6 ms·

While I like several aspects of cash, like little tracking/privacy violations, hard for someone to just cut you off from your money etc., I don't think I've use

While I like several aspects of cash, like little tracking/privacy violations, hard for someone to just cut you off from your money etc., I don't think I've used cash in 5+ years (except vacations). Absolutely every vendor in my country accepts cards or some kind of app payment and have for years, even girl scouts selling cookies. And cash is expensive. It's easy to scoff about the 1-2 % fees on cards (but in my country "BankAxept" has a flat fee of ~0.024 USD per transaction, so even cheaper). But having a business dealing with a lot of cash is also crazy expensive. You have to have extra security, pay someone to come and get it or yourself go to the bank and deposit. Then also buy rolls of change. I remember my dad spending a lot of hours a week dealing with this. So yeah, I'm all for keeping it, but I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps.

Laaas 4y ago
I imagine we'll have digital cash eventually, but the only sound non-blockchain solution I know of requires local quantum computation: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107 https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107
- tzs 4y ago
  What do you mean by “sound”? Why doesn’t David Chaum’s eCash from 1982 [1] qualify? That’s an on-line system. In 1990 he, Fiat, and Nairobi proposed an off-line system [2]. [1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau... [2] http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf
  - Laaas 4y ago
    The latter works fine if you're OK with completely trusting the banks. Local quantum computation gives you provably sound, decentralised, unprintable digital cash. Nice paper though, I wonder if you can make it quantum resistant.
nic547 4y ago
This popular imitative doesn't mandate the acceptance of cash. It mandates that the federal government must ensure that there are enough banknotes and coins and that replacing the swiss franc with another currency must be done via popular vote. So it's not really that radical. The same organisation is already planning on another popular initiative that seems to go in the direction of mandating the acceptance of cash, but other than the title "Wer mit Bargeld bezahlen will, muss mit Bargeld bezahlen können" (roughly: if you want to pay with cash must be able to pay with cash) I can't find any details about it.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > And cash is expensive. It's easy to scoff about the 1-2 % fees on cards The fee could be 100% for the vendor if the card holders uses chargeback. People forget that chargeback exists because they almost never use it but it's a real possibility. The recent OnlyFans scandal was in fact not an OnlyFans scandal but people charging back their credit card after the acquire the content provided by the creator. If something has a shot at ever replacing cash won't be cards but instant wire transfers between banks so that payments mde by citizens are both real time and impossible to chargeback. SEPA Instant is the closest effort but even in leader countries there are 40%+ banks which still don't have it. In the US it will be called FedNow but it's in its infancy
- sofixa 4y ago
  Are you talking about SEPA Instant? It's already here, across the whole eurozone, and usually free (some legacy banks charge a small fee).
  - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
    The EU is ahead but it's not as widely availible as you claim. The leaders are Austria and Spain and they hover around 50% banks having it https://www.cpg.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/sepa-instant-coverage-table-2021-10-1024x623.png https://www.cpg.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/sepa-instant-c...
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Your source is from 2021, so hardly representative of today.
      - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
        Oh yes centuries ago indeed
- Gare 4y ago
  You mean something like Digital Euro? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
slillibri 4y ago
A fee for using cash would be incredibly regressive because poor people use cash the most.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The poor already pay more for using cash. They pay the same amount as people using credit cards and don’t get any of the rewards/cash back that the more affluent do
  - 1_1xdev1 4y ago
