7 ms·

With the death of cash, privacy faces a deeply uncertain future

72 points by smooke 6y ago

typenil 6y ago
As long as it's framed as a way to cut off immoral right wing extremists from the financial system, Silicon Valley will enthusiastically embrace dystopian government control of currency.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- excannuck 6y ago
  And 20 years ago, neo-cons embracing dystopian government control to make sure muslims didn't use cash. It's all control. But instead of seeing it as right vs. left, its better framed as authoritarians (historic and modern left [1], Silicon Valley, FBI) vs. people who value their freedom and privacy either because its innate to their being, or because their particular group is kept under a watchful eye (gays in the 80s, muslims 20 years ago, christians people today). Avoid getting ensnared in the identity trap the way you just did. Once you do, you've accepted the basic premise of identity politics and, therefore, things like CRT; which is just 's/class/identity/g' for Marxism. [1] that is all of the left's history from the Jacobins until today minus twenty or thirty years centered around the early 90s.
  - kevinventullo 6y ago
    Christian people are kept under a watchful eye in the US today? All 200 million of them?
    - faissaloo 6y ago
      Yes, along with everyone else, the NSA exists.
    - excannuck 6y ago
      What's your question? What's your point? That mass surveillance doesn't exist and therefore the number of Christians are impractical to surveil? Are you sure that the number is 200 million? Is that self-identified including "cultural" Christians who merely inherited a label? Are you counting the person who got water sprinkled as a baby and never set foot in a Church? Does your number lump the post-modern wing of Presbyterianism with Latin-mass Catholics? If you know anything about Christianity you'd know that to reach 200 million you must be including all of the above. And, if you did lump them all together, then you don't really understand Christians. Christians are quickly becoming the most discriminated class in America. By Christians I mean those coherent with Christian teaching. You might not like them, and you might agree with their persecution and so you might not like that the ennobled label of "victimhood" is rightly applied to them. But, nonetheless, Christians are increasingly under pressure in the West. But, don't worry. There aren't that many of them. Certainly not 200 million.
  - typenil 6y ago
    Neither party values freedom or privacy. Who can I vote for who even pretends? I'm gay and largely agree with leftist ideals, but completely disagree with modern tactics by both parties. But the left controls technology, and so I criticize them more because there's more at stake. So I'm an identitarian for criticizing Silicon Valley for constantly engaging in that kind of discourse? Are you identitarian for assuming I am one? I criticize Silicon Valley because they are worthy of criticism. You say they aren't?
    - excannuck 6y ago
      You don't vote for a party, you vote for an individual. Unless a party has some overarching values that you care about (say you have a strong opinion about abortion either way, and your local candidate is trustworthy on that issue). Instead you focus on individual candidates. Nationally (if you're in the USA), guys like Rand Paul, or Ron Wyden have worked across the aisle on these issues. You have to look at individual cases with care, even when they vote the same. Justin Amarsh appears to follow his conscience and voted against Trump in the impeachment and I respect him for his coherency. Romney also voted against Trump, but that was pure opportunism and the old very neo-connish GOP trying to wrestle control back from the "pacifist" wing of the GOP. But what if both your candidates suck? Well, politics is local. Make sure you pay attention to the primary and refuse to back a neo-con/lib, be they Pelosi, Romney or whatever.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations? Transactions are slower than sending money electronically, the paper is subject to decay, and if your cash gets stolen you have no recourse to getting it back. The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
- remirk 6y ago
  > Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations Buying groceries.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    Even that is becoming more and more rare. The makeup of a 30-checkout supermarket here (Sweden) is probably 20 self-checkout, 5-no-cash manual ones and 5 that can handle cash. Many if not all small businesses like hotdog vendors, flea markets etc have completely dropped cash because it's expensive and inconvenient. Once the costs of cash management is higher than that of cards or digital transactions, there is no incentive. It's easy to say "we need cash for privacy" but if people are doing better business without cash, it's hard to convince them.
- generalizations 6y ago
  > Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations? That sounds like a restatement of 'who needs privacy if you have nothing to hide'. I use cash because I don't feel like making my purchase history available to anyone with deep pockets. If someone wants to figure out what I buy, I'd rather they just go ahead and hire someone to follow me around.
- fatsdomino001 6y ago
  Giving money to homeless people. And as a general principle I don't like having all of my transactions logged and tracked. That's the same fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide, then submit yourself to complete tracking"
korse 6y ago
I don't like not being able to participate in society when the bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I am committing fraud. Taking away cash puts me at the mercy of these systems, which is uncomfortable. I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash, and there are never any 'pending' transactions.
- DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
