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This is a fantastic post - I'm 100% going to start using the term "Casino-Chip Society" whenever I talk about "cashless" society. There is another reason that

by alexb_ 4y ago

This is a fantastic post - I'm 100% going to start using the term "Casino-Chip Society" whenever I talk about "cashless" society. There is another reason that cashless society is awful that was not talked about in this article, but I think is just as important - a digital dollar means that you have a dollar where it is impossible to commit crime. While that sounds like a good thing (who wants crime?), it very much stops being a good thing as soon as you bump up with laws that go against your morals. Designing systems with the assumption that we will always have democratic and free government is a horrendous idea, allowing the government to have a complete record and log of every single transaction you ever make, as well as having the ability to stop you using digital money, makes it so easy for fascists.

uoaei 4y ago
> it very much stops being a good thing as soon as you bump up with laws that go against your morals A pretty explicit part of the fascist ideology per se is that laws are merely morals that are written down and enforced. The idea is that people adopt their moral code from the central government who defines how people "should" perceive the world in order to make citizens obedient to the dogma of the state. Willing fascists do everything they can to dissolve any notion of personal choice in the matter, for themselves and for others, and by their very constitution cannot conceive of morals existing outside of a system of authority.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Wait, so does that mean the "War on Drugs" wasn't making me more free??? The US Government would never do anything fascist so obviously you're wrong.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    All laws make you less free. Laws exist to restrict freedoms in order to create a better society - what a better society means is the part where political differences come up. Most people can agree on laws existing to prevent harm unto others, but then what does that mean? Answers depend on your values and goals, and are fundamentally what politics are. The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.
    - js8 4y ago
      > The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit. I think you're wrong. Not all laws prohibit. For example, take a law that establishes public libraries. It doesn't prohibit anybody from anything.
      - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
        Nah, all government is bad. Socialism is when the government spends money, freedom is when I get paid $5 an hour and eat trans fats
        alexb_ 4y ago
        When exactly did I say that all government is bad? I personally think it's great the government restricts the right of people to commit murder.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        Why? The market would take care of it. Instead of police, just hire security.
        jacobr1 4y ago
        This is one of the problems with polarization. The legitimate points of one side get grouped in with all the other ridiculous crap. Every law, every program has a cost. Many times this costs are worth it. And there are plenty of times where they aren't, or have unintended side-effects. Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right, even if you disagree on where they fall on the balance of net-benefits in the final analysis. TANSTAAFL
        mason55 4y ago
        > Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right I don't think either side is better or worse at this. It's more like, point out the costs of the other side's policies while glossing over the costs of your own. Abortion is a great example. I never hear a pro-life argument that starts out "abortion should be illegal but it will create all these unwanted babies and here's what I propose we do about that and what it will cost. We'll vote on outlawing abortion but it will be tied to tax increases to pay for programs to ensure these children have proper nutrition and education." The idea that the right cares about babies right up until the moment you're born is common enough that George Carlin was joking about it in the 70s.
- Karellen 4y ago
  What else are laws - even in a democracy - if not "merely morals that are written down and enforced"?
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I think the difference is that the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state in Fascism. A well functioning society necessarily ought not legally forbid things that I consider immoral, which allows for personal autonomy with regards to ethics.
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      I think that would be better stated as in totalitarianism, the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state. Fascism is only one form of totalitarianism.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    The issue is in the word "merely". Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encouraging "good" ones. In this sense the law has a moral quality. Roughly speaking, "law" is morality as practiced by a state. The difference is in the acknowledgment or ignorance of the laws' congruence with the moralities of the citizens' opinions and preferences those laws are meant to represent. One could say the entire goal of democracy is the messy process of aligning the state's morality with the collective morality of its citizens. Fascism is then comparable to defining a single normative moral position and imposing it on the entire populace unilaterally. In short, the question is: whose morals?
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Laws and morals are both normative claims about the actions of individuals, but while morals are concerned with individual actions, laws must be concerned about societal-level ramifications of not just the actions, but also the enforcement of law. For example, most people would agree that adultry is bad and immoral. But as a society we've decided that its immorality isn't sufficient to overcome the ills of being punishable by the state, and thus it ought not to be illegal. Stealing to feed your starving family is moral, but we don't want to support theft in general so its illegal. In a free society, one must recognize that legality ought loosely follow morality, with the ideal being that illegal actions are the strict subset of immoral actions which cause greater ill than the enforcement of their illegality. In the absence of an oracle into objective good and evil, a society must err on the side of not making things illegal which could potentially either be not worse than the ill of their enforcement, or not be immoral at all. The all-to-common trap is to confuse the direction of influence: morality should influence legality, never the other way around. Allowing legality to influence one's perception of morality is simply surrendering your autonomy to those who greatest influence the law, and is a sure-fire path to authoritarianism.
