if the network doesn't come back online within 24-72 hours, leaving the merchant with a loss. Not terribly reassuring.
Maybe where you are? But EFTPOS in Canada is done online. It is designed to. The bank interrogates the cryptographic processor in the chip and pin card over the network with each purchase.
I was unable to purchase anything with my bank card for more than a day during the outage mentioned above.
In a cashless society there is a lot of information about people in few hands and you never know how this information will be used now or in the future. It can be a democracy or a dictatorship. The corruption is everywhere, the threshold is different.
That's not a problem in Australia. The LOT OF INFORMATION is really in the hands of a pile of people. Breaches in security (even medical systems) are almost weekly, so everyone really has access to all the info.
The police use bus passes to track criminals, and even the use of COVID check-ins are fair game.
That's probably true in practice but it doesn't have to be. In Japan they have train passes which effectively give you cashless money. They don't require you to register them. To add money you can put them in a machine and add cash. They can be used to buy many things. Most convenience stores accept them for example.
That said, most people do register them or use their phones in 2022 so in that case, yes you can be tracked.
They can also be tracked by their history if you have othe data sources. Let’s say you have cell phone data of someone. You can then correlate that with place (let’s say home and work) and time of a few purchases. This then de-anonymizes the card and the other purchases, even if they had their cellphone turned of in the delicate purchases.
That is completely incorrect. In cashless payment systems like GNU Taler customers are anonymous while only merchants e.g. recipients of payments are not anonymous to comply with anti money laundering and income transparency for the purpose of taxes.
Australia is not cashless. New notes and coins are minted regularly. I still pay using cash, and increasingly so.
Never once, ever, has there been a problem paying with cash, nor do I expect there to be.
For those online services that only accept cards, you can buy a gift card from the local post office or a few other locations & use that.
Australia is not cashless, it's just that cash is infrequently used.
You can easily get cash out at ATMs, to buy some weed from a dealer or for buying second hand goods from other people on Facebook Marketplace. You can pay your groceries with cash, or any bill at a post office.
But you can have almost all of that while still having cash! I can see the benefit of security for some people (eg train lady) and that could be one of exceptions but I believe most places should be mandated to take cash payments as privacy and redundancy should prioritised more than ever.
We know from experience that government, whether totalitarian or not, can abuse any power they have. That’s why we have checks and balances everywhere in our society like judicial reviews or ombudsman. Cash is one of those checks and balances.
Fortunately no but I’ve been personally robbed though when they took the cash in my wallet. I still carry around cash.
> I saw a video of a bus driver who got a shotgun shoved into his face
I too have seen videos of violence. Welcome to the internet.
EDIT: note that I don’t disagree with some exceptions and going mainly cashless. Most people will be cashless as it’s convenient. But I’m arguing for that having 5% to 10% cash usage in our society is better than 100% cashless.
I love the sentiment of avoiding the totalitarian dictatorship but you don’t exactly have any control there. Technology is leverage and it can be used for evil, just as with IBM tabulating machines in nazi Germany
So what do you propose instead? Destroy all modern tabulating machines a.k.a. computers just in case they'll get misused by the government?
Then feel free to throw away that supercomputer in your pocket with advanced tracking capabilities into the nearest toilet and flush.
Keeping a healthy democracy and our leaders accountable is far better for everyone than going back to the stone age just in case someone might misuse tech.
And since you brought up Nazis using tabulating machines to abuse Jews, remember that the Nazis were also defeated thanks to computers to break their codes.
The tech arms race is still a thing whether you like it or not and there's no going back. If your government isn't developing advanced snooping, they'll have no issues buying said tools from a country who does (US, Israel, Italy, Sweden, etc.)
I rarely carry cash (or even a wallet) around anymore and I agree it's convenient. But one thing that bothers me is that we've allowed something like one percent of our entire retail economy to go directly towards supporting a rent-seeking American duopoly (Mastercard and Visa).
The crazy thing is that we've got a payment system that is free (Osko) but we can't be bothered moving to it.
Whole you're looking, check out the digital identity act which completely contravenes the referendum we had (in the ?80's) which voted against having a national identity card.
Whilst I am not super keen to have a national identity card, the Australian government has effectively linked all this info together already, with agencies cooperating.
Also, I'm not sure that a referendum held 35 years ago really means very much. In that time the population has grown from 16 million to 26 million, and many of the people who voted in the referendum would no longer be alive.
Even the cash based society under a totalitarian dictatorship idea tends to forget that the cash in question is issued by said dictatorship, and the currency is a public monopoly. The dictatorship sets what tax is settled in.
The veneration of this type of cash forgets what it is in a modern world - a receipt for banking liabilities at either the central bank or the government Treasury. It's those that make the tokens worth something.
