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Debate in Austria over enshrining use of cash in the constitution

109 points by rumcajz 7y ago

narag 7y ago
What I find most interesting is how those parties seem to find out what people wants and incorporate it into their agenda. Very different thing is parties building their agendas, usually around authoritarian measures coming from some lobbies and then shoving them down our throats with massive amounts of propaganda.
seibelj 7y ago
The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously. I think if you get to the root of the issue, most governments would prefer to track every transaction to ensure compliance with tax, money laundering, [insert whatever regulation]. However I think the state already has an absurd amount of power and the citizens need every tool possible to prevent governments from hurting them. Anonymous transactions, such as those using cash but also using new technologies like privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, are essential to keeping the state from becoming a panopticon. You can already see the inevitable outcome of all-powerful government with the ridiculous situation in Hong Kong and the social credit system in China.
- cstejerean 7y ago
  It’s not just anonymity. To get a credit/debit card you need to agree to some TOS, probably binding arbitration, and are at the mercy of the bank deciding whether or not they want to cancel your account. That would be my problem with cashless, the idea that people could be cut off entirely from the system and have no way to transact. Until the government / central bank will issue everyone a irrevocable bank account with the right to transact for free indefinitely getting rid of cash has bigger issues than just privacy implications.
  - toomanybeersies 7y ago
    The solution to that particular problem would be to make it a legal right to have a bank account. It doesn't have to have all the extras, just an account that stores your money, and a card you can use for accessing your money.
    - mNovak 7y ago
      This circles back to the anonymity issue though.. what level of authentication is required to obtain said card? Can I stand there and blatantly collect 20 cards under different names? How does the bank know I'm not a terrorist which they are legally bound not to transact with? I suppose if they're just freely distributed from a vending machine, it just becomes plastic bills of arbitrary denomination.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      That is an extremely sweeping requirement that also embeds a lot of assumptions into the legal system that are not sensible. We've seen something similar before when South Korean banks [0] managed to lock themselves in to the dawn of the software industry and have spent more than a decade looking like idiots. This whole situation is happening because cash is very flexible and we innovated away from it when it became a bad idea. At any stage over the next few decades the basic nature of the playing field could change and this 'right to have a bank account' could totally stomp out innovation. Not to mention; if at any point now or in the future a loophole slips in to the legislative process consumers could get roasted. This is a poor solution to a non-problem. Just let people transact in cash. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-koreas-online-banking-system-is-stuck-in-1996/#6b073554527c https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...
      - toomanybeersies 7y ago
        Banks have been around for hundreds of years. All I'm proposing is that there is a legal right for people to hold a bank account of some form, where they are able to put their money so they don't have all their life savings in cash under the bed. I'm not suggesting that we ban cash at all, just that people have a right to securely store their money and the option to use cashless transactions if they choose. Being legally required to hold a bank account use cashless transactions is just as much of a violation of one's rights as being barred from opening a bank account and being forced to use cash for all transactions. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It's not about allowing people to transact in cash, but allowing them alternative choices, all of which should be legal. If you can't hold a bank account (because the banks have decided you're not allowed one for whatever reason), you need to use cash for everything. This means you always have a relatively large amount of cash on you. Not only are you now at greater risk of burglary or robbery, the consequences of being a victim are now even greater. You also can't put money in a savings account, or pay for things online. I've had my house burgled and had large amounts of cash stolen from me before. There was nothing the police could do. Even if they caught the burglar, the money wasn't coming back to me. It was a significant hit to my personal finances at the time. Bank accounts and cashless transactions aren't just a way for the government to keep tabs on the population, they're also a form of security for the general population.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  > The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously. Well, a big argument for cash is that it allows you to do illegal transactions as well, and that this is extremely important, because who decides what is illegal and not? Making all illegal transactions impossible is a great way to stop civil disobedience, to stop dissenting movements, to stop anything the current regime simply doesn't like. But those are the things driving our society forward.
  - esoterica 7y ago
    That's kind of an amusing line of thinking, that the government has an obligation to make doing illegal things as easy as possible, because sometimes doing the illegal thing is morally permissible. How far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole? For example, the existence of a police force makes it harder to break the law, should we disband the police to make engaging in civil disobedience easier?
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Government is us, the people. It's not some mythical entity separate from the society it exists in. How far are you willing to go the other way? If the police knew where every single citizen was 100% of the time, crime rates would plummet! Super easy, fit everyone with a gps anklet, and make it punishable with jailtime for anyone who tampers with them or removes them. Tadaa! It's a balance between fascism and liberty, between control and freedom. Removing cash moves that balance too far in the wrong direction, which is why we should oppose it, if we want a free society.
    - Reelin 7y ago
