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Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protecti

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.
      - naniwaduni 5y ago
        Does the figure being "only" 100-1 instead of 300-1 really detract from the point? Would that whole 0.9% even stand on the same side?
      - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
        Factors that push it in the other direction are desertion rates if we're talking domestic military occupation and fighting fitness -- how many police and reservists are actually able and willing to occupy a country with a likely insurgency for an undermined amount of time. Some percentage of that 2.9 mil number are not front line combatants. But also if the occupation is only in a single region then the denominator is much lower or if parts of the population side with the military.
    - mycall 5y ago
      Yet the tribalism has effectively made that 300-1 ratio closer to 1:1. Well, maybe not that extreme but the rotten two-party system is failing us.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Plenty of people are going to side with whatever the army does, and it'll be a capital offense to interfere with them.
  - Liquix 5y ago
    I believe the point is that it would require orders of magnitude more resources - a prohibitive amount of resources - for an overbearing government to strip citizens of physical assets, vs. the ease and subsequent temptation of doing so digitially
    - rlt 5y ago
      Well, it’s easier to steal custodial digital asset accounts... It’s harder to steal properly secured non-custodial cryptocurrency/asset wallets. e.x. multisig or Shamir’s Secret Sharing, brainwallets or passphrase encrypted wallets, etc
  - throwaway22032 5y ago
    Sure, so then you've declared war. Socratically, consider what would have happened if Trudeau would have had to send in the army to violently remove property from all of these people. I'll submit that a different, far more reasonable solution would have been arrived at.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  By ordering the banks to close their accounts. People are not holding significant portions of their wealth in physical cash outside of the banking system. Apart from it being absurdly dangerous, there's also not anything like enough physical currency to do that. Not to mention investment accounts, deeds to property, etc. Businesses being forced to accept all the risk and inconvenience of accepting cash to protect people from having their assets is somewhere between a security theater and a straight up pipe dream.
  - bugbuddy 5y ago
    Businesses should accept cash as a signal to potential customers that they are not some snobbish high-tech cashless only establishments. Also, there are a million other regulations that businesses have to deal with from license and insurance to the number of fire extinguishers. Asking businesses to accept cash is not a life-or-death decision from a business cost point of view. If anything, it means more potential customers and better PR.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
That is highly unlikely and worth the risk. Also, GP isn’t advocating keep all your money in cash. Just for paying cash where you can.
ddingus 5y ago
We can fix that, and it is being addressed. Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting. The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics. One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance. Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abuses and risks other payment forms bring to the table. I do not connect payments to my phone for example. Everyone I know who did has a story to tell about how doing that cost them.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Care to address how civil forfeiture is being addressed? This 2015 post suggests that in 2014, civil forfeiture exceeded burglary. > Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually... Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, .... According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/police-civil-asset-forfeitures-exceed-all-burglaries-in-2014/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_... I'd love to see evidence that the tide is turning, hopefully you have some.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the personnel and infrastructure to support all or most of their customers paying in person, in cash, the costs of the things I'm actually paying them for would go way up. Sure, if you're going out for coffee and you'd rather pay with cash, it's a hassle if the coffee shop doesn't accept it. But that just means you go and find another coffee shop that does. That's a very different issue than the issue of cutting off people's access to non-cash methods of payment, which is what the article under discussion is talking about.
bko 5y ago
If only there were a digital cash that you can self custody, easily verify and transfer. In all seriousness, I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. Obviously there's a whole lot of baggage with the current cryptocurrencies out there today, but there's no reason we have to resort to carrying around pieces of paper or voting for the right people to ensure our assets and livelihood are outside of the reach of the state (at least without going through the proper legal channels).
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  > I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.
  - 14 5y ago
    And this is the problem that I see as well. One can buy crypto but how do you convert to fiat currency if the government controls all the off ramps? This is the flaw with bitcoin as far as I can tell. Maybe one day someone on the darkweb will start selling goods like an Amazon style store where you can get anything you could on Amazon, like a drop shipping store, sent to your house for bitcoin. If you can link it on the internet you can have an intermediary ship it to you for bitcoin. I think there is a real market for such a store in the future. How the person who is collecting all the bitcoins exchanges their bitcoins to cash I haven't figured that part out yet. Maybe they do it in a country like Venezuela but I am not sure if that is possible.
    - Quindecillion 5y ago
      The idea of course is that eventually you would never need to convert back to fiat in the first place.
    - ransom1538 5y ago
selfhoster11 5y ago
Some developed societies don't actually make it legal to rob you as long as you wear a police uniform.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I'm not fully understanding your point. Are you saying that we shouldn't have saner laws in Canada because a country somewhere else struggles with corruption?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    No, I'm saying civil asset forfeiture on the basis that "cash kinda sus" (to borrow an expression) doesn't seem to be practiced elsewhere in the developed world to the extent that it's done in the US.
romaniv 5y ago
> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better. Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening. It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.
- natoliniak 5y ago
  yep. I really like the system we have in Poland, where you have a full choice. You can live entirely cashless or cash only or hybrid. You can pay any utility bill with instant transfers using a few clicks or with cash by visiting any post office where they wire the money to the service provider on your behalf. Having options is always better than not having options and with our history of authoritarian governments who loved confiscating citizen's assets, I hope the current financial system stays as is.
moralestapia 5y ago
>Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. What a foolish strawman. As if people were to carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Not a strawman. Nevada Cops Use Civil Forfeiture To Steal a Veteran’s Life Savings. https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432736
- Quekid5 5y ago
  I'm not disagreeing that it's a straw man, but... some people do carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go. Not anyone with any substantial wealth, ofc. But I thought it was worth saying out loud.
nathanaldensr 5y ago
From what I can see, your comment doesn't address the parent's comment at all. Government is not a "profit-seeking enterprise," it's a monopoly on violence. That is an enormous difference. I am not sure why you focus so much on businesses.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Because while you are correct in terms of political theory, the real world is different. There are hundreds of news stories like this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-and-seize-turns-police-into-self-funding-gangs https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-a... Police departments often get to keep a large share of money taken during civil forfeiture. You bet this creates moral pressure to bring in more cash.
csee 5y ago
Carrying $50 in my wallet which gets seized with an extremely low probability is not how I "lose it all". It's how I "lose $50 maybe but most likely not". How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  Yeah, it's super disingenuous. Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that. In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end. I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled. There are a lot of people who are invested via their job, their business or their literal investments, into cashless payments. Big public companies like Apple and Google have made billion dollar investments in cashless payments, and a lot of people hold their stock and/or work for them.
me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
I get what you're saying but isn't that fairly rare? Yes it obviously sucks when it happens, but an outlier in such a system vs everyone in the digital system isn't that hard to decide upon.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  "Back in my day..."
- dylan604 5y ago
  Getting detained police after receiving your weekly/monthly cash payment would look very suspicious to Officer Friendly as, surely everyone would agree, only criminals carry that kind of cash around. There are many twists and turns down the slippery slope.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    Jeez. I take "lots of cash" out of the ATM, because when I do it, I do it all at once. Also... drug dealers are cashless, they are using Monero! :D Ha!
heavyset_go 5y ago
In response to the 2012-2012 financial crisis in Cyprus[1], the Cypriot government decided to take 47.5% of uninsured deposits over the amount of €100,000 in the Bank of Cyprus, and all deposits over the amount of €100,000 from the Laiki bank. Greece did something similar with their bonds. "Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)
- XorNot 5y ago
  Conversely if your house burns down 100% of the money under your mattress is now worthless.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I have a cache of money from Switzerland that became worthless recently (well, I can still exchange it at the Swiss National bank someday). That kind of hurt. Also, I have some Indian money that is definitely worthless no matter what now.
kyrra 5y ago
WSJ opinion pages actually have a good opinion piece on this yesterday. The general take I got is that all money police or judiciary collect should go into the state's overall general fund, rather than going to the local government. https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-traffic-ticket-pulled-over-revenue-injustice-due-process-minority-low-income-policing-11645464482 https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-... Mirror: https://archive.fo/T4tgR https://archive.fo/T4tgR
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Leaving it in the general fund means the state could just grant that money back to the departments.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Money is fungible, and if you fund some <good cause> with <particular tax/fee/whatever>, all that means is that funding that was previously earmarked for <good cause> would get spent on <some less good cause>. The solution to highway robbery and grift is not earmarking revenue, the solution is hanging the robbers and grifters off the mile posts.
    - bugbuddy 5y ago
      I second this. While we are at it, we should have a national registry for corrupt or abusive police and other government employees. Once you get on the registry it stays for some years and you get to enjoy the better salary levels of private employers in the meantime.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
The only time I've ever been mugged was by some cops. They stopped me, searched me for drugs, and took cash out of my wallet.
- bugbuddy 5y ago
  That’s why I only carry enough cash for what I need to spend on. This works great as a budgeting tool also. If you only have $50 cash, you would never end up spending more than that. That and a credit card as a backup in case a cop shows up…
bugbuddy 5y ago
This is a straw-man argument that civil asset forfeiture is a reason to support cashless. Civil asset forfeiture applies to both cash and debit cards(do an AltaVista search about it). Also, I can’t decipher the contextual meaning of your last sentence.

