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> 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 co

• 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.
• loceng 5y ago
  "It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision" Tell that to Justin Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act in Canada and where he immediately started freezing bank accounts of peacefully protesting Cabadians under the falsely built narrative that they are "terrorists" or "funding terrorists" - all without court order.
• globular-toast 5y ago
  > We need more constitutional human rights. And those can't ever be breached, right? We can't be trusted to honour written laws and contracts. We've shown that time and time again. The best way is to remove the possibility or at least the temptation to do it by making it too hard to violate. Physical cash has that property, as does a trustless digital cash based on cryptocurrency (I'm not sure what the best one is in this respect).
• midjji 5y ago
  Yeah cashless is the way to go, but I dont think the problem is as big as it seems. People are also becoming digital nomads, and while citizenships for pay, and more importantly the digital identities that come with them, are still kind of expensive, long term I expect it will become cheaper and more common. This also directly solves the issue of op. Cryptocurrencies are a stop gap solution to this, but known transaction histories and inherently poor fraud prevention make them poor digital cash replacements. Today Ecuador is shilling bitcoin, but imagine if they instead sold tier 2 citizenships, no taxes no welfare type, with new and independent identities. Pay 5000$ and get a new identity and passport, along with an account in one of our many banks, or which can be used to set up an account in an international bank. Sure you wont get to share credit scores with your main identity... Various international laws mean it wont be called exactly this, perhaps its a fee for the creation of a minimum accounting requirement corporation with hidden controller instead (and trying to prevent these is already ongoing but it does not work), but it does not matter in practice. As long as it satisfies the conditions of being able to make transactions easily, has a dispute mechanism with centralized authority with the self serving interest to remain independent, etc. I'd wager that the majority of identity thefts arent performed in order to steal money from that identity or ever even cause any damage to the original identity. They are performed in order to get around travel and work restrictions. Lets say you are from ukraine or belarus, now getting a work visa equivalent to germany or france is kindof a pain in the ass, in particular doing so quickly, but buying a stolen passport from e.g. rumania isnt hard, and all you are doing is setting up a single french debit account in that name and working under that identity. Odds are that kind of thing gets discovered 30 years latter when the original identity realizes they are getting a small pension from some job in france they never had. But why would they care. Massively expanded surveillance states could prevent this, but while that will be the case in china, places like the usa are just to discoordinated, and the eu is actively working against it to the point both google and facebook are no longer asking. How can we make our ads better, but rather how can we keep ad quality with much less information per user.
• 6510 5y ago
  > most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
• neb_b 5y ago
  As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.
  • CharlesW 5y ago
    Any dreams of Bitcoin replacing cash died years ago.
    • eric_cc 5y ago
      Source?
    • m348e912 5y ago
      More specifically the dream of bitcoin replacing cash died in 2017 when changes were made to the protocol. Bitcoin became cost prohibitive to use for small transactions (less than several hundred dollars) and the addition of a feature called 'replace by fee' meant that small transactions weren't immediately reasonably trustworthy and you would have to wait for one or more confirmations on the blockchain.
      • bally0241 5y ago
        Bitcoin is hardly cost prohibitive. When was the last time you sent a transaction? The last one I sent cleared at 2sats/byte and was <$1. Are you going to buy your coffee with it? No, probably not, but that hardly makes it a useless as currency replacement. Replace-by-fee doesn't make small transactions any less trustworthy either, since you should never trust any unconfirmed transaction (by definition, if its not on the blockchain its not yet a transaction). Furthermore, the lightning network blows away the competition in terms of cost per transaction, and while not perfectly trust-less (unlike the base layer) it has far less custodial risk than a bank or credit card account. If for example your counter-party goes rogue, at worst you just close the channel resulting in a rollback to the last settled balance state, minus an on-chain fee.
        • m348e912 5y ago
          Don't you think the custodial nature of lighting network opens it up to the same type of censorship we're seeing with bank transactions in Canada? What's stopping governments from blacklisting wallets and pressuring LN nodes from transacting with them?
