14 ms·

Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

237 points by rwmj 3y ago

jason-phillips 3y ago
I live an hour or so outside of Austin and people still primarily write checks as that's the only acceptable payment method, along with cash. My new wife said, "Wait, why not just use Stripe? I'll tell them." I had to explain to her that one does not simply pull forward a society thirty years into the future. There is an incredible amount of cultural inertia to overcome. So I carry a lot of cash out here.
- glimshe 3y ago
  You'd be surprised. I visited South America and all I saw was phone payments... They basically skipped the credit card age, as cards were never popular among the poor.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Aren't the phone payments backed by credit cards or do they by preloaded vouchers?
    - baq 3y ago
      Bank accounts directly I’d assume. Why add another layer of indirection?
      - xadhominemx 3y ago
        It varies by country but a lot of them are just virtual debit and credit cards because the payments run over the card network rails.
  - fundad 3y ago
    It’s not surprising that a lot Murica is decades behind most places in the world. Especially places where foreigners visit.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      How is it behind? I've not been at a store in a while that I couldn't use apple pay or a card? I know it's popular to bag on America, but I figure most of HN is better than that.
      - canucker2016 3y ago
        Until Apple Pay and other smartphone-related payment methods became common, the USA credit card was technologically behind much of Europe, Canada, and other developed countries. Chip-and-PIN (EMV, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV) is the standard in Europe and Canada for relaying credit card info & authentication. Many USA retailers were stuck using the credit card's magnetic stripe for entering card info. Evidently the USA still hasn't moved to Chip-and-PIN, with Chip and Signature being more common. Updating the point-of-sale terminals has been the chokepoint supposedly, https://lauraclery.com/chip-and-pin-united-states/ https://lauraclery.com/chip-and-pin-united-states/.
- chasd00 3y ago
  > I live an hour or so outside of Austin and people still primarily write checks I can’t think of an area within 65 miles of downtown Austin where checks would be common. Which direction from Austin do you live? East maybe?
- ghaff 3y ago
  I use very little cash in MA. But checks are still pretty much the default for a lot of people doing various services for me. I can just leave a check for someone like my housekeeper. I could presumably make arrangements to pay in a different form (including cash) but why bother? And, in many cases, it's my bank actually "writing" the check and delivering it. I'd change if it became an aberration or weird to do but it's just not a problem in general. (And I wouldn't try to pay by check or cash at Walmart for example.)
  - rwmj 3y ago
    That's wild. Here in the UK, tradespeople usually have a card reader, or some accept bank transfers.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      It's becoming more common but for someone like my housekeeper, I may not even be home and can just leave a check on the counter. As I say, I could doubtless make alternative arrangements but a check is the default and it's easy.
      - rwmj 3y ago
        For someone I need to pay regularly like a cleaner I would set up a bank transfer recipient in my banking app (or website) and then payments - either one offs or regularly scheduled - are simple, instant and free.
        ghaff 3y ago
        And so is writing a check and leaving it on the counter--especially for a service that is somewhat predictable but actually isn't on a set schedule. She texts me that she's coming next week, I write a check and leave it on the counter, done.
        GeoAtreides 3y ago
        Well, it's not really done, is it? She has to go to the bank and cash the check, right? It's not the end of the world, sure, but it's an extra trip compared with a bank transfer -- with a bank transfer she has the money ready to be used immediately.
- gambiting 3y ago
  Aren't cheques even worse for privacy though? Not only your bank knows exactly who you paid and how much, the seller also now has your actual name since it's just written on the cheque - at least when paying by card they get nothing. Maybe I'm getting it wrong - cheques are something I've only seen in films, in my country no bank accepts them since 2020 anymore, they've been completely phased out.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    I was given a chequebook when I opened my current bank account in 2004, I've written 8, all of them in the first 10 years.
    - jason-phillips 3y ago
      Same, until I moved to a rural area. I did a lot of research about this place but didn't discover the pervasiveness of the cash society until I moved here.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - grobbyy 3y ago
    Last I looked, checks had privacy regulations. Most other payment methods don't really. I'm also my bank's customer. For most payment companies, I'm the product.
    - astura 3y ago
      What sort of "privacy regulations?"
  - jason-phillips 3y ago
    Here - that being outside of Austin in Texas - I think the root causes for this behavior lie with tax cheats and ineptitude.
  - 3y ago
troupo 3y ago
I really really really like cashless payments I really really really dislike that my money can be whisked away at the whim of a cray government or a glitch in the system
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  A government can reduce the purchasing power of cash too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis... Or just issuing new money at a rate that exceeds demand for the money (meaning the relative desirability of the money, which relates to the trustworthiness of the community using the money and the economic productivity of the community using the money). Like when the population pyramid starts turning upside down and the benefits promised to older people need to come into fruition from a smaller and smaller labor supply. Edit to respond to 4bpp: > With cash, they can only do it to everybody at once or not at all. I think government can use the new money to inflate the price of certain things quicker than others, effectively advantaging certain portions of the population, which is what I allude to in my 3rd paragraph. For example, inflating asset prices lets those who own more assets (or certain assets) lose purchasing power more slowly than those who do not (see most labor sellers). This is a somewhat related example of how a policy change for all can be designed to affect certain populations differently: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-hutchins-center-explains-the-chained-cpi/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-hutchins-center-expla... Use lower CPI to update tax brackets, and higher CPI to calculate Social Security benefits, i.e. increasing wealth redistribution from young to old without explicitly saying it.
  - fithisux 3y ago
    But with cash it cannot "disable" selectively
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      That is a good point!
  - CPLX 3y ago
xbmcuser 3y ago
I personally started using digital payments once phone touchpay systems came out previously you had to take out cash or card from your wallet to pay so I would still use cash. But once phone payment became common just tapping your phone to pay had a lot less friction than taking out wallet and paying cash or by card.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  they will get you by convenience
  - fithisux 3y ago
    Clever boy
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Of course they will. Why shouldn’t they?
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Oddly, I’ve never been inconvenienced by my wallet.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yeah, I carry a small wallet and pretty much never use phone pay. I'm taking something out of my pocket in either case and there's never a question whether my credit card will work or not.
- nickjj 3y ago
  If a card supports tapping and you have 1 card in a thin wallet, could you tap your wallet in the same way you could tap your phone?
- LordGrey 3y ago
  I started using digital payments once I got an Apple Watch. Double-click a button on the side, tap the watch on the reader, I'm done. Very little friction and good security; it is really a no-brainer. Provided the reader accepts Apple Pay, that is....
mypastself 3y ago
> [On] 23rd August 1994, the chaotic music duo and performance artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1m of notes behind a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. They are not alone in attempting to reduce money’s power… They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so.
- croes 3y ago
  >They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so. Did they. Notes aren't a limited resource and they can still be considered in the cashflow
