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The core concept to remember I think is that there are two ways to pay for things: * Ways that involve cash or cash equivalents * Ways where a purchase requir
by CPLX 10y ago
The core concept to remember I think is that there are two ways to pay for things:
* Ways that involve cash or cash equivalents
* Ways where a purchase requires the permission of someone else
Just think of the word authorization, which is a required element of essentially all non-cash transactions. It has the word authority embedded right in it. If you're OK with that concept, you are necessarily OK with the idea that someone you have never met and don't control has the ability to stop you from using your funds in the way you'd like to at any time.
A cashless society is, at a fundamental level, not free.
- ghaff 10y agoI can go weeks without touching cash these days. Nonetheless, I find the idea that I could be prevented from making a person-to-person financial transaction for even a modest amount without a paper trail pretty unsettling.
- huffmsa 10y agoPaper trail? What are you hiding citizen? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
- icantdrive55 10y agoHe buys a pack of cigarettes for someone else, and happens to rack up a huge medical bill. The Insurance company might have a reason to disavow him? (Trump and disavow?) He buys a 12 pack, and his kid steals it, and gets into an accident causing front page news. His kid lies, and says dad gave me the beer. (He is screwed.) He goes onto physical therapy office. One of the legitimate places that, but sounds weird--like the power of hands--whatever. The wife sees the bill and it always stays in the back of her mind forever. He buys a pressure cooker, and is suddenly profiled? He pays out of packet for a CAT scan because he's a hypochondriac, and things he has a brain tumor. He is forced to claim he did have a CAT scan on all those pesky insurance forms. (Happened to me.) Yea some of these are far fetched, but not being able to buy groceries last nights wasen't. My slick new chipped bank card was not recognized by the machine. I usually carry a c-note, but used it the following week because of bank card problems. I guess the McCarty Era is not taught in school anymore? So no--I don't want a paper trail either. Hell Safeway knows my diet better than me. (Yes--different card.)
- a_t48 10y agoThe person who you replied to was speaking satirically.
- Jemmeh 10y ago"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
- gyey 10y agoTo be the devil's advocate here, what situation can you imagine that would warrant a person to legitimately hide information or keep secrets from their own government?
- Joakal 10y agoConsider that what the government knows could become public due to leaks, changes of government (election, war), third party access, etc. I certainly do not want my bank passwords to be with the government. My bank accounts can be wiped out. Hence I do not like my communication recorded at all for this reason.
- coding123 10y agoNot everything that is a law should be. Why is marijuana even illegal? Can ANYONE even answer that in the context of alcohol being legal? So yes, for this any many other reasons, it's good to keep secrets from the government. By the way, pot is just an example, you can literally dig millions of unjust laws up if you looked, we're all just conditioned to OBEY.
- tomohawk 10y agoAlcohol is involved in a very large number of deaths in the US every year. A very large proportion of suicides, automobile deaths, shooting deaths, diabetes deaths, and so on are directly caused by alcohol consumption. It's not like we need more people running around with impaired decision making ability.
- eternalban 10y agoBecause they have different psychological effects. One makes you think, the other makes you stupid.
- lucio 10y agoYou miss the /s at the end. There are some literal people around here /s
- known 10y agoPrivacy != Secrecy
- giardini 10y agoLast year I tired of reconciling my credit card and checkbook accounts, so shifted to using cash only (I have credit cards if there's an emergency). So far I'm spending ~10% less each month. I'm more careful about purchases. I get and seek cash discounts. Best of all I don't need to do the reconciliation.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoResearch suggests you are not alone. We spend more when we pay with plastic. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/credit-cards-make-you-spend-more/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/credit-cards-ma... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/your-money/credit-cards-encourages-extra-spending-as-the-cash-habit-fades-away.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/your-money/credit-cards-e...
- rz2k 10y agoHow do you ask for a cash discount?
- giardini 10y agoJust ask! "Do you give a cash discount?"
- dougmany 10y agoThere is a candy store near my house that has a bowl of mixed candy near the register. You can take a piece from the bowl if you pay in cash.
- Joakal 10y agoI've been doing this by just straight up asking. "Is there a discount with cash?" "No" "Ok, I'll pay with my card" Merchants prefer cash as card costs them money. Usually works with dry cleaners, cafes, etc. Big businesses generally say no.
- OJFord 10y agoFunny, I've always viewed it as a card surcharge rather than a cash discount.