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  If you base your life purely around some nebulous definition of convenience, then you are not living, you are following the path of least resistance. In a few short years or decades it will be more convenient to simply plug yourself into the wall. What then? "We" simply accept that the real world is too inconvenient? Too resource intensive, too difficult, too ugly? You do you, boo, I ain't down for that.
  • Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    Well, considering the "real world" too inconvenient and seeking ways to make it less so is what humanity has been doing for millennia, right? Most people use a washing machine rather than washing their clothes in the river, because indeed, the latter is too resource intensive, difficult and ugly if you have an alternative. Of course, this doesn't mean that a technology that provides convenience can't come with hidden costs, and the cashless society indeed comes with risks. That's where the interesting debate is IMO, but the fact that people value convenience is quite reasonable and not new.
    • throwaway22032 5y ago
      Sure. Using cash is not actually inconvenient though. I often find that people use the term "convenient" to mean "more pleasing to me" which is completely different. It's not more convenient for me to buy milk from Amazon than it is for me to get it from my corner shop, it might be more pleasing if I didn't like seeing or talking to people. Those are two different things. By contrast if I had to wash my clothes in a river it would take me literally hours of manual labour every week and they wouldn't be as clean.
      • Koshkin 5y ago
        Having to carry pieces of paper around, and getting pieces of metal as change is inconvenient. Come on people.
        • throwaway22032 5y ago
• JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  >No, that battle is lost. How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash. There are bills being worked on at the federal level. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395
  • jakobdabo 5y ago
    Lost in the sense of look around how people are spending their money. I'm very happy for that law, and hope common sense will prevail and cash will be around for a long time. But you can't deny that vast majority of money transactions in the modern world is cashless. Hence my point that the battle is lost - if you take away average person's right of using their credit cards or bank accounts, how are they supposed to pay their bills or buy food?
    • ddingus 5y ago
      Falling back on cash helps here, but you are not wrong. It is an important matter! Needs to be worked through, rights established and enforced.
    • 14 5y ago
      I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell, and that the only choice is to use their regular till but that is staffed by one person so it is always a long wait which is what I am sure Walmart has planned to discourage its use.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        >I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell They do where I live. All of the purpose build self checkout machines at Home Depot are cashless but all the ones that can be operated by an employee do cash when in self checkout mode.
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
• walterbell 5y ago
  > No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient. Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash. However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors. The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn't work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while "digital due process" is slowly constructed. Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street. If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (https://usa.kinokuniya.com https://usa.kinokuniya.com), it's a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews. The online-offline playing field is now less tilted. Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators. The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end. <there's always a bigger shark.jpg>
  • inter_netuser 5y ago
    well. If money is speech, does it mean cash is protected by the 1A?
  • forty 5y ago
    Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.
• api 5y ago
  > Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. Unfortunately you are probably right. The history of computing clearly shows that convenience beats absolutely everything including privacy, security, and autonomy. The most convenient option almost always wins regardless of any other factors.
• upsidesinclude 5y ago
  We don't have limited rights. You need to work on understanding that rights are not granted. Rights are inherent. Enumeration of rights is only to emphasize the importance
  • quadrangle 5y ago
    As soon as some rights are violated, you don't have them any more. The language of "granting" could be changed to "respecting" and it would be an improvement indeed. But rights are only natural and inherent to the extent that people are free to exercise them in absence of interference.
    • upsidesinclude 5y ago
      They can be obstructed or denied, yes. This does not mean you do not have that right. It means it is being denied you. That's the nature of rights and it's important to consider rights in this fashion because it shapes our ideas about what is acceptable in terms of obstruction and denial
  • Supermancho 5y ago
    > We don't have limited rights. You need to work on understanding that rights are not granted. That's a definition you accept, which is not a useful definition to me. There are rights that are not inherent and sometimes the legal and moral mix. eg I don't have the right to take an organ from a human who has not yet suffered systemic death, unless they have gone through a process that includes giving consent to that process that may allow the organ to end up under my purview AND I accept it.