      > an obligation to make doing illegal things as easy as possible (possible) != (as easy as possible) The claim is that making illegal transactions impossible would cause societal harm. I agree that it's an amusing idea, but it's also extremely important and not much talked about. Bruce Schneier touched on it in a 2018 essay (https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2018/11/surveillance_kills_f.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2018/11/surveillanc...). > All social progress—from ending slavery to fighting for women's rights—began as ideas that were, quite literally, dangerous to assert.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  How does this relate to campaign finance and funding of political speech?
- jkepler 7y ago
  Better to build strong privacy by default into the one crypto with an 11-year track record for withstanding all attacks against it's network: Bitcoin. Of course, since consensus changes are really hard, and to preserve the 21 million coin hard limit, I suspect strong privacy will necessarily be built on layer 2 technologies like the Lightning Network. What's needed, and what Austrians (by citizenship or economic theory) want, is digital cash with real privacy.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    There's a consensus in Bitcoin that the main next step towards better privacy is using Schnorr signature, but in the last few years there were multiple security issues found in the Schnorr signature based multisig protocol (MuSig). After each improvement the devs prove the security of the protocol and present it in a cryptography conference, asking for peer reviews, that's why it's moving so slowly (which is great).
- alexmlamb 7y ago
  "ridiculous situation in Hong Kong" How is it ridiculous? I can't think of any government, except maybe Canada, that would just allow a part of their country to secede, especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country).
  - jhanschoo 7y ago
    Parent poster's comment unnecessarily villianizes Beijing's stance to the HK situation, but this comment is no better, and is flamewar-baiting. > just allow a part of their country to secede Organized HK protestors have a list of five demands and none of them involve secession. The only demand that involves a constitutional-level change is the demand for universal suffrage in HK to the HK government. They are not asking for any expansion of the powers of the HK govt. > especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country). It is news to me that the UK govt. is expressing support for the aims of the movement beyond emphasizing their generic right to protest. Do you have a source?
dmix 7y ago
> “If for example I go shopping, and it’s recorded exactly how much schnapps I’ve bought, that’s an invasion of my privacy,” he says. Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash? > Following a recent EU directive, Austrian banks are phasing out “ATM cards” and renaming them debit cards. And some banks are currently planning to equip the new debit cards with the ability to make payments online, as is common elsewhere. I'm confused do they mean they are just getting the ability to pay with debit cards at stores in 2019? Or is this just adding the VISA part to debit cards?
- LIV2 7y ago
  I'm assuming that their bank cards and debit cards are two different things Presumably their "bank cards" only use some local payment scheme rather than visa or MasterCard (explaining why it can't be used online) The newer "debit card" uses Visa or MasterCard which means it is accepted anywhere Visa/MasterCard is
  - t0astbread 7y ago
    I'm Austrian and as far as I understood it's just a name change. Functionally it always was a debit card.
    - LIV2 7y ago
      Looks like currently they're using Maestro and switching to MasterCard Debit which uses the credit card network Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash? Nobody knows because there are no real proposals, it's all just a PR stunt. It's vaguely hinted that shops would be forced to keep accepting cash. But the government presumably does not want people to pay their taxes with cash. I don't even think that's possible currently.
lioeters 7y ago
I'm no Luddite by any means, but on this topic I side with those who consider physical cash transaction a civil rights issue. I suppose people in some EU countries, for example, which have mostly (?) transitioned to a cashless society don't mind what a massive invasion of privacy it is. On the other hand, I do understand the advantages, the convenience, and perhaps the inevitability of going cashless. Already most of our financial transactions are being tracked and circulated ("peddled") in countless ways, as are our online activity, phone conversations, real-time location.. At this rate, future humans will look back at our concept of "privacy" and not comprehend what it means.
- _the_inflator 7y ago
  Privacy: crypto to the rescue.
  - a012 7y ago
    How exactly the crypto could rescue?
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      "something something blockchain!"
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Theoretically Monero would be a possible solution, but only if your sole requirement is anonymity. Heavy emphasis on only if though, since payment systems are much, much more than that requirement (i.e. dispute handling, chargebacks, insurance, fraud identification, etc.). I don't think there are any crypto implementations today that could compete with existing mainstream systems, which in itself is a statement that opens a can of worms on HN, but maybe someday.
      - guelo 7y ago
        As if the store that can't be bothered to accept cash is going to accept some hard to use fringe coin.
eloff 7y ago
As a software engineer, I feel all money should be digital and the IRS should be replaced with an algorithm. Fairer and more efficient for all. As a human living in a fallible state, I don't ever want the government to have that kind of power and visibility into my private life.
- Svip 7y ago
  You put a lot of trust in the people developing that algorithm. Do you get to vote for an algorithm replacement every four years?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    The algorithm exists. Just because it’s not machine-executable doesn’t make it not an algorithm.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      It's exercised by humans though, with gives _some_ accountability. Try asking a computer in court what it was thinking when it ran the algorithm.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        Why? The algo should obviously be public so if you went to court you'd question the algo or its impl, not the computer. After all, you only want restitution and correction of the issue, not punishment.
        tastroder 7y ago
        > The algo should obviously be public Given that, at least in the US, people had to regularly sue corporations that defend the secrecy of their fancy algorithms^W^W Excel sheets as trade secrets... that's not as obvious as you might think.
pushtheenvelope 7y ago
