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Cash will never die. Fundamentally, a wechat/alipay transaction is traceable. Traceability is great for expense reports, but a non-starter if you're a drug dea

by Hasz 9y ago

Cash will never die. Fundamentally, a wechat/alipay transaction is traceable. Traceability is great for expense reports, but a non-starter if you're a drug dealer -- especially with China's draconian drug laws. Even if you were to launder the money through fronts or a series of transactions, a state level actor (i.e, China) would have no real difficulty in tracking down such activity. With cash, this becomes much, much harder in cost, time and manpower. Not impossible for a state, but certainly an effective deterrent from casual or low level investigation. This difference in traceability will keep cash and other compact tangible mediums of value (precious gems and metals, ivory, drugs, etc) in use by subsets of the population for as long as people value the relative anonymity and are willing to put up with the costs and risks a physical medium entails.

wklauss 9y ago
> Cash will never die. I wouldn't say never. It can be marginalized to the point that it becomes annoying for vendors to rely on it and all you need is a little bit of regulatory push to stop cash. By then, most shoppers would not care enough to protest. As for drug dealers... what can I say... i don't think their needs will be taken into account and as far as I know, bitcoin is already working for them in that regard.
TACIXAT 9y ago
There is a finite amount of money in circulation and the bills are numbered. It is a very traceable currency, even though it is not being traced. Simple use image recognition when it is deposited or withdrawn from a bank and record the customer doing the transaction. [BANK A]->[CUST A]->???->[CUST B]->[BANK B]. If someone is laundering money or using it in a criminal operation you will likely see patterns in the flows. It would lead to behavior of withdrawing money at an ATM then spending it to disassociate it from yourself by getting change. What if they build in scanning to cash registers though? Seems relatively simple to track cash if there was any will to do so.

by Hasz 9y ago

wklauss 9y ago

> Cash will never die. I wouldn't say never. It can be marginalized to the point that it becomes annoying for vendors to rely on it and all you need is a little bit of regulatory push to stop cash. By then, most shoppers would not care enough to protest. As for drug dealers... what can I say... i don't think their needs will be taken into account and as far as I know, bitcoin is already working for them in that regard.

TACIXAT 9y ago

There is a finite amount of money in circulation and the bills are numbered. It is a very traceable currency, even though it is not being traced. Simple use image recognition when it is deposited or withdrawn from a bank and record the customer doing the transaction. [BANK A]->[CUST A]->???->[CUST B]->[BANK B]. If someone is laundering money or using it in a criminal operation you will likely see patterns in the flows. It would lead to behavior of withdrawing money at an ATM then spending it to disassociate it from yourself by getting change. What if they build in scanning to cash registers though? Seems relatively simple to track cash if there was any will to do so.