    • upsidesinclude 5y ago
      False and here's why: There are rights which are fundamental. Saying "definition", as if it is a flexible description does not satisfy the reality. These rights are defined by the fact that they are inherent. Your example is a perfectly described granted right. You have been granted the right to something which is not yours and you have no other right to take. The distinction is important. There is no moral hazard nor wrong committed in preventing someone from harvesting organs without permission. There is a wrong perpetrated when someone has been restricted in their speech or movement. The usefulness, as you say, lies in the treatment of these things as distinctly different in nature
• ddingus 5y ago
  I agree on rights and mapping them into the digital space. That is long overdue. However, until we actually do move past this "wild west" digital time, rejecting it is reasonable and prudent behavior.
• bugbuddy 5y ago
  Driving is also easier and more convenient than walking but it would be absurd to suggest that everyone should have a car available for them to drive as a constitutional human rights. Another counter point is that cash is arguably easier and more convenient in some aspects for some people.
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    Nit: owning property is a constitutional right. Compelling someone else to provide it for you with the force of law is not.
    • DoreenMichele 5y ago
      Yeah, it's a driver's license that's a privilege not a right. Own all the cars you want. Create a car museum if that's your thing and you've got the funds. But behave if you want to actually legally drive any of them.
      • zdragnar 5y ago
        No license is required to operate a vehicle on private land... it is only on public roadways (which are public land) and public accomodations (privately owned parking lots that are publicly accessible) that a license is required.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • bugbuddy 5y ago
      I thought it would be obvious what I meant. I should have anticipated the lawyers in the audience here.
  • temp8964 5y ago
    Owning a car is a constitutional right as owning other stuff. It’s called property right.
• jaredandrews 5y ago
  Your last sentence sounds like civil forfeiture and I certainly think it should be outlawed. As far as cashless society winning, I dunno, I'm definitely worried about that outcome, but it's straight up illegal in my state to not to accept cash in a retail establishment and a good number of bars I go to don't accept cards at all. I use cash all the time and I find it way more convenient than a credit or debit card. My wallet doesn't randomly prevent me from opening it at a grocery store I have been to a thousand times and stop me from paying for groceries.
  • throwaway22032 5y ago
    Agree with this. I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me. Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper. There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cash and so you don't have cash. Try harder.
    • rtpg 5y ago
      It's handing over multiple pieces of paper, getting back of mix of paper and coin, and then having to futz around with that. Compare with just tapping a single card against a machine, having records of the payment for yourself (for keeping track of spending, etc), etc. It's obviously not all "objectively better" but "strictly easier" is not true if you amortize across all usages of cash vs non-cash (going to ATMs after figuring out you don't have enough on you?) I'm not going to argue against cash existing, but "swipe the machine" works 98 times out of 100. For the other 2 times, yeah carry some cash on you. I think it's a very good system of last resort, but especially in places with contactless payments cash is less practical
      • throwaway22032 5y ago
        Shrug. I guess my note book is less "convenient" than notepad.exe. More moving parts. We're just not on the same page here, sorry, I don't get it at all. It's like, are we counting the waves of the hands or what? I'm literally here now and I've just pressed about 300 buttons to write this message, are movements rationed?
• CPLX 5y ago
  Just remember that a society without cash is one in which every single member of society requires the explicit permission of multiple unaccountable people they have never met each and every every time they seek food, shelter, or clothing.
• wvenable 5y ago
  Lets not conflate "take" and "freeze". There's already enough confusion on that. Also freezing of your funds can benefit you -- if the bank notices suspicious withdrawals they will freeze your account to prevent you from being cleaned out. It's never okay to take someone's money/property without any court decision (and that should include civil forfeiture). But freezing shouldn't necessarily be lumped into that because it has valid usages. There just needs to be proper regulations and consequences.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  Try getting rid of cashless stuff. It’s really liberating.