There is a very good presentation on the Case for Electronic Cash by Jerry Brito of the Coin Center non-profit. I highly recommend people watch it to understand why cash is important to preserve an open, liberal society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmXDJpYF46E&fbclid=IwAR3tBKD1PRUK8qt32VaR1K2uuF36JqLVSVvwkiA_2_TO7Up_5881Xf_Z8Yc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmXDJpYF46E&fbclid=IwAR3tBKD...
_trampeltier 7y ago
Every bank is a private company and can choose there customers. So if no bank want you (what reason ever) you just fall out of the system complete.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I totally agree with this. Japan is still mostly a cash based society. One of the things I love about it is that I can still rent a car or book a hotel room without a credit card. This keeps people on an even footing. If you are homeless without an address (and therefore a bank account), you can still buy things. If you have poor credit, then you can still pay with cash for anything. The anonymity of cash is nice, but the lack of discrimination of cash is its real feature.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Mostly cashless still in Japan but changing fast with PayPay and its competitors leading the adoption for many daily point of sales already.
- tw04 7y ago
  How so? You can work for cash and never interact with a bank at all.
  - skrause 7y ago
    How do you work for cash in a future cashless society?
- flukus 7y ago
  Nationalized banks with universal service obligations do/did exist. Even for a private bank it's pretty sweet deal though, practically every kid in Australia for the last 50 years got a savings account from ours, even though it was fully privatized 20 years ago many of us still use the same account, they've made some massive profits from that obligation.
- tastroder 7y ago
hpaavola 7y ago
Cashless society would be a pain for kids, homeless, people with trash credit history, etc. So either we need to force all banks to give their internet bank access and some sort of debit card to absolutely anybody who just asks that without any fees, or cash must be accepted.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  And if you make kids use cashless means of payment this means more tracking even earlier in life. No thank you.
t0astbread 7y ago
This makes me wonder how much fintech is regulated in regards to consumer privacy. You'd thing that with all the care that's being taken to (try to) ensure the safety of people's money, regulators would also consider their privacy.
cbhl 7y ago
If a seller is required, by law, to accept cash, what happens to online-only retailers like Amazon? Do they just close up shop and leave? Do they restrict online purchases to people within a reasonable drive of a retail location?
mehrdadn 7y ago
Forget all the issues with government control and illegal transactions and human rights and whatnot for a second. How are people supposed to transact in an emergency without cash? Say if there's an earthquake, the power/internet goes down, etc.?
beefield 7y ago
The real benefit to get rid of cash would be to allow properly negative interest rates.[1] At the same time I fully agree with the privacy worries on going cashless. So, what we really need are anonymous physical tokens whose value can change over time. Easy solution is to just tale the current bills and say that after one year, unless deposited to bank before that, are worth only 90% of the face value. But with current technological capabilities, and if someone would actually be interested, we should be able to come up with way better solutions. Solutions that actually make it easier to pay with these anonymous tokens than current cash. [1] I know. This is far from intuitive to accept. It took me literally months to accept that negative rates make any sense after the first negative yields popped up. To help you understand, let's say I have a fresh apple and you want to have an apple today. In the textbook case I am willing to give it to you today, if you give me tomorrow two apples, because I prefer also to have an apple today compared to having ot tomorrow. This is fine, but what about me having a big basket of apples about to rot, and willing to have also some apples in the winter? There is no law of nature saying that there should be someone willing to give me more apples next winter if I give them to him today. In this case it is easy to see that a negative interest should apply to lending of apples. And it should be economics 101 to understand that artificially limiting prices will often cause welfare losses.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  Money is not apples, money in a bank account doesn't rot. Why make it rot artificially? You don't explain.
  - beefield 7y ago
    That was to illustrate that it is possible that people prefer consumption in the future. To your question why to make money rot has many answers. But the easiest one is that if you belong to those who believe that central banks actually have a useful role in managing the economy, then why restrict artificially the main tools central banks have in their disposal, i.e. interest rates?
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
GhostVII 7y ago
I am essentially fully cashless at this point, I don't carry cash in my wallet or anything, but I still think it is incredibly important to have the option to use cash should I choose to. If for some reason I start getting rejected by banks, or dislike the restrictions that they are placing on me, it is a last resort that I can always fall back to. It prevents me from being fully dependent on private parties like banks, which I find valuable, even if I am unlikely to actually use it. I don't think that, as a society, we should be forcing people to hand over their private information to some bank in order to go through everyday life.
eitland 7y ago
Recently the governor of "Norges Bank", the central bank of Norway made it clear he wants to enforce that shops have to accept cash. The reason for this is that we might need cash in an emergency. Sources (for those who master Norwegian) : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%C3%B8ystein+olsen+kontanter&t=fpas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%C3%B8ystein+olsen+kontanter&t=fpa...
buzer 7y ago
One big issue with society that would be completely cashless is that it will essentially grant ability for foreign governments to control people in different countries. There is an on-going case in Finland where Boris Rotenberg (allegedly someone who is in inner circles of Russia's leadership) is in OFAC sanctions list due to Crimea occupation, but he also has Finnish citizenship and he's not in EU's sanctions list. Due to being on OFAC list Finnish banks are refusing to accept payments coming from his Finnish account in fear of US actions (including fines and sanctions against the banks). If you are not even allowed to do things in cash (and to be honest, it's pretty close to that in Finland already), you would also need to disallow banks from blocking transactions that are not breaking local laws. Otherwise in the worst case you are making it so that foreign governments have power to force people to commit crimes (like being unable to pay taxes since bank refuses to move the money).