    Are you trying to justify making the poor pay even more by suggesting they already bear the burden?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I’m not trying to justify anything. I’m saying it’s naive to think that the poor don’t already pay more.
      - DoctorOW 4y ago
        Nobody said they don't already pay more
  - mc32 4y ago
    Maybe but using CCs is even more expensive for the poor given their propensity to not pay their balances in full for multiple reasons; so from that PoV cash is cheaper.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      And the poor also use pay day loans and overdraft more and pay overdraft fees. Even paying credit card interest at 20% a year is cheaper than paying a $36 overdraft fee when your account is $5 negative for a couple of days until pay day.
  - 4y ago
dataflow 4y ago
> I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps. This sounds like... a poor choice of a hill to die on? The people who need cash the most tend to be poorer; asking them to pay more would be just cruel to many of them. There are lots of things (like taxes in general....) where some people benefit more than others from them, but we ignore that and just distribute the burden equally as a matter of principle instead of asking everyone to pay proportionally to what they use.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Good point, I haven't thought of that angle. Edit: But the homeless on the streets where I live that sell magazines etc accept mobile payment. And I've worked for the main government welfare agency a few years providing help to these people, and an assumption / basis was that they had a phone to be contacted on, which proved to work fine for most of them.
  - dataflow 4y ago
    This is really going on a tangent that's beside my point on the fees, but are you genuinely suggesting people can treat payments like phone calls or texts -- things that tolerate long delays? If someone calls you and your phone is unavailable for whatever reason, they can back later, even tomorrow or in a week. Or maybe you borrow someone's phone to call back. You... can't do any of this when you're trying to make a payment on the spot. Especially when you're poor. If an electronic solution is ever going to work at all, it needs to be something that's not powered. Like debit cards, not phones. But even with those, there are so many giant problems here that I don't have the energy to go on the tangent.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  In places where you can get life by with just a phone and a card, even poor people have phones. So perhaps this reality is already changing in favor of the poorer?
  - dataflow 4y ago
bagels 4y ago
Card fees are often 3% and vendors have to increase prices to cover this. People paying cash are already paying these same inflated prices to cover credit card fees.
- toastal 4y ago
  Luckily not everywhere. In Thailand cash (and bank transfers) are king. Most places do not accept credit, and the place that do usually require a $15 or $30 minimum and/or you're going to pay that extra overhead yourself. Alternatively, like when I bought my monitor recently, folks will just give you a discount for paying via cash/transfer (high value items like that often end up as credit charges or interest loans through the bankers).
wkat4242 4y ago
I still use cash a lot. Many places I go to only accept cash. These places are not fully licensed which is probably why they don't want to accept digital but there's definitely still a case for it IMO.
tsol 4y ago
What about the people that do use cash regularly? >And cash is expensive. Cards are expensive, the price is just currently being subsidized by the industry. Do we as a society really want to have to rely on that? There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future
- morelisp 4y ago
  > There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future What kind of guarantee can be made except strong limits enshrined in law, which there already are? (If you don't trust the laws, you can't trust cash either.)
- photonbucket 4y ago
  Credit card fees should go down if they remove the overhead of 'rewards'
starkd 4y ago
There are a lot of people who deal only in cash. I knew someone who was a shop mechanic. Completely self-employed and only took cash. When he died, he had stored savings in random places all over his house. He had thousands squirreled away. I can't imagine how much he lost due to inflation over the years, but he had plenty of money to live on.

