34 ms·

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillanc

by throwaway22032 5y ago

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can't give it to them. I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week. This isn't some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system. But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal. By the same token, if you tell me there's been a murder on my street I'll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I'll tell you where to shove it. That's what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why. Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind.

trevormcneal 5y ago
somehow people with the cognitive capacity of a rotten potato would call you science denier for being pro freedom. I'm not talking about vaccines and such, but being pro freedom as in being against a survilance state which can fuck you up at any time and has total control using coercion over all aspects of your life. We got at such stage in history which is impossible even to have an honest debate about freedom without having legal problems and risking our careers to just end. Let's hope internet still a safe place for this for a while.
mehdix 5y ago
imho, we as a society have been rushing/forced to embrace new technology without really understanding the downsides. I use nowadays cash as much as possible. The notion that every single mundane payment of mine is being monitor, tied to some profile and bid in realtime terrifies me. And no, no payment provider has ever promised me that they won't do this. We had also cash cards in the past in Germany, to my understanding they would provide digital payment without tracking and central control, but they are deprecated.
tibanne 5y ago
^ This. Bitcoin Cash (still has low fees and is truly peer to peer) is the way IMO. Try tipping someone on reddit or Twitter. www.chaintip.org
Shadonototra 5y ago
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. no > I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week. your "inconvenience" is the result of modern slavery you get to not have to work hard because some other poor kid will produce everything you need, he won't get to have your "inconvenience"
YeBanKo 5y ago
Digital cash can partially solve the problem, the idea has been around since 80s [1]. Blinded signature allows you to have a bearer token without attaching information about the source or identity. It resembles cash in many ways. Surely government can shut it down, but they would not be able to do it in a stealthy way. [1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...
raxxorrax 5y ago
> too powerful to not be abused And it was abused fairly quickly. The problem is that people don't really seems to understand that this is a problem even if they do not support the current cause. I hope this is an educational instead of a neurological issue.
trentzboot 5y ago
"Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind." I'm sorry but I don't think that is true, unless people lose this understanding by the time are eligible to vote or obtain higher education that is.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
We shouldn't have to reject a major improvement in our quality of life because of abusive governments and their surveillance. What we need is technology that makes their abuse impossible. This is why cryptocurrencies were invented in the first place. They were supposed to emancipate us by providing private and anonymous digital cash that's free from government and bank control. Most of them failed at actually protecting us from anything but there are projects out there that are still trying, such as Monero. We should support these technologies instead of trying to turn back the clock. We need to reject them instead. Just start using cryptocurrency for everything and cut them out.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  It's not a technological problem. They'll just pressure all businesses not to accept your crypto. Just the airlines, banks, any payment processor, any gold bullion dealers, any supermarkets, any restaurants, any car rentals, any car dealers. Probably can be done in less than 10 lines of regulation. Nobody is going to risk jail for your crypto. What then? You are going to invent some tech that will somehow make totalitarian government impossible?
inter_netuser 5y ago
They'll just pressure businesses into not accepting cash. That pressure is already there in many subtle ways.
jakobdabo 5y ago
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don't hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it's frozen?
- trevormcneal 5y ago
  AFAIK in US you need a fair trial before being punished, this is on the 10 amendments.
  - malka 5y ago
    You money does not have constitutional rights.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  This is a political battle. Whatever your laws will say, the politician will find an emergency to justify bypassing it. We all saw what happened with COVID. The only viable choice is not to have such powerful governments in the first place. Contrary to the parent poster, I really think we do need the anarcho-libertarian dream - and it doesn't mean we should't have private justice or private protection: it just means this power shouldn't be wielded centrally (eg. by having private competing companies).
- artprojton 5y ago
  >We need more constitutional human rights. I hate these solutions to all of the various problems. These governments and corporations don't care about any of these laws, make up new laws whenever they want, ignore laws whenever they want. You can't just undo millions of people using a system of physical money, but you can undo laws instantly, or not even follow them. All of the solutions to these types of modern societal problems have to be solved in a way that isn't just a few words in a piece of paper, because the people in charge can never be trusted.
MithrilTuxedo 5y ago
I thought cashlessness without a trusted third party was a solved problem. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- pepesza 5y ago