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.
    - naniwaduni 5y ago
      Does the figure being "only" 100-1 instead of 300-1 really detract from the point? Would that whole 0.9% even stand on the same side?
    - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
      Factors that push it in the other direction are desertion rates if we're talking domestic military occupation and fighting fitness -- how many police and reservists are actually able and willing to occupy a country with a likely insurgency for an undermined amount of time. Some percentage of that 2.9 mil number are not front line combatants. But also if the occupation is only in a single region then the denominator is much lower or if parts of the population side with the military.
  - mycall 5y ago
    Yet the tribalism has effectively made that 300-1 ratio closer to 1:1. Well, maybe not that extreme but the rotten two-party system is failing us.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Plenty of people are going to side with whatever the army does, and it'll be a capital offense to interfere with them.
- Liquix 5y ago
  I believe the point is that it would require orders of magnitude more resources - a prohibitive amount of resources - for an overbearing government to strip citizens of physical assets, vs. the ease and subsequent temptation of doing so digitially
  - rlt 5y ago
    Well, it’s easier to steal custodial digital asset accounts... It’s harder to steal properly secured non-custodial cryptocurrency/asset wallets. e.x. multisig or Shamir’s Secret Sharing, brainwallets or passphrase encrypted wallets, etc
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  Sure, so then you've declared war. Socratically, consider what would have happened if Trudeau would have had to send in the army to violently remove property from all of these people. I'll submit that a different, far more reasonable solution would have been arrived at.
Godel_unicode 5y ago
By ordering the banks to close their accounts. People are not holding significant portions of their wealth in physical cash outside of the banking system. Apart from it being absurdly dangerous, there's also not anything like enough physical currency to do that. Not to mention investment accounts, deeds to property, etc. Businesses being forced to accept all the risk and inconvenience of accepting cash to protect people from having their assets is somewhere between a security theater and a straight up pipe dream.
- bugbuddy 5y ago
  Businesses should accept cash as a signal to potential customers that they are not some snobbish high-tech cashless only establishments. Also, there are a million other regulations that businesses have to deal with from license and insurance to the number of fire extinguishers. Asking businesses to accept cash is not a life-or-death decision from a business cost point of view. If anything, it means more potential customers and better PR.