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Assuming they (or someone else) owned the notes, yes. By reducing their own holdings, they raised the value of everyone else's. If the notes were counterfeit or had otherwise managed to come into existence without being owned by anyone, then no.
    - venusenvy47 3y ago
      Would it raise the value of the currency if the central bank didn't know this stash was destroyed? It seems like this pile of cash would still be considered to be "in circulation" until the central bank declared it to not be.
      - mouse_ 3y ago
        Yes
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        The central bank's knowledge isn't relevant in any way. The value of the currency goes up because the willingness of people to spend it went down. You can't spend money that doesn't exist, so this effect will occur regardless of anyone's knowledge of anything.
superkuh 3y ago
I will always recall the chaos of being in a northern Minnesota tourist town (Ely) when the single fiber-optic line serving the region was cut. I sure was glad our group brought cash. All the people with only third party companies willing to pay for them some time in the future had their trips and plans ruined. But that's sort of a trivial example. It could be much worse. And then there's the rent seeking inherent in any commercially provider payment service combined with enshittification. No single company payment system will remain "good" for long. Not that credit cards are good to start given the puritanism and censorship they impose. And that's not even mentioning the US state dept. control of those networks preventing donations to political groups like wikileaks. Cash matters. Having some corporation promise to pay for your stuff 3 days in the future means giving up control. You might not care now, but you might care in the future when $localpolitics get dicey. Imagine not being able to pay for an abortion with $companypay because it's illegal in $company's legal place of operation. Plus cash is just so much more convient and faster.
- darrenf 3y ago
  > Plus cash is just so much more convient and faster. There are many reasons I'm not anti-cash, but I am really struggling to think of a single example of this specific statement being true. Just acquiring cash at all means I have to take time out of my day, repeatedly, to make withdrawals. Then I have to carry it securely (as well as the cards I need to get hold of more), which is annoying at the best of times and pretty much impossible when I'm out running, say. Handing cash to a merchant means they need to figure out change, and eventually I end up carrying a bunch of coins and they are even slower to spend than notes. Boarding buses was so much slower when each person paid in cash. Paying for a beer or meal needed the staff to take the money back to the till and return with change. When going abroad I need to use notes and coins I'm unfamiliar with. Honestly, when is cash faster?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yeah, I usually carry some cash in local currency. But I often end up with coins I can't be bothered to figure out or with a ziplock bag of currency I ultimately never end up using in a drawer at home. And, if I were really stuck in a place that unexpectedly required me to use cash for everything I almost certainly wouldn't have enough with me.
madsbuch 3y ago
I Denmark we are removing the 1000kr bill as of May 2025. from then on the highest bill. is 500kr which is roughly equal to 80 usd. Denmark Is the most cashless society I have yet experiences (and I have been traveling a fair bit). This comes with pros and cons. and I think the reason why it works is because of an incredibly high social trust.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Besides high social trust, I assume also a great IT infrastructure with guaranteed high uptime, a tech literate population willing to adopt new technology and not be stubborn to change, plus a small business environment not focused on cash driven tax dodging, like in the German speaking countries.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    yep, especially because a lot of people use debit cards that only work when online. and yes, even on small markets merchants charge with a handheld terminal.
  - forinti 3y ago
    I live in a middle-income country and it's now not unusual to see beggars with card machines at the red light.
    - dazc 3y ago
      In the UK we have anti-money laundering rules for banks commonly known as 'know your customer' where they are obliged to inquire about how one's business works. I can imagine a few interesting conversions as a result.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        crypto was probably a godsend.
- Philpax 3y ago
charcircuit 3y ago
It's strange that governments are not minting more digital currency if the demand for physical currency is falling.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Because it doesn't solve any problem that anyone has? Bank transfers and card payments are easy, fast and already widespread, at least everywhere except for the US.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Is printing tons of physical money solving problems people actually have either or is it just increasing costs from having to manufacture, transport, secure, etc physical money.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      We all just read an article about society going cashless without any Blockchain stuff. No need to print physical money just hand out cheap loans digitally.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  Tell me you're a bitcoin guy that's never taken a single Macro class without telling me... Government prerogative is to create currency ex-nihilo; there's no need waste a bunch of energy in that process.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    A money printer doesn't just magically create money out of thin air. Printing it as a cryptocurrency would use less energy than printing it physically. Alternatively the government could just edit a bank account it already has and just increase its balance.
- imtringued 3y ago
  When you deposit money at a commercial bank, and they send the excess cash to the central bank, they do get central bank reserves. However, that doesn't mean it happens routinely. Most banks probably just send the cash between one another, decided via a clearing house with no central bank middle man. I am only describing the cash handling process here by the way. 99% of the business still operates based on electronic reserves.
pythonbase 3y ago
Pakistan is still a cash based economy, many outlet either deny card payments or apply a processing fee to encourage cash transactions. "State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) data indicates that the Cash in Circulation (CinC) has increased to Rs9. 2 trillion ($32 billion) at the end of June 2023, which is equivalent to 30 per cent of the total money supply (M2), or around 11pc of the national GDP." [0] 0: https://www.dawn.com/news/1779399 https://www.dawn.com/news/1779399
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  If you take white economy and black economy its maybe 50:50 in Pakistan hence the we are still using mostly cash. Most of the rich and the ruling class are rich because of illegal/untaxed wealth so its not in their interests to get a digital payment system. Where as the taxes are so high that the rest prefer not to use digital systems either. I don't know if its still the case but 15-20 years ago post dated cheques used to go from company to company without being deposited into the bank as it was an easier way to transport large amounts without it getting officially documented. Even the most used digital systems in Pakistan have so far been of moving cash from 1 place to another. Like you deposit money in 1 shop and it is paid cash to your family in another shop. Either the shop pay 17% sales tax by getting payment through credit card or takes a cash payment and hide the sale
toenail 3y ago
I don't see why I should give a corporation information about all my payments. I already carry a phone with me, that's enough to spy on where I am, they don't need to know what I do or who I do it with. Privacy is a right, not a privilege, I don't see why I should just throw it away for a little convenience.
- okr 3y ago
  (Since when is privacy a right? Just curious. I always saw it as a privilege. Having my room with my bed to sleep in.)
  - ThunderSizzle 3y ago
    Since SCOTUS hallucinated it into being to make their pro-abortion ruling in Roe v Wade. It's the only time I've seen the right to privacy taken to the extreme.
  - baq 3y ago
    If it’s written in the law then it is. Depends where you live.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    It's fairly common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy > Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy. Not the US, but: > In the US, privacy and associated rights have been determined via court cases and the protections have been established through laws. Privacy is not a privilege, it is a right.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    There exist natural rights. It is not frequent to find, say, a "right to breathe" or a "right to walk" as an explicit topic, because the absence of its object has critical implications. Same for the "right" to privacy. It is something that would be strongly defended because its absence would not be accepted.