  Bitcoin the network is fully transparent, which makes BTC not really fungible - it can and is traced, which creates better/worse BTC. This is why coinbase (small c) BTC is sold at premium. Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom. FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.
  - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Lightning solves both scalability and privacy of the base layer of bitcoin.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Satoshi called it digital cash actually for a reason, not cashlessness. It has similar properties to physical cash, as the ownership can't be taken away trivially. The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.
  - fuckcensorship 5y ago
    The key issue with using Bitcoin as a digital form of cash is that Bitcoin lacks a key property of cash: fungibility. Combine this with the transparent nature of Bitcoin's blockchain and you have a currency which is an authoritarian's dream and not a currency that could/should replace cash.
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      That's why we have Monero
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fr33d0m_ 5y ago
I love and agree with every word. Thanks for writing.
cm2187 5y ago
I agree in principle and I am against the disappearance of cash, but the convenience is also a factor and I end up never using cash. I think a cashless society wil happen in any case. With covid many shops didn't accept cash, I don't know how people who got locked out of the banking system dealt with that.
- FpUser 5y ago
  If government allows for cashless society without safeguards it is criminal negligence. Any serious outage and we are crippled.
FpUser 5y ago
100% agree with everything you said
datadata 5y ago
Agree with this all, but I don't think the simple answer is sufficient. Cash as an option must be preserved, but the abuse of this power over cashless transactions will still happen. Cash itself will become even more of a probable cause and associated with crime if the abuse is allowed to preside only over the cashless transactions.
chowells 5y ago
Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption In US but not in other developed countries! Do not generalize.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  How precisely do the police seize the assets of tens of thousands of people simultaneously? They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis. It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.
    - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
      The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. If you think a million soldiers are going to occupy the USA without resorting to obscene levels of violence (such that money is not your concern) you're a bit mistaken.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.
reaperducer 5y ago
The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Agreed. Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs. Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal for a retail business to refuse cash. Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash. But they lost thousands because a fat guy isn't going to buy cookies there in the future.
- eric_cc 5y ago
  > Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination Then you should fight the good fight of making cash great again! :P
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  Right. I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway. So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse. It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  You don't need a bank account to use cards to pay for things. You also don't need to use an attempt at humor about fat people to add authority to your argument.
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    ^^ shoulda said "add weight to your argument"
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    It wasn't an attempt at humor. It was a statement of fact. I'm a fat guy. I'm not going to buy cookies there. Try not to invent imaginary offenses on behalf of strangers.
pdonis 5y ago
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. We can't. Too many transactions are conducted remotely now, and you can't send cash over a phone line or over the Internet. And having those transactions remote is not just a minor convenience; in many cases the transactions would not happen at all if they had to happen in person, and a lot of wealth creation would not take place. The simple answer is, as the article says, to view freezing people's bank accounts and credit cards as a punishment at least as serious as imprisonment, and to view doing it without first having a trial as at least as serious as imprisoning people indefinitely without trial. Right now most people do not view it that way, and governments reach for freezing assets as a tool of first resort because they do not view it as having serious political consequences. That is what needs to change.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Go talk to Rohan Grey (https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html), who is one of the few people who cares about this that isn't also a private cryptocurrency shill.
cryptonector 5y ago
How do you reject the cashless society? You need to get so many people on board. Look at Canada. You'd have to get a huge proportion of the population to go on strike, and for a very long period of time.
lhorie 5y ago
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering. The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction. It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    > It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now. The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same. Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan. Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%. The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around. How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.
SN76477 5y ago
>I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week. so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending. Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.
hx833001 5y ago
Massachusetts passed a law I believe in 1978 requiring the acceptance of cash by all retailers.