So basically you are saying that all citizens are required to accept the terms of service and privacy policy of their pick of Apple or Google to participate in commerce, travel, etc.
As someone that typically leaves home with no electronics, only uses open source privacy respecting software, has no cell phone, and uses no google/apple products, it seems I would be unwelcome in your country.
It sounds a lot like your country has ceded to a US surveillance capitalism duopoly
Given Australia took the extraordinary step of violating UN Human Rights codes it agreed to when preventing citizens and in some cases foreign residents from leaving the country during the pandemic I'd say they're already on the way.
After all, the action was unprecedented, contravened human rights and aligned their response with North Korea and China, the only other countries who have ever had such restrictions.
This action had the result of a number of despicable outcomes, such as denying people from visiting dying loved ones, separating families including parents from children and worse.
After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths -- despite >90% vaccination. Human rights trampled for nothing, apparently.
Australia is also at the forefront of invasive pernicious surveillance, with a previous PM claiming Australian law 'trumps math' (in trying to ban encryption) and huge amounts of spying. The current government's party vehemently voted in favor of mass surveillance on all ISP connections, as well as supported content filtering (censorship) -- including for political content.
> After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths
You sound so out of touch with what the Australian experience has been.
Australia has had 14k deaths from COVID, vs over 1 million for the US. Percapita that is about 1/5 the deaths of the US. We've also had about 1.5 times the reported cases per capita than the US.
The strategy was to lock down until the population was vaccinated. Once that had happened, it was time to open back up again. Of course we were going to see more deaths.
Yes, the lockdowns were frustrated, yes unfortunate situationsboccurred. But going by the US stats, the response of the Australian government probably saved about 180 thousand lives.
I explained how Australia trampled on UN Human Rights charters, including by essentially imprisoning foreign residents. What does that have to do with lockdown policies?
There's a pretty big leap between mask mandates (a pretty common response) and preventing foreigners from leaving, a UN Human Rights violation that almost no other country engaged in other than dictatorships like North Korea and China.
I always love these strong opinions about Australasian responses to Covid, and how they tend to significantly differ from the opinions of the people who live in that country.
Something about it really riled some segments overseas up, to the point they were frothing at the month claiming Australia had concentration camps, and NZ was a socialist hellhole.
You're right about the Australian government's obsession with surveillance though. But then, as a Kiwi, I've always felt that started when John Howard wanted to be best buds with George W Bush, and Australia started mimicking the US.
This morning, I had a very new looking 10,000 yen bill at the conbini auto-register that wouldn't go into the register. Looked at it, didn't seem to be folded or missing a corner, which often causes bill insertion into machines to fail. Tried again, wouldn't go in. Had to use another bill.
<Commercial>
If only we went cashless and installed the app, I wouldn't have to deal with bill and coin recognition failing anymore! What a wonderful, convenient world!
</Commercial>
Just kidding. There'd be all the familiar glitches, errors, holdups and overreaches of excessive bureaucracy + automation and the malice and incompetence behind it.
Edit: decided to look up "Malice and Incompetence" to see if anyone else has struck on the idea that Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which overfits us towards thinking malice and incompetence are mutually exclusive. Giving credit to this blogger for coining this word "malcompetence: incompetence magnified by malevolent intent."
Anecdotally Apple Pay on vending machines in the U.S. is amazing and I've only encountered one within the past few years that was erroring whenever you tried to tap, and any debit/credit transaction on that machine didn't work.
Reliability good. I think it's useful to have cash as a fallback. I don't know if the conbini has a manual override where the machine opens like a register at the cashier's behest. I hope it does. And I hope it always will.
I use only cash IRL so my purchasing history and locations I frequent are not logged and sold. I detest that industry. A secondary reason is because some of those of us that do not -have- to use cash must do it anyway to justify stores continuing to accept it.
You get used to it. People actually give me discounts for cash frequently, particularly small businesses or individuals. Saves them up to 5% fees on stripe/square.
It has major benefits when dealing with service workers. You tip well in cash on the first drink and they prioritize your table all night even when places are slammed because you are not a tip gamble like everyone else, and they likely get away with not reporting most of it to management.
I do carry visa gift cards purchased with cash for the rare vendors that refuse cash directly in captive venues where no other choice exists like concerts.
Another thing to consider in that credit and debit card processing fees, which in the US are substantial, especially for small merchants that can't use large volume to negotiate a discount. This amounts to a ~3% hidden "tax" on all transactions, the bulk of which goes to one of four enormous corporations.
The US needs to get on top of this. Most other places I know of don't have the cashback cards because they limit the fees that can be charged.