impossiblefork 3y ago
I think what's required is electronic cash, something like a CBDC with an electronically transferable, partially anonymous system that still allows offline payments if case the central computers get knocked out. GNU Taler satisfies one half of these constraints (cashlikeness + taxability). The Swedish e-krona pilot also has a token based component to allow offline payments.
- asystole 3y ago
  We already have this. It's called bitcoin. For offline payments, there's physical devices like opendime and potentially Chaumian mints like cashu.
  - impossiblefork 3y ago
    I think the advantage here is that it's ordinary money, which if people fail to obtain it, will lead to them defaulting on their debt and losing real things. When you have enormous amounts of debts denominated in a currency, so many time the price of those things that would be lost, its value is almost entirely determined on what interest rate the central bank sets. If you hoard it to get people to default so as to obtain the value of the collateral, the central bank will printing to stop you. Meanwhile, there's no point in trying to do that kind of thing with bitcoin. The value of the collateral is probably less than the value of the physical cash. What you do then is to invent your own bitcoin and hope that somebody will accept units of it. For this reason I believe that the fair value of Bitcoin is zero, but I can't know when it ends up at zero, so I'm not shorting it, just as I am not shorting the US real estate market, even though it's clear that from a discounted-cash-flow PoV it must be incredibly overvalued, provided that it wasn't incredibly undervalued back when interest rates were at 1%.
  - arthur_sav 3y ago
    Lets be honest, bitcoin is not usable for every day transactions.
    - asystole 3y ago
Alifatisk 3y ago
I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.
- Xplune13 3y ago
  That's a new one. Genuine question, why do you prefer using cash instead of using a phone or card?
  - 34679 3y ago
    Cash is free and easy. Electronic payments add cost and complexity that sometimes results in failure.
  - rhdunn 3y ago
    Cash is useful in cases where your phone/card isn't working. E.g. if your phone has run out of battery, you are in a location that has a poor signal, your account has been locked due to a suspicious/unusual transaction (even if legitimate), etc. You don't need it all the time, just for emergencies.
    - atq2119 3y ago
      Systems you want to use in an emergency have a tendency to start failing when you don't exercise them regularly. That's my primary reason for using cash. Privacy is the second. The tactile sense for how much money I spend is the third.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    Transactions through credit cards and similar are not anonymous. Having third parties track your daily activities is beyond dystopian.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Not new at all. Many people feel that way. Lots of good arguments too.
keiferski 3y ago
Obligatory Neuromancer (1984) reference: His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal. I am fairly convinced that using cash will slowly be labeled as a "criminal" activity and gradually shamed into non-use by regular people.
- toenail 3y ago
  > I am fairly convinced that using cash will slowly be labeled as a "criminal" activity and gradually shamed into non-use by regular people. Of course. The only people who need cash are criminals and terrorists. Now move along citizen.
  - generic92034 3y ago
    That would not work at all in many countries. There are some with a strong attachment to cash.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Sorry, my comment was too vaguely written, but I meant to imply that it won't be the government that does this, but regular people enforcing social norms. "We aren't the kind of people that use cash," and so forth.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > The only people who There have been political groups spreading and promoting exactly that concept. "Thieves and junkies", they say. Forgetting completely "people with dignity" - also because that image is fading from aggregate memory.
- casperc 3y ago
  Well to be fair, in my country (Denmark), that is mostly the case. For normal purchases, using cash is very much not the norm. But paying a carpenter, cleaner or similar, who will give a lower rate (and not pay income tax and VAT), that is very much the norm (though socially frowned upon). Also drugs I guess.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
There are two fallacies I frequently feel the need to debunk in this discussion. - Cash is anonymous - Cash is an "old" or "low" technology. When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Modern cash is high technology. Look at a UK or European note already. Holograms, nano-technology, advanced materials science... It's well past the point of being worth forging, and it is likely that future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash, such as time-out, store variable value, and be more traceable. The function cash really performs is a resilience buffer for person to person transactions that works independently of electrical power and Internet. Smart people at the top are never going to let that slide, because it would be national security suicide and practically inviting civil unrest. Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay, but it may not have all the properties we think it has and defend it for.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime". Your buying something is not logged anywhere, for example.
  - grobbyy 3y ago
    You fell for a simple fallecy. The line isn't that cash is used in a major crime. It's that someone in power wants someone in prison. 1. You might not be involved in a major crime but you might be a suspect. Lots of innocent suspects get convicted. 2. You might be a whistleblower. Lots of whistleblowers get framed. Etc. "If I've done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide" didn't work out well for Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. A lot of the reason many of us want privacy preserved is to prevent a similar path here. Totalitarian governments don't always pop up overnight on a revolution; they often creep up on you. The creeping process is also often: 1. We'll track X with major checks on privacy; it will only be used for terrorism and child abuse investigations and held in a secure vault 2. We're just doing a better job of sharing / using data we already collect Neither off those is objectionable, but together, you end up in a distopia.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_xivi 3y ago
I think the ongoing banking crisis in Lebanon (similarly in Egypt and maybe elsewhere too) where there are restrictions on people's access to their deposits or making international transactions should be on everyone's mind when talking about eliminating cash. The downside of going cashless aren't hypothetical or as far-fetched as people think. The whole society can be put on hold overnight. We can see this happening in front of us. Using whatever payment method for convenience in itself is fine. But, eliminating cash as medium, without providing a better alternative, one that can still work in disasters where power or network is down, is wild.
- xadhominemx 3y ago
  What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits? Unless you are saying people should not bank at all and keep cash under the mattress?
  - _xivi 3y ago
    > What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits? The difference it makes is that now you only have one way to access your savings. Any failures, technical issues, outage, etc. and you're out of luck to say the least. The principle is that you shouldn't rely on a single system ever. If you're eager to go that way be my guest. I was using a real life scenario of how that turned out bad for people. I don't care about paper vs electronic. I care about relying on a single point of failure.
    - xadhominemx 3y ago
      How is any of this different with cash withdrawals? You're still withdrawing from a digital account.
hasty_pudding 3y ago
I think privacy crypto will be big if cash goes away.
yaky 3y ago
The other day, I paid cash at the local Chinese-American place, and the owner said "thank you for using cash, it helps small businesses", which took me by surprise. So I asked how much card processors charge, and she went on a bit of a rant, listing processing fees for everything from regular debit cards* charging 3-4% to rewards credit cards being around 7% to special international or world credit cards charging something like 17%. And most of them have a very narrow window to correct or void the transaction. With such rent-seeking behavior by banks, I very much understand wanting to keep cash around. * Debit cards charged as debit, by entering a PIN. Some terminals allow you to "bypass PIN" and/or automatically charge debit cards as credit. I don't know, it's shady.
