What makes cash special is that compared to other assets, it puts a bit more power into the hands of the individual and a bit less power in the hands of the government.
To count or seize the individuals cash, the government has to make some fuzz. Aka send men with guns.
There seems to be some divide in our world between people who consider individual power a good thing and people who consider it unnecessary.
Here in Europe, I have the feeling the vast majority of people consider it unnecessary. The vibe I get is "The system works, so why not let the government handle and control everything.".
I wouldn't be surprised if that is a global phenomena and holds steady throughout time. For example, even when the US government seized their citizens gold in 1933, there was no resistance.
That people consider "cash" something they "own" is already a sign that people don't understand and don't care how they are gamed by the government. The government can take the value out of that cash however it pleases by printing more of it.
And no matter how much the government does that, nobody complains:
Gold is hard to pay with though. When Russia had their Dollars frozen last year, it was not like they said "No prob, we'll use gold then". Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if countries will shift their reserves to Bitcoin in the coming decades. As it combines the durability of gold with the usability of money.
> Here in Europe, I have the feeling the vast majority of people consider it unnecessary. The vibe I get is "The system works, so why not let the government handle and control everything.".
> I wouldn't be surprised if that is a golbal phenomena and holds steady throughout time.
Come to the east of EU/Europe and you'll see a completely opposite vibe. No wonder, people in their 40s still remember communism. And the older people sometimes think communism was still better - however bad it was - than whatever we have now.
This dichotomy was made extremely apparent to me during the pandemic. In the US, not saying all opinions were homogenous but most of my liberal friends supported government actions during the pandemic (e.g. closures originally, then mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etc.) I'm friends with a number of folks from Eastern Europe, a couple of whom spent their early childhood under Ceausescu, and the difference couldn't have been more stark. While these friends generally agree with things like union support, worker protections, environmental action, LGBT rights, etc., their opinions were pretty much lockstep with the US right in terms of the pandemic, and it was clear this was due to ingrained government distrust. The sad thing to me is that while I could clearly understand and wholeheartedly agree with some of their positions, it got to the point where it often veered off into "crazytown" in my opinion ("You're not going to inject Bill Gates' mind control poison, are you?")
What really sucks is that I can't say anybody is wrong for being skeptical of a government, insofar as any large organization with power over individuals is dangerous. But the critical mistake they are making is that this doesn't mean a government action can't be good. Coordinating public health responses is probably one of the most good government actions possible, and it was vilified for political power.
In my mind, it's analogous to a starving rural person saying they should have their hunting rifle melted down (condemning them to likely death) because lots of people have been unjustly murdered by assault rifles. Yes, guns are dangerous - they're powerful, and power is dangerous. So we recognize that there can be abuses of the power of guns (and governments), and we already have guardrails against some of the most egregious abuses - very few people argue citizens should have free access to heavy machine guns and missile launchers. What we argue about is where we should draw the line between usefulness vs risk of abuse of abuse. And in this analogy, there are some people so scared of guns that they're saying we shouldn't even have them available as a simple hunting tool.
Bringing it back to government, people are so traumatized by government abuses, regardless of whether those abuses happened to them or even happened at all, that they're sort of arguing for the melting down of the government even when it is genuinely acting in their best interest. Except it's worse, because the anti-mask movement is not trying to actually abolish government at all, just weaponize their own fear for targeted harm.
The issue is that there's a difference between coordinating and coercing. If you want to have a body that studies the best way to stymie a pandemic and make recommendations, and one of those recommendations is to wear a mask in certain circumstances, that's great. If that body has a reputation for being competent and reasonable then most people will follow their recommendations.
The problem comes when those recommendations become regulations which get enforced without context or nuance, because then people chafe, and it becomes a political issue, and then people resist for the sake of resisting. Which makes everything worse, and that doesn't work.
The thing that works is for people to actually believe in the rules and follow them out of solidarity and self-interest. But then you don't need to point a gun at anybody. And by the time you've sullied your own reputation to the point that you do have to, you've already lost.
> The problem comes when those recommendations become regulations which get enforced without context or nuance, because then people chafe, and it becomes a political issue, and then people resist for the sake of resisting. Which makes everything worse, and that doesn't work.
The core issue was fearmongering and misinformation. We had people on TV, on the internet, reaching a wide audience, just making up lies about the pandemic or "just asking questions" in a way that is identical to making up and spreading lies. They did this for power, for ratings, for fun, whatever. It is also true that the implementation was not great and that Americans have a cultural tendency to petulance when "told" to do something, but I expect most of that could have been worked through if there wasn't such an active opposition.
> their opinions were pretty much lockstep with the US right in terms of the pandemic, and it was clear this was due to ingrained government distrust
As a person born in communism but too young to remember, now living in USA, my attitude during pandemy was best described as: The mandates are more like guidelines than actual rules.
They were definitely a good thing. We needed people not to congregate en masse in poorly ventilated spaces. But joke’s on you if you think that means I won’t go running without a mask, not like I’m breathing in peoples’ face for extended periods.
There is a general phenomenon that countries who pioneer a concept or technology and start to deploy an earlier iteration at great scale seem to stick with the older version while younger countries "skip" ahead. Good example might be the magnet stripe card payments or check books common in the US but almost never used in Western Europe anymore.
I suspect Poland's precarious positions in the 19th century might have affected its development of central banking and currency in such a way as to make society less "stuck in its ways".
From childhood to adolescence I used to go on calls with my dad to fix air conditioners with my dad and we met a Polish couple. By this time I was 14 and communist, having read the motorcycle diaries. Anyway, I asked them about their experience growing up in communist Poland.
The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack. The husband on the other hand, well, he wasn't communist, but he told me about how you didn't feel precarious, so to speak. How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.