Hnrobert42 5y ago

That is highly unlikely and worth the risk. Also, GP isn’t advocating keep all your money in cash. Just for paying cash where you can.

ddingus 5y ago

We can fix that, and it is being addressed. Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting. The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics. One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance. Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abuses and risks other payment forms bring to the table. I do not connect payments to my phone for example. Everyone I know who did has a story to tell about how doing that cost them.

mellavora 5y ago
Care to address how civil forfeiture is being addressed? This 2015 post suggests that in 2014, civil forfeiture exceeded burglary. > Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually... Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, .... According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/police-civil-asset-forfeitures-exceed-all-burglaries-in-2014/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_... I'd love to see evidence that the tide is turning, hopefully you have some.
pdonis 5y ago
> The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the personnel and infrastructure to support all or most of their customers paying in person, in cash, the costs of the things I'm actually paying them for would go way up. Sure, if you're going out for coffee and you'd rather pay with cash, it's a hassle if the coffee shop doesn't accept it. But that just means you go and find another coffee shop that does. That's a very different issue than the issue of cutting off people's access to non-cash methods of payment, which is what the article under discussion is talking about.

bko 5y ago

If only there were a digital cash that you can self custody, easily verify and transfer. In all seriousness, I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. Obviously there's a whole lot of baggage with the current cryptocurrencies out there today, but there's no reason we have to resort to carrying around pieces of paper or voting for the right people to ensure our assets and livelihood are outside of the reach of the state (at least without going through the proper legal channels).

AdrianB1 5y ago
> I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.
- 14 5y ago
  And this is the problem that I see as well. One can buy crypto but how do you convert to fiat currency if the government controls all the off ramps? This is the flaw with bitcoin as far as I can tell. Maybe one day someone on the darkweb will start selling goods like an Amazon style store where you can get anything you could on Amazon, like a drop shipping store, sent to your house for bitcoin. If you can link it on the internet you can have an intermediary ship it to you for bitcoin. I think there is a real market for such a store in the future. How the person who is collecting all the bitcoins exchanges their bitcoins to cash I haven't figured that part out yet. Maybe they do it in a country like Venezuela but I am not sure if that is possible.
  - Quindecillion 5y ago
    The idea of course is that eventually you would never need to convert back to fiat in the first place.
  - ransom1538 5y ago

selfhoster11 5y ago

Some developed societies don't actually make it legal to rob you as long as you wear a police uniform.

freedomben 5y ago
I'm not fully understanding your point. Are you saying that we shouldn't have saner laws in Canada because a country somewhere else struggles with corruption?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  No, I'm saying civil asset forfeiture on the basis that "cash kinda sus" (to borrow an expression) doesn't seem to be practiced elsewhere in the developed world to the extent that it's done in the US.

