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Dumb question: why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? The problem I have with articles like this is that I don't trust these

Dumb question: why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? The problem I have with articles like this is that I don't trust these coins. What are Grin and Zcash going to be worth in 5 years? Are they going to be stable enough to use as an actual currency and is the marketplace going to be confident enough to use them as currency? I agree that cash is an important aspect of the economy that should be protected but I don't see how a couple coins that I have not heard of are going to be the panacea they purport to be.

brightball 4y ago
There is some law about being required to accept any form of legal tender. I think there are some specifics to it though.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  I've seen more and more fast casual restaurants in the US starting to go cashless, so there's definitely a way for businesses to get around it. But I don't know the law at all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- josephcsible 4y ago
  The key word is "debts". If you owe a debt to someone, e.g., in a restaurant where you eat first and then pay, they have to accept cash. But in situations where there's no debt, e.g., restaurants where you pay before they give you your food, they can refuse cash.
josephcsible 4y ago
> why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? Why shouldn't business owners be able to choose which forms of payments to accept?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Because it is a profoundly discriminatory practice. At the extreme, it amounts to "your money's no good here", in the bad sense of that phrase.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    But isn't discrimination only bad when it's based on membership of protected classes? And preferred method of payment definitely isn't a protected class.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      It's well established that lower income cohorts have less access to digital finance and credit. Cashless systems instantly become a proxy to exclude those cohorts.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        But income isn't a protected class either (and it can't be made one, or nothing would be allowed to be expensive).
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091797 1. If the net effect is to discriminate against a protected class, legal liability may still exist. 2. Discrimination as a general concept is not identicial to discrimination against a protected class. It may be legal in a strict sense, and still morally, socially, and politically reprehensible and/or disruptive.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Discriminations harms extend well beyond those which are recognised legally. The law itself is very often a tool for further oppression, and should be considered on that basis. There are two elements to that question: the legal and the moral. Legally the premise is shaky as it's a short walk from "use a specific payment method" (a financial instrument, a device, a service, a company) to what are protected classes: age, race, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy, and veteran status in the United States.[1] As such, strictly as a business decision there's a considerable risk involved that such practices would be found to be de facto discimination against one or more protected classes. (Keep in mind that there are religions which consider interest on money to be against their beliefs, which would then transfer to use of revolving credit instruments. I've no idea whether this has been tested in US courts.) On a moral basis, even that which is not strictly illegal may be against principles of greater justice, and gatekeeping access to goods or services can easily work against those with limited means (unable to buy the latest mobile smartphone or desktop/laptop computer), unabile to maintain broadband comms access, owning a working but end-of-lifed device (for Android as little as 2--3 years, somewhat better for Apple), living in regions without high-speed broadband (most of the US), excluded from access to credit by low credit scores, or forced by circumstances to accept massive invasions of privacy or exposure to manipulation (propaganda, advertising, targeted manipulation) simply to participate minimally in the everyday business of life. Note that remote-commerce can be a force for inclusion and against oppression. The Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the subject of recent commentary on that point, see for example: "How Sears Catalog Fought White Supremacists" https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-catalog-fought-white-supremacists/6176981.html https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-ca... The major operative factor to me seems to be whether a technology constrains or expands opportunities. Reducing payment options quite clearly constrains them. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-classes-under-anti-discrimination-laws.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-cla...
kornhole 4y ago
It would be great if we could make it law, but it will be difficult. It is in government's and other's interests to eliminate cash. It is not law here in California. I recently went to a bar that would not take cash. I somewhat loudly explained to the bartendenr that my bar tab is one of the last things I want public and that my friends and I would not be returning.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Cash works for in person transactions. It can work for certain delayed transactions (e.g., prepaid or post-paid remote orders, will-call, layaway), though in almost all cases those are actually transacted by some other mechanism --- vouchers, credit cards, cheques, postal mail orders, or personal / direct credit. There is an arguable need for an anonymous remote-transaction payment mechanism. That itself introduces numerous further concerns (none of which TFA addresses): - Black market, criminal, ransom, or blackmail transactions. - Refund or chargebacks initiated by the payee for nonfulfillment / fraudulent transaction / substandard product or service. - Money laundering and tax avoidance. (That's just off the top of my head. Financial crimes isn't my strong suit. FBI list: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes)