I found this really interesting. Perhaps this is gendered because the husband (who worked) is more stressed out by economic precarity than the wife (who didn't), or who knows.
Anyway, I think Poland is a bad example here - I think they are not as nostalgic towards communism generally as, say, Russians are. Moldovans seem to even go beyond nostalgia, holding communism to just be a time when life was much better.
I don't have opinions on this, just my experiences based on a handful of conversations. In other words, less than anecdotal.
> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on.
Except if you pissed off the communist party, then none of that for you and your children.
No way around the state-given requirements - want to work with computers and don't have a diploma for that? Well that's not possible - here's your shovel and get digging already, the state needs you! Want to move to another city and change careers? Well you're going to need good friends at important positions, and gift them dearly (and not just once to get what you want - you needed to build the relationship for a long time before that).
My grandfather was beating his children (my father and uncle) because if a child did or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, it was over for the whole family, and he felt like that's the only way to get the children to truly understand it. And even in 2013 - 25 years after the revolution - he was still afraid of the communist secret police.
My father was hit by a car when he was 12 and had a very seriously broken leg. My grandfather was taking care of him by himself, because the state's idea of taking care was locking him in a dark room with bars on the windows and using a medieval-like machine to stretch the leg, without any painkillers.
My grandfather took him to Yugoslavia to swim in the sea and that actually helped and saved his leg. However since it took months, the communist party decided to label him a parasite - punishable by prison. The local communist party cell voted about it and it didn't go through by one vote... that my grandfather got thanks to a bribe.
It was "good" for the people who fell in line - as in, they didn't have any special circumstances. Anything out of the ordinary and your life was way worse.
> The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack.
Women had to use newspaper instead of menstrual pads. There was only very few styles of clothing/shoes available for women, while men had much more choice. Women didn't get the opportunities to be educated and work like men did, because it was expected they will stay at home and take care of children. It was a system made by men, for men. It's not surprising that a woman hated it.
> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.
It's sort of like, communism is for conformists. If your goal in life is to be a mid-level bureaucrat who never speaks out of turn then your rent gets paid.
But it's exactly that security that makes it fall apart. There is no penalty for mediocrity so it proliferates.
Probably because the "bad parts" never applied to them since they had the right socio-economic background (connections to the party), and they knew how to game the system so that it worked in their favor (did no actual work but were reaping the rewards).
>Having your path in life mapped out, i.e. not dealing with uncertainty.
Because after the fall of communism a huge portion of the population was financially illiterate since you grew up and were taught that the state will take care of everything, and suddenly you wake up in an economy that's 180 degress different to what you were taught and were used to your whole life, making people completely clueless to the new world of unregulated capitalism and an easy pray to all the scammers and wise-guy opportunists at every step, so inflation, poverty and unemployment was rampant, as well a huge amount of people fell victims to various Ponzi/pyramid/get-rich-quick schemes that were common in the west 100 years earlier but were new here.
> Probably because the "bad parts" never applied to them since they had the right socio-economic background (connections to the party), and they knew how to game the system so that it worked in their favor (did no actual work but were reaping the rewards).
Without having to "game" the system, one could easily fall for the rose-tinted glass effect. I have seen it a few times in people that have lived through the war (WWII) and would have happily told you how their leader weren't so bad (including the one in bed with or directly associated with Nazism).
In short, the post-fall countries transitioned to Kleptocracies more than anything else. The transition to capitalism was very spotty and state run businesses existed for a long time after the fall (and in many cases many businesses are still state run and have yet to transition).
Out of the 200M+ [1] people in the USSR, what percentage would you say had connections to the party? My impression is that 99% (all but 2M) likely did not.
Hence, the "bad" parts did apply to plenty of people and those are the people we are talking about. My experience is from living half a decade in a post-fall country from 1995 to 2000. The people I talked to that missed communism often now had it bad and were left behind. In essence the average quality of life was worse under the USSR but the extremes in quality of life were less - nobody was fully left behind as they are now. There was a very certain social net that was there. On the flip side, with less extremes, there was very little opportunity for advancement, so you wind up with a relatively homogeneously poor but not impoverished society. Post-fall, poverty rates jumped (from extremely low to very high), the homogeneously poor society was still poor and the safety net was completely removed (without any of the upsides of non-communism yet to be felt; it's a decades long process to change an economy from the USSR system).
> unregulated capitalism
The only unregulated capitalism's out there are black markets. The capitalism of countries in transition post-fall were largely capitalism in name only. Kleptocracy is AFAIK far more accurate of how to describe those transitional governments that still exist today (Belorussia, Russia, Georgia, the central Asian republics are all examples that exist today)
> as well a huge amount of people fell victims to various Ponzi/pyramid/get-rich-quick schemes that were common in the west 100 years earlier but were new here
Is there somewhere I can read more about this? My impression is the governments switched to democracies in name only. Huge portions of government were there to siphon as much as they could for their own personal gain. Want a drivers license? Pay a bribe. Want a building permit? Pay ten bribes? Want to move your grain to a port terminal? Pay a bribe at every city you pass through. (The very latter is a real example, I was very loosely involved with a post-fall USDA project that looked at that problem. Notably identifying, "Hey, here is your problem - the bribes. By the time a farmer has gotten their grain to port they've payed more in bribes than their base cost - this will not work!"
I'd suggest watching the 1420 channel, where they interview Russians on the street. Many of the older generation have a nostalgia of life under communism, whereas the younger generation is more skeptical.
And as noted, transacting in ingots of the precious metals isn't practical. Also heavy and hard to securely store and transport.