akira2501 4y ago
> a digital dollar means that you have a dollar where it is impossible to commit crime Maybe. You'll probably just be able to convert it to some other form of value at a loss and then continue from there. Plenty of governments have envisioned the end of the "black market" only to be shown how utterly impossible that idea is.
- bombcar 4y ago
  That's the thing that wasn't explicit in the article; that each time you "switch layers" you often incur fees - if you're going down or back. You can deposit cash at a bank and get it back, but that's almost an exception. Once you get into layer 3 it is harder and harder to get back to layer 1 or 2 without losing "some value" - gift cards being the most obvious example.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    > You can deposit cash at a bank and get it back, but that's almost an exception. You get back the same cash but you almost certainly don't get back the same value due to inflation.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      True, but that hits you if you just stuff 20s in your mattress (which is why inflation is the most effective flat tax we have).
    - bruce511 4y ago
      >> You get back the same cash No you don't, or at least, no I don't. My bank has fees for depositing cash (more than x times a month), fees for withdrawing cash (even at an atm) and fees for holding my cash (having an account.) Trading in cash is _really_ expensive.
      - senortumnus 4y ago
        This is surprising. You should consider other banks.
knowaveragejoe 4y ago
The history of civil rights progress is characterized by marginally deviant behavior(for the time) slowly becoming more accepted and mainstream. Take LGBT rights or marijuana for example. If you disallow even the slightest level of deviance than you potentially neuter the ability of money to participate in that process.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bruce511 4y ago
So let's say I have lots of level 2 money. I go to various banks and trade in the level 2 for level 1. I take my billions of level 1,and stick it in a warehouse. Maybe one day I even set it on fire. What does this mean? Does the fed recognizes the loss, and just print more? Have I in effect just shrunk the economy? My level 2 money is still in the system, its just the paper has vanished. By extension, say every person loses one $10 bill every year, in an unrecoverable (by anyone) way. Presumably that's factored into the money supply? Is changing the paper (as in the UK this year) a way of "cleaning the balance sheet" - effectively preventing some truly monster hoard from suddenly appearing? So many questions...
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  What I'm wondering is .. when you own stocks of companies it is like having one type of currency, one per company or fund. (right?). Now when the stock-market goes down I lose money. And so do most people who own stocks. Where does that lost money go? Everybody lost a lot in the most recent downturn and (most) nobody gained. We simply have less "value" now. Where did that value go? How could it have just vanished?
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    For the value of a stock to go down people have to sell it. What the people who have not sold lost, the people who have sold gained. Overall the money supply has not changed, money has just moved from holders to sellers
  - bruce511 4y ago
    So that's level 3 value right? It's not money (level 1) or even chips (level 2). So I'd say it's inaccurate to say you lost money. More accurate to say you lost value. When the shares were issued (out of thin air) they had speculative value - they are promises for future dividends (presumably level 2) based on future profits. The stock market acts as a level 2/level 3 swap place, and hence let's you calculate the "current level 2 price" of your level 3 paper. So yes, the value simply got lost. But balance that with the way it simply got created in the first place. And bear in mind that _all_ shares go to 0 in the long run. Ultimately the future arrives and that future value speculation is fully realised.
bombolo 4y ago
> Designing systems with the assumption that we will always have democratic and free government is a horrendous idea I wonder if that's why germans are so against anything that is privacy invading while swedish people are quite happy to have their home address publicly known.
badpun 4y ago
> a digital dollar means that you have a dollar where it is impossible to commit crime. This is overly definitive. For example, in Poland, it's illegal to run a private online poker site and yet there's plenty of operators doing it. They offer digital money transfers via payment processors which specialize in skirting the law, such as Neteller, Payza etc. The Polish state doesn't care enough about its own laws regarding online gambling to clamp down on such practices and so people are happily commiting crimes using the "digital dollar".
- akiselev 4y ago
  The GP phrased that way too much like an allegory from under a rock and not enough like an internet comment. (I think) He means that digital currencies remove plausible deniability. The Polish government can both claim to crack down on gambling to its conservative supporters and at the same time avoid investing too many resources in pointless anti-vice enforcement. The second they have a digital ledger of all transactions in the country, they either have to get real with their conservative supporters who will vote them out or really go after all the people gambling whose bookies will drag them out from their beds. Politics is a balancing act.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  With better surveillance tech (no cash being an example of this) you can pave the way for future governments to exercise that power in bad ways even if the current one is lenient.
- mymythisisthis 4y ago
  In Canada, casinos are used to wash money, https://www.cp24.com/news/mystery-shoppers-sent-to-ontario-casinos-made-away-with-over-35k-despite-not-having-proof-of-winnings-1.6175095 https://www.cp24.com/news/mystery-shoppers-sent-to-ontario-c... The government makes too much from casinos, and doesn't care.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by alexb_ 4y ago