The flip side of this, of course, is that in places with limited fees it is now cheaper for the merchant to use a card than to deal in cash, as cash has to be counted, reconciled and banked, has security requirements for transport etc. In places like the UK and Australia, lots of small merchants now operate in a cashless way because it costs less.
This is a surprising point I never see raised, that cash has its own overhead costs, just that they're diffuse (training and paying employees to close and count the registers, hiring Garda trucks to transport cash) versus explicit (processor fees).
3% is presumably still far higher than cash's overhead, but the rate is so entrenched in the US that I wonder what it would take to get it dislodged.
3% is not for electronic payment, 3% is for accepting credit card payment. Debit cards are much, much cheaper. And merchants are free to charge credit card payers an extra 3% or whatever they want to cover credit card costs.
> In 2020, the average interchange fee per covered transaction was equal to $0.23. This value has not changed significantly since Regulation II took effect on October 1, 2011.
Hopefully, the upcoming FedNow system will make electronic payments effectively free.
This would seem to make it potentially quite expensive on small transactions?
People use cards for the most trivial amounts here in Australia. Apparently the typical transaction fees are apparently 0.5% for debit and 0.9% for credit, which means that yeah, I just wave my phone to buy a donut...
For banks not covered until the regulations that cap fee, the cost is only 1% + $0.04. But it seems the banks that are covered under the regulations are charging the max allowed, 0.05% + $0.21.
3% is actually not bad for what it gets you: fraud detection, not having to lug cash to the bank every day, reduction of theft and employee mistakes, better recordkeeping for taxes, a way to handle refunds, and cleanliness. Small merchants often use Venmo where I am, and they save 3% in exchange for that awkward dance of sending payments.
But why do we need a 3rd party middle man fornwhat used to be a private transaction between two individuals?
If the government is going to replace cash with technology, why can't it do it itself and not involve some trabsbational bohemoth like Visa or Mastercard?
I thought this for the longest time and couldn't believe how often it was overlooked
Then I ran across an article talking about business owners for whom handling cash (there are many associated costs, safely transporting it, employee theft risk, time counting it, so on)....is actually more costly than the credit card middle man fees so they stopped accepting it.
Surely it varies case by case but still I was a bit flabbergasted
I think a cashless society can work perfectly well. There's a single place that I still use cash with because they don't take card (probably avoiding tax) so every time I go there, I come back with change to tip to delivery people when I order food. Everything from my rent to my grocery shopping is done digitally and I honestly think it's great.
However, that's probably because I live in a debit-based country. Debit cards without overdraft capabilities should be readily available even to people with no financial skills because you can't use them to spend more than you earn, making the risk to the banks themselves minimal. The small fee paid for banking services is the only thing at risk and even that won't have much of an impact on the bank in general.
Some countries, most importantly probably the USA, almost exclusively operate on credit cards for digital money, which are practically quick instant loans that you don't want to think about. There's very little in there to limit your credit card spending to your actual income and some people are foolish or desperate enough to borrow money to pay off loans, with credit cards being one of the easiest options. People with poor or no financial skills will run up a debt and quickly stop qualifying for credit, and the end result is that they're dependent on cash or even something as archaic as cheques to transfer money in stores. The extreme impact credit scores can have in the States is mind boggling but it almost looks like people accept some shady third party evaluating their entire life for fraud risk as a normal thing.
If your standard modus operandi is spending money that you'll have to pay back later, I don't think your society can be cashless. Normalise debit cards as standard payment systems and almost everyone can qualify. Frauds will find themselves struggling to get an affordable bank account, but in a modern banking system there are plenty of alternatives available.
Based on this article, Canada clearly needs a banking overhaul for any cashless ambitions to stick without dire consequences.
You are creating a log of "everything you do", available to third parties, both statal and private. «That's probably» more because of lack of sense of "creepy".
And «that's probably» also because you are not considering the infrastructure required, such as that time in spring the shop owner in front of me was having a nervous breakdown as a blackout had his transaction equipment off. In normal times you give a banknote, take change and the fiscal registration will be postponed to after the blackout. In cretinous times, there will be no purchase. I was there to buy water.
Good infrastructure is definitely one of the many requirements for a cashless society. I've personally experienced a blackout that lasted longer than 30 minutes and even then the amount of blackouts I've encountered can be counted on one hand. During those the cell tower backups managed to maintain connectivity for at least 15 minutes. Any store that invested in an UPS for their checkout systems would've just kept going for the entire time the power was out, maybe at a little slower rate because of the sudden influx of connections to the cell towers.