Trying to transact in and hold a commodity is also problematic because these metals have other uses. What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets? What if you lent platinum to a friend and suddenly we find a room-temperature superconductor that needs platinum, and the value of that platinum is now 10x'd? Or you lent platinum to a friend and before they could spend it, its value plummets for industry reasons and now they can't even do the thing that was presumably going to allow them to eventually repay you?
"Our fiat currency is valuable because, and exclusively because, our government pays its debts, has excellent regulation and enforcement, a well-understood legal system, 99% of the world's aircraft carriers, and a large stockpile of nuclear weapons" seems like a pretty decent option compared to all the others? And the Fed doing monetary policy things isn't exclusively negative. They seem to have kept us from going into a recession or having runaway inflation just this year and the three years prior. So that could've been a lot worse, I think.
>Gold-backed reserve notes and even coins made of the metal(s) can still be debased
Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable. It's similar to making the argument that while Windows is less secure than Linux, Linux also has security issues, so we should just have everybody use Windows.
We have ample evidence that the caretakers of our money supply are, shall we say, less than diligent.
No currency system is going to be perfect. You have to balance a lot of things, and every single one is subject to corruption and other sorts of chicanery. There is always a "what-if" scenario.
> Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable.
Gold might be better at average value performance over time than fiat currencies which are actively managed for stability and a bias toward slight value decline, but its very definitely not more stable than major fiat currencies.
That's an odd assertion to make, considering the current condition of fiat currencies.
Gold is more or less untethered to anything right now, other than what people think it's worth as a hedge. There is an intrinsic value in industrial applications, but that's an edge case. So you are basically valuing gold based on what you can get for it in fiat currencies, which is like using a yardstick to measure itself.
Inflation after closing the gold window in the 70s has been staggering. If you have to cough up something--gold, silver, goats, something--for your currency, you can't play the sorts of games we do now with dollars.
> That's an odd assertion to make, considering the current condition of fiat currencies.
Its not, if you look at the actual inflation-adjusted price of gold over time.
The claim that the exchange value of gold for other goods and services should be more stable than the exchange rate of fiat currencies for goods and services simply is inconsistent with the facts.
> If you have to cough up something--gold, silver, goats, something--for your currency, you can't play the sorts of games we do now with dollars.
Yes, its much harder to actively manage a commodity currency for price stability, which is the main “game” played with fiat currencies.
> the exchange rate of fiat currencies for goods and services simply is inconsistent with the facts.
Those who did well in the birthing geo lottery of North America have a different experience than most others. Even European nations in past 25 years cancelled their currencies.
EU countries who switched to the Euro did not cancel their currency. It automatically converted and you had years to convert physical currency at the bank.
If you find a 25 year old buried bucket of Portuguese Escudo, US dollar, and gold, which still spends? Which was cancelled or went to zero? Europe has frequently cancelled their currencies over past 25 and 100 years.
Those who were born into US dollar over past 25 or 100 years may believe fiat currency stays around, but that is a US-centric view.
Maybe Austrians have a valid historical concern about cash.
If you mean “the wide range in which the extremely unstable value of gold varies doesn't move very much over time, so that the value it had a 300 years ago today is likely to be repeated sometime within a 100 year window centered on today, whereas fiat currencies have a more consistent downward value trend”, that’s true, but its not value stability, or a good thing in a currency.
Its not a particularly great thing in an investment asset either.
There are some fairly obvious solutions to this. For example, suppose you had bearer securities representing shares in an investment portfolio. It wouldn't have wild price changes any more than the underlying security, which could be a highly diversified index fund or a real estate trust or whatever you like.
The bearer token has a secret in it, which you can change over the internet if you have the existing one, so if the token changes hands you can swap the secret out and be assured the previous owner hasn't kept a copy of it. Which would also allow you to transfer them over the internet.
That would make for great "cash" but not if trading in them requires you to be a securities broker or file a tax form each and every time you want to buy a pack of gum.
> What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets?
Or, for an example that actually happened with gold and silver, we find a previously unknown (to the society using it as currency) plentiful and cheap supply of the same metal?
> What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets?
With metals you can only question "What if?", with fiat currency the only question is "When?", because all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless.
First, I don't accept “99% decline over 100 years” as collapse of a currency.
Second, even if I did, the US Dollar retains 5.6× the value this standard would set. (Of course, it wasn’t purely a fiat currency over that whole time period, but then, setting a standard for collapse/no-collapse time window longer than pure fiat currencies have been a norm and then demanding counterexamples that have existed and not collapsed in
that time is kind of sketchy, independently of whether you have a sane definition of collapse.)
Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark are the countries with the most faithful government worshippers. It's simply a religion in those countries at this point.
You'd expect Switzerland to be on that list, but in my experience the Swiss are nothing like that.
I don't want to seem dismissive but the Netherlands + Sweden + Finland + Denmark <= 40 M people, so less than 10% of the EU and they do change governments leaning alternatively to the right or to the left like any other country.
Seen from outside, Switzerland has a lot of checks on government with referenda for everything, important or trivial matters.
Possibly because as a total amount of gold by itself is a poor indicator of anything. As a fraction of GDP and/or per-capita might yield some numbers that at least made the amount relatable to something that countries commonly differ in in important ways.
"What makes cash special is that compared to other assets, it puts a bit more power into the hands of the individual and a bit less power in the hands of the government."
They can take the value out of it much more easily than printing more. They just need to instruct the central bank to not redeem a deposit for the note. If for some reason a commercial bank continued to accept central bank issued notes, the government can simply require the banks to stop accepting them as a requirement for their banking license.
Gold is a sham, too. Its economic value in terms of useful uses is waaay below the market rate. The only reason people hoard gold is because everyone historically believes it to be valuable...
Banks hide behind their machine learning/AI algorithms to debank people and small businesses they don't like (reputational risk). Banks also use such tools to debank people and businesses in the name of derisking, because their tools flag so. That's why cash is important in the society; otherwise, you would be forced out of the society by going cashless.