- notso411 3y ago
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- dazc 3y ago
  We have some small traders in the UK who insist on a minimum spend for accepting cards because of the fees levied. It doesn't really make any business sense although I appreciate the sentiment behind it.
- infinitecost 3y ago
  What part of the world? In the US at least this experience would only apply to a business owner that was getting absolutely fleeced by their processor.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  I wish more businesses would (could?) give cash discounts. It's the answer to the convenience and rewards offered by credit cards. If I can save as much or more by paying in cash as I can by paying by card, then I have a great motivation to start carrying cash around!
  - yaky 3y ago
    Several small businesses in my city do charge 3% for using a card. So that is like a cash discount. Many gas stations (usually ones serving trucks) have cash discounts for fuel, too. (US, midwest)
switch007 3y ago
Regarding Mr Corbyn's strawberries, if he takes them (or eats them, spoils them etc), is he not then in debt with Aldi? In which case his cash serves as payment of his debt? I guess you'd be in hot water for the prior act of stealing though
- HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  Taking something does not legally incur a debt, it's just a crime. The merchant did not agree to lend you anything, so there's no loan, so you can't pay it off with "legal tender".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
A few months ago, Australia’s second biggest ISP died for a few hours. Retailers tied to their network were unable to process non-cash transactions.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Months ago, in Singapore, similarly a single relatively small server farm had issues, blocking for a long time a very large number of transactions. (Some details at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/dbs-digibank-paylah-outage-mobile-payment-qr-code-cash-3384776 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/dbs-digibank-payl... ) The news outlets in Singapore then commented: please, as these things can always happen, do not forget to bring some cash with you...
  - canucker2016 3y ago
    Visa Europe had an outage for a few hours in 2018. see https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418684/visa-cards-europe-not-working-network-outage https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418684/visa-cards-europe... Canada's payment network had an outage for over an hour last year, 2023 Sep 23. see https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/moneris-network-outage-1.6976615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/moneris-network-outage-1.6976...
thread_id 3y ago
WHAAAAATTTTT!!!!! “…thousands were queuing in Nairobi to have their eyeballs scanned as part of the “Worldcoin” project, founded by OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In exchange for handing over their biometric data, some 350,000 Kenyans each received 25 free crypto tokens, worth approximately $50. Those tokens were transferred directly via Kenya’s main mobile payments app, M-Pesa.” Actually that doesn’t sound so forward thinking when you consider that the UN has been doing since 2016: “In 2016, the UN World Food Programme trialled a system that issued relief payments through the use of biometrics. Refugees were able to buy items from the supermarket using their biometric data as a credential: all they needed to do was scan their iris to pay for an item. The idea was to improve convenience and prevent fraud. Since that trial, the World Food Programme’s Building Blocks initiative has become the world’s largest humanitarian use of blockchain technology.”
- vachina 3y ago
  Haha a UUID tied to my biometrics. What could go wrong.
happytiger 3y ago
Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions. I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper. You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the business, the consumer ultimately pays for it in higher prices. Heck, people pay transaction fees on payments they make the to government because the government won’t take cash. Do we really need to make not paying invisible fees in everything illegal? Seems crazy.
- noodlesUK 3y ago
  There were already costs. There were always costs and risks associated with cash handling: armored trucks doing cash collection, risks of money in tills being lost. If it really were a lot cheaper you wouldn’t see businesses clamouring to go cashless. That’s not to say I think cash should go the way of the dodo, but I don’t think there’s that much difference paying g4s to collect your money vs Mastercard. IMO the benefits of cash are on the consumer, not the business.
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    These are even higher for digital, all the associated software development, audits, etc. That processing fee is on top of this, and is easily variable.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      You need exactly the same level of software durability for cash handling; see the Post Office scandal, where the computer system was misrecording cash transactions.
  - graemep 3y ago
    I do not think so. Otherwise the British government would not have needed to outlaw charging customers more for card transactions to encourage the move away from cash.
34679 3y ago
The new soccer stadium in St. Louis is completely cashless. Upon arrival, you attach a form of payment to a scan of your face, then the system tracks you and your purchases throughout the stadium. No thanks.
andreygrehov 3y ago
What’s interesting is that cash 10% more valuable than digital money. I wonder if that gap will keep increasing.
svggrfgovgf 3y ago
Does anyone check their credit card bills or bank statements to be sure that all of the charges are valid and for the correct amount? It seems like if you use electronic payment for everything there would be a lot of items to verify. Or do you just assume there's never any errors?
- nabeards 3y ago
  Yes, we do. But nobody we know does. We are fanatic at tracking our spending too, though, and that seems to be a dying art.
- pasttense01 3y ago
  I think it is common to check that all the charges are valid--since there is a lot of credit card number theft around. But I think it is uncommon to check that they are the correct amount--instead you eyeball the numbers and don't do further checking unless a charge seems unreasonable.
tupolef 3y ago
You can use a banknote for an unlimited number of transactions, with no intermediary, and no tax per transaction. States and banks benefit by printing this tool for you, because in return they control the movement of money when it comes back to them, and its value. But with digital currency, they've hit the jackpot, realizing that they can have their cake and eat it too: they can control the movement of money, its value and even tax it on a per-transaction basis. And without any advantage other than saving space in your pocket.
Geee 3y ago
My bank freezed my access to my debit card and online bank recently, without a reason. They just sent me a message that I should visit the branch in person. Not going to happen. Fortunately I could open a new bank account online and had some spare cash too. For the first time I realized that I'm a slave to my bank. They can just freeze my money just like that. In a fully cashless system you'd be a complete slave to the system.
- unicornmama 3y ago
  Yes. Complete a complete slave. LeVar Burton will have to come out of retirement to make a Roots sequel so that the world can understand your harsh mistreatment.
- alexpetralia 3y ago
  You are a slave to many systems - labor markets, product markets, food markets - all of which are not controlled by you. You can be cut off "just like that" if the powers that be choose to do so. In the modern world you simply cannot survive without depending on other parts of society. Given the alternative, I don't find this to be such a bad compromise.
CommanderData 3y ago
The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying. Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade. Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it. That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems become centralised either through standards or legislation. It will be easy to track someones habits or location globally.
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse. Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (and I mean PURELY) someone somewhere will know when and how you're spending your money. If you want to deal with privacy concerns then it needs to be codified in law. And that involves dealing with the entire chain, not just point of sale and not just thinking cash will save you.
  - jonkho 3y ago