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Privacy is definitely at stake in cash-less electronic transactions, but going cash-less might be the only way to curb corruption in a country like India. In India, only pathetic (<10-20%) percentage of people pay direct tax, what remains after corrupt bureaucrats take their share is what spent on development of the country. It's no brainer on why cash transactions is the preferred mode for the corrupt. Cash-less electronic transactions, fool-proof audit backed by tech like blockchain seems like only option left to curb this menace and save the country. As far as privacy is concerned, due to the loop-hole in the law, any citizen's bank account can be accessed by the authorities at any time; so cash-less transactions isn't going to change much here. Corrupt, don't use the bank accounts to store their stash anyways, at-least within the country. But India is not ready for cash-less transaction anytime soon, as evident from the demonetisation of 2016 in which promoting cash-less transaction was one of the main arguments.
fractallyte 7y ago
It's also worth noting that almost every bank in Austria charges customers for the 'privilege' of having a bank account...
- woodson 7y ago
  True. But no ATM fees! (Or did that change?)
  - fractallyte 7y ago
    There are no ATM fees, but that's also the case in other countries where a bank account is free.
iamsb 7y ago
Other than food and drinks, I have not really bought anything using cash in last couple of years. Everything else it seems I have been buying using a debit card, online or offline. So I am bit a lost on how this protects privacy. Is this only important in context of services such as legal prostitution, drug use etc where having cash transaction will feel safer? If that is the case, I am sure those businesses will continue to operate in cash-ful manner. If there are other use cases, please do share. As an aside Austria is the first country I came across where the immigration website uses phrase "third country workers"[1], which is mildly disappointing to see. [1] - https://www.migration.gv.at/en/welcome/ https://www.migration.gv.at/en/welcome/
- bmn__ 7y ago
  Why does the phrase disappoint you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_country_national https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_country_national
LoSboccacc 7y ago
wouldn't this make digital services incostitutional? should provider in Austria like Netflix start accepting makes cash envelopes?
sarcasmOrTears 7y ago
There is no debate about cashless honestly, it's like debating if raping children should be legal or not, except that without cash you easily get to a society where powerful people rule the world (see Epstein). Those who argue against cash should be seen with suspicion and removed from their positions of power if they have any. I'd say even jail time should be considered when it comes to anti-cash lobbying, using the same penalty currently used by enslaved but multiplied by the total population. Sounds absurd? Sounds like too much? It's the only way to keep those tyrannical maniacs in check.
ur-whale 7y ago
This makes me incredibly happy: there is finally a western European democracy that makes the outlawing of cash a true political issue. The EU has quietly taken away what I consider to be a fundamental human rights over the past 10 years (the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was), and no one noticed. Did you know you can't buy a car cash in most EU countries? [EDIT]: This is issue is nowhere on the political radar of most USians because it hasn't come to your shores. But it should, because it's coming.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > The EU has quietly taken away ... the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was How was this the EU and not the convenience of card payments? Is there an EU regulation making us use less cash?
  - ur-whale 7y ago
    I didn't mean to imply the EU as a body enforces this, but the limits are real: https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu-consommateurs/PDFs/PDF_EN/Limit_for_cash_payments_in_EU.pdf https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu...
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
      Interesting, thanks! For Austria this refers to § 61 Nationalbankgesetz (law on the National Bank): https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=10004409&FassungVom=2019-09-05 https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes... (in German, unsurprisingly). That reads (my rough translation): (1) [The ECB and other central banks emit Euro bank notes.] (2) The bank notes referred to in (1) must be accepted at their full face value without limits, unless the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment. IANAL, but to me this means like (a) there is already a law in Austria obliging businesses to always accept cash, except that (b) this might be meaningless since a business could always stipulate that "the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment".
peterjussi 7y ago
I don't see why cashless must mean non-anonymous. There are chargeable payment cards around the world that effectively are anonymous and cashless.
a3_nm 7y ago
In addition to privacy, another argument against credit cards are fees like interchange fees and assessments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee. When I pay by card, banks and Visa/Mastercard get a cut of my purchase, which the merchant doesn't get (and I don't think they are allowed to pass on these fees to the consumer). When I pay by cash, the merchant gets 100%. I usually prefer to give my money to a local shop rather than to financial middlemen.
- tatami 7y ago
  It's not quite 100%, the merchant has costs associated with using cash: The time a cashier has to spend counting the cash register's content, time spent on bank runs to put away earnings/get extra coins for change, some fees associated with it, some amount that gets "lost"... I remember the cost was less than credit cards take, but not much lower than Girocard payments.
l0b0 7y ago
People will still do illegal/subversive/socially unacceptable things and be paid for them. So a "cashless" society would generate a massive demand for alternative forms of currency. There are already plenty of those, including digital ones, so this might in the long run be disastrous for national currencies. Which would be interesting but also disastrous for a lot of people in the meantime.