romaniv 5y ago

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better. Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening. It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.

natoliniak 5y ago
yep. I really like the system we have in Poland, where you have a full choice. You can live entirely cashless or cash only or hybrid. You can pay any utility bill with instant transfers using a few clicks or with cash by visiting any post office where they wire the money to the service provider on your behalf. Having options is always better than not having options and with our history of authoritarian governments who loved confiscating citizen's assets, I hope the current financial system stays as is.

moralestapia 5y ago

>Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. What a foolish strawman. As if people were to carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.

mellavora 5y ago
Not a strawman. Nevada Cops Use Civil Forfeiture To Steal a Veteran’s Life Savings. https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/ https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432736
Quekid5 5y ago
I'm not disagreeing that it's a straw man, but... some people do carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go. Not anyone with any substantial wealth, ofc. But I thought it was worth saying out loud.

nathanaldensr 5y ago

From what I can see, your comment doesn't address the parent's comment at all. Government is not a "profit-seeking enterprise," it's a monopoly on violence. That is an enormous difference. I am not sure why you focus so much on businesses.

mellavora 5y ago
Because while you are correct in terms of political theory, the real world is different. There are hundreds of news stories like this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-and-seize-turns-police-into-self-funding-gangs https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-a... Police departments often get to keep a large share of money taken during civil forfeiture. You bet this creates moral pressure to bring in more cash.

csee 5y ago

Carrying $50 in my wallet which gets seized with an extremely low probability is not how I "lose it all". It's how I "lose $50 maybe but most likely not". How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!

throwaway22032 5y ago
Yeah, it's super disingenuous. Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that. In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end. I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled. There are a lot of people who are invested via their job, their business or their literal investments, into cashless payments. Big public companies like Apple and Google have made billion dollar investments in cashless payments, and a lot of people hold their stock and/or work for them.

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago

I get what you're saying but isn't that fairly rare? Yes it obviously sucks when it happens, but an outlier in such a system vs everyone in the digital system isn't that hard to decide upon.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?

throwaway22032 5y ago
"Back in my day..."
dylan604 5y ago
Getting detained police after receiving your weekly/monthly cash payment would look very suspicious to Officer Friendly as, surely everyone would agree, only criminals carry that kind of cash around. There are many twists and turns down the slippery slope.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  Jeez. I take "lots of cash" out of the ATM, because when I do it, I do it all at once. Also... drug dealers are cashless, they are using Monero! :D Ha!

heavyset_go 5y ago

In response to the 2012-2012 financial crisis in Cyprus[1], the Cypriot government decided to take 47.5% of uninsured deposits over the amount of €100,000 in the Bank of Cyprus, and all deposits over the amount of €100,000 from the Laiki bank. Greece did something similar with their bonds. "Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)

XorNot 5y ago
Conversely if your house burns down 100% of the money under your mattress is now worthless.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I have a cache of money from Switzerland that became worthless recently (well, I can still exchange it at the Swiss National bank someday). That kind of hurt. Also, I have some Indian money that is definitely worthless no matter what now.

kyrra 5y ago

WSJ opinion pages actually have a good opinion piece on this yesterday. The general take I got is that all money police or judiciary collect should go into the state's overall general fund, rather than going to the local government. https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-traffic-ticket-pulled-over-revenue-injustice-due-process-minority-low-income-policing-11645464482 https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-... Mirror: https://archive.fo/T4tgR https://archive.fo/T4tgR

patmorgan23 5y ago
It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Leaving it in the general fund means the state could just grant that money back to the departments.
- vkou 5y ago
  > It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Money is fungible, and if you fund some <good cause> with <particular tax/fee/whatever>, all that means is that funding that was previously earmarked for <good cause> would get spent on <some less good cause>. The solution to highway robbery and grift is not earmarking revenue, the solution is hanging the robbers and grifters off the mile posts.
  - bugbuddy 5y ago
    I second this. While we are at it, we should have a national registry for corrupt or abusive police and other government employees. Once you get on the registry it stays for some years and you get to enjoy the better salary levels of private employers in the meantime.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

The only time I've ever been mugged was by some cops. They stopped me, searched me for drugs, and took cash out of my wallet.

bugbuddy 5y ago
That’s why I only carry enough cash for what I need to spend on. This works great as a budgeting tool also. If you only have $50 cash, you would never end up spending more than that. That and a credit card as a backup in case a cop shows up…

bugbuddy 5y ago

This is a straw-man argument that civil asset forfeiture is a reason to support cashless. Civil asset forfeiture applies to both cash and debit cards(do an AltaVista search about it). Also, I can’t decipher the contextual meaning of your last sentence.