conradev 5y ago
How do you pay for digital goods with cash? Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them? I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money? Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.
- sebow 5y ago
  This is a disingenuous argument.If you want to pay for software or digital goods you already probably have or want a bank account, a paypal or something.You're already in the ecosystem and nobody forces you to use cash everywhere.By the way >it is< possible to pay for digital goods using cash, without a bank account or digital money service: it's called Western Union/MoneyGram/etc.Yeah there are limits and often way more expensive, but at the same time you don't pay with your transaction data, which the bank uses for more than you know. Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons. People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.
  - conradev 5y ago
    My point was that a larger and larger proportion of the things we buy we buy over the internet: it is something like 25% of all consumer purchasing now. Those transactions are cashless. Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue. I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet. I also agree it is not a binary thing.
pshc 5y ago
This reminds me of all the posts on HN about running your own email server. Admirable but ultimately negligible. Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.
- darawk 5y ago
  Unfortunately events like the ones we've just had are what's necessary to demonstrate to people that no, we actually do need technology like this. Cashless is going to happen. The convenience gain is too large for it not to. Cryptocurrency is the only way to preserve any semblance of genuine sovereignty in a cashless world. It is a technological necessity.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  HN's bias against cryptocurrency is a useful counterweight to the massive profit-motivated hype surrounding it.
- progval 5y ago
  Most cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) do not solve this issue, governments could order businesses (or payment systems used by businesses) not to accept payment coming from some blacklisted addresses, even indirectly; and this is possible thanks to the public ledger. And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not. Governments might even ban cash one day. This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  It still blows my mind how antagonistic HN is to cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin.
  - phoinix 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal." Dont worry, soon everything from your toaster to your car will be internet connected and will be disabled on command
- suifbwish 5y ago
  Don’t forget the toilet. Potty privileges will be the first thing to get shut off.
andrepd 5y ago
Absolutely. For instance, pervasive CCTV isn't in itself a bad thing, but pervasive CCTV which can be (and is) accessed arbitrarily is a major major problem. I'm fine with CCTV which records to encrypted offline storage, which can be unencrypted by court order only, with as strong a probable cause as you would need for a wiretap or a search warrant.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
busymom0 5y ago
Important to note that the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-transaction-reporting-amid-trucker-convoy-protests-financial-intelligence-expert-1.5776170 https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans... Despite this, the government has been able to do this.
jlpom 5y ago
> But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things You really wouldn't says that if you've been locked, it's one of the worst thing in the world, even more so when it's unfair -- this is a progress.
ksec 5y ago
>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Oh How the tide have turned. You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash. Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.
- ksec 5y ago
  And I wish instead of putting technology into cashless, we should be doing the old sci-fi stuff which is putting technology into cash itself. Better Anti-Counterfeit money features .
r0rshrk 5y ago
Demonetisation exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
DeathArrow 5y ago
>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. But you can't as long as the cashless society is forced upon you. At most you can try to take refuge on currencies which aren't controlled by governments like crypto. But since crypto is very volatile, it isn't a practical thing to do. You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises. Too bad nobody invented a stable crypto currency meant to only facilitate trade as opposed to speculation.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Freicoin? It is dead because nobody wants to use crypto as day to day currency. Meanwhile the physical chiemgauer is doing well in its region.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises. That’s exactly what gigolo chains were designed for. Police would confiscate your cash, but not your jewelry, so carrying around jewelry allowed you to post bail fairly easily (also why bail bondsmen deal in lots of jewelry). The use of gold jewelry as backup money is also common in India where people are less confident in the local currency.
jjav 5y ago
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Very much this. It is disappointing and scary to see tech people, of all groups, who like this idea. Cash is a perfect currency. It is strictly peer to peer, fully fungible, can't be blocked or censored by any party, anonymous, has no dependency on anything (still works when the electricity and internet are down).
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Cash is kind of fungible, but not really. Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection. In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.
  - runeks 5y ago
    > Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection. This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment. Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.
- convienent888 5y ago