- Animats 10y agoIn China, all ATMs are supposed to record serial numbers.[1][2] That's already deployed. There's no secret about this; some ATMs in Hong Kong give you a list of the serial numbers of the bills just dispensed on their receipt. Coming up next, face recognition.[3] Many ATMs already have the hardware. To improve counterfeit recognition, most ATMs which accept cash now take a high-resolution image of both sides of the bill and do considerable processing on it. It just takes a software upgrade. Some bank counting machines also have this feature. Cummings markets their cash counter to law enforcement, so they can capture all the serial numbers from a drug bust and track them.[4] [1] http://www.grgbanking.cn/en/chinaATMs/images/H68NL.pdf http://www.grgbanking.cn/en/chinaATMs/images/H68NL.pdf [2] http://hkmb.hktdc.com/en/1X09V6YK/hktdc-research/ATMs-to-provide-banknote-serial-numbers http://hkmb.hktdc.com/en/1X09V6YK/hktdc-research/ATMs-to-pro... [3] http://en.yibada.com/articles/35951/20150601/china-worlds-first-atm-with-facial-recognition-detect-fake-bank-notes.htm http://en.yibada.com/articles/35951/20150601/china-worlds-fi... [4] http://www.cumminsallison.com/us/en/products/currency-handling/jetscan-ifx-i100-law http://www.cumminsallison.com/us/en/products/currency-handli...
- delinka 10y agoBut that still doesn't track with whom you spent that cash.
- vkou 10y agoUnless your counterparty goes ahead and deposits it in their bank at the end of the day. If five of the twenty bills you withdrew at 9 am were deposited by Seven-Eleven at 7 pm, I can guess that you went shopping at Seven-Eleven... And more likely then not, I'll be right. A particular bill does not change hands very frequently between ending up at a bank. If anything, a bill that you withdrew not ending up back in circulation is suspicious.
- Animats 10y agoA particular bill does not change hands very frequently between ending up at a bank. Right. At one time the US Fed estimated that the average number of transactions for cash outside a bank was two. That's an old number, measured years ago to plan bill replacement. (One of the Federal Reserve's functions is paper bill replacement. Banks pull worn bills and send them to the Fed, which tallies them, shreds them, and replaces them with new bills from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Dollar bills last about 18-22 months.)
- wolfgke 10y ago> I can go weeks without touching cash these days. Luckily I can still go weeks without touching my EC card these days.
- canadian_voter 10y agoBingo, I think you nailed it. The cashless society – which more accurately should be called the bank-payments society... is a utopia where money cannot leave – or even exist – outside the banking system, but can only be transferred from bank to bank. Such a system replaces a relationship between two parties with relationships between those parties and the bank. If either party falls out of favour with the bank, they can't do business with each other.
- jrs235 10y agoThe introduction of the revelatory "mark of the beast". No one will be able to [legally] buy or sell without it. I suspect anyone that tries to barter or trade outside of the system will be considered and labeled a criminal for operating in black markets or tax evasion.
- johnchristopher 10y agoOh but I have heard people claiming the contrary: that banks are actually using a number for transaction and it has 666 embedded into it.
- NotSammyHagar 10y agookay, if you believe stuff like that, it's hard to take you seriously. 666, the devil, he's there in your transaction? I remember when conservatives didn't like that unix has daemons. That was not particuarly a useful concern.
- ptaipale 10y agoI guess this is a sarcastic reference to the "barcodes contain 666" conspiracy theory. http://www.av1611.org/666/barcode.html http://www.av1611.org/666/barcode.html
- jbpetersen 10y agoFun fact: The SF innovation center of Visa has t-shirts which literally say "The Mark" on them. Though supposedly in reference to [this guy](https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/innovation-centers/san-francisco/the-inside-edge/innovators/mark-nelsen.html https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/innovation-centers/san-...).
- nannal 10y agoI'm a bitcoin supporter (and user) for this among many other reasons.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI must admit that I don't understand the details of bitcoin. But if I understand correctly, can't a majority of owners block your transaction?
- jstanley 10y agoMost Bitcoin owners have absolutely no say in whether or not your transaction goes through. Only miners can do that. Big miners can easily delay your transaction, by refusing to include it in a block, but the only way they can prevent your transaction entirely is if all of the miners collude not to include it.
- maxerickson 10y agoYou only need collusion among a majority of mining power to ignore a transaction, not all miners. It's still effectively impossible because it would undermine confidence in the system (which is why people are willing to pay miners in the first place).
- schoen 10y agoIt's very complicated to articulate exactly who can block Bitcoin transactions. The traditional simple answer is that "a majority of mining power" can block an individual transaction by refusing to include it in blocks. However, they have to be pretty committed to this, because if someone outside of the group does eventually mine a block that contains the censored transaction, the group members also have to be willing not to build on that block, and to trust each other not to do so. Just agreeing not to include the transaction in blocks themselves would be insufficient. At that point there are complicated questions about how stable and credible the arrangement will be, since systematically avoiding building on certain mined blocks involves slowing down the consensus slightly, and also trusting that the eventual consensus will exclude those blocks. If, say, 51% of mining power committed to censoring one particular transaction, that might yield an effective fork of Bitcoin for some period of time because the other 49% might gamble on their ability to get their rival blocks accepted in the long term (or, if they didn't know about the 51%'s policy, not see any reason why they shouldn't simply build on what appeared to be the longest chain!).