barrysteve 4y ago
If you're going to legislate monetary privacy, why not use an update-to-date form of electronic privacy and outlaw all the ways of breaking it? A nation-state enforced "black box" is probably the only way to stop nation-states breaking open any privacy features in the marketplace. It's probably easier to conceive of a black box/black blockchain that can't be opened if you aren't trying to fight off the whole world and every conceivable adversary to keep the contents unknown.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were. How do you trust the government enough to keep its hands out of a digital ledger system that's supposedly private when we all know how valuable that information is? The whole point of crypto to begin with was to pry control away from the government.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    I get the rebuttal and agree with your sentiment. The government acts as if it's above the law and outside of trust, why bother trying to engage with them? Well I've seen the completely-hidden privacy pattern tried. People tried to cut out the government and at the end of the day, they will lie, cheat and steal because they know their rule is backed up with guns and in legal grey areas, the average tech bro is remarkably vulnerable to the system they live inside. Just look at what happened to Ladar Levison for just being an unknowing facilitator of Snowden, his stuff got nuked. If you want something to be private, there has to be a mechanism to roll back government control and the only way to do that peacefully, is legally inside the system. The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? This could be a whole new gov department that has a zero trust policy of it's employees like the intelligence agencies have and aimed at keeping pandora's box closed, rather than revealing everything. Training people to keep the lid shut and keeping the unknown, unknown is very different to the CIA/NSA method of harvesting everything it can in the world. Then pretending the same employees that can harvest everything on the planet, won't leak the NSA's database too for their own profit or moral reasons. I don't know, the easy answer is just to roll custom stuff and go private individually and blend in with the herd. For real privacy, there's big big problems that avoiding the gov won't help.
colordrops 4y ago
As others are saying, it's an implicit goal by those holding the levers to eliminate cash. China has already effectively done it. US is edging closer, and it won't be stopped unless there is an explicit movement against it.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  Right, but the US is still (theoretically) a representative democracy that's beholden to its people. China is an autocracy. Americans have the ability to speak up about this issue in a way that the Chinese don't.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Ok, but is that stopping the slide to a cashless society?
- thablackbull 4y ago
  Except those are just market forces and it is more convenient to use electronic payment. I'm not sure what you mean by China, it's China's government that is forcing all merchants to accept cash [1]. > The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is looking to close the widening digital divide and has warned merchants that they must accept cash or face disciplinary action,... [1] https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-merchants-to-accept-cash/ https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-...
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Are we really still beholden to such simplistic and wrong ideas such as everything being explained by "market forces"? Do they exist? Yes. Are they they only factor? No. Are they they main factor? Depends on what you are talking about. Power brokers in the US will do whatever it takes to move things a certain way if it benefits them. I dare you to find an anonymous visa card that actually works. You won't.
    - 4y ago
ianmiers 4y ago
Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments. It also doesn't work in businesses that get robbed. The better question is, why do you need a new currency to get privacy? Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. What remains to be seen is if there's sufficient incentives to build anything around these or for any portion of the economy to move to them. Most purchases aren't sensitive, so for private payments to work, they need to be ubiquitous for non privacy reasons and just give people who need it the option for privacy. Much like cash does. But again, cash doesn't work online or increasingly offline
- genev 4y ago
  > Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. That's what Monero is, right? It doesn't really matter how stable it is, if I'm just going to convert to USD/EUR immediately after my transaction.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    No, Monero is not pegged to any other currency
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? Yes, you can utilize dollar backed and dollar pegged stablecoins, like USDC and DAI, respectively, in privacy-shielding protocols like https://zk.money https://zk.money and https://tornado.cash https://tornado.cash. The problem at the moment is that Ethereum has very limited scalability, and privacy-shielded transactions are about five to ten times more compute-intensive than vanilla transactions, making them prohibitively expensive to conduct for most applications. Ethereum layer 2 solutions that preserve the base layer's decentralization hold the promise to make such transactions viable at scale, but they are still quite immature in their feature set. For example, all of the general computation L2s still rely on a centralized coordinator.
t_mann 4y ago
We could pass laws to protect cash, but in reality the opposite is happening. Harvard economists like Ken Rogoff are actively lobbying to kill cash exactly in order to remove anonymous transaction possibilities (to fight crime, purportedly), and they are playing into the hands of all the companies who profit off cashless transactions.