"What if the power goes out" is a question that needs to be answered for any part of society relying on technology, which, with the rise of ICS and IoT systems, is already affecting everything around us. Bridges will be stuck open (or closed), train will stop and grind to a halt, the shipping industry will grind to a halt, hospitals won't work for more than a day, electric cars will be unusable even sooner, the list goes on.
Good digital and electrical infrastructure is far from available everywhere, and in areas where it's not, a completely cashless society is simply not a good idea.
It's a receipt for disaster. Especially if they centralize it even more by replacing banks with a Central Bank that fully controls the Digital Currency. Which they are already planning and testing. This will be misused. And people can be controlled with this in a really bad way. If your Social Credit Score is low you could be taxed higher or even forbidden to drive your car or travel, for example. Your food choices could be restricted at any moment too if you don't behave.
You don't need a cashless society for any of that. Background checks and basic identification requirements can already impose oppressive regulation on everyone even if the products are paid for by cash.
Cash is just an IOU for the bank that can be devalued at any point in time. If you want to avoid government oppression, go back to bartering rare metals. "Yes but what if the government turns oppressive" isn't an avoidable scenario, cashless or not.
> There’s no question printed or minted currency is grubby and kind of gross (paper banknotes, studies demonstrate, can be covered in everything from E. coli to fecal matter).
What's with this compulsive obsession with hygiene? Our own bodies contain about 3 times more microbes than human cells [1]. The air we breath is full of microbes, pollen and spores (not to mention the chemical pollutants nobody seems to care about). Any surface we touch - door handles, pieces of paper, keyboard keys, sofas, etc. - is full of microbes. Just saying...
I think this article just really highlights how badly the Canadian banking system needs to be modernized. Is it really that bad? I think I saw my parents use cheques a few times. That was in the nineteen eighties. Banks stopped accepting them in much of Europe decades ago. The cost of processing those became just prohibitively expensive and they offered no benefit whatsoever. There's no logical reason to be doing anything with cheques in 2022. That's just bureaucratic inertia and stupidity.
You could turn this question around as well. What's the cost of cash? It's not zero. Cash logistics are expensive. Companies that hold cash need security, the cash needs transport, it needs to be printed and distributed, insured, etc. And there's the black economy which means losses in tax revenue. A lot of shops in e.g. the Netherlands went cashless so they make less of a target for armed robberies.
Bank accounts are really cheap these days. Some banks charge for them but that's just greed. The nominal cost of tracking a few million integers in a computer is pretty low. That's why there are so many online banks these days. Creating a few billion bank accounts is not a technical problem. Same with transaction cost. There's no logical reason to charge multiple percents on every transaction. That kind of scam only works if banks have a monopoly on their markets, which of course in some markets is very much a thing. In market with competition, that cost goes away pretty quickly.
If you actually want to only do business in cash, you're already going to have a very bad time. 95% of jobs (99.9% of decent paying or professional or large company jobs) won't pay you in cash. The same for any sort of loan or finance (who can you borrow money from without leaving an electronic trail?). What sort of landlord or mortgage company will accept actual cash? Can you pay the tax man with it (probably but good luck).
The truth is, you're already in a cashless society for the vast majority of your income and expenses.
The cost is that you cannot easily break the law. Despite the current state of the world and the continued apathy of lawmakers to anything but corporate pockets, people insist on furthering policy which only gives more trust and control to the government. America came to be out of a bloody rebellion against tyranny, and 200 years later people seem determined to recreate the British authoritatian system that our founders once destroyed.
When there are major power outages that take down networks how will cashless payments be made?
I've seen stores stay open in a power outage with clever uses of extension cords running out to vehicles, enough to power the cash register and a few led lights. These stores were able to easily sell groceries (before they perished) and non-perishable items via cash.
There's no guarantee a cashier can actually handle processing sales without the computer to add things up. I can't remember the last time I saw a calculator or battery-backed adding machine for backup at a checkout. Assuming prices are even printed/stickered on the products.
In China, even though the gov said that it is illegal to refuse using the cash. Most of the small shops stop receiving that. They do not have enough cash to give change.
As for me, the only problem is that when your phone is dead, you can barely purchase anything. So I always carry a credit card.
I do have some cash at home for emergencies. But it was already locked there for several years.
The only reason when you need cash would be that you want to "hide" the trade. The police has already cought a lot of drug dealers by tracing the payment records of their customers.
However, as most of pepole will not use cash. So it will be much more easier for police to trace the serial number of the cash. It is getting more difficult to
"hide" payment these days.
Not only for drug dealers, also for the husbands who wnat to have some small private money. Especially when you want to buy some games or some new useless gadgets. You will miss the good old days with cash.
UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions using VPA (Virtual Payment Address) are free for now. Around 6 billion transactions are processed every month. But apparently the Indian govt is planning on adding a 50 paise (₹0.5; $1 ≈ ₹80) transaction fee in the future.
This is an issue I have experience and strong opinions about, and please take the following as one sample of the sentiment that is brewing in this country over policies that impact cashlessness, privacy, autonomy, freedom of movement and association, and lately, of speech. I just happen to be close to these issues from a tech and policy perspective, and am an expert at articulating these things, but regretably, this will be a bit political.
Framing the issue in terms of the "most vulnerable," ignores the effects of economic centralization on the majority. The current government is tremendously unpopular in a large segment of the population, and just this year it used our partial cashlessness to make the banks freeze the accounts of citizens who donated to an opposition activist cause that had constitutionally legitimate concerns. So much so that the government only avoided collapse from a loss of confidence by withdrawing its emergency powers legislation before it was about to be put down by our senate. It's polarized and getting bad fast.
Policies like cashlessness just consolidate economic division and the inevitable effect is a permanent underclass that starts in the grey markets using alternative means of exchange, and spreads to creating poverty traps and a parallel and inescapable underground economy that is more violent and exploitative as a result of its official isolation than anything we have today.
Just look at any country with official exchange rates for their debased or controlled currencies, and consider what their economic upsides are.
Cashlessness is a policy of economic polarization, not inclusion. It has become hard to believe that creating an underclass isn't the explicit agenda of the policy influencers behind it, because the middle class prosperity that characterizes Canadian society means that the status conferred on technocrats is too little to mollify their status anxiety. I know these people. I have worked with them in government, media, and tech for decades. I grew up with them and know their alumni. I have sat at their brunch tables. The thing they seethe most over is independent business owners whose way of life comes from providing value and the actual approval of the people who buy their products, and patronize their businesses. It is the inconsolable envy toward those whose contributions are actually desired by the people they live with - and not imposed in some social engineering scheme for fabricated constituencies of "the most vulnerable" that always seem to put the same people at the centre managing them. What this class hates is the basic natural dignity of people that comes from humble, competent achievement, and not the affectations of prestige. As though their impostor syndrome were our fault, because nobody recognizes them as elite outside their own circles. We owe them no deference, and this is unforgivable.
I would say what has changed in Canada over the last decade is that I see that people really openly hate each other, but that's not the whole picture. It's that the people actuated by their own hatred have graduated into our institutions and do not see themselves as accountable to the values of the society they grew up identifying as a victim of. We didn't care about what the Laurentian Consensus and the media class thought because we believed with distance, diversity, and different communities, we could co-exist peacefully. What is clear now is that this was naive.
The argument about locking activists bank accounts was, "but they were extremists," but when you compare them to the actual arsonists, looters, rioters, shooters, and knife criminals motivated by more fashionably acceptable causes like creating religious and racial conflict, it's like our government and chattering classes just humiliate themselves by parroting absurdities and lies, and then take out their shame on Canadians with even more self righteousness. It's a cycle of abuse that is winding up with ever more momentum. When you see the government ministers speaking television, it's something darker than smug. There's a relish for the impunity these actors have that people recognize as fundamentally anti-Canadian.
Advocates of cashlessness problematize the freedom of others instead of producing things anyone wants, because it's just easier. My prediction is we have less than 5 years before this country descends into a constitutional crisis more serious than the referendum on Quebec's separation in the early 90s. This isn't about the tech. I feel like we have a narrowing opportunity to stop antagonizing citizens with policies and utterly disconnected articles like these.
Norway has been mostly cashless for the better part of 2 decades. I've noticed one particular thing that gets much more difficult.
I have trouble teaching my kid about money, and quick addition/substraction. When money is much more abstract, it's difficult to explain how bank accounts aren't limitless, that it's not enough to put a piece of plastic close to a card reader.
The other part is that I get shocked at how slow kids seem to be at knowing how to do various "money changing calculations".
I think this is a good thing. It will prevent Terrorism, and keep us all from buying Porn, so no more onanism or Luciferian child abuse and cannibalism. Also will eliminate drugs.
Trolling is not per se bad. A good troll upsets people using their own arguments. A great troll however does this without them realising. A good troll results in downvotes and being called a troll. A great troll doesn't.
So, a good troll, but not a great troll. Not however a bad troll. Nothing mentioned was not arguments people have not used. Perhaps apart from the cannabilism part.
I vote '+3 Troll' if we're doing /. style meta voting/commenting.
>Nothing mentioned was not arguments people have not used.
Unnecessary double negative, and these aren't really arguments so much as rhetorical shortcuts. I'd say, "The buzz-words used are familiar".