• Terry_Roll 5y ago
  I had my only personal UK bank account frozen without warning for weeks. The first I knew of it was when the call centre wouldnt answer the phone for 45mins from the shop where I had just tried to use the card. Had to abandon the process and go home. Next morning, call the bank call centre, do security get told they cant talk to me. The processes to get the account activated was interesting, I couldnt complain to the govt ombudsman until I had exhausted the complaints process with the bank. Problem was the bank wouldnt talk to me, every time I called the call centre, passed security checks they would tell me they couldnt talk to me, so you are kept in a legal limbo of sorts. Govt ombudsman couldnt do anything until the 1st stage had been completed. So the rules are exploitable as most lawyers will also demonstrate in court. So yes have some cash but behind the scenes data sharing does go on, it could be a simple conversation down the pub or a contract to process some data or provide a service. Signwritten vans & trucks give the game away to neighbours as to whats going on. Get some crypto where you can draw cash out of a machine, there are plenty of bitcoin machines and online crypto currency exchanges to move money around the world. When the Greek govt debt crisis kicked off, bitcoins spiked as people moved their money out of Greece, some events like this will also trigger a spike in crypto because its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders. The less reliant you become on any one entity the less any one entity can mess you up especially when you dont agree with their politics, methods or employer.
  • danuker 5y ago
    Wasn't the fact that they told you they could not talk to you considered "exhausting" the process?
  • zivkovicp 5y ago
    This is probably good advice, just remember that crypto is also digital and totally transparent (mostly). If you obtain your crypto via an exchange, then your wallet can be positively linked to your physical person, and (eventually) prohibiting transactions by blacklisting wallets would be trivial. :( I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and make the effort to anonymise your wallet is now.
• dheera 5y ago
  In China almost everything is WeChat/AliPay these days. People almost never use cash, even the street vendors use mobile payments. It's a problem because if you do something that Tencent doesn't like, they can just shut you out of your life, quite literally. And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like. I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really. Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.
  • fortuna86 5y ago
    I tried to pay for a beer in China using cash (Yuan) and they refused. Credit card, no way. They just gave me the beer for free.
    • smcl 5y ago
      I wonder how this would impact tourism. Like, if I'm at the beginning stage of planning a trip and I'm choosing where I want to go then "weirdly requires setting up a payment app" is one of the criteria that puts a country quite far down my list.
      • dheera 5y ago
        It used to be worse than that, until only VERY recently you need a China bank account to set up WeChat payments, and you need a China +86 mobile number to set up a bank account. Granted, if you are fluent in local language you can get a mobile number and bank account in less than an hour if you go first thing in the morning to beat the lines, but for tourists who do not speak Chinese it is basically damn near impossible to navigate setting all that up. That said, international tourism isn't a big revenue generator, they care FAR more about the domestic tourism market, which is many times bigger. Foreign tourists are largely an afterthought. Even now, domestic tourists can just tap their national ID card to board trains but tourists usually have to stand in line to buy paper tickets, or even if you get your bank account and all set up to buy tickets online, you'll still need to stand in line to print out the ticket because the electronic readers at train boarding gates don't support reading passports or foreign IDs of any sort.
• DON-MAC 5y ago
  A constitution is only a piece of paper. If the culture doesn't value liberty, privacy, etc. then it doesn't matter what's in the document.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  Cashless and freedom can co-habit, just allow anonymous prepaid debit cards. But no, that is not allowed, power is too sweet.
  • walterbell 5y ago
    True, even when they do exist, some companies refuse to accept prepaid cards, or they are limited to a single country.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  >We need more constitutional human rights. We need but we can't have. Governments and lobby groups are slowly eroding the rights and freedoms. And even if we theoretically have those rights, who is to enforce them?
• ekianjo 5y ago
  > We need more constitutional human rights you mean those that are taken away by governments at the blink of an eye?
• Rapzid 5y ago
  Yeah, better off voting at this point.