trevormcneal 5y ago

somehow people with the cognitive capacity of a rotten potato would call you science denier for being pro freedom. I'm not talking about vaccines and such, but being pro freedom as in being against a survilance state which can fuck you up at any time and has total control using coercion over all aspects of your life. We got at such stage in history which is impossible even to have an honest debate about freedom without having legal problems and risking our careers to just end. Let's hope internet still a safe place for this for a while.

mehdix 5y ago

imho, we as a society have been rushing/forced to embrace new technology without really understanding the downsides. I use nowadays cash as much as possible. The notion that every single mundane payment of mine is being monitor, tied to some profile and bid in realtime terrifies me. And no, no payment provider has ever promised me that they won't do this. We had also cash cards in the past in Germany, to my understanding they would provide digital payment without tracking and central control, but they are deprecated.

tibanne 5y ago

^ This. Bitcoin Cash (still has low fees and is truly peer to peer) is the way IMO. Try tipping someone on reddit or Twitter. www.chaintip.org

Shadonototra 5y ago

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. no > I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week. your "inconvenience" is the result of modern slavery you get to not have to work hard because some other poor kid will produce everything you need, he won't get to have your "inconvenience"

YeBanKo 5y ago

Digital cash can partially solve the problem, the idea has been around since 80s [1]. Blinded signature allows you to have a bearer token without attaching information about the source or identity. It resembles cash in many ways. Surely government can shut it down, but they would not be able to do it in a stealthy way. [1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...

raxxorrax 5y ago

> too powerful to not be abused And it was abused fairly quickly. The problem is that people don't really seems to understand that this is a problem even if they do not support the current cause. I hope this is an educational instead of a neurological issue.

trentzboot 5y ago

"Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind." I'm sorry but I don't think that is true, unless people lose this understanding by the time are eligible to vote or obtain higher education that is.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

We shouldn't have to reject a major improvement in our quality of life because of abusive governments and their surveillance. What we need is technology that makes their abuse impossible. This is why cryptocurrencies were invented in the first place. They were supposed to emancipate us by providing private and anonymous digital cash that's free from government and bank control. Most of them failed at actually protecting us from anything but there are projects out there that are still trying, such as Monero. We should support these technologies instead of trying to turn back the clock. We need to reject them instead. Just start using cryptocurrency for everything and cut them out.

inter_netuser 5y ago
It's not a technological problem. They'll just pressure all businesses not to accept your crypto. Just the airlines, banks, any payment processor, any gold bullion dealers, any supermarkets, any restaurants, any car rentals, any car dealers. Probably can be done in less than 10 lines of regulation. Nobody is going to risk jail for your crypto. What then? You are going to invent some tech that will somehow make totalitarian government impossible?

inter_netuser 5y ago

They'll just pressure businesses into not accepting cash. That pressure is already there in many subtle ways.

jakobdabo 5y ago

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don't hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it's frozen?

trevormcneal 5y ago
AFAIK in US you need a fair trial before being punished, this is on the 10 amendments.
- malka 5y ago
  You money does not have constitutional rights.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
This is a political battle. Whatever your laws will say, the politician will find an emergency to justify bypassing it. We all saw what happened with COVID. The only viable choice is not to have such powerful governments in the first place. Contrary to the parent poster, I really think we do need the anarcho-libertarian dream - and it doesn't mean we should't have private justice or private protection: it just means this power shouldn't be wielded centrally (eg. by having private competing companies).
artprojton 5y ago
>We need more constitutional human rights. I hate these solutions to all of the various problems. These governments and corporations don't care about any of these laws, make up new laws whenever they want, ignore laws whenever they want. You can't just undo millions of people using a system of physical money, but you can undo laws instantly, or not even follow them. All of the solutions to these types of modern societal problems have to be solved in a way that isn't just a few words in a piece of paper, because the people in charge can never be trusted.