Governments (worst offenders being the Western ones) across the world have forced private parties to do the dirty work for them without any due process.
This cash provision in the constitution is a nice alternative to the US 2nd amendment about firearms, where you want something that will serve as a check on the state exigencies of the day for the forseeable future. You don't need to arm everyone, but guaranteeing the freedom to associate and transact with each other in an unmediated way is pretty close.
It'll vary from place to place, but dealing with cash can be quite an expensive exercise. There are costs to depositing it for example. Plus there's a whole layer of security that happens when you have cash on the premises.
If you have employees, cash also makes it much (much) easier for theft, fraud, tax evasion, and so on. It's pretty easy for employees to skim cash if it's coming and going.
If the "cash" part of the business is small compared to the rest then it makes (business) sense to simply eliminate that.
I agree with you though that it has an unequal effect on different groups of people. And yes, the un-banked (and that typically means the poorer segment of society) tend to be the most affected.
And yet millions of businesses have figured out how to make it work for the last thousand years.
Cashless advocates are always talking about how "expensive" cash is, but never quantify it. Is handling cash more expensive than credit card fees, for example? If it were, businesses like supermarkets that operate on 1-2% margins wouldn't take cash. But they do. Some near me take cash freely, but charge extra to use debit cards. (For some reason, credit cards incur no fee.)
It's like the banks have used fear to institutionalize extortion.
"Think of all these horrible things that might possibly happen to your business. Damed shame if one of these exceedingly unlikely things was to happen.
Now if you give us 3% off your sales, we can make all that disappear..."
I'm going to make a really shitty analogy because I'm bored.
Cash = chamber pot / outhouse
Electronic payments = modern plumbing
People shat for millennia without modern plumbing. Installing and maintaining modern plumbing often requires external expertise who will wish to be paid for their services. In developed countries, the modern plumbing also needs to connect to public infrastructure and comply with a variety of regulations.
By choosing modern plumbing over chamber pots, we got rid of some issues pretty much entirely (monetary analogies in parentheses)...
- No one has to empty the shit bucket / shovel dirt in the hole (the business does not need to send an employee to the bank with a money bag)
- No one has to smell the shit of the previous user/customer (no one has to handle physical objects that may have had an interesting and/or disgusting journey prior [0] [1])
I like your analogy, but it excludes a reason I've heard from at least a few candid bar owners in NYC: "Do you know how much money you can hide in these drawers?" Which is to say "do you have any idea how peaceful it is to use the restroom with a locking door and no security cameras?"
I'm not saying I agree with or endorse tax evasion—but some are doing it for this very reason, while others simply don't want a 3rd party to their b2c transactions (for whatever reason) and are ready and willing to lose customers who only want to pay in plastic. Some even offer the consolation ATM on-premises.
Forgive me if I don't exactly take "I can't commit crime as easily" as a good justification for anything.
If you don't like the tax law, work on getting it changed or move your business somewhere where the taxes are more to your liking. Oh, being in NYC gives you access to a massive market you wouldn't have if you were in a lower tax environment? A market that continues to exist thanks to infrastructure funded via tax revenue? Funny how that works...
> Forgive me if I don't exactly take "I can't commit crime as easily" as a good justification for anything.
That was half of it—the other half was some businesses would prefer to not have a credit card processor party to their sale. It could be for a number of reasons that that are perfectly valid and legal.
> If you don't like the tax law, work on getting it changed or move your business
Also, to be clear, I am but a messenger. I don't own a business or take cash or credit card payments. If I did, I reckon I'd report them accurately for fear of getting audited and hauled off to prison—but I do appreciate your enthusiasm.
Sorry for the late reply but it's Monday and I don't feel like doing actual work yet and lol, just lol if you read HN when you're not on the clock.
Much like taxes, it comes down to market access. By accepting credit cards, they get access to a larger market, a larger potential set of customers. The cashless person can patronize their business thanks to the electronic payment infrastructure the banks created and maintain. That infrastructure is paid for by transaction fees.
If a business owner feels that cards are too much of a privacy issue or whatever aside from the fees, that's their opinion and they're welcome to it. They can work to find payment systems and markets that align with their values if it bugs them sufficiently. There is a possibility that the intersection of the sets of "places where the markets align with their values", "places where the business owner wants to operate", and "places where the business can be successful" might be small or nonexistent. You can't always get what you want, as the song says.
Likewise, a business owner who feels taxes are unfair can look for places where the taxes align to their values. There may or may not be places that have an agreeable tax structure and sufficient markets to sustain the business.
I get pretty tired of business owners who act like the government and service providers are unjustly stealing from them when often the business' entire ability to exist and sustain itself depends on the infrastructure and services provided.
You're the messenger, yes, but no one forced you to put your hands on the keyboard. Don't be surprised if you're handed a response for the message you chose to deliver. Feel free to carry it back to the business owners you've chatted with.
Are businesses allowed to defend themselves in all states in the US these days? What will happen to thieves -- will they be released by the courts? will the police even bother to come and collect them if the businesses have caught them?
Regardless of what internet-addicted fear mongers might have you believe, the United States has not evolved into a state of lawlessness.
A quick look at any local court docket shows that thieves still get caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Real life is very different from sensationalist internet blogspam headlines.
Cash registers are essentially a vault and all an employee has to do to protect the money inside is to close the drawer. Self-checkout machines are even better, because there is no "drawer" and they only spit out money as change, which is never more than the amount you put in.
It's more like "We don't serve homeless people or the unbanked." It is correlated with race but it's unlikely to be a dogwhistle for racism as many cashless establishments are neuvo liberal. An example is downtown Austin there's a popular cashless place called "Local Foods" that's more hipster than hobby.