- frandroid 10y agoThanks for summarizing this so succinctly.
- illumin8 10y agoI get it, but think of what you're getting in return. The example in the article, about the Coke vending machine. Imagine in the past, before vending machines - the only way you would be able to buy a Coke in that particular area would be if there was enough foot traffic to justify a full time real human being to sit there all day, with inventory of soft drinks, and exchange your cash for them. The opportunity cost alone of having a human being sit there and accept payments, and risk being robbed, is immense compared to the cost of putting a vending machine there with an electronic payment system. I would argue that without new technologies like this, your ability as a consumer to buy a Coke would be severely limited. We might as well go back to a feudal society where everyone met in the village market during the morning to buy food and goods. The convenience factor alone of being able to buy anything you want in almost any area of the world, at any time of day or night, without having to have a live human being there to perform the transaction, is huge.
- stdbrouw 10y agoThis has to be the worst imaginable example. Have you never seen a coin-operated vending machine?
- rvense 10y agoOr had to live without a coke for half an hour till you passed by somewhere where they were sold? My country will be more or less cashless within a few years. We are handing over complete power over the economy to unaccountable private institutions, and the debate always comes down to convenience and eliminating robberies. It's a travesty.
- scrumper 10y agoAn electronic payments system-based vending machine is risker (where the risk is to your ability as a consumer to get a coke on demand) than the current model (coin operated vending machine) since it depends on connectivity to the payments network to function. This is easily interrupted through malice, negligence, or oversight. In my experience coin op vending machines by and large work; bill readers are hit and miss; card reading machines almost never function. (BTW not downvoting you, but your comment does inexplicably ignore coin op machines which are an existent, good solution.)
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYou have a point about cashless transactions, though I'm not sure if the argument about the word "authorization" stands. At least I always understood it that I authenticate myself to the bank, and then I authorize the bank to transfer my funds to someone else...
- jon-wood 10y agoIn an ideal scenario that's the case, however the bank isn't solely answerable to you. There are situations such as being investigated by the police where access to any money in your bank account can be suspended, and they will no longer authorise you to make use of it.
- M_Grey 10y agoA cashless society would be an attempt to create a society that lacks basic economic freedom, but it would also fail. People will simply return to barter, and the use of whatever precious metals/stones/etc are hot that year.
- jk563 10y agoI don't see this as a given. I for one would be more than happy to have a cashless society, and I would struggle to believe that I'm unique out of the ~7 billion there are of us.
- M_Grey 10y agoDoubtless you're part of a fairly large demographic... that's part of the problem which has no easy solution.
- ghaff 10y agoHave an upvote. But also try to understand why many people are uncomfortable with the idea that even modest transactions can be monitored by governmental agencies. In practice, there are always ways to work outside the system of course. But to the degree these become real exceptions they become that much more suspicious as a result.
- jk563 10y agoError in conciseness! I can empathise completely and do understand the reasoning of the opinion of a large number of people who do not want a third party being privy to every transaction. I was attempting to convey that there are likely many people on both sides of the debate, should have expanded a bit more!
- ktRolster 10y agoAs an example of your point, during the Nixon crash, people used postage stamps as a proxy for cash. They also used Canadian coins in America to replace USD coins. People would literally drive over the border to Canada, get a bunch of coins, and bring them back and sell them to stores so they could make change.
- allemagne 10y agoI am okay with acknowledging this and using both cash and non-cash systems when they fit my needs. While cashless systems are gaining traction, is there any actual attempt for them to replace cash wholesale?
- ghaff 10y agoAs in eliminate cash entirely? Not as far as I know. Even in Sweden, articles I've read suggest that the shift to cashless will continue at its own pace but no one is really talking about completely pulling cash out of circulation at this point. (And most people don't seem to be in favor of that.) What probably does happen over time though is that, if the cashless penetration becomes high enough, a lot of retail merchants and individuals just stop accepting cash because it's too big a hassle for a tiny slice of their business.
- NotreDev 10y agoYes. See India in Q4'16 https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/03/01/2185261/indias-cash-crunch-gdp-data-and-negative-speculation/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/03/01/2185261/indias-cash-c...
- iopq 10y agoBitcoin uses a system that doesn't rely on any single person's authority.