Cannibalism? If I imagine ahead to the 2040s - if the world has too many people and resource are scarce, eating people rapidly reduces the footprint while providing needed rations. Further, imagine there's a set of people who are notoriously paranoid, superstitious, sexist, racist white-or-adjacent supremacists, idiots etc. And they are refusing at every turn to reasonably live in the safe, advanced system with the logistics necessary for long term human survival and eventual interstellar flourishing. Instead they are insisting on an archaically wasteful, hard-to-document way of life prone to runaway growth, proliferation and oppression, and we constantly need to quell unrest caused by patently false theories that originate from wherever their communication is able to go on unabated by effective moderation tools. Why is it seriously so wrong to kill them and eat them? All of the moral and religious traditions they hold to are clearly outdated, what if cannibalism was just another outdated principle? Maybe we only need to eat enough of them to make sure they never take over and spread. Eating it can be a helpful sign of loyalty, and a demoralization tool. At some point of evolutionary and transhuman divergence, it might be reasonable to admit they're like monkeys to us - and there are some existing traditional recipes for monkey meat.
Why is this framed like a hypothetical scenario when there's an abundance of countries that are already cashless and have been so for a long time? I haven't even seen a physical bill in many years. No idea how the coins look nowadays.
Cash is going away someday, thats for sure. Digital payments are just more comfortable to use and it allows to send money over vast distances in a few seconds, which is useful for buying stuff on the internet.
I'd just wish open source, decentralized, not-crypto-bro currencies like Monero (https://www.getmonero.org/), that are unlike Bitcoin actually anonymous, would be more commonly accepted outside of darknet markets.
In a way Monero has been good money last couple of years. Not fluctuating too much up or down compared to others. So using it as fungible money could be ok. Monero has trade-offs though, how many are mined and have there been exploits/bugs in the supply?
It's good for a cryptocurrency, but looking at the exchange rates, that's still fluctuating way too much to make me feel comfortable in using it as a real currency.
I love the concept of the blockchain, but the cryptobros turned any kind of decentralized money into a gambling game, even the ones designed to be reasonably stable. This type of greed is why we can't have nice things.
Working with cash is not free either, you need security truck and drivers that come pick up cash at end of day...
Afaik in EU debit cards are capped much lower than 3%.
It's not mutually exclusive. For example, if the operating costs of a cashless system are 1%, the operators charge 3% and cash costs business 5%, the operators turn a profit while it's advantageous for businesses as well. If businesses lower prices with the 2% they saved, it's advantageous for consumers too.
Everybody who talks about how they never use cash and love the convenience of never having to use cash, they all sound just like all the people who loved Google just before their account was terminated for undisclosed reasons.
Cash is the illusion of autonomy and control of one’s financial destiny to those who don’t believe in regulation as a recourse mechanism for financial inclusion.
The solution is not cash, it is regulators who will kick the door in when you’ve suffered injury in the course of using financial infrastructure or services.
The reality is sometimes that regulators kick the door in for banks financially including legal stuff:
Operation Choke Point [1]
The consequence of abolishing cash seems to be total financial control and that is a bit like arming the police: of course you might need military equipment for fighting a cartel.
But applying it to daily operation is very cruel to parts of society.
I always thought we should give every SSN/EIN an account at a state-ran bank, structurally obliged to serve all legal uses.
This would ensure everyone had access to direct-deposit payment (eliminating most of the case behind the "it's almost a real bank account" prepaid-card products with exploitative fees) and create a single huge audience to target for "over the top" services to develop.
Perhaps it could be put together as a "portable" service-- you can link your state-bank account with your preferred brick-and-mortar to handle cash and in-person services. There would be phone-number style portability, to encourage them to compete for most features/lowest fee/subsidy requirements.
Does the need for constant vigilance suck? Yes. Is it necessary because humans will be humans? Also yes. If change is inevitable, as is turnover in governance and those who participate in it, than naturally systems and underlying mechanisms must be maintained to ensure stability.
People problems demand people solutions. I know, it’s a bummer. No tech saved Kansas abortion rights earlier this week. Overwhelming constituent turnout to vote did (voter registration is up 1000% in Kansas). (Used only as an example for my thesis)
What you are suggesting is that all societal problems are "people problems". So we should just give up trying long-term solutions and just engage in partisan politics all the time.
You are making the perfect the enemy of the good. This is not about fixing everything all the time. This is about giving individuals in general leverage against their institutions. The goal is to put systems in place that make the individual battles (for liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness) easier.
I think your failure to identify the nature of this situation is emblematic of a failure of common liberal/leftist thought.