What Europe has since a few year though is a right to a bank account.
Banks must offer basic accounts to anybody (at nondiscriminatory pricing) and unless it's used for fraud or if the fee cannot be paid isn't allowed to close it.
Credit cards actually don't need electricity or the network to be up. That was kind of the original point. The business that you're paying trusts the card issuer to pay them on your behalf, so they can communicate the payment details to the bank asynchronously, and after supplying the paid for goods or services.
But the rest of your point stands. Cash grants a lot more flexibility.
For people who are OK with keeping their money in banks but want to take it out as cash so they can spend it anonymously (as opposed to those who want cash because they don't want to have anything to do with the banking system at all) it is possible to design a system that retains the anonymity of cash but has the convenience of digital currency. And no, this does not require a blockchain.
Long before Bitcoin, back in the days before cryptographic currency meant you were probably dealing with geeks bearing grifts, cryptography researchers developed digital cash systems.
One I remember worked like this. Banks could issue digital dollars in multiple denominations. To spend a digital dollar D you would do a transformation on it to produced an altered digital dollar D' that you could give to someone. They could verify that D' came from a legitimate digital dollar, but got no information about which digital dollar it came from. When they deposit D' the bank could tell that it was generated from a digital dollar they issue and the denomination but they could not tell which digital dollar it came from. So even if the bank kept a record of every digital dollar you withdrew they could not figure out that D' came from one issue to you, let alone which particular one it was or when it was issues.
If you tried to double spend by transforming D to produce D' and then did that again to produce D'' you would get two seemingly different altered digital dollars because the transformation includes a random factor.
However if you spend both D' and D'' when they get deposited the bank is able to combine them to recover the original D and can look up who they issued it to and then you've got a lot explaining to do.
There have been a few such systems. One of the earliest was David Chaum's Ecash [1]. The first three references on that page link to papers covering technical details.
Here's a paper analyzing several digital cash protocols [2].
It's a purely populistic political move, as their far right party is campaigning against digital money, e-cards, EU. We had the very same campaign a few decades ago, when the EU demanded some overview over tax evasion accounts.
Tax evasion is my biggest gripe against the existence of cash.
As a professional working for a company, I have little or no means of avoiding tax. Rich people can and do pay expensive lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes in tax law, to minimize their tax liability.
People in cash-friendly occupations, like contracting, likewise have the ability to hide income through under-the-table cash transactions.
Which leaves poor saps like me to carry an unfair percentage of the tax burden, just so that a few people can feel like they are evading government supervision. (Hint: they are not).
> just so that a few people can feel like they are evading government supervision. (Hint: they are not).
It seems like you're conceding your own point here. If you live in a mansion and drive a Ferrari and claim you only make $15,000/year to the IRS, you're going to jail like Al Capone.
Whereas what cash allows you to do is keep anyone from knowing every little thing you buy, which is irrelevant to income tax which by then you've already paid and also irrelevant to sales tax which is collected by the seller even if they don't know who you are.
While at the grocery store this week, they happily announced that the credit-card processing system had just come back online. It had been down for a few hours for the entire store. Having the option to pay in cash was important even if it meant a trip to the ATM.
that's the catch in Austria, the number of ATMs goes down as we speak, there are certain places where you have to drive half an hour to the next ATM, so this cash thing is a bit pointless
I recall a trip to Austria as a boy in the early nineties and having it related by an Austrian (who dealt with international types/tourists a lot) that the opening of a McDonald's Drive-Thru located somewhat up towards the mountains near Innsbruck had not gone smoothly!
It seems that the locals, being from long established farming stock, were aghast at handing over money before they got their meals from a different window!
Credit cards were barely accepted anywhere either.
Whilst I'm sure the credit card situation has improved markedly since then, maybe a good amount of the spirit behind the drive thru reaction remains?!
it wouldn't necessarily be farmers alone, there is a saying "Geld gegen Ware", meaning I give you the money you give me simultaneously the goods, it's simply not usual to give the money beforehand
Cash has a real implication accessibility as well — particularly those who may not have enough income to even hold a bank account (that may be a NA thing?). It also helps those who aren't digitally literate or may have cognitive disabilities that a screen can make worse.
In addition to some level of security — there are a lot of reasons to keep cash around.
I’m fine with electronic money but bank notes do get replaced periodically. Last time I went back to England I tried to pay with cash in the pub and was refused since the notes had been changed. Covid meant it was the first time I’d been back for several years. I paid on card like everyone else (not usual in the US.) Went to the post office the next day to exchange them, no ID required.
Ive got a bunch of Swiss currency that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank. Annoying. My Indian money is also obviously worthless now, I wonder if my euros are still useful? Cash is a pain, I wish I didn’t keep any foreign currency now since a lot of it is worthless or needs to be converted in special locations.
In small amounts I enjoy how pretty it is. As a kid I found it fascinating how different it all looked. Growing up we only had a few. French Francs, German Marks, Belgian Francs, Danish Krone.
Yes. But I collected too much, this was when I was living in China and had a fear of not having enough hard convertible cash. I didn’t realize, as an American, that cash can expire.
Yes, because they had a thing a few years where they made it useless, and everyone had to exchange for new notes (and even that was limited). It was well reported in the news at the time.
It is just annoying. They aren’t worth as much as money I had from the west. I have lots of Thai and Indonesian currency as well, but I’m sure it’s inflated to nothing by now.
You're being sarcastic, but I think you have a pretty warped perception here. Take a look at OpenSecrets' data on Google Inc in 2012 or 2014[0] for example. (hint: They have pretty graphs if you scroll down a bit). Notice that it's pretty much neck and neck for total contributions to dems/republican candidates? Facebook, who set a lobbyist spending record, has historically donated more to Republicans than democrats[1]
I wouldn't call a 60-40 split "neck and neck". And I don't think this counts donations by employees, which I suspect are overwhelmingly to Democrats (because what isn't?)