109 points by rumcajz 7y ago

What I find most interesting is how those parties seem to find out what people wants and incorporate it into their agenda. Very different thing is parties building their agendas, usually around authoritarian measures coming from some lobbies and then shoving them down our throats with massive amounts of propaganda.

seibelj 7y ago

The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously. I think if you get to the root of the issue, most governments would prefer to track every transaction to ensure compliance with tax, money laundering, [insert whatever regulation]. However I think the state already has an absurd amount of power and the citizens need every tool possible to prevent governments from hurting them. Anonymous transactions, such as those using cash but also using new technologies like privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, are essential to keeping the state from becoming a panopticon. You can already see the inevitable outcome of all-powerful government with the ridiculous situation in Hong Kong and the social credit system in China.

cstejerean 7y ago
It’s not just anonymity. To get a credit/debit card you need to agree to some TOS, probably binding arbitration, and are at the mercy of the bank deciding whether or not they want to cancel your account. That would be my problem with cashless, the idea that people could be cut off entirely from the system and have no way to transact. Until the government / central bank will issue everyone a irrevocable bank account with the right to transact for free indefinitely getting rid of cash has bigger issues than just privacy implications.
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  The solution to that particular problem would be to make it a legal right to have a bank account. It doesn't have to have all the extras, just an account that stores your money, and a card you can use for accessing your money.
  - mNovak 7y ago
    This circles back to the anonymity issue though.. what level of authentication is required to obtain said card? Can I stand there and blatantly collect 20 cards under different names? How does the bank know I'm not a terrorist which they are legally bound not to transact with? I suppose if they're just freely distributed from a vending machine, it just becomes plastic bills of arbitrary denomination.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    That is an extremely sweeping requirement that also embeds a lot of assumptions into the legal system that are not sensible. We've seen something similar before when South Korean banks [0] managed to lock themselves in to the dawn of the software industry and have spent more than a decade looking like idiots. This whole situation is happening because cash is very flexible and we innovated away from it when it became a bad idea. At any stage over the next few decades the basic nature of the playing field could change and this 'right to have a bank account' could totally stomp out innovation. Not to mention; if at any point now or in the future a loophole slips in to the legislative process consumers could get roasted. This is a poor solution to a non-problem. Just let people transact in cash. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-koreas-online-banking-system-is-stuck-in-1996/#6b073554527c https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...
    - toomanybeersies 7y ago
      Banks have been around for hundreds of years. All I'm proposing is that there is a legal right for people to hold a bank account of some form, where they are able to put their money so they don't have all their life savings in cash under the bed. I'm not suggesting that we ban cash at all, just that people have a right to securely store their money and the option to use cashless transactions if they choose. Being legally required to hold a bank account use cashless transactions is just as much of a violation of one's rights as being barred from opening a bank account and being forced to use cash for all transactions. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It's not about allowing people to transact in cash, but allowing them alternative choices, all of which should be legal. If you can't hold a bank account (because the banks have decided you're not allowed one for whatever reason), you need to use cash for everything. This means you always have a relatively large amount of cash on you. Not only are you now at greater risk of burglary or robbery, the consequences of being a victim are now even greater. You also can't put money in a savings account, or pay for things online. I've had my house burgled and had large amounts of cash stolen from me before. There was nothing the police could do. Even if they caught the burglar, the money wasn't coming back to me. It was a significant hit to my personal finances at the time. Bank accounts and cashless transactions aren't just a way for the government to keep tabs on the population, they're also a form of security for the general population.
henrikschroder 7y ago
> The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously. Well, a big argument for cash is that it allows you to do illegal transactions as well, and that this is extremely important, because who decides what is illegal and not? Making all illegal transactions impossible is a great way to stop civil disobedience, to stop dissenting movements, to stop anything the current regime simply doesn't like. But those are the things driving our society forward.
- esoterica 7y ago
  That's kind of an amusing line of thinking, that the government has an obligation to make doing illegal things as easy as possible, because sometimes doing the illegal thing is morally permissible. How far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole? For example, the existence of a police force makes it harder to break the law, should we disband the police to make engaging in civil disobedience easier?
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Government is us, the people. It's not some mythical entity separate from the society it exists in. How far are you willing to go the other way? If the police knew where every single citizen was 100% of the time, crime rates would plummet! Super easy, fit everyone with a gps anklet, and make it punishable with jailtime for anyone who tampers with them or removes them. Tadaa! It's a balance between fascism and liberty, between control and freedom. Removing cash moves that balance too far in the wrong direction, which is why we should oppose it, if we want a free society.
  - Reelin 7y ago
    > an obligation to make doing illegal things as easy as possible (possible) != (as easy as possible) The claim is that making illegal transactions impossible would cause societal harm. I agree that it's an amusing idea, but it's also extremely important and not much talked about. Bruce Schneier touched on it in a 2018 essay (https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2018/11/surveillance_kills_f.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2018/11/surveillanc...). > All social progress—from ending slavery to fighting for women's rights—began as ideas that were, quite literally, dangerous to assert.
CameronNemo 7y ago
How does this relate to campaign finance and funding of political speech?
jkepler 7y ago
Better to build strong privacy by default into the one crypto with an 11-year track record for withstanding all attacks against it's network: Bitcoin. Of course, since consensus changes are really hard, and to preserve the 21 million coin hard limit, I suspect strong privacy will necessarily be built on layer 2 technologies like the Lightning Network. What's needed, and what Austrians (by citizenship or economic theory) want, is digital cash with real privacy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xiphias2 7y ago
  There's a consensus in Bitcoin that the main next step towards better privacy is using Schnorr signature, but in the last few years there were multiple security issues found in the Schnorr signature based multisig protocol (MuSig). After each improvement the devs prove the security of the protocol and present it in a cryptography conference, asking for peer reviews, that's why it's moving so slowly (which is great).
alexmlamb 7y ago
"ridiculous situation in Hong Kong" How is it ridiculous? I can't think of any government, except maybe Canada, that would just allow a part of their country to secede, especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country).
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  Parent poster's comment unnecessarily villianizes Beijing's stance to the HK situation, but this comment is no better, and is flamewar-baiting. > just allow a part of their country to secede Organized HK protestors have a list of five demands and none of them involve secession. The only demand that involves a constitutional-level change is the demand for universal suffrage in HK to the HK government. They are not asking for any expansion of the powers of the HK govt. > especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country). It is news to me that the UK govt. is expressing support for the aims of the movement beyond emphasizing their generic right to protest. Do you have a source?