- stinkytaco 10y agoBanking doesn't rely on a single person's authority either. But it relies on a network of connections and rules. So does bitcoin. No blockchain, no transaction. Really, cash relies on some sort of approval too. Someone's got to mint money and assure its scarcity (eg: value). I believe in cash for a variety of reasons, but there is no transaction aside from barter that doesn't rely on someone else's authority to buy something.
- cortesoft 10y agoNo, but it generates a perfect paper trail.
- iopq 10y agoNot so perfect. Take, for example, using a tumbler - the prosecution can't prove that the coins going into the tumbler were yours, only that you got some coins from the tumbler and exchanged them for dollars.
- cortesoft 10y agoIt might make it hard to prove the coins' source, but it would make proving money laundering easier.
- iopq 10y agoUsing a tumbler is not against the law. For one thing, you can't launder bitcoins because bitcoins are a commodity, not considered money.
- cortesoft 10y agoMany money laundering techniques use a commodity in the process, that doesn't make it not money laundering. Just because using a tumbler itself is not against the law, if you use it to hide the source of income, it is still money laundering. You can't get around financial laws by using property instead of currency. "A payment made using virtual currency is subject to information reporting to the same extent as any other payment made in property." https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/irs-virtual-currency-guidance https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/irs-virtual-currency-guidan...
- otakucode 10y agoAnd don't forget that 'payment processing' is never free. In fact, it is never even a flat fee despite the fact that it does not actually cost anything more to transfer a larger number over a network than it does a smaller one. Yet people seem to have no problem handing over the majority of their economy to 'processed' payments which empower banks with the ability to do nothing less than levy taxes and exert the same sort of control over the economy that was previously reserved to the federal government. If they wish to restrict the availability of money in the economy, they can simply raise the payment processing fees. If they wish to boost their own profit margin, they simply raise the payment processing fees. They show favoritism by giving large companies big discounts on those fees, revealing them not to be fees actually needed to pay for a service being provided but merely a chunk of money they take simply because they can.
- bjelkeman-again 10y agoCash handling is not free either. Large amounts require security or increased risk.
- mikejmoffitt 10y agoRisk doesn't cost money in the way payment processing costs money.
- skookumchuck 10y agoThere was a long period of "free banking" in this country where banks printed banknotes, not the government.
- stupidcar 10y agoUh, no. Paying with cash is exchanging a promise that someone else, usually the central bank, will pay the bearer on demand the value of the promissory note. Even if you could actually exchange the note for its equivalent in precious metals — which you can't — you're still just exchanging a token without intrinsic value. Its only value is conferred entirely by the monetary whims of the government. Governments can, and have, on multiple occasions, completely disregarded sensible monetary policy and started printing money when they didn't have enough of it, totally destroying the value of people's cash in hand through hyperinflation. This is something you have literally no defense against. When paying with some other method, we need to make a clear distinction between debit and credit. If I pay with a credit card, I am asking someone else, usually a bank, to lend me the money to pay. Obviously, in such a situation, they have the right to refuse, albeit only in accordance with any pre-existing legal agreements between us. If I pay with a debit card, I am asking one my debtors, usually a bank, to repay part of the debt they owe me to the person of my choosing. They may choose to be somewhat awkward about this, but they fundamentally cannot choose to disregard the debt they owe me, so long as they wish to remain solvent. Nor do they, in any meaningful sense, have the ability to grant or refuse "permission" to pay. They owe me money and, subject to the relevant bankruptcy laws, any pre-existing legal agreements between us, reasonable anti-fraud measures, etc., they have to pay. None of this has anything to do with the issue of "freedom". It is simply a matter of the way financial transactions work in modern society. The amount of money in the economy hugely exceeds the amount of cash in circulation. Most money exists in the form of credit and debt. Your money exists in the form of credit and debt. There is nothing scary or unfree about having money in the form of a debt the bank owes you, compared to having it as promissory notes from the government, or as legal deeds to property, or precious metals with a market value. Each and every store of value is entirely reliant upon the continued proper functioning of the market, the legal system and the government. Money in the form a bank deposit is probably the safest way to store moderate amounts of money. As a physical entity, cash can be damaged, lost, stolen, etc. And the only person affected by this is you, meaning you have no common cause with any other person to recover your losses. A bank's stability and existence is underwritten by the livelihoods of all its customers, employees and investors.
- appleflaxen 10y ago
- nickpsecurity 10y agoIve never seen it stated better. Im probably gonna use that explanation in future if you dont mind.
- Shivetya 10y agoOne addition. those same people can later declare a purchase you made to be criminal after the fact. Scenarios include purchases made from someone that is convicted of a crime and the government deciding devices/equipment/goods you own are dangerous to the state
- godmodus 10y agoBut is it avoidable?