It's not. The guy is an incompetent right wing a-hole who babblers populist ideas like this to get the people riled up like he's standing up for them with their best interest at heart, instead of focusing on the real issues that people face (housing, cost of living, healthcare, education, immigration, the economy, etc)
He's basically the Donald Trump equivalent of Austria but instead of raising border walls to "stop Mexicans" he's, "crusading for cash, and stopping Romanians" instead of the actual issues.
Yes, privately schooled people groomed for political positions are not idiots in the classical term, and while he might not be incompetent at doing things that further his own agenda but he's incompetent at tackling present day issues as going cashless was never an issue in Austria to begin with.
> going cashless was never an issue in Austria to begin with
I have had requests in Austria to pay with a card: some pressure exists. After 2020, such pressure was on signs spread in the territory.
And Austria is part of systems above. Or, for example, does one still find bank cards without "Contactless" NFC in Austria? Please let us know - I am sitting in the car right now.
>I have had requests in Austria to pay with a card:
We must be living in different Austrias then. I've never been pressured to pay by card ever and many places don't even accept cards.
>After 2020, such pressure was on signs spread in the territory.
Well yeah, Covid happened in 2020, and contactless payment is much more hygienic than exchanging paper that's been through god knows where throught its lifetime. Or don't you feel public health and safety in a pandemic is irrelevant?
So you are minimizing the pressure towards using cards instead of cash in the last years as contingent only. At least in Austria. And you are suggesting that now it is over.
You are also minimizing the point that Austria is not a disconnected independent self-ruling entity, but part of bigger systems and a subject in bigger systems. I said: are there still traditional bank cards in Austria, not readable from a distance? The wave to remove them seems to be international. Not only the apparently last international circuit (Maestro) using them was ceased one month ago, but I am not aware of traditional cards working in at least local circuits. Austria seems to be bearing "alien" pressures like the rest.
You have to see the waves coming to prevent them. That of Covid is suggestive: in the Fall of 2020 in Austria it seemed to be regarded as just an "Italian predicament".
>are there still traditional bank cards in Austria, not readable from a distance?
Do you actually live in Austria and know the real situation on the ground, or are you making up fantasy scenarios for strawman arguments for some good old-fashioned internet trolling? Because you would know the answer tot that.
I wrote very clearly, FirmwareBurner: if you did not understand, re-read what I wrote and make the mandated effort. If clarifications are useful, ask for them.
Nobody told you I live in Austria. The information I have is based on my research, which is unfortunately bound to be limited (which also implies, it was unsuccessful in finding around alternatives to the current mess). I have also been in Austria and made my limited queries (not only as I have not visited every bank, but also as it did not happen in the past months, and some of the systemic changes are only weeks old): those queries have been unsuccessful, like in other territories. And very clearly, the point was beyond bank cards - it is about binding trends, as I wrote very literally -, which are mentioned to make an example. And if you have good information, share it, or you are being unhelpful, further to your unhelpful attitude towards comprehension.
> fantasy scenarios for strawman arguments
Logical process, induction and deduction, probabilistic. Maestro is gone, and it is the last international channel with "traditional" service I knew. In some territories, local channels have been shut down. I have been in a few banks of "your" territory, they did not offer said service. Web sources have not shown solutions. All of this does not promise well. And I have not made factual statements: both times I asked in this branch I made direct questions.
If you, from this, could deduce "Oh, but see: Austria reveals to be an exception", because you retained services that disappeared elsewhere, then the original point would be corroborated by the fact that elsewhere those services disappeared.
It's like Jeopardy. Notice that pretty much any halfway knowledgable adult can answer most of the questions on the show? Now try to become an actual contestant.
It takes real intelligence to convince millions of people to support you, and the skill to talk at their level and pretend to care about things in the same way they do.
I have to remind myself of this -- when a politician says something stupid, it isn't because they are actually stupid, it's because they know who they are trying to talk to. So my gripe isn't really with the politician. I may not like Trump, but the more important underlying questions are who supports him and why. If not him, it'll just be someone else, because those people have a viewpoint and they'll vote for someone that matches it.
The other thing to keep in mind with politicians is that they spend all day talking and then reporters choose the six words to quote in a story based on whether they want to make them sound like a genius or an idiot.
Nearly every time you hear a politician quoted as saying something outrageous it turns out to be some ambiguous or inarticulate wording they didn't intend that way or something that was just maliciously taken out of context. Because motivating the opposition isn't in their interest.
Trump is an unusual exception because he says things in context that sound outrageous out of context on purpose in order to get people to talk about him, and reporters keep lining up to fall in the trap like it's a ride at an amusement park.
Everyone has good ideas, hell, I just had 3 good ideas this morning, the point is the intentions of political ideas, and he's intentions are purely for gathering populist support and votes from those doing tax fraud (a large sizable percentage in Austria) as going cashless was never an option in Austria anyway so it was a non-issue to begin with, a nothing burger if you will.
In which country do you live where going cashless is a bigger concern for the population than healthcare, housing, education, cost of living and the rest, because I'd like to live there?
What's with these strawmen arguments? How will cash prevent a dictatorship?
And all cash users don't just keep their all cash under their mattress to be eaten away by rats and inflation, but still use banks and assets to hold their money and use ATMs to get cash as needed, so the government can still lock your banc account leaving you penniless regardless if you used to pay by cash at the supermarket or by card.
But having your entire population tracked when they pay and a way to shut down the money of anything because it has no cash fallback helps a lot setting one up.