    There are things that are justified to exist whose sole purpose is keeping things in-check. If any of your aforementioned tools gets abused by the authorities we can still fall back to using cash. If you take away the fallback alternative, then abuse is much more difficult to keep in check. This is called Game Theory.
  - HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
    There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far more expensive for the government, and the protesters have more options to fight back—run, hide the cash, etc. Not to mention it will probably drum up sympathy for the oppressed. And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.
jas- 3y ago
Be worried when laws get passed against barter systems that would circumvent these systems
- HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  I don't think barter is a realistic way to circumvent the disappearance of cash. Sure, it'll work once in a while, when you happen to have something of equal value that the other guy wants—but most of the time it'll be such a drag on every transaction that transactions just won't happen often. Want to get some groceries? Are you just going to hand the cashier a pair of shoes in return? There are good reasons physical currencies have existed for thousands of years, in many forms across many societies. I think rather than barter, we'd have to fall back on something like gold, seashells... Something that's hard to fake, hard to make, easy to appraise, and easy to carry. Like cash.
alkonaut 3y ago
Not used a coin or paper bill for several years now. It’s now at the point where I don’t know what the most common bills and coins look like since they were changed a few years back and I have never owned most of them. I should keep cash as a backup just like I keep some canned food, but I wonder how society would work in that scenario when many stores don’t have cash registers, many bank offices don’t allow cash deposits and so on. The US would be far more resilient in that situation.
apapapa 3y ago
Luckily we still have crypto
thelastparadise 3y ago
I like to stop by the ATM on the way to the store and get a few bills out, then use it at regular stores. It freaks them out every time but I find it is a better money to use.
EasyMark 3y ago
Yeah it sucks. I can't quite put my finger on it, but is seems like giving up every transaction to the government and corps. That seems like a terrible terrible thing just for a little bit more convenience. I have some bit of hope though, it seems like Gen Z is seeing that "tech fixes everything" is bullshit and see to be enjoying less materialistic and "gotta get the latest/greatest". Millennials were likewise less materialistic than Gen X. Hopefully people come around to using tech where it makes sense and use it less in those areas that are detrimental to quality of life and where simple solutions work just fine.
waynesonfire 3y ago
No it's not. In my neighborhood, businesses are starting to offer cash discounts. The credit card companies are getting too greedy with their fees.
david2ndaccount 3y ago
The issues with physical currency are almost entirely self-inflicted. Governments should retire the smallest denominations and introduce larger coins/bills. In the US, all of the coins are worth so little that the only practical coin is the rare half-dollar. Retire all of those worthless coins, require transactions be rounded to the nearest half-dollar or dollar, and issues with physical currency for the user will go away. Now of course, the government won’t do this as they want physical currency to be inconvenient so they can track you and deny you access to your own money when they find it convenient. We’re in an era of growing authoritarianism. Hopefully we survive this one.
- alexwhb 3y ago
  This is a really good point. And one of the reasons I hardly ever use cash is having to deal with so much annoying change. If you eliminate most change… cash becomes not a big deal
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  I would argue the root cause of this phenomenon is inflation and the first step we should take is to make the dollar a stable unit of measure not to consciously allow its value to fall.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    Deflation is worse than inflation, and it's hard to hit a single number, so central banks aim for low, stable inflation. 1-2% inflation isn't very perceptible vs 0 but avoids deflation.
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      Please explain why deflation is worse.
      - kuchenbecker 3y ago
        Cash becomes an appreciating asset. It leads people to hoard cash rather than invest in stocks and bonds, and delay purchases stagnating the economy. Japan mid 1990s to mid 2010s is a real-world example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades In the worst cases, deflation causes demand to drop causing a recession, which further depresses demand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation
realcertify 3y ago
The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence. Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong". Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.
- yakireev 3y ago
  > Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions Which country is it? In many jurisdictions cash transactions are already illegal above certain threshold. It might be that you won't have too many places to go.
- yankoff 3y ago
  Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash. Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
- xadhominemx 3y ago
  What are you talking about? Deposits that came in via paper money are treated in exactly the same manner as those deposited electronically.
  - yankoff 3y ago
    Cash transactions over $10k have to be reported to the IRS. You'd have to provide ID and TIN. If that weren't the case, criminals wouldn't have had problems with money laundering.
coppsilgold 3y ago
It's technologically feasible to create centralized digital cash that is much more anonymous than physical cash. You can do it by using zero knowledge proofs where you have vouchers & nullifiers. It's virtually the same idea that powers Tornado Cash. It's tractable but challenging, every single transfer of a digital-cash note would necessitate an entry into a public Merkle-tree. You could mitigate this by introducing a multitude of denominations (a separate Merkle-tree for each one) trading some anonymity-set size for the mitigation. Another possibility is to introduce special cash pools that have expiry dates, incentivise their use with lower transaction costs. The transaction costs would have to also be ZKP vouchers but much more flexibility on those, such as rapid expiry. If a government was crazy enough to do this, they would give up all control over how the money is spent. The only control they would have is whether or not to shut the whole thing down. Discrimination would not be feasible, reversing transactions impossible. They could still print money of course.
- sneak 3y ago
  Governments did everything they could to stop Tornado Cash. Uncensorable, anonymous digital payments is the very last thing the state wants for its citizens. That allows private people to raise (and pay for) an army. Preventing rival armies within their territory is the primary and most important function of a state.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
bookofjoe 3y ago
I've been reading this for going on 30 years and I still have some in my wallet which is accepted everywhere. Seems to me this is just a recurring trope trotted out for want of an article topic.
dfawcus 3y ago
I was in a large supermarket (Tesco) today where they were experiencing "technical difficulties". A repeated announcement over the tannoy stated they could not accept contact-less payments, not by card, not by phone. They were still accepting cash and physical card insertion (Chip & PIN, or Chip & Signature). Despite that lots of people were getting flustered at the checkouts (manned and self service) when they were unable to pay. Always carry some cash!
lawrenceyan 3y ago
Crypto is an electronic replacement for cash that is ideally not dependent on centralized entities incentivized by processing fees (still in progress of course, but we're rapidly getting there!).
DaleNeumann 3y ago
Fees on digital payments by merchants should be banned, if we are going into a digital era without cash and an expectation that everyone pays digitaly then they should come along with us and be more accommodating or atleast more realistic if they want our business, even if it is just a small cup of coffee the convenience of tap and scan is far superior to dragging your feet to a machine in the middle of the night looking over your shoulder always expecting the worst.
soco 3y ago
Crazy idea: instead of fighting the consequences of surveillance society, how about we fight the surveillance ITSELF? Everybody here agrees surveillance is bad, yet I bet right now there a few HN readers working on surveillance tech, and not at least most of us are voters, some even involved a bit deeper in politics. How about we actually do something against that what we know it's wrong?