  > I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash It's the opposite for me. It is much more difficult for me to keep track of cash expenses while budgeting and it is easy to forget individual transactions. So much that at this point if I ever take out cash, I consider that money spent as far as my budget is concerned.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > I don't like not being able to participate in society when the bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I am committing fraud. Now imagine when you are too poor to have a bank account, your credit history prevents you from getting a credit card in the first place, or you don't have a permanent address to associate with a digital payment card. A cashless society is one that will only further exclude those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cashless-society-poor-exclusion_n_5a857082e4b0ab6daf463c4a https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cashless-society-poor-exclusi... It is not something to strive for.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    depends on what the replacement for cash is. If it's private credit cards that lock the marginalised out then yes. If It's some frictionless digital cash replacement like a few of the central bank currencies that have been floating around I'd welcome it. Seeing how long it took for people to receive covid relief funds, if you could just distribute money to everyone in a country instantly it'd be a step up.
    - CarelessExpert 6y ago
camjohnson26 6y ago
This is the real killer app of cryptocurrency. Monero is a decentralized, untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy. All the arguments against cryptocurrency can also be applied to cash, but that doesn’t take away their main value proposition, which is a mathematically secure way to send payments while protecting the sender’s privacy.
- blueprint 6y ago
  As a monero contributor, I can say one problem differentiating it still from the capabilities of cash is the inability to give Monero to someone who doesn't already have a wallet. there's trust involved in every solution we know of so far.
  - dougk16 6y ago
    I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a few years haha.
    - crusty 6y ago
      That doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me, it sounds like an investment vehicle. The reason cash is cash is that there's no inherent benefit to sitting on it. No one is going to be able to trade 10 $5 bills they put in the drawer this year for 5 $100 bills in a year or two, and we all understand that and operate on that shared understanding. If there's a hope and a real chance that I could get rich by just sitting on a cryptocurrency, I'll have to weigh its divestment against holding it. And the people or entities that have the biggest counterweight to investment are likely to be those who get some additional benefit besides its monetary value that they'd have to pay mightily for with cash anyway, like anonymity for practical rather than political reasons.
- 6y ago
theonlybutlet 6y ago
There will always be an alternative, maybe even just bartering. Aside from organized crime, simple tax avoidance will be the main driver.
rvense 6y ago
This article is very flawed. It mentions two scenarios: decentralized, uncontrolled money, versus government control. But it is missing the third scenario, which is the on that is actually happening in most places: plain old privatization. The Chinese government might be trying to build a state-backed digital currency, but as the article states it is already almost cashless. And in Europe, as far as I know, each country already has one or a few de facto standard app-based solutions for digital payments between private persons. My country has instant bank transfers between banks and one mobile payment app. And at some point, the (American) smartphone solutions are likely to allow person-to-person transfer. This is all based on existing, privatized banking infrastructure which, while obviously not completely outside government control, is certainly not a public resource like the cash-based infrastructure was.
siliconc0w 6y ago
Societies need to implement rules so that any sharing of a user's data needs to flow through data repositories that are controlled by the user and so they can authorize and audit each of these flows. Sort of like an oAuth dialogue, "Mortage Lender A wants access to your 2020 after-tax income" and you'd give them limited access so they could underwrite the loan and it'd be illegal to store the user's data any longer than necessary for that purpose. This would give companies cleaner data and common API while eliminating the possibly for anti-consumer data middle men like credit bureaus who could be then be summarily launched into space.
decker 6y ago
Cash isn't dead. Even in a pandemic, there's a lot of stores that still accept it. This article seems more like clickbait FUD for pumping cryptocurrency.
- fakedang 6y ago
  This actually got me thinking.... What if someone utilized GPT-3 to write incoherent garbage that can pass off in front of Quant firm's sentiment analyzers as trending topics? If one were invested enough, one could certainly pump all sorts of stocks too.
- danShumway 6y ago
  Philadelphia recently passed a law outright requiring stores to accept cash; they viewed requiring a bank account and credit card to be an accessibility problem for homeless residents. A couple of fast-food places I (pre-pandemic) used to frequent switched from requiring credit cards to accepting both afterwards, which was kind of nice. There is reason in general to be concerned about the lack of good, private digital payment systems, but there are still plenty of cities where a pro-cash sentiment is strong, or at least a pro-"cash should be an option" sentiment. And I suspect (but can't confirm) that rural areas might also bias towards more cash transactions as well. The general trend away from cash is something to pay attention to, but depending on where you live, it may not be an emergency right now.
99chrisbard 6y ago
Cash please; https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-cities-and-finance https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-citie...
upofadown 6y ago
There is a third way to have a government issued electronic currency that provides privacy for the purchaser. So the government can't cut off an individual but they can still collect sales taxes. * https://taler.net/ https://taler.net/
andreskytt 6y ago
Would someone define privacy, please? I have searched far and wide and can only find scholarly articles on the various approaches to privacy but there is no commonly accepted definition. What I’ve found, however, is that people often implicitly define privacy as the right to lie. Nobody should know how much money I have and should be relying on my statement alone. True, not all governments or other institutions are worthy of the full truth. But it is also true, that any cooperation involves a level of trust hard to reach when one side reserves the right to lie without consequence.