How so? Look at modern dictatorships, or ones masquerading as democracies (Venezuela, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Cuba, etc). They all use and allow cash. How did sticking to cash help them prevent their situation?
You can't function in a moderns western country without a bank account anyway: rent, salary, utilities, all are fully wired now (I can't go pay my utilities at the counter in cash or get my salary in cash), so even if you buy your groceries and weed with cash, the government can just lock your bank accounts making you broke overnight, and unless you got close friends and family to shelter you indefinitely, you're a few weeks/months away from homelessness deepening on how much you got saved under the mattress.
If the government wants to track you, they'll do it whether you use cash or not. Just look how effective the KGB and Stasi were at tracking people when cashless payments weren't even invented yet.
Your clutching at straws at this point trying to prove that cash plays such a big parts in preventing authoritarian regimes.
What helps prevent authoritarian regimes is a separation of powers in government and an accountable political class. The nordic countries have more or less given up cash, yet I doubt they're at the risk of political authoritarianism and have the lowest corruption index in the world. If you feel like your country is at the risk of becoming an dictatorship, maybe focus more on how you can become more like the nordics instead of sticking to cash.
there's always bigger fish to fry and therefore we cannot talk about the smaller ones?
but srsly, "cashless" used to be a FPÖ (the far right party in Austria) topic, now the conservatives have finally picked up on it. I don't like either of their agendas and nobody seriously suggested going cashless in Austria.
However, I'm also not a fan of being forced to use a private company just to pay for my basic necessities. And it seems plausible to me that after a certain decline of cash usage and the corresponding decline in infrastructure, there will be a tipping point when handling cash becomes so expensive that it will be shut down for cost reasons.
A good question to ask imo is:
Is it possible to hold a view that's not held by my political ingroup?
>there's always bigger fish to fry and therefore we cannot talk about the smaller ones?
Why not focus on the bigger fish that actually impact everyone? If I'm bleeding from my severed artery, I'm gonna care about that more than my chipped tooth.
Politicians focusing on mediatizing bogus issues to keep voting population attention away from the real issue is the oldest trick in the book ("hey don't look at our corruption scandals and the rising CoL, look at how we're gonna defend your use of cash").
>However, I'm also not a fan of being forced to use a private company just to pay for my basic necessities.
What about your bank? Necessities are more than just paying for groceries at the supermarket by cash, you know.
All your other actual necessities like salary, tax-returns, insurances, utilities and sometimes rent are deducted automatically via direct debit from you bank account, not via cash-in0hand trasnations. You can't live cash-only without a bank as an intermediate anyway.
>handling cash becomes so expensive that it will be shut down for cost reasons.
But handling cash the right way (counting it, accounting it, carrying and storing it securely, etc) already IS more expensive that contactless transaction fees, but cash-only businesses offset that by doing tax-fraud, and as an honest tax-payer I want tax-fraud to end. Getting rid of cash completely is just a bonus and a means to ending tax-fraud. Tax fraud is a bigger issue in Austria.
> it is a little surprising to see such political news on HN
In my experience, currencies have been of consistent interest in HN. At least, if you consider cryptocurrencies as such ;-)
> But this is a none-issue
> is meant to be a step against organised crime
Perhaps recent developments around the world would change your mind? The Canadian trucker protests of 2022 saw political protestors get bank accounts frozen, and more recently a famous politician in the UK got de-banked partly out of his political views. And these are democratic countries with rule of law. The situation in places like China are a lot more dire, where the government can easily make you cease to be able to function in society, simply by freezing your WePay account.
in china recently businesses have been warned against refusing to accept cash. most online services also accept other payment options besides wechat. not having wechat pay is an inconvenience but not a tragedy.
> The Canadian trucker protests of 2022 saw political protestors get bank accounts frozen
I get it, but given that the protest was funded by right-wing groups in the USA, is it really valid to call it just a Canadian trucker protest? I thought the reason for freezing the accounts was that Canada had laws against undeclared foreign funded political activities (like the USA does as well)?
And if it was cash, most countries already require you to declare, at the border, if you have more than $10k in cash (or untracked instruments of trade) when you pass through customs. I don't see a "right to cash" changing that, and the Canadian truck protest still wouldn't have been able to be funded by the Americans even if cash was used.
>> recently a famous politician in the UK got de-banked partly out of his political views
As a person in the UK, who is fairly in touch with the media industry.
This is such a non-story. I just want to do my bit to fight disinformation with the real information here :
That FORMER (not current) politician is a TV personality, who works for a TV channel called GB News [1]
GB News is directly managed by Paul Marshall, in a personal capacity (who also operates a hedge fund). [2]
That hedge fund took out short positions against the bank (which means they made bets that the banks share price would fall). In fact they had the largest bet ever against the bank, since records began of short positions. [3]
Coutts is a private bank that is exclusively for high net worth individuals [4]
The TV personality withdraw money from his Coutts account and fell below the minimum balance requirements needed for an account with this private bank (which is £1million or $1.3million in dollars) [5]
The TV channel then made a big splash by announcing that this man's account got closed due to his political positons, rather than the reality of his financial withdrawals. Which cause the banks share price to drop due to the negative media attention.
This made a large profit for the hedge fund that had bet against the bank and was managed by the person who owns the TV channel that ran this story [6]
The TV personality withdraw money from his Coutts account and fell below the minimum balance requirements needed for an account with this private bank
From what I've seen on the news, the account balance issue was an excuse that Coutts came up with later, after it was revealed that he had his account closed because "his views do not align with ours" or something similar. There was a leaked email or memo or something with that information.
Edit:
According to what the Telegraph says are minutes of a meeting of Coutts' wealth reputational risk committee held on November 17 2022, they read: "The committee did not think continuing to bank NF [Nigel Farage] was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.
