7 ms·

> The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. In classic HN

> The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins. The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash. We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
> But convenience always wins. It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills. >We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out. if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments and banks cannot just turn off access to your account, but that is not an answer, you need to explain all of the processes that will need to support this possibility, because obviously banks and governments do need to turn off access to accounts at times. But if we allow cash as a fallback, then we already have a system that works. All the various rules and processes about cash have been worked out long ago, over generations! replacing the security that cash provides for people not to starve or freeze because of any number of possible problems would be an incredibly expensive and error prone process.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?
  - walterbell 5y ago
    > You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.
      - walterbell 5y ago
        Would be good to quantify the cash decline, if any, outside the US. Like others, I incorrectly assumed US was using less cash. Cash is winning in the world reserve currency, and the cashless doth protest..
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments. Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined. Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be! The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!
the_other 5y ago
An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones. N=1.
sofixa 5y ago
> The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash. No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode. And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.
walterbell 5y ago
> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    it kind of depends. there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead. in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Automated surveillance enforcement tends to bring the discrepancy between the law and the norms of behavior to light. The state prefers to forgo enforcement and keep the law rather than keep the enforcement and alter the law to reflect norms.
    - oarsinsync 5y ago
      > in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.) Some countries took the opposite approach, and introduced lay-bys just before toll booths, enabling drivers to speed to their heart's content, and then have a rest before going through the next toll booth.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon... You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by an AI to link you to your government-run wallet. https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-facial-recognition-equipped-vending-machine-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-fa...
- modo_mario 5y ago
  Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo? It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.
  - walterbell 5y ago
    We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095
- thfuran 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until you get a new hat and glasses and cease to exist.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
You mean contactless payment which has been available outside the USA for over a decade, including Android wallet from 2011? Yes the future is unevenly distributed, but when it comes to banking and other payment infrastructure the "developed" country where it is least present is the USA
jjav 5y ago
> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie. The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.
- peterbraden 5y ago
  This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past. Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path. If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    > Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#sec0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...) I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.
ekianjo 5y ago
> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

> But convenience always wins. It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills. >We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out. if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments and banks cannot just turn off access to your account, but that is not an answer, you need to explain all of the processes that will need to support this possibility, because obviously banks and governments do need to turn off access to accounts at times. But if we allow cash as a fallback, then we already have a system that works. All the various rules and processes about cash have been worked out long ago, over generations! replacing the security that cash provides for people not to starve or freeze because of any number of possible problems would be an incredibly expensive and error prone process.

Cederfjard 5y ago
You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?
- walterbell 5y ago
  > You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.
    - walterbell 5y ago
      Would be good to quantify the cash decline, if any, outside the US. Like others, I incorrectly assumed US was using less cash. Cash is winning in the world reserve currency, and the cashless doth protest..
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments. Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined. Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be! The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!

the_other 5y ago

An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones. N=1.

sofixa 5y ago

> The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash. No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode. And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.

walterbell 5y ago

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

Supermancho 5y ago
> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  it kind of depends. there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead. in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Automated surveillance enforcement tends to bring the discrepancy between the law and the norms of behavior to light. The state prefers to forgo enforcement and keep the law rather than keep the enforcement and alter the law to reflect norms.
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.) Some countries took the opposite approach, and introduced lay-bys just before toll booths, enabling drivers to speed to their heart's content, and then have a rest before going through the next toll booth.

dane-pgp 5y ago

> You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon... You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by an AI to link you to your government-run wallet. https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-facial-recognition-equipped-vending-machine-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-fa...

modo_mario 5y ago
Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo? It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.
- walterbell 5y ago
  We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095
thfuran 5y ago
It's all fun and games until you get a new hat and glasses and cease to exist.

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

You mean contactless payment which has been available outside the USA for over a decade, including Android wallet from 2011? Yes the future is unevenly distributed, but when it comes to banking and other payment infrastructure the "developed" country where it is least present is the USA

jjav 5y ago

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie. The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.

peterbraden 5y ago
This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past. Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path. If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#sec0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...) I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.

ekianjo 5y ago

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!