P.S. We still live in a time of great prosperity and freedom. That's largely due to technological progress. Technology can be the difference between feasible and impossible regulation. Technology changes the very landscape on which the political battles occur. To ignore the influence of technology on politics is to go into battle blindfolded.
have a paper-scissors-rock style guard - the separation of powers and checks and balances.
Institution1 holds regulatory powers, and institution2 is the guard/police for institution1. Then another institution3 guards institution2, and institution1 also has a responsibility to oversea institution3.
It's not a complete illusion. Cash transactions can't just be shut down with a push of a button- although it might not seem like much, it's a significant hurdle for authoritarianism.
Yeah, all systems are fallible. But systems that fail on the side of the individual are preferable to those that fail on the side of the institution. So let's strive for individual liberty instead of wishing for benevolent rulers.
There is no solution. Just look at the thread. There are people against replicating the security and privacy model of cash through digital payment services like GNU Taler.
A world where you can ensure your privacy in both cash and digital payments would be better simply because if the government takes one of them away you still have the other. So instead, we argue for worse is better. Only cash is allowed to be anonymous, only cash is supposed to protect your privacy, only cash does bla bla bla, people are following the letter of their ideology, not it's spirit.
Outside the US, "accidental US Persons" may not be able to have a bank account. These are people who are not US citizens and have no real ties to the US, but are nevertheless considered to be US Persons by the US, which means they are required to file taxes. The US has no way to enforce that directly of course, but it can require banks who want to do business with the US (which is every bank in the world) to report on these people and deny them an account if they don't jump through the right hoops.
This has lead to a class of people who are unable to have a bank account, in countries where almost everybody else does have a bank account.
I wish it did, but it doesn't. Bitcoin is way too volatile and unreliable for serious use, and is mostly used as a questionable investment tool these days. And it's not compatible with the payment systems the rest of the world uses.
This kind of abusive extraterritorial law is exactly why the USA needs dissolved / divided into smaller countries. The sooner the better.
The only reason I don't advocate for it constantly is that Russia and China are far more dangerous. But I think the future state of the world needs to be one where country size is limited by international law to assure there's always somewhere for individuals to escape to (nearly impossible for US citizens and persons today, too many countries friendly to its abusive ways) and that wars are regional and never can come to the levels of destruction that you'll see with super powers and World Wars.
But in the world consisting of a multitude of small independent nations what we would see is perpetual warfare between neighbors, so in my view everyone would be better off if we all lived in the U.S. of the W.
According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.
But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
Look, I switched to completely contactless payment through my phone since Covid, and it's so convenient I'm not going back. And it's hard for me to imagine people who don't have access to a bank account or smartphone, but those people do exist, and they may eventually become unable to buy a loaf of bread, and that's a problem.
Due to government tactics, a lot of australians are now deliberately using cash a) for the privacy b) as a statement against orwellian mechanisms.
I find it really sad when people are blaise about something that once gone, can't be put back. A social credit system, & everyone talking about it as an inevitable thing, have already bought into the propaganda.
I find it inevitable that with sentiments like that, that i'll be forced to live in a car & eventually the gutter & arrested regularly because of my nuisance factor. All because of the convenience.
Is this meant as a joke? Because almost the whole world is working on outlawing or "regulating" these and they aren't even anonymous most of the time. Not being controlled and centralized is threatening enough.
Could you please expand? In this area, the only ones available I found have a surcharge of ~5..10% (you buy a 100€ card through 105€..110€). Note: I am not certain of the amount, it has been a while since I used one.
And in Europe electronic payments cannot by law be anonymous over 150€.
>But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
...
Seriously, your argument is that privacy violations will cause people to starve? not the fact that there is a currency monopoly and you can't issue your own currency and start your own regional economy from scratch if the currency is concentrated in the hands of rich people and hence cannot be used and you must constantly borrow new money into the system which eventually gets saved by the rich forcing you to go to the bank and ask them permission over and over again? The dystopia you are imagining is already there. The only thing you're losing is privacy which is solved by GNU Taler.
That is not that they're arguing at all, they are arguing that those who are locked out of the system by the government or banks or corporations will be starved by a cashless system.
They would either be locked out by not having a bank account or device to participate in the system with, or by having their accounts suspended.
Local alternative currency systems[0] have existed for a long time in many cities. They're small and fringe, but they exist. Amsterdam, for example, has NOPPES[1]. But these systems are not threatened by electronic payment systems.
That's not a real choice because governments will abuse it. If you don't have private, permissionless payments, you face the risk that the government will stop you from buying bread.
Don't believe it? Here are some other programs governments have abused: The US put people on the no fly list for refusing to become FBI informants [1]. Canada froze bank accounts of protestors. China abused their COVID tracking app to stop protests. [2]
It's important to remember past government abuses so we don't give them more tools for future abuses.