dmix 7y ago

> “If for example I go shopping, and it’s recorded exactly how much schnapps I’ve bought, that’s an invasion of my privacy,” he says. Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash? > Following a recent EU directive, Austrian banks are phasing out “ATM cards” and renaming them debit cards. And some banks are currently planning to equip the new debit cards with the ability to make payments online, as is common elsewhere. I'm confused do they mean they are just getting the ability to pay with debit cards at stores in 2019? Or is this just adding the VISA part to debit cards?

LIV2 7y ago
I'm assuming that their bank cards and debit cards are two different things Presumably their "bank cards" only use some local payment scheme rather than visa or MasterCard (explaining why it can't be used online) The newer "debit card" uses Visa or MasterCard which means it is accepted anywhere Visa/MasterCard is
- t0astbread 7y ago
  I'm Austrian and as far as I understood it's just a name change. Functionally it always was a debit card.
  - LIV2 7y ago
    Looks like currently they're using Maestro and switching to MasterCard Debit which uses the credit card network Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)
tom_mellior 7y ago
> Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash? Nobody knows because there are no real proposals, it's all just a PR stunt. It's vaguely hinted that shops would be forced to keep accepting cash. But the government presumably does not want people to pay their taxes with cash. I don't even think that's possible currently.

lioeters 7y ago

I'm no Luddite by any means, but on this topic I side with those who consider physical cash transaction a civil rights issue. I suppose people in some EU countries, for example, which have mostly (?) transitioned to a cashless society don't mind what a massive invasion of privacy it is. On the other hand, I do understand the advantages, the convenience, and perhaps the inevitability of going cashless. Already most of our financial transactions are being tracked and circulated ("peddled") in countless ways, as are our online activity, phone conversations, real-time location.. At this rate, future humans will look back at our concept of "privacy" and not comprehend what it means.

_the_inflator 7y ago
Privacy: crypto to the rescue.
- a012 7y ago
  How exactly the crypto could rescue?
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    "something something blockchain!"
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Theoretically Monero would be a possible solution, but only if your sole requirement is anonymity. Heavy emphasis on only if though, since payment systems are much, much more than that requirement (i.e. dispute handling, chargebacks, insurance, fraud identification, etc.). I don't think there are any crypto implementations today that could compete with existing mainstream systems, which in itself is a statement that opens a can of worms on HN, but maybe someday.
    - guelo 7y ago
      As if the store that can't be bothered to accept cash is going to accept some hard to use fringe coin.

eloff 7y ago

As a software engineer, I feel all money should be digital and the IRS should be replaced with an algorithm. Fairer and more efficient for all. As a human living in a fallible state, I don't ever want the government to have that kind of power and visibility into my private life.

Svip 7y ago
You put a lot of trust in the people developing that algorithm. Do you get to vote for an algorithm replacement every four years?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  The algorithm exists. Just because it’s not machine-executable doesn’t make it not an algorithm.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    It's exercised by humans though, with gives _some_ accountability. Try asking a computer in court what it was thinking when it ran the algorithm.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      Why? The algo should obviously be public so if you went to court you'd question the algo or its impl, not the computer. After all, you only want restitution and correction of the issue, not punishment.
      - tastroder 7y ago
        > The algo should obviously be public Given that, at least in the US, people had to regularly sue corporations that defend the secrecy of their fancy algorithms^W^W Excel sheets as trade secrets... that's not as obvious as you might think.

pushtheenvelope 7y ago

There is a very good presentation on the Case for Electronic Cash by Jerry Brito of the Coin Center non-profit. I highly recommend people watch it to understand why cash is important to preserve an open, liberal society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmXDJpYF46E&fbclid=IwAR3tBKD1PRUK8qt32VaR1K2uuF36JqLVSVvwkiA_2_TO7Up_5881Xf_Z8Yc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmXDJpYF46E&fbclid=IwAR3tBKD...