uoaei 4y ago

> it very much stops being a good thing as soon as you bump up with laws that go against your morals A pretty explicit part of the fascist ideology per se is that laws are merely morals that are written down and enforced. The idea is that people adopt their moral code from the central government who defines how people "should" perceive the world in order to make citizens obedient to the dogma of the state. Willing fascists do everything they can to dissolve any notion of personal choice in the matter, for themselves and for others, and by their very constitution cannot conceive of morals existing outside of a system of authority.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Wait, so does that mean the "War on Drugs" wasn't making me more free??? The US Government would never do anything fascist so obviously you're wrong.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  All laws make you less free. Laws exist to restrict freedoms in order to create a better society - what a better society means is the part where political differences come up. Most people can agree on laws existing to prevent harm unto others, but then what does that mean? Answers depend on your values and goals, and are fundamentally what politics are. The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.
  - js8 4y ago
    > The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit. I think you're wrong. Not all laws prohibit. For example, take a law that establishes public libraries. It doesn't prohibit anybody from anything.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      Nah, all government is bad. Socialism is when the government spends money, freedom is when I get paid $5 an hour and eat trans fats
      - alexb_ 4y ago
        When exactly did I say that all government is bad? I personally think it's great the government restricts the right of people to commit murder.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        Why? The market would take care of it. Instead of police, just hire security.
      - jacobr1 4y ago
        This is one of the problems with polarization. The legitimate points of one side get grouped in with all the other ridiculous crap. Every law, every program has a cost. Many times this costs are worth it. And there are plenty of times where they aren't, or have unintended side-effects. Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right, even if you disagree on where they fall on the balance of net-benefits in the final analysis. TANSTAAFL
        mason55 4y ago
        > Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right I don't think either side is better or worse at this. It's more like, point out the costs of the other side's policies while glossing over the costs of your own. Abortion is a great example. I never hear a pro-life argument that starts out "abortion should be illegal but it will create all these unwanted babies and here's what I propose we do about that and what it will cost. We'll vote on outlawing abortion but it will be tied to tax increases to pay for programs to ensure these children have proper nutrition and education." The idea that the right cares about babies right up until the moment you're born is common enough that George Carlin was joking about it in the 70s.
Karellen 4y ago
What else are laws - even in a democracy - if not "merely morals that are written down and enforced"?
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I think the difference is that the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state in Fascism. A well functioning society necessarily ought not legally forbid things that I consider immoral, which allows for personal autonomy with regards to ethics.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    I think that would be better stated as in totalitarianism, the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state. Fascism is only one form of totalitarianism.
- uoaei 4y ago
  The issue is in the word "merely". Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encouraging "good" ones. In this sense the law has a moral quality. Roughly speaking, "law" is morality as practiced by a state. The difference is in the acknowledgment or ignorance of the laws' congruence with the moralities of the citizens' opinions and preferences those laws are meant to represent. One could say the entire goal of democracy is the messy process of aligning the state's morality with the collective morality of its citizens. Fascism is then comparable to defining a single normative moral position and imposing it on the entire populace unilaterally. In short, the question is: whose morals?
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Laws and morals are both normative claims about the actions of individuals, but while morals are concerned with individual actions, laws must be concerned about societal-level ramifications of not just the actions, but also the enforcement of law. For example, most people would agree that adultry is bad and immoral. But as a society we've decided that its immorality isn't sufficient to overcome the ills of being punishable by the state, and thus it ought not to be illegal. Stealing to feed your starving family is moral, but we don't want to support theft in general so its illegal. In a free society, one must recognize that legality ought loosely follow morality, with the ideal being that illegal actions are the strict subset of immoral actions which cause greater ill than the enforcement of their illegality. In the absence of an oracle into objective good and evil, a society must err on the side of not making things illegal which could potentially either be not worse than the ill of their enforcement, or not be immoral at all. The all-to-common trap is to confuse the direction of influence: morality should influence legality, never the other way around. Allowing legality to influence one's perception of morality is simply surrendering your autonomy to those who greatest influence the law, and is a sure-fire path to authoritarianism.

akira2501 4y ago

> a digital dollar means that you have a dollar where it is impossible to commit crime Maybe. You'll probably just be able to convert it to some other form of value at a loss and then continue from there. Plenty of governments have envisioned the end of the "black market" only to be shown how utterly impossible that idea is.