Laaas 4y ago

I imagine we'll have digital cash eventually, but the only sound non-blockchain solution I know of requires local quantum computation: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107 https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107

tzs 4y ago
What do you mean by “sound”? Why doesn’t David Chaum’s eCash from 1982 [1] qualify? That’s an on-line system. In 1990 he, Fiat, and Nairobi proposed an off-line system [2]. [1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau... [2] http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf
- Laaas 4y ago
  The latter works fine if you're OK with completely trusting the banks. Local quantum computation gives you provably sound, decentralised, unprintable digital cash. Nice paper though, I wonder if you can make it quantum resistant.

nic547 4y ago

This popular imitative doesn't mandate the acceptance of cash. It mandates that the federal government must ensure that there are enough banknotes and coins and that replacing the swiss franc with another currency must be done via popular vote. So it's not really that radical. The same organisation is already planning on another popular initiative that seems to go in the direction of mandating the acceptance of cash, but other than the title "Wer mit Bargeld bezahlen will, muss mit Bargeld bezahlen können" (roughly: if you want to pay with cash must be able to pay with cash) I can't find any details about it.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago

> > And cash is expensive. It's easy to scoff about the 1-2 % fees on cards The fee could be 100% for the vendor if the card holders uses chargeback. People forget that chargeback exists because they almost never use it but it's a real possibility. The recent OnlyFans scandal was in fact not an OnlyFans scandal but people charging back their credit card after the acquire the content provided by the creator. If something has a shot at ever replacing cash won't be cards but instant wire transfers between banks so that payments mde by citizens are both real time and impossible to chargeback. SEPA Instant is the closest effort but even in leader countries there are 40%+ banks which still don't have it. In the US it will be called FedNow but it's in its infancy

sofixa 4y ago
Are you talking about SEPA Instant? It's already here, across the whole eurozone, and usually free (some legacy banks charge a small fee).
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  The EU is ahead but it's not as widely availible as you claim. The leaders are Austria and Spain and they hover around 50% banks having it https://www.cpg.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/sepa-instant-coverage-table-2021-10-1024x623.png https://www.cpg.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/sepa-instant-c...
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Your source is from 2021, so hardly representative of today.
    - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
      Oh yes centuries ago indeed
Gare 4y ago
You mean something like Digital Euro? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

slillibri 4y ago

A fee for using cash would be incredibly regressive because poor people use cash the most.

scarface74 4y ago
The poor already pay more for using cash. They pay the same amount as people using credit cards and don’t get any of the rewards/cash back that the more affluent do
- 1_1xdev1 4y ago
  Are you trying to justify making the poor pay even more by suggesting they already bear the burden?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I’m not trying to justify anything. I’m saying it’s naive to think that the poor don’t already pay more.
    - DoctorOW 4y ago
      Nobody said they don't already pay more
- mc32 4y ago
  Maybe but using CCs is even more expensive for the poor given their propensity to not pay their balances in full for multiple reasons; so from that PoV cash is cheaper.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And the poor also use pay day loans and overdraft more and pay overdraft fees. Even paying credit card interest at 20% a year is cheaper than paying a $36 overdraft fee when your account is $5 negative for a couple of days until pay day.
- 4y ago

dataflow 4y ago

> I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps. This sounds like... a poor choice of a hill to die on? The people who need cash the most tend to be poorer; asking them to pay more would be just cruel to many of them. There are lots of things (like taxes in general....) where some people benefit more than others from them, but we ignore that and just distribute the burden equally as a matter of principle instead of asking everyone to pay proportionally to what they use.

matsemann 4y ago
Good point, I haven't thought of that angle. Edit: But the homeless on the streets where I live that sell magazines etc accept mobile payment. And I've worked for the main government welfare agency a few years providing help to these people, and an assumption / basis was that they had a phone to be contacted on, which proved to work fine for most of them.
- dataflow 4y ago
  This is really going on a tangent that's beside my point on the fees, but are you genuinely suggesting people can treat payments like phone calls or texts -- things that tolerate long delays? If someone calls you and your phone is unavailable for whatever reason, they can back later, even tomorrow or in a week. Or maybe you borrow someone's phone to call back. You... can't do any of this when you're trying to make a payment on the spot. Especially when you're poor. If an electronic solution is ever going to work at all, it needs to be something that's not powered. Like debit cards, not phones. But even with those, there are so many giant problems here that I don't have the energy to go on the tangent.
rmbyrro 4y ago
In places where you can get life by with just a phone and a card, even poor people have phones. So perhaps this reality is already changing in favor of the poorer?
- dataflow 4y ago

bagels 4y ago

Card fees are often 3% and vendors have to increase prices to cover this. People paying cash are already paying these same inflated prices to cover credit card fees.

toastal 4y ago
Luckily not everywhere. In Thailand cash (and bank transfers) are king. Most places do not accept credit, and the place that do usually require a $15 or $30 minimum and/or you're going to pay that extra overhead yourself. Alternatively, like when I bought my monitor recently, folks will just give you a discount for paying via cash/transfer (high value items like that often end up as credit charges or interest loans through the bankers).

wkat4242 4y ago

I still use cash a lot. Many places I go to only accept cash. These places are not fully licensed which is probably why they don't want to accept digital but there's definitely still a case for it IMO.

tsol 4y ago

What about the people that do use cash regularly? >And cash is expensive. Cards are expensive, the price is just currently being subsidized by the industry. Do we as a society really want to have to rely on that? There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future

morelisp 4y ago
> There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future What kind of guarantee can be made except strong limits enshrined in law, which there already are? (If you don't trust the laws, you can't trust cash either.)
photonbucket 4y ago
Credit card fees should go down if they remove the overhead of 'rewards'

starkd 4y ago

There are a lot of people who deal only in cash. I knew someone who was a shop mechanic. Completely self-employed and only took cash. When he died, he had stored savings in random places all over his house. He had thousands squirreled away. I can't imagine how much he lost due to inflation over the years, but he had plenty of money to live on.