MithrilTuxedo 5y ago

I thought cashlessness without a trusted third party was a solved problem. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

pepesza 5y ago
Bitcoin the network is fully transparent, which makes BTC not really fungible - it can and is traced, which creates better/worse BTC. This is why coinbase (small c) BTC is sold at premium. Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom. FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  Lightning solves both scalability and privacy of the base layer of bitcoin.
xiphias2 5y ago
Satoshi called it digital cash actually for a reason, not cashlessness. It has similar properties to physical cash, as the ownership can't be taken away trivially. The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.
- fuckcensorship 5y ago
  The key issue with using Bitcoin as a digital form of cash is that Bitcoin lacks a key property of cash: fungibility. Combine this with the transparent nature of Bitcoin's blockchain and you have a currency which is an authoritarian's dream and not a currency that could/should replace cash.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    That's why we have Monero

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fr33d0m_ 5y ago

I love and agree with every word. Thanks for writing.

cm2187 5y ago

I agree in principle and I am against the disappearance of cash, but the convenience is also a factor and I end up never using cash. I think a cashless society wil happen in any case. With covid many shops didn't accept cash, I don't know how people who got locked out of the banking system dealt with that.

FpUser 5y ago
If government allows for cashless society without safeguards it is criminal negligence. Any serious outage and we are crippled.

FpUser 5y ago

100% agree with everything you said

datadata 5y ago

Agree with this all, but I don't think the simple answer is sufficient. Cash as an option must be preserved, but the abuse of this power over cashless transactions will still happen. Cash itself will become even more of a probable cause and associated with crime if the abuse is allowed to preside only over the cashless transactions.

chowells 5y ago

Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

goodpoint 5y ago
> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption In US but not in other developed countries! Do not generalize.
throwaway22032 5y ago
How precisely do the police seize the assets of tens of thousands of people simultaneously? They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis. It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.
  - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
    The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. If you think a million soldiers are going to occupy the USA without resorting to obscene levels of violence (such that money is not your concern) you're a bit mistaken.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.

reaperducer 5y ago

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Agreed. Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs. Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal for a retail business to refuse cash. Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash. But they lost thousands because a fat guy isn't going to buy cookies there in the future.

eric_cc 5y ago
> Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination Then you should fight the good fight of making cash great again! :P
throwaway22032 5y ago
Right. I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway. So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse. It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.
Godel_unicode 5y ago
You don't need a bank account to use cards to pay for things. You also don't need to use an attempt at humor about fat people to add authority to your argument.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  ^^ shoulda said "add weight to your argument"
- reaperducer 5y ago
  It wasn't an attempt at humor. It was a statement of fact. I'm a fat guy. I'm not going to buy cookies there. Try not to invent imaginary offenses on behalf of strangers.

pdonis 5y ago

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. We can't. Too many transactions are conducted remotely now, and you can't send cash over a phone line or over the Internet. And having those transactions remote is not just a minor convenience; in many cases the transactions would not happen at all if they had to happen in person, and a lot of wealth creation would not take place. The simple answer is, as the article says, to view freezing people's bank accounts and credit cards as a punishment at least as serious as imprisonment, and to view doing it without first having a trial as at least as serious as imprisoning people indefinitely without trial. Right now most people do not view it that way, and governments reach for freezing assets as a tool of first resort because they do not view it as having serious political consequences. That is what needs to change.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Go talk to Rohan Grey (https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html), who is one of the few people who cares about this that isn't also a private cryptocurrency shill.

cryptonector 5y ago

How do you reject the cashless society? You need to get so many people on board. Look at Canada. You'd have to get a huge proportion of the population to go on strike, and for a very long period of time.

lhorie 5y ago

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering. The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.

throwaway22032 5y ago
No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction. It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  > It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now. The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same. Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan. Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%. The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around. How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.