bombcar 4y ago
That's the thing that wasn't explicit in the article; that each time you "switch layers" you often incur fees - if you're going down or back. You can deposit cash at a bank and get it back, but that's almost an exception. Once you get into layer 3 it is harder and harder to get back to layer 1 or 2 without losing "some value" - gift cards being the most obvious example.
- uoaei 4y ago
  > You can deposit cash at a bank and get it back, but that's almost an exception. You get back the same cash but you almost certainly don't get back the same value due to inflation.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    True, but that hits you if you just stuff 20s in your mattress (which is why inflation is the most effective flat tax we have).
  - bruce511 4y ago
    >> You get back the same cash No you don't, or at least, no I don't. My bank has fees for depositing cash (more than x times a month), fees for withdrawing cash (even at an atm) and fees for holding my cash (having an account.) Trading in cash is _really_ expensive.
    - senortumnus 4y ago
      This is surprising. You should consider other banks.

knowaveragejoe 4y ago

The history of civil rights progress is characterized by marginally deviant behavior(for the time) slowly becoming more accepted and mainstream. Take LGBT rights or marijuana for example. If you disallow even the slightest level of deviance than you potentially neuter the ability of money to participate in that process.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bruce511 4y ago

So let's say I have lots of level 2 money. I go to various banks and trade in the level 2 for level 1. I take my billions of level 1,and stick it in a warehouse. Maybe one day I even set it on fire. What does this mean? Does the fed recognizes the loss, and just print more? Have I in effect just shrunk the economy? My level 2 money is still in the system, its just the paper has vanished. By extension, say every person loses one $10 bill every year, in an unrecoverable (by anyone) way. Presumably that's factored into the money supply? Is changing the paper (as in the UK this year) a way of "cleaning the balance sheet" - effectively preventing some truly monster hoard from suddenly appearing? So many questions...

galaxyLogic 4y ago
What I'm wondering is .. when you own stocks of companies it is like having one type of currency, one per company or fund. (right?). Now when the stock-market goes down I lose money. And so do most people who own stocks. Where does that lost money go? Everybody lost a lot in the most recent downturn and (most) nobody gained. We simply have less "value" now. Where did that value go? How could it have just vanished?
- jack_pp 4y ago
  For the value of a stock to go down people have to sell it. What the people who have not sold lost, the people who have sold gained. Overall the money supply has not changed, money has just moved from holders to sellers
- bruce511 4y ago
  So that's level 3 value right? It's not money (level 1) or even chips (level 2). So I'd say it's inaccurate to say you lost money. More accurate to say you lost value. When the shares were issued (out of thin air) they had speculative value - they are promises for future dividends (presumably level 2) based on future profits. The stock market acts as a level 2/level 3 swap place, and hence let's you calculate the "current level 2 price" of your level 3 paper. So yes, the value simply got lost. But balance that with the way it simply got created in the first place. And bear in mind that _all_ shares go to 0 in the long run. Ultimately the future arrives and that future value speculation is fully realised.

bombolo 4y ago

> Designing systems with the assumption that we will always have democratic and free government is a horrendous idea I wonder if that's why germans are so against anything that is privacy invading while swedish people are quite happy to have their home address publicly known.

badpun 4y ago

> a digital dollar means that you have a dollar where it is impossible to commit crime. This is overly definitive. For example, in Poland, it's illegal to run a private online poker site and yet there's plenty of operators doing it. They offer digital money transfers via payment processors which specialize in skirting the law, such as Neteller, Payza etc. The Polish state doesn't care enough about its own laws regarding online gambling to clamp down on such practices and so people are happily commiting crimes using the "digital dollar".

akiselev 4y ago
The GP phrased that way too much like an allegory from under a rock and not enough like an internet comment. (I think) He means that digital currencies remove plausible deniability. The Polish government can both claim to crack down on gambling to its conservative supporters and at the same time avoid investing too many resources in pointless anti-vice enforcement. The second they have a digital ledger of all transactions in the country, they either have to get real with their conservative supporters who will vote them out or really go after all the people gambling whose bookies will drag them out from their beds. Politics is a balancing act.
quickthrower2 4y ago
With better surveillance tech (no cash being an example of this) you can pave the way for future governments to exercise that power in bad ways even if the current one is lenient.
mymythisisthis 4y ago
In Canada, casinos are used to wash money, https://www.cp24.com/news/mystery-shoppers-sent-to-ontario-casinos-made-away-with-over-35k-despite-not-having-proof-of-winnings-1.6175095 https://www.cp24.com/news/mystery-shoppers-sent-to-ontario-c... The government makes too much from casinos, and doesn't care.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]