72 points by smooke 6y ago

As long as it's framed as a way to cut off immoral right wing extremists from the financial system, Silicon Valley will enthusiastically embrace dystopian government control of currency.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
excannuck 6y ago
And 20 years ago, neo-cons embracing dystopian government control to make sure muslims didn't use cash. It's all control. But instead of seeing it as right vs. left, its better framed as authoritarians (historic and modern left [1], Silicon Valley, FBI) vs. people who value their freedom and privacy either because its innate to their being, or because their particular group is kept under a watchful eye (gays in the 80s, muslims 20 years ago, christians people today). Avoid getting ensnared in the identity trap the way you just did. Once you do, you've accepted the basic premise of identity politics and, therefore, things like CRT; which is just 's/class/identity/g' for Marxism. [1] that is all of the left's history from the Jacobins until today minus twenty or thirty years centered around the early 90s.
- kevinventullo 6y ago
  Christian people are kept under a watchful eye in the US today? All 200 million of them?
  - faissaloo 6y ago
    Yes, along with everyone else, the NSA exists.
  - excannuck 6y ago
    What's your question? What's your point? That mass surveillance doesn't exist and therefore the number of Christians are impractical to surveil? Are you sure that the number is 200 million? Is that self-identified including "cultural" Christians who merely inherited a label? Are you counting the person who got water sprinkled as a baby and never set foot in a Church? Does your number lump the post-modern wing of Presbyterianism with Latin-mass Catholics? If you know anything about Christianity you'd know that to reach 200 million you must be including all of the above. And, if you did lump them all together, then you don't really understand Christians. Christians are quickly becoming the most discriminated class in America. By Christians I mean those coherent with Christian teaching. You might not like them, and you might agree with their persecution and so you might not like that the ennobled label of "victimhood" is rightly applied to them. But, nonetheless, Christians are increasingly under pressure in the West. But, don't worry. There aren't that many of them. Certainly not 200 million.
- typenil 6y ago
  Neither party values freedom or privacy. Who can I vote for who even pretends? I'm gay and largely agree with leftist ideals, but completely disagree with modern tactics by both parties. But the left controls technology, and so I criticize them more because there's more at stake. So I'm an identitarian for criticizing Silicon Valley for constantly engaging in that kind of discourse? Are you identitarian for assuming I am one? I criticize Silicon Valley because they are worthy of criticism. You say they aren't?
  - excannuck 6y ago
    You don't vote for a party, you vote for an individual. Unless a party has some overarching values that you care about (say you have a strong opinion about abortion either way, and your local candidate is trustworthy on that issue). Instead you focus on individual candidates. Nationally (if you're in the USA), guys like Rand Paul, or Ron Wyden have worked across the aisle on these issues. You have to look at individual cases with care, even when they vote the same. Justin Amarsh appears to follow his conscience and voted against Trump in the impeachment and I respect him for his coherency. Romney also voted against Trump, but that was pure opportunism and the old very neo-connish GOP trying to wrestle control back from the "pacifist" wing of the GOP. But what if both your candidates suck? Well, politics is local. Make sure you pay attention to the primary and refuse to back a neo-con/lib, be they Pelosi, Romney or whatever.