237 points by rwmj 3y ago

I live an hour or so outside of Austin and people still primarily write checks as that's the only acceptable payment method, along with cash. My new wife said, "Wait, why not just use Stripe? I'll tell them." I had to explain to her that one does not simply pull forward a society thirty years into the future. There is an incredible amount of cultural inertia to overcome. So I carry a lot of cash out here.

glimshe 3y ago
You'd be surprised. I visited South America and all I saw was phone payments... They basically skipped the credit card age, as cards were never popular among the poor.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Aren't the phone payments backed by credit cards or do they by preloaded vouchers?
  - baq 3y ago
    Bank accounts directly I’d assume. Why add another layer of indirection?
    - xadhominemx 3y ago
      It varies by country but a lot of them are just virtual debit and credit cards because the payments run over the card network rails.
- fundad 3y ago
  It’s not surprising that a lot Murica is decades behind most places in the world. Especially places where foreigners visit.
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    How is it behind? I've not been at a store in a while that I couldn't use apple pay or a card? I know it's popular to bag on America, but I figure most of HN is better than that.
    - canucker2016 3y ago
      Until Apple Pay and other smartphone-related payment methods became common, the USA credit card was technologically behind much of Europe, Canada, and other developed countries. Chip-and-PIN (EMV, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV) is the standard in Europe and Canada for relaying credit card info & authentication. Many USA retailers were stuck using the credit card's magnetic stripe for entering card info. Evidently the USA still hasn't moved to Chip-and-PIN, with Chip and Signature being more common. Updating the point-of-sale terminals has been the chokepoint supposedly, https://lauraclery.com/chip-and-pin-united-states/ https://lauraclery.com/chip-and-pin-united-states/.
chasd00 3y ago
> I live an hour or so outside of Austin and people still primarily write checks I can’t think of an area within 65 miles of downtown Austin where checks would be common. Which direction from Austin do you live? East maybe?
ghaff 3y ago
I use very little cash in MA. But checks are still pretty much the default for a lot of people doing various services for me. I can just leave a check for someone like my housekeeper. I could presumably make arrangements to pay in a different form (including cash) but why bother? And, in many cases, it's my bank actually "writing" the check and delivering it. I'd change if it became an aberration or weird to do but it's just not a problem in general. (And I wouldn't try to pay by check or cash at Walmart for example.)
- rwmj 3y ago
  That's wild. Here in the UK, tradespeople usually have a card reader, or some accept bank transfers.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It's becoming more common but for someone like my housekeeper, I may not even be home and can just leave a check on the counter. As I say, I could doubtless make alternative arrangements but a check is the default and it's easy.
    - rwmj 3y ago
      For someone I need to pay regularly like a cleaner I would set up a bank transfer recipient in my banking app (or website) and then payments - either one offs or regularly scheduled - are simple, instant and free.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        And so is writing a check and leaving it on the counter--especially for a service that is somewhat predictable but actually isn't on a set schedule. She texts me that she's coming next week, I write a check and leave it on the counter, done.
        GeoAtreides 3y ago
        Well, it's not really done, is it? She has to go to the bank and cash the check, right? It's not the end of the world, sure, but it's an extra trip compared with a bank transfer -- with a bank transfer she has the money ready to be used immediately.
gambiting 3y ago
Aren't cheques even worse for privacy though? Not only your bank knows exactly who you paid and how much, the seller also now has your actual name since it's just written on the cheque - at least when paying by card they get nothing. Maybe I'm getting it wrong - cheques are something I've only seen in films, in my country no bank accepts them since 2020 anymore, they've been completely phased out.
- ta1243 3y ago
  I was given a chequebook when I opened my current bank account in 2004, I've written 8, all of them in the first 10 years.
  - jason-phillips 3y ago
    Same, until I moved to a rural area. I did a lot of research about this place but didn't discover the pervasiveness of the cash society until I moved here.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- grobbyy 3y ago
  Last I looked, checks had privacy regulations. Most other payment methods don't really. I'm also my bank's customer. For most payment companies, I'm the product.
  - astura 3y ago
    What sort of "privacy regulations?"
- jason-phillips 3y ago
  Here - that being outside of Austin in Texas - I think the root causes for this behavior lie with tax cheats and ineptitude.
- 3y ago