If you give me the choice between a government that tries to force me to cede my autonomy and my privacy in order to buy a loaf of bread or go hungry, I'm sharpening my pitchfork and lighting my torch ten times out of ten.
Governments don't even have to get involved, we are heading in the direction fo functional cashlessness by the influence of corporations and the market alone. Hope you like incinerating fat cats to doom music, my friend.
but you missed a crucial part -- the post says "pitchforks" but is made by a ninety-nine percent civilized person with manners and education, who is unlikely to actually do the physical act mentioned -- but in the modern day, will Very Likely remember this topic at voting time. Take-no-prisoners politics means that the losing candidate, really actually loses and is therefore out of a job right now. So these are high stakes for political types and they do know it.
Sadly most American politicians on both sides of the aisle would probably vote for cashless right now, but, not all of them... and things do change.
Russians are a slavic people. There are ethnic subgroups of other backgrounds that live largely within the borders of Russian and have Russian nationality like the Tatars, the Chechens, the Kalmyks etc.
Though I don't think that would help. Let's say we go cashless some day, then people get oppressed and manage to put together an uprising. Will the result be the return of cash, or just putting another despot in charge? So many times it's the latter. Perhaps the only real answer is smashing the datacentres, like modern-day luddites..
You must be really naive if you think that isn't the case already.
Imagine a bitcoin standard where the rich own all the Bitcoin and governments force you to use Bitcoin. The rich have no reason to lend you Bitcoin for free, you don't need the Bitcoin, you need the loaf of bread and you are willing to trade your time for that loaf of bread but since the middleman Bitcoin was inserted, you are forced to borrow in the hope that you can pay the money back. Nobody lends out money for free, you are going to have to pay interest. The best part is that you are going to default as the interest payments end up in the wallet of the rich guy you just borrowed money from, due to the magic of compound interest he is going to lend his money out again. This means your debt is unpayable because interest payments must recirculate in the economy and somehow end up with you again but in this case they are just being lent out again. The only thing you can do is outcompete some other guy and take the money he borrowed into the economy to pay your own debt. Since someone is going to lose this competition there are going to be destitute and poor people in your society. The only known way out of this mess that is commonly practiced is to force the economy to grow faster which degrades the environment and results in ever inequality. The obvious solution and actually working solution is to make liquidity have a cost so that withholding money from the economy is impossible over the long term.
Money is power and control for those who have it and their power extends beyond what they can buy with it, it also extends to those who don't have it.
If you want total financial control over people, you sure want it over the whole population, and not just those who already have too much to lose to actually protest or do something against the government.
Since the "two missed meals" that are between today and a revolution are most probable for the poor, skipping them would be bad for the overlords.
It does seem to be a more clear and present danger to health and wellbeing for a chunk of society than the usual HN paranoia about loss of some imagined supreme personal autonomy and the government stopping you from buying what you want.
It's an exceptionally flexible and convenient method of control.
Earlier this year, donors to the truck convey protest in Canada had their bank accounts frozen. This wasn't a targeted list of "these 37 people have broken a law"--rather, it was a broad mandate to freeze accounts assocated with the protests, operationalized a bit differently by each bank.
In a society where most businesses don't take cash anymore, this turnkey coercive capability becomes more airtight.
The frog will boil slowly. A few years ago, all US payment processors blocked donations to Wikileaks, after they reported on war crimes in Iraq. Today, most people still think of digital money in the same way as physical cash; in reality, every transaction is a request for permission, with fraud heuristics and blocklists that might say yes or no.
Soon, a guy gets DUI, loses the ability to buy alcohol for six months--who would oppose that? Over time, the scope and frequency of financial deplatforminig will expand. Twitter does one-week suspensions for violating their terms of service. Why not your credit card?
Few stores keep video recordings indefinitely. A fair number don't even bother with recording at all, they just make sure cameras are visible to act as a deterrent.
Financial transaction records at banks might as well be forever, though.
One of those is far more powerful than the other, and far more dangerous if it gets leaked to malicious actors.
There are anonynous digital payment services. It is very difficult to surveil your loaf of bread transaction history if it isn't recorded and the customer is unknown.
One of the key selling-points of Central Bank Digital Currencies for governments is that they will be able to provide extensive insights into citizens' behavior (how demand and consumption patterns change according to various factors) as well as a variety of levers that they will be able to use adjust that behavior in subtle and opaque ways. I'm not sure how much parallel privacy-focused systems will be tolerated under such future regimes.
Shoplift? No big deal. Have the theoretical potential to avoid even 1 penny in taxes? The only option is a financial panopticon that tracks the flow of all money!
