4 ms·

Criminal can drain your whole account (plus credit limit) by applying force to you. They can only have whatever you are currently carrying n case of cash.

toomanybeersies 11y ago
Conveniently, you can just go to the police, file a report, and get your money back from the bank.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Not so simple if criminals made you withdraw funds from ATM.
imtringued 11y ago
In Africa it's quite the opposite. Cash is a liability. It's bound to be stolen. A stolen phone can be locked remotely and easily tracked.
EGreg 11y ago
Well you can have the same restrictions applied in the app as an ATM. Or claim to. I take your point though. The inconvenience to the mugger to force you to travel to an ATM may be much greater than making you send a larger amount with your phone. After all, with physical cash it was very believable you didn't have more money that can be extracted. Now that you can move more, the mugger can force you to move more. BUT then you can reverse it later. Unless you can argue that the mugger would be more likely to kill you afterwards than before, as a result of the sum. But then you could have the reversals happen anyway, and the muggers would know that's the default. All that remains is proving it was a mugging... all the transactions could be reversed based on that (we are not talking about bitcoins here, but systems of credit so the mugger might go into debt if they spent the money already). The idea of banks etc. instead of bitcoin actually helps in a libertarian type system because the money can be yanked back and the mugger doesn't want the inconvenience of never having a bank account. Plus if his other property is all interconnected, then crime really won't pay, and there would be less need for incarceration. We just have to somehow have fair systems of proving it was really a mugging. Maybe along the lines of the DMCA... someone could claim a mugging and then you'd have some time to respond, both sides would present evidence, and there would be a global reputation for both true and false claims of mugging. Anyway I think in practice there have been less muggings now that cash is digital in Africa.

toomanybeersies 11y ago

Conveniently, you can just go to the police, file a report, and get your money back from the bank.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
Not so simple if criminals made you withdraw funds from ATM.

imtringued 11y ago

In Africa it's quite the opposite. Cash is a liability. It's bound to be stolen. A stolen phone can be locked remotely and easily tracked.

EGreg 11y ago

Well you can have the same restrictions applied in the app as an ATM. Or claim to. I take your point though. The inconvenience to the mugger to force you to travel to an ATM may be much greater than making you send a larger amount with your phone. After all, with physical cash it was very believable you didn't have more money that can be extracted. Now that you can move more, the mugger can force you to move more. BUT then you can reverse it later. Unless you can argue that the mugger would be more likely to kill you afterwards than before, as a result of the sum. But then you could have the reversals happen anyway, and the muggers would know that's the default. All that remains is proving it was a mugging... all the transactions could be reversed based on that (we are not talking about bitcoins here, but systems of credit so the mugger might go into debt if they spent the money already). The idea of banks etc. instead of bitcoin actually helps in a libertarian type system because the money can be yanked back and the mugger doesn't want the inconvenience of never having a bank account. Plus if his other property is all interconnected, then crime really won't pay, and there would be less need for incarceration. We just have to somehow have fair systems of proving it was really a mugging. Maybe along the lines of the DMCA... someone could claim a mugging and then you'd have some time to respond, both sides would present evidence, and there would be a global reputation for both true and false claims of mugging. Anyway I think in practice there have been less muggings now that cash is digital in Africa.