troupo 3y ago

I really really really like cashless payments I really really really dislike that my money can be whisked away at the whim of a cray government or a glitch in the system

lotsofpulp 3y ago
A government can reduce the purchasing power of cash too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis... Or just issuing new money at a rate that exceeds demand for the money (meaning the relative desirability of the money, which relates to the trustworthiness of the community using the money and the economic productivity of the community using the money). Like when the population pyramid starts turning upside down and the benefits promised to older people need to come into fruition from a smaller and smaller labor supply. Edit to respond to 4bpp: > With cash, they can only do it to everybody at once or not at all. I think government can use the new money to inflate the price of certain things quicker than others, effectively advantaging certain portions of the population, which is what I allude to in my 3rd paragraph. For example, inflating asset prices lets those who own more assets (or certain assets) lose purchasing power more slowly than those who do not (see most labor sellers). This is a somewhat related example of how a policy change for all can be designed to affect certain populations differently: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-hutchins-center-explains-the-chained-cpi/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-hutchins-center-expla... Use lower CPI to update tax brackets, and higher CPI to calculate Social Security benefits, i.e. increasing wealth redistribution from young to old without explicitly saying it.
- fithisux 3y ago
  But with cash it cannot "disable" selectively
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    That is a good point!
- CPLX 3y ago

xbmcuser 3y ago

I personally started using digital payments once phone touchpay systems came out previously you had to take out cash or card from your wallet to pay so I would still use cash. But once phone payment became common just tapping your phone to pay had a lot less friction than taking out wallet and paying cash or by card.

ekianjo 3y ago
they will get you by convenience
- fithisux 3y ago
  Clever boy
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Of course they will. Why shouldn’t they?
HumblyTossed 3y ago
Oddly, I’ve never been inconvenienced by my wallet.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, I carry a small wallet and pretty much never use phone pay. I'm taking something out of my pocket in either case and there's never a question whether my credit card will work or not.
nickjj 3y ago
If a card supports tapping and you have 1 card in a thin wallet, could you tap your wallet in the same way you could tap your phone?
LordGrey 3y ago
I started using digital payments once I got an Apple Watch. Double-click a button on the side, tap the watch on the reader, I'm done. Very little friction and good security; it is really a no-brainer. Provided the reader accepts Apple Pay, that is....

mypastself 3y ago

> [On] 23rd August 1994, the chaotic music duo and performance artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1m of notes behind a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. They are not alone in attempting to reduce money’s power… They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so.

croes 3y ago
>They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so. Did they. Notes aren't a limited resource and they can still be considered in the cashflow
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Assuming they (or someone else) owned the notes, yes. By reducing their own holdings, they raised the value of everyone else's. If the notes were counterfeit or had otherwise managed to come into existence without being owned by anyone, then no.
  - venusenvy47 3y ago
    Would it raise the value of the currency if the central bank didn't know this stash was destroyed? It seems like this pile of cash would still be considered to be "in circulation" until the central bank declared it to not be.
    - mouse_ 3y ago
      Yes
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      The central bank's knowledge isn't relevant in any way. The value of the currency goes up because the willingness of people to spend it went down. You can't spend money that doesn't exist, so this effect will occur regardless of anyone's knowledge of anything.

superkuh 3y ago

I will always recall the chaos of being in a northern Minnesota tourist town (Ely) when the single fiber-optic line serving the region was cut. I sure was glad our group brought cash. All the people with only third party companies willing to pay for them some time in the future had their trips and plans ruined. But that's sort of a trivial example. It could be much worse. And then there's the rent seeking inherent in any commercially provider payment service combined with enshittification. No single company payment system will remain "good" for long. Not that credit cards are good to start given the puritanism and censorship they impose. And that's not even mentioning the US state dept. control of those networks preventing donations to political groups like wikileaks. Cash matters. Having some corporation promise to pay for your stuff 3 days in the future means giving up control. You might not care now, but you might care in the future when $localpolitics get dicey. Imagine not being able to pay for an abortion with $companypay because it's illegal in $company's legal place of operation. Plus cash is just so much more convient and faster.

darrenf 3y ago
> Plus cash is just so much more convient and faster. There are many reasons I'm not anti-cash, but I am really struggling to think of a single example of this specific statement being true. Just acquiring cash at all means I have to take time out of my day, repeatedly, to make withdrawals. Then I have to carry it securely (as well as the cards I need to get hold of more), which is annoying at the best of times and pretty much impossible when I'm out running, say. Handing cash to a merchant means they need to figure out change, and eventually I end up carrying a bunch of coins and they are even slower to spend than notes. Boarding buses was so much slower when each person paid in cash. Paying for a beer or meal needed the staff to take the money back to the till and return with change. When going abroad I need to use notes and coins I'm unfamiliar with. Honestly, when is cash faster?
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, I usually carry some cash in local currency. But I often end up with coins I can't be bothered to figure out or with a ziplock bag of currency I ultimately never end up using in a drawer at home. And, if I were really stuck in a place that unexpectedly required me to use cash for everything I almost certainly wouldn't have enough with me.

madsbuch 3y ago

I Denmark we are removing the 1000kr bill as of May 2025. from then on the highest bill. is 500kr which is roughly equal to 80 usd. Denmark Is the most cashless society I have yet experiences (and I have been traveling a fair bit). This comes with pros and cons. and I think the reason why it works is because of an incredibly high social trust.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Besides high social trust, I assume also a great IT infrastructure with guaranteed high uptime, a tech literate population willing to adopt new technology and not be stubborn to change, plus a small business environment not focused on cash driven tax dodging, like in the German speaking countries.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  yep, especially because a lot of people use debit cards that only work when online. and yes, even on small markets merchants charge with a handheld terminal.
- forinti 3y ago
  I live in a middle-income country and it's now not unusual to see beggars with card machines at the red light.
  - dazc 3y ago
    In the UK we have anti-money laundering rules for banks commonly known as 'know your customer' where they are obliged to inquire about how one's business works. I can imagine a few interesting conversions as a result.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      crypto was probably a godsend.
Philpax 3y ago

charcircuit 3y ago

It's strange that governments are not minting more digital currency if the demand for physical currency is falling.