_trampeltier 7y ago

Every bank is a private company and can choose there customers. So if no bank want you (what reason ever) you just fall out of the system complete.

mikekchar 7y ago
I totally agree with this. Japan is still mostly a cash based society. One of the things I love about it is that I can still rent a car or book a hotel room without a credit card. This keeps people on an even footing. If you are homeless without an address (and therefore a bank account), you can still buy things. If you have poor credit, then you can still pay with cash for anything. The anonymity of cash is nice, but the lack of discrimination of cash is its real feature.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Mostly cashless still in Japan but changing fast with PayPay and its competitors leading the adoption for many daily point of sales already.
tw04 7y ago
How so? You can work for cash and never interact with a bank at all.
- skrause 7y ago
  How do you work for cash in a future cashless society?
flukus 7y ago
Nationalized banks with universal service obligations do/did exist. Even for a private bank it's pretty sweet deal though, practically every kid in Australia for the last 50 years got a savings account from ours, even though it was fully privatized 20 years ago many of us still use the same account, they've made some massive profits from that obligation.
tastroder 7y ago

hpaavola 7y ago

Cashless society would be a pain for kids, homeless, people with trash credit history, etc. So either we need to force all banks to give their internet bank access and some sort of debit card to absolutely anybody who just asks that without any fees, or cash must be accepted.

ekianjo 7y ago
And if you make kids use cashless means of payment this means more tracking even earlier in life. No thank you.

t0astbread 7y ago

This makes me wonder how much fintech is regulated in regards to consumer privacy. You'd thing that with all the care that's being taken to (try to) ensure the safety of people's money, regulators would also consider their privacy.

cbhl 7y ago

If a seller is required, by law, to accept cash, what happens to online-only retailers like Amazon? Do they just close up shop and leave? Do they restrict online purchases to people within a reasonable drive of a retail location?

mehrdadn 7y ago

Forget all the issues with government control and illegal transactions and human rights and whatnot for a second. How are people supposed to transact in an emergency without cash? Say if there's an earthquake, the power/internet goes down, etc.?

beefield 7y ago

The real benefit to get rid of cash would be to allow properly negative interest rates.[1] At the same time I fully agree with the privacy worries on going cashless. So, what we really need are anonymous physical tokens whose value can change over time. Easy solution is to just tale the current bills and say that after one year, unless deposited to bank before that, are worth only 90% of the face value. But with current technological capabilities, and if someone would actually be interested, we should be able to come up with way better solutions. Solutions that actually make it easier to pay with these anonymous tokens than current cash. [1] I know. This is far from intuitive to accept. It took me literally months to accept that negative rates make any sense after the first negative yields popped up. To help you understand, let's say I have a fresh apple and you want to have an apple today. In the textbook case I am willing to give it to you today, if you give me tomorrow two apples, because I prefer also to have an apple today compared to having ot tomorrow. This is fine, but what about me having a big basket of apples about to rot, and willing to have also some apples in the winter? There is no law of nature saying that there should be someone willing to give me more apples next winter if I give them to him today. In this case it is easy to see that a negative interest should apply to lending of apples. And it should be economics 101 to understand that artificially limiting prices will often cause welfare losses.

tom_mellior 7y ago
Money is not apples, money in a bank account doesn't rot. Why make it rot artificially? You don't explain.
- beefield 7y ago
  That was to illustrate that it is possible that people prefer consumption in the future. To your question why to make money rot has many answers. But the easiest one is that if you belong to those who believe that central banks actually have a useful role in managing the economy, then why restrict artificially the main tools central banks have in their disposal, i.e. interest rates?
  - tom_mellior 7y ago

GhostVII 7y ago

I am essentially fully cashless at this point, I don't carry cash in my wallet or anything, but I still think it is incredibly important to have the option to use cash should I choose to. If for some reason I start getting rejected by banks, or dislike the restrictions that they are placing on me, it is a last resort that I can always fall back to. It prevents me from being fully dependent on private parties like banks, which I find valuable, even if I am unlikely to actually use it. I don't think that, as a society, we should be forcing people to hand over their private information to some bank in order to go through everyday life.

eitland 7y ago

Recently the governor of "Norges Bank", the central bank of Norway made it clear he wants to enforce that shops have to accept cash. The reason for this is that we might need cash in an emergency. Sources (for those who master Norwegian) : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%C3%B8ystein+olsen+kontanter&t=fpas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%C3%B8ystein+olsen+kontanter&t=fpa...

buzer 7y ago

One big issue with society that would be completely cashless is that it will essentially grant ability for foreign governments to control people in different countries. There is an on-going case in Finland where Boris Rotenberg (allegedly someone who is in inner circles of Russia's leadership) is in OFAC sanctions list due to Crimea occupation, but he also has Finnish citizenship and he's not in EU's sanctions list. Due to being on OFAC list Finnish banks are refusing to accept payments coming from his Finnish account in fear of US actions (including fines and sanctions against the banks). If you are not even allowed to do things in cash (and to be honest, it's pretty close to that in Finland already), you would also need to disallow banks from blocking transactions that are not breaking local laws. Otherwise in the worst case you are making it so that foreign governments have power to force people to commit crimes (like being unable to pay taxes since bank refuses to move the money).