brightball 4y ago

There is some law about being required to accept any form of legal tender. I think there are some specifics to it though.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
I've seen more and more fast casual restaurants in the US starting to go cashless, so there's definitely a way for businesses to get around it. But I don't know the law at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
josephcsible 4y ago
The key word is "debts". If you owe a debt to someone, e.g., in a restaurant where you eat first and then pay, they have to accept cash. But in situations where there's no debt, e.g., restaurants where you pay before they give you your food, they can refuse cash.

josephcsible 4y ago

> why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? Why shouldn't business owners be able to choose which forms of payments to accept?

dredmorbius 4y ago
Because it is a profoundly discriminatory practice. At the extreme, it amounts to "your money's no good here", in the bad sense of that phrase.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  But isn't discrimination only bad when it's based on membership of protected classes? And preferred method of payment definitely isn't a protected class.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    It's well established that lower income cohorts have less access to digital finance and credit. Cashless systems instantly become a proxy to exclude those cohorts.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      But income isn't a protected class either (and it can't be made one, or nothing would be allowed to be expensive).
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091797 1. If the net effect is to discriminate against a protected class, legal liability may still exist. 2. Discrimination as a general concept is not identicial to discrimination against a protected class. It may be legal in a strict sense, and still morally, socially, and politically reprehensible and/or disruptive.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Discriminations harms extend well beyond those which are recognised legally. The law itself is very often a tool for further oppression, and should be considered on that basis. There are two elements to that question: the legal and the moral. Legally the premise is shaky as it's a short walk from "use a specific payment method" (a financial instrument, a device, a service, a company) to what are protected classes: age, race, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy, and veteran status in the United States.[1] As such, strictly as a business decision there's a considerable risk involved that such practices would be found to be de facto discimination against one or more protected classes. (Keep in mind that there are religions which consider interest on money to be against their beliefs, which would then transfer to use of revolving credit instruments. I've no idea whether this has been tested in US courts.) On a moral basis, even that which is not strictly illegal may be against principles of greater justice, and gatekeeping access to goods or services can easily work against those with limited means (unable to buy the latest mobile smartphone or desktop/laptop computer), unabile to maintain broadband comms access, owning a working but end-of-lifed device (for Android as little as 2--3 years, somewhat better for Apple), living in regions without high-speed broadband (most of the US), excluded from access to credit by low credit scores, or forced by circumstances to accept massive invasions of privacy or exposure to manipulation (propaganda, advertising, targeted manipulation) simply to participate minimally in the everyday business of life. Note that remote-commerce can be a force for inclusion and against oppression. The Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the subject of recent commentary on that point, see for example: "How Sears Catalog Fought White Supremacists" https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-catalog-fought-white-supremacists/6176981.html https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-ca... The major operative factor to me seems to be whether a technology constrains or expands opportunities. Reducing payment options quite clearly constrains them. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-classes-under-anti-discrimination-laws.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-cla...

kornhole 4y ago

It would be great if we could make it law, but it will be difficult. It is in government's and other's interests to eliminate cash. It is not law here in California. I recently went to a bar that would not take cash. I somewhat loudly explained to the bartendenr that my bar tab is one of the last things I want public and that my friends and I would not be returning.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Cash works for in person transactions. It can work for certain delayed transactions (e.g., prepaid or post-paid remote orders, will-call, layaway), though in almost all cases those are actually transacted by some other mechanism --- vouchers, credit cards, cheques, postal mail orders, or personal / direct credit. There is an arguable need for an anonymous remote-transaction payment mechanism. That itself introduces numerous further concerns (none of which TFA addresses): - Black market, criminal, ransom, or blackmail transactions. - Refund or chargebacks initiated by the payee for nonfulfillment / fraudulent transaction / substandard product or service. - Money laundering and tax avoidance. (That's just off the top of my head. Financial crimes isn't my strong suit. FBI list: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes)