camjohnson26 6y ago

Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations? Transactions are slower than sending money electronically, the paper is subject to decay, and if your cash gets stolen you have no recourse to getting it back. The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.

remirk 6y ago
> Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations Buying groceries.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  Even that is becoming more and more rare. The makeup of a 30-checkout supermarket here (Sweden) is probably 20 self-checkout, 5-no-cash manual ones and 5 that can handle cash. Many if not all small businesses like hotdog vendors, flea markets etc have completely dropped cash because it's expensive and inconvenient. Once the costs of cash management is higher than that of cards or digital transactions, there is no incentive. It's easy to say "we need cash for privacy" but if people are doing better business without cash, it's hard to convince them.
generalizations 6y ago
> Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations? That sounds like a restatement of 'who needs privacy if you have nothing to hide'. I use cash because I don't feel like making my purchase history available to anyone with deep pockets. If someone wants to figure out what I buy, I'd rather they just go ahead and hire someone to follow me around.
fatsdomino001 6y ago
Giving money to homeless people. And as a general principle I don't like having all of my transactions logged and tracked. That's the same fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide, then submit yourself to complete tracking"

korse 6y ago

I don't like not being able to participate in society when the bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I am committing fraud. Taking away cash puts me at the mercy of these systems, which is uncomfortable. I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash, and there are never any 'pending' transactions.

DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
> I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash It's the opposite for me. It is much more difficult for me to keep track of cash expenses while budgeting and it is easy to forget individual transactions. So much that at this point if I ever take out cash, I consider that money spent as far as my budget is concerned.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> I don't like not being able to participate in society when the bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I am committing fraud. Now imagine when you are too poor to have a bank account, your credit history prevents you from getting a credit card in the first place, or you don't have a permanent address to associate with a digital payment card. A cashless society is one that will only further exclude those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cashless-society-poor-exclusion_n_5a857082e4b0ab6daf463c4a https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cashless-society-poor-exclusi... It is not something to strive for.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  depends on what the replacement for cash is. If it's private credit cards that lock the marginalised out then yes. If It's some frictionless digital cash replacement like a few of the central bank currencies that have been floating around I'd welcome it. Seeing how long it took for people to receive covid relief funds, if you could just distribute money to everyone in a country instantly it'd be a step up.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago

camjohnson26 6y ago

This is the real killer app of cryptocurrency. Monero is a decentralized, untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy. All the arguments against cryptocurrency can also be applied to cash, but that doesn’t take away their main value proposition, which is a mathematically secure way to send payments while protecting the sender’s privacy.