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Privacy is definitely at stake in cash-less electronic transactions, but going cash-less might be the only way to curb corruption in a country like India. In India, only pathetic (<10-20%) percentage of people pay direct tax, what remains after corrupt bureaucrats take their share is what spent on development of the country. It's no brainer on why cash transactions is the preferred mode for the corrupt. Cash-less electronic transactions, fool-proof audit backed by tech like blockchain seems like only option left to curb this menace and save the country. As far as privacy is concerned, due to the loop-hole in the law, any citizen's bank account can be accessed by the authorities at any time; so cash-less transactions isn't going to change much here. Corrupt, don't use the bank accounts to store their stash anyways, at-least within the country. But India is not ready for cash-less transaction anytime soon, as evident from the demonetisation of 2016 in which promoting cash-less transaction was one of the main arguments.

fractallyte 7y ago

It's also worth noting that almost every bank in Austria charges customers for the 'privilege' of having a bank account...

woodson 7y ago
True. But no ATM fees! (Or did that change?)
- fractallyte 7y ago
  There are no ATM fees, but that's also the case in other countries where a bank account is free.

iamsb 7y ago

Other than food and drinks, I have not really bought anything using cash in last couple of years. Everything else it seems I have been buying using a debit card, online or offline. So I am bit a lost on how this protects privacy. Is this only important in context of services such as legal prostitution, drug use etc where having cash transaction will feel safer? If that is the case, I am sure those businesses will continue to operate in cash-ful manner. If there are other use cases, please do share. As an aside Austria is the first country I came across where the immigration website uses phrase "third country workers"[1], which is mildly disappointing to see. [1] - https://www.migration.gv.at/en/welcome/ https://www.migration.gv.at/en/welcome/

bmn__ 7y ago
Why does the phrase disappoint you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_country_national https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_country_national

LoSboccacc 7y ago

wouldn't this make digital services incostitutional? should provider in Austria like Netflix start accepting makes cash envelopes?

sarcasmOrTears 7y ago

There is no debate about cashless honestly, it's like debating if raping children should be legal or not, except that without cash you easily get to a society where powerful people rule the world (see Epstein). Those who argue against cash should be seen with suspicion and removed from their positions of power if they have any. I'd say even jail time should be considered when it comes to anti-cash lobbying, using the same penalty currently used by enslaved but multiplied by the total population. Sounds absurd? Sounds like too much? It's the only way to keep those tyrannical maniacs in check.

ur-whale 7y ago

This makes me incredibly happy: there is finally a western European democracy that makes the outlawing of cash a true political issue. The EU has quietly taken away what I consider to be a fundamental human rights over the past 10 years (the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was), and no one noticed. Did you know you can't buy a car cash in most EU countries? [EDIT]: This is issue is nowhere on the political radar of most USians because it hasn't come to your shores. But it should, because it's coming.

tom_mellior 7y ago
> The EU has quietly taken away ... the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was How was this the EU and not the convenience of card payments? Is there an EU regulation making us use less cash?
- ur-whale 7y ago
  I didn't mean to imply the EU as a body enforces this, but the limits are real: https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu-consommateurs/PDFs/PDF_EN/Limit_for_cash_payments_in_EU.pdf https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eu...
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    Interesting, thanks! For Austria this refers to § 61 Nationalbankgesetz (law on the National Bank): https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=10004409&FassungVom=2019-09-05 https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes... (in German, unsurprisingly). That reads (my rough translation): (1) [The ECB and other central banks emit Euro bank notes.] (2) The bank notes referred to in (1) must be accepted at their full face value without limits, unless the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment. IANAL, but to me this means like (a) there is already a law in Austria obliging businesses to always accept cash, except that (b) this might be meaningless since a business could always stipulate that "the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment".

peterjussi 7y ago

I don't see why cashless must mean non-anonymous. There are chargeable payment cards around the world that effectively are anonymous and cashless.

a3_nm 7y ago

In addition to privacy, another argument against credit cards are fees like interchange fees and assessments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee. When I pay by card, banks and Visa/Mastercard get a cut of my purchase, which the merchant doesn't get (and I don't think they are allowed to pass on these fees to the consumer). When I pay by cash, the merchant gets 100%. I usually prefer to give my money to a local shop rather than to financial middlemen.

tatami 7y ago
It's not quite 100%, the merchant has costs associated with using cash: The time a cashier has to spend counting the cash register's content, time spent on bank runs to put away earnings/get extra coins for change, some fees associated with it, some amount that gets "lost"... I remember the cost was less than credit cards take, but not much lower than Girocard payments.

l0b0 7y ago

People will still do illegal/subversive/socially unacceptable things and be paid for them. So a "cashless" society would generate a massive demand for alternative forms of currency. There are already plenty of those, including digital ones, so this might in the long run be disastrous for national currencies. Which would be interesting but also disastrous for a lot of people in the meantime.