barrysteve 4y ago

If you're going to legislate monetary privacy, why not use an update-to-date form of electronic privacy and outlaw all the ways of breaking it? A nation-state enforced "black box" is probably the only way to stop nation-states breaking open any privacy features in the marketplace. It's probably easier to conceive of a black box/black blockchain that can't be opened if you aren't trying to fight off the whole world and every conceivable adversary to keep the contents unknown.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were. How do you trust the government enough to keep its hands out of a digital ledger system that's supposedly private when we all know how valuable that information is? The whole point of crypto to begin with was to pry control away from the government.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  I get the rebuttal and agree with your sentiment. The government acts as if it's above the law and outside of trust, why bother trying to engage with them? Well I've seen the completely-hidden privacy pattern tried. People tried to cut out the government and at the end of the day, they will lie, cheat and steal because they know their rule is backed up with guns and in legal grey areas, the average tech bro is remarkably vulnerable to the system they live inside. Just look at what happened to Ladar Levison for just being an unknowing facilitator of Snowden, his stuff got nuked. If you want something to be private, there has to be a mechanism to roll back government control and the only way to do that peacefully, is legally inside the system. The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? This could be a whole new gov department that has a zero trust policy of it's employees like the intelligence agencies have and aimed at keeping pandora's box closed, rather than revealing everything. Training people to keep the lid shut and keeping the unknown, unknown is very different to the CIA/NSA method of harvesting everything it can in the world. Then pretending the same employees that can harvest everything on the planet, won't leak the NSA's database too for their own profit or moral reasons. I don't know, the easy answer is just to roll custom stuff and go private individually and blend in with the herd. For real privacy, there's big big problems that avoiding the gov won't help.

colordrops 4y ago

As others are saying, it's an implicit goal by those holding the levers to eliminate cash. China has already effectively done it. US is edging closer, and it won't be stopped unless there is an explicit movement against it.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
Right, but the US is still (theoretically) a representative democracy that's beholden to its people. China is an autocracy. Americans have the ability to speak up about this issue in a way that the Chinese don't.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Ok, but is that stopping the slide to a cashless society?
thablackbull 4y ago
Except those are just market forces and it is more convenient to use electronic payment. I'm not sure what you mean by China, it's China's government that is forcing all merchants to accept cash [1]. > The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is looking to close the widening digital divide and has warned merchants that they must accept cash or face disciplinary action,... [1] https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-merchants-to-accept-cash/ https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-...
- colordrops 4y ago
  Are we really still beholden to such simplistic and wrong ideas such as everything being explained by "market forces"? Do they exist? Yes. Are they they only factor? No. Are they they main factor? Depends on what you are talking about. Power brokers in the US will do whatever it takes to move things a certain way if it benefits them. I dare you to find an anonymous visa card that actually works. You won't.
  - 4y ago

ianmiers 4y ago

Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments. It also doesn't work in businesses that get robbed. The better question is, why do you need a new currency to get privacy? Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. What remains to be seen is if there's sufficient incentives to build anything around these or for any portion of the economy to move to them. Most purchases aren't sensitive, so for private payments to work, they need to be ubiquitous for non privacy reasons and just give people who need it the option for privacy. Much like cash does. But again, cash doesn't work online or increasingly offline

genev 4y ago
> Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. That's what Monero is, right? It doesn't really matter how stable it is, if I'm just going to convert to USD/EUR immediately after my transaction.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  No, Monero is not pegged to any other currency
ETH_start 4y ago
>>Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? Yes, you can utilize dollar backed and dollar pegged stablecoins, like USDC and DAI, respectively, in privacy-shielding protocols like https://zk.money https://zk.money and https://tornado.cash https://tornado.cash. The problem at the moment is that Ethereum has very limited scalability, and privacy-shielded transactions are about five to ten times more compute-intensive than vanilla transactions, making them prohibitively expensive to conduct for most applications. Ethereum layer 2 solutions that preserve the base layer's decentralization hold the promise to make such transactions viable at scale, but they are still quite immature in their feature set. For example, all of the general computation L2s still rely on a centralized coordinator.

t_mann 4y ago

We could pass laws to protect cash, but in reality the opposite is happening. Harvard economists like Ken Rogoff are actively lobbying to kill cash exactly in order to remove anonymous transaction possibilities (to fight crime, purportedly), and they are playing into the hands of all the companies who profit off cashless transactions.