SN76477 5y ago

>I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week. so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending. Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.

hx833001 5y ago

Massachusetts passed a law I believe in 1978 requiring the acceptance of cash by all retailers.

conradev 5y ago

How do you pay for digital goods with cash? Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them? I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money? Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.

sebow 5y ago
This is a disingenuous argument.If you want to pay for software or digital goods you already probably have or want a bank account, a paypal or something.You're already in the ecosystem and nobody forces you to use cash everywhere.By the way >it is< possible to pay for digital goods using cash, without a bank account or digital money service: it's called Western Union/MoneyGram/etc.Yeah there are limits and often way more expensive, but at the same time you don't pay with your transaction data, which the bank uses for more than you know. Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons. People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.
- conradev 5y ago
  My point was that a larger and larger proportion of the things we buy we buy over the internet: it is something like 25% of all consumer purchasing now. Those transactions are cashless. Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue. I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet. I also agree it is not a binary thing.

pshc 5y ago

This reminds me of all the posts on HN about running your own email server. Admirable but ultimately negligible. Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.

darawk 5y ago
Unfortunately events like the ones we've just had are what's necessary to demonstrate to people that no, we actually do need technology like this. Cashless is going to happen. The convenience gain is too large for it not to. Cryptocurrency is the only way to preserve any semblance of genuine sovereignty in a cashless world. It is a technological necessity.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
HN's bias against cryptocurrency is a useful counterweight to the massive profit-motivated hype surrounding it.
progval 5y ago
Most cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) do not solve this issue, governments could order businesses (or payment systems used by businesses) not to accept payment coming from some blacklisted addresses, even indirectly; and this is possible thanks to the public ledger. And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not. Governments might even ban cash one day. This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.
tenuousemphasis 5y ago
It still blows my mind how antagonistic HN is to cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin.
- phoinix 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal." Dont worry, soon everything from your toaster to your car will be internet connected and will be disabled on command

suifbwish 5y ago
Don’t forget the toilet. Potty privileges will be the first thing to get shut off.

andrepd 5y ago

Absolutely. For instance, pervasive CCTV isn't in itself a bad thing, but pervasive CCTV which can be (and is) accessed arbitrarily is a major major problem. I'm fine with CCTV which records to encrypted offline storage, which can be unencrypted by court order only, with as strong a probable cause as you would need for a wiretap or a search warrant.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

busymom0 5y ago

Important to note that the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-transaction-reporting-amid-trucker-convoy-protests-financial-intelligence-expert-1.5776170 https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans... Despite this, the government has been able to do this.

jlpom 5y ago

> But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things You really wouldn't says that if you've been locked, it's one of the worst thing in the world, even more so when it's unfair -- this is a progress.

ksec 5y ago

>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Oh How the tide have turned. You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash. Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.

ksec 5y ago
And I wish instead of putting technology into cashless, we should be doing the old sci-fi stuff which is putting technology into cash itself. Better Anti-Counterfeit money features .

r0rshrk 5y ago

Demonetisation exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

DeathArrow 5y ago

>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. But you can't as long as the cashless society is forced upon you. At most you can try to take refuge on currencies which aren't controlled by governments like crypto. But since crypto is very volatile, it isn't a practical thing to do. You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises. Too bad nobody invented a stable crypto currency meant to only facilitate trade as opposed to speculation.

imtringued 5y ago
Freicoin? It is dead because nobody wants to use crypto as day to day currency. Meanwhile the physical chiemgauer is doing well in its region.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises. That’s exactly what gigolo chains were designed for. Police would confiscate your cash, but not your jewelry, so carrying around jewelry allowed you to post bail fairly easily (also why bail bondsmen deal in lots of jewelry). The use of gold jewelry as backup money is also common in India where people are less confident in the local currency.

jjav 5y ago

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Very much this. It is disappointing and scary to see tech people, of all groups, who like this idea. Cash is a perfect currency. It is strictly peer to peer, fully fungible, can't be blocked or censored by any party, anonymous, has no dependency on anything (still works when the electricity and internet are down).

ALittleLight 5y ago
Cash is kind of fungible, but not really. Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection. In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.
- runeks 5y ago
  > Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection. This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment. Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.
convienent888 5y ago