blueprint 6y ago
As a monero contributor, I can say one problem differentiating it still from the capabilities of cash is the inability to give Monero to someone who doesn't already have a wallet. there's trust involved in every solution we know of so far.
- dougk16 6y ago
  I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a few years haha.
  - crusty 6y ago
    That doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me, it sounds like an investment vehicle. The reason cash is cash is that there's no inherent benefit to sitting on it. No one is going to be able to trade 10 $5 bills they put in the drawer this year for 5 $100 bills in a year or two, and we all understand that and operate on that shared understanding. If there's a hope and a real chance that I could get rich by just sitting on a cryptocurrency, I'll have to weigh its divestment against holding it. And the people or entities that have the biggest counterweight to investment are likely to be those who get some additional benefit besides its monetary value that they'd have to pay mightily for with cash anyway, like anonymity for practical rather than political reasons.
6y ago

theonlybutlet 6y ago

There will always be an alternative, maybe even just bartering. Aside from organized crime, simple tax avoidance will be the main driver.

rvense 6y ago

This article is very flawed. It mentions two scenarios: decentralized, uncontrolled money, versus government control. But it is missing the third scenario, which is the on that is actually happening in most places: plain old privatization. The Chinese government might be trying to build a state-backed digital currency, but as the article states it is already almost cashless. And in Europe, as far as I know, each country already has one or a few de facto standard app-based solutions for digital payments between private persons. My country has instant bank transfers between banks and one mobile payment app. And at some point, the (American) smartphone solutions are likely to allow person-to-person transfer. This is all based on existing, privatized banking infrastructure which, while obviously not completely outside government control, is certainly not a public resource like the cash-based infrastructure was.

siliconc0w 6y ago

Societies need to implement rules so that any sharing of a user's data needs to flow through data repositories that are controlled by the user and so they can authorize and audit each of these flows. Sort of like an oAuth dialogue, "Mortage Lender A wants access to your 2020 after-tax income" and you'd give them limited access so they could underwrite the loan and it'd be illegal to store the user's data any longer than necessary for that purpose. This would give companies cleaner data and common API while eliminating the possibly for anti-consumer data middle men like credit bureaus who could be then be summarily launched into space.

decker 6y ago

Cash isn't dead. Even in a pandemic, there's a lot of stores that still accept it. This article seems more like clickbait FUD for pumping cryptocurrency.

fakedang 6y ago
This actually got me thinking.... What if someone utilized GPT-3 to write incoherent garbage that can pass off in front of Quant firm's sentiment analyzers as trending topics? If one were invested enough, one could certainly pump all sorts of stocks too.
danShumway 6y ago
Philadelphia recently passed a law outright requiring stores to accept cash; they viewed requiring a bank account and credit card to be an accessibility problem for homeless residents. A couple of fast-food places I (pre-pandemic) used to frequent switched from requiring credit cards to accepting both afterwards, which was kind of nice. There is reason in general to be concerned about the lack of good, private digital payment systems, but there are still plenty of cities where a pro-cash sentiment is strong, or at least a pro-"cash should be an option" sentiment. And I suspect (but can't confirm) that rural areas might also bias towards more cash transactions as well. The general trend away from cash is something to pay attention to, but depending on where you live, it may not be an emergency right now.

99chrisbard 6y ago

Cash please; https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-cities-and-finance https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-citie...

upofadown 6y ago

There is a third way to have a government issued electronic currency that provides privacy for the purchaser. So the government can't cut off an individual but they can still collect sales taxes. * https://taler.net/ https://taler.net/

andreskytt 6y ago

Would someone define privacy, please? I have searched far and wide and can only find scholarly articles on the various approaches to privacy but there is no commonly accepted definition. What I’ve found, however, is that people often implicitly define privacy as the right to lie. Nobody should know how much money I have and should be relying on my statement alone. True, not all governments or other institutions are worthy of the full truth. But it is also true, that any cooperation involves a level of trust hard to reach when one side reserves the right to lie without consequence.