"This was not a political decision but one centred around inclusivity and purpose."
He also said there was a perception that he was regarded as "racist and xenophobic", which he called an "appalling slur".
One important aspect though was that Coutts is part of a larger banking group, who offered Mr Farrage a chance to open an account with Netwest, another bank in the group.
So it’s not that they refused him service totally and he was unable to obtain a bank account anywhere, which is in my opinion an important distinction.
If you want to see the intentional spread of misinformation and intricate conspiracy theories with political motives, you might want to check a mirror.
Exactly how does your "real information" stand up to:
> BBC News
> TV, radio and online, 4 July 2023
> We reported that the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s bank account had been closed by Coutts because he fell below the financial threshold needed for an account. This information came from a senior source familiar with the matter after Mr Farage had put the story about his banking arrangements into the public domain, saying that the bank had political motives in closing his account.
> Mr Farage’s view was reflected in all our reporting and he has been widely interviewed across the BBC throughout. Since this original coverage, Nigel Farage submitted a subject access request to Coutts bank and obtained a report from the bank's reputational risk committee. While it mentioned commercial considerations, the document also said the committee did not think continuing to have Mr Farage as a client was "compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation".
> Because of this evidence, we have since changed the headline and the copy on the original online article about his bank account being shut for falling below the wealth limit to reflect that the claim came from a source and added an update to recognise the story had changed. We acknowledge that the information we reported - that Coutts’ decision on Mr Farage’s account did not involve considerations about his political views - turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage.
People like you are why they report falsehoods initially, and as quietly as possible issue corrections later. The news of the correction and the resignation of the director of the bank has no effect on your desire to defend political censorship to the death.
But please talk more about that evil right wing news outlet that had no need to issue an apology to anyone, as if the messenger is more important than the facts.
>> But please talk more about that evil right wing news outlet
What on earth are you on about? "people like me" "evil right wing news" ?!
I have not referenced anything as either right or left wing. Nor did I mention anything of mine or anyone else's political leanings.
I cited my theory including several sources that show it to be factual that this television personality's employers gained several millions by causing the bank's share price to drop.
Yet you seem to be deploying personal attacks rather than finding fault with my core assumptions.
> They claim that the EU wants to ban all cash payments. But this is a none-issue, as the proposed EU law sets a limit to 50.000 € and is meant to be a step against organised crime.
Assuming you're Austrian and have a better grasp of this issue than I.
That said, I think this is an interesting news story despite the Austrian politics; privacy & surveillance, fiat currency & inflation, economic access and freedoms... these are all issues that many countries and peoples will have to tackle in the coming years...
Do you have a source for the 50.000 € limit? At least where I live, even as of now it is more 5000 € for a single deal/sale. If the sale amount is above that, it must go through a cashless payment.
For context here: This guy is a right-wing nutjob who spews Russian propaganda. Ensuring cash is mandated in the constitution ensures that there is always a good money laundering and bribing method available, especially for the Russian mob and spy agencies, which Vienna is crawling with for years: https://www.businessinsider.com/vienna-crawling-russian-spie...
The fact that bad people commit crimes with cash doesn't mean that there isn't a public interest in keeping cash widely available as a means of transaction. I don't suppose many HN readers would be in favor of banning encryption just because the internet is crawling with criminals and child pornographers using encrypted communication.
Lol, the article you just posted is literally an example of bribing someone without using cash. Did you even read it? Do you get your information from just reading headlines without any critical thought? Was this post generated by ChatGPT?
Using a very basic and simple understanding of how votee politics and Austria works it's pretty obvious what the simplest reason this policy is being proposed: Cash is popular in Austria and this guy wants to get votes.
Seems a little short-sighted. Constitutions are meant to last for centuries, right? What's the payment landscape going to look like in 2400?
Even now, the enforcement detail is too much to put into a Constitution. There would need to be statute dictating exactly what vendors of what size selling what goods in what way have to actually accept cash. There's no sane way to require this of remote transactions. Nobody is mailing envelopes of cash before receiving anything. At best, a Constitutional provision could say something like "the government can't ban cash," which is great, but in a hundred years when nobody at all accepts it and banks don't carry it, you have a pointless, toothless provision in your Constitution.
> Constitutions are meant to last for centuries, right?
Apparently, according to a study[0], the average life expectancy of a constitution (I presume it means a written, codified one) since 1789 is around 19 years. So while I'm sure the writers of constitutions envision them to last for centuries, in appears that they don't in practice.
The world's oldest written, codified constitution still in operation is the one in the US.
Yeah, their successors saw the "an update is required for your constitution, would you like to apply it?" pop-up and they keep clicking "remind me later" button for the last ~100 years.
To count or seize the individuals cash, the government has to make some fuzz. Aka send men with guns.
There seems to be some divide in our world between people who consider individual power a good thing and people who consider it unnecessary.
Here in Europe, I have the feeling the vast majority of people consider it unnecessary. The vibe I get is "The system works, so why not let the government handle and control everything.".
I wouldn't be surprised if that is a global phenomena and holds steady throughout time. For example, even when the US government seized their citizens gold in 1933, there was no resistance.
That people consider "cash" something they "own" is already a sign that people don't understand and don't care how they are gamed by the government. The government can take the value out of that cash however it pleases by printing more of it.
And no matter how much the government does that, nobody complains:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
Governments on the other hand understand very well that money is a sham. Thats why they hold hundreds of billions of dollars in gold:
https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/which-world-...
Way more than they hold foreign currency.
Gold is hard to pay with though. When Russia had their Dollars frozen last year, it was not like they said "No prob, we'll use gold then". Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if countries will shift their reserves to Bitcoin in the coming decades. As it combines the durability of gold with the usability of money.