rwmj 3y ago
Because it doesn't solve any problem that anyone has? Bank transfers and card payments are easy, fast and already widespread, at least everywhere except for the US.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Is printing tons of physical money solving problems people actually have either or is it just increasing costs from having to manufacture, transport, secure, etc physical money.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    We all just read an article about society going cashless without any Blockchain stuff. No need to print physical money just hand out cheap loans digitally.
pxmpxm 3y ago
Tell me you're a bitcoin guy that's never taken a single Macro class without telling me... Government prerogative is to create currency ex-nihilo; there's no need waste a bunch of energy in that process.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  A money printer doesn't just magically create money out of thin air. Printing it as a cryptocurrency would use less energy than printing it physically. Alternatively the government could just edit a bank account it already has and just increase its balance.
imtringued 3y ago
When you deposit money at a commercial bank, and they send the excess cash to the central bank, they do get central bank reserves. However, that doesn't mean it happens routinely. Most banks probably just send the cash between one another, decided via a clearing house with no central bank middle man. I am only describing the cash handling process here by the way. 99% of the business still operates based on electronic reserves.

pythonbase 3y ago

Pakistan is still a cash based economy, many outlet either deny card payments or apply a processing fee to encourage cash transactions. "State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) data indicates that the Cash in Circulation (CinC) has increased to Rs9. 2 trillion ($32 billion) at the end of June 2023, which is equivalent to 30 per cent of the total money supply (M2), or around 11pc of the national GDP." [0] 0: https://www.dawn.com/news/1779399 https://www.dawn.com/news/1779399

xbmcuser 3y ago
If you take white economy and black economy its maybe 50:50 in Pakistan hence the we are still using mostly cash. Most of the rich and the ruling class are rich because of illegal/untaxed wealth so its not in their interests to get a digital payment system. Where as the taxes are so high that the rest prefer not to use digital systems either. I don't know if its still the case but 15-20 years ago post dated cheques used to go from company to company without being deposited into the bank as it was an easier way to transport large amounts without it getting officially documented. Even the most used digital systems in Pakistan have so far been of moving cash from 1 place to another. Like you deposit money in 1 shop and it is paid cash to your family in another shop. Either the shop pay 17% sales tax by getting payment through credit card or takes a cash payment and hide the sale

toenail 3y ago

I don't see why I should give a corporation information about all my payments. I already carry a phone with me, that's enough to spy on where I am, they don't need to know what I do or who I do it with. Privacy is a right, not a privilege, I don't see why I should just throw it away for a little convenience.

okr 3y ago
(Since when is privacy a right? Just curious. I always saw it as a privilege. Having my room with my bed to sleep in.)
- ThunderSizzle 3y ago
  Since SCOTUS hallucinated it into being to make their pro-abortion ruling in Roe v Wade. It's the only time I've seen the right to privacy taken to the extreme.
- baq 3y ago
  If it’s written in the law then it is. Depends where you live.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  It's fairly common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy > Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy. Not the US, but: > In the US, privacy and associated rights have been determined via court cases and the protections have been established through laws. Privacy is not a privilege, it is a right.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  There exist natural rights. It is not frequent to find, say, a "right to breathe" or a "right to walk" as an explicit topic, because the absence of its object has critical implications. Same for the "right" to privacy. It is something that would be strongly defended because its absence would not be accepted.

impossiblefork 3y ago

I think what's required is electronic cash, something like a CBDC with an electronically transferable, partially anonymous system that still allows offline payments if case the central computers get knocked out. GNU Taler satisfies one half of these constraints (cashlikeness + taxability). The Swedish e-krona pilot also has a token based component to allow offline payments.

asystole 3y ago
We already have this. It's called bitcoin. For offline payments, there's physical devices like opendime and potentially Chaumian mints like cashu.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  I think the advantage here is that it's ordinary money, which if people fail to obtain it, will lead to them defaulting on their debt and losing real things. When you have enormous amounts of debts denominated in a currency, so many time the price of those things that would be lost, its value is almost entirely determined on what interest rate the central bank sets. If you hoard it to get people to default so as to obtain the value of the collateral, the central bank will printing to stop you. Meanwhile, there's no point in trying to do that kind of thing with bitcoin. The value of the collateral is probably less than the value of the physical cash. What you do then is to invent your own bitcoin and hope that somebody will accept units of it. For this reason I believe that the fair value of Bitcoin is zero, but I can't know when it ends up at zero, so I'm not shorting it, just as I am not shorting the US real estate market, even though it's clear that from a discounted-cash-flow PoV it must be incredibly overvalued, provided that it wasn't incredibly undervalued back when interest rates were at 1%.
- arthur_sav 3y ago
  Lets be honest, bitcoin is not usable for every day transactions.
  - asystole 3y ago

Alifatisk 3y ago

I believe once we go fully cashless, we'll regret it and wish we could go back. I can barely enjoy a full day without being required to bring my phone / debit card with me because the register does not accept cash.

Xplune13 3y ago
That's a new one. Genuine question, why do you prefer using cash instead of using a phone or card?
- 34679 3y ago
  Cash is free and easy. Electronic payments add cost and complexity that sometimes results in failure.
- rhdunn 3y ago
  Cash is useful in cases where your phone/card isn't working. E.g. if your phone has run out of battery, you are in a location that has a poor signal, your account has been locked due to a suspicious/unusual transaction (even if legitimate), etc. You don't need it all the time, just for emergencies.
  - atq2119 3y ago
    Systems you want to use in an emergency have a tendency to start failing when you don't exercise them regularly. That's my primary reason for using cash. Privacy is the second. The tactile sense for how much money I spend is the third.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Transactions through credit cards and similar are not anonymous. Having third parties track your daily activities is beyond dystopian.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Not new at all. Many people feel that way. Lots of good arguments too.

keiferski 3y ago

Obligatory Neuromancer (1984) reference: His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal. I am fairly convinced that using cash will slowly be labeled as a "criminal" activity and gradually shamed into non-use by regular people.

toenail 3y ago
> I am fairly convinced that using cash will slowly be labeled as a "criminal" activity and gradually shamed into non-use by regular people. Of course. The only people who need cash are criminals and terrorists. Now move along citizen.
- generic92034 3y ago
  That would not work at all in many countries. There are some with a strong attachment to cash.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Sorry, my comment was too vaguely written, but I meant to imply that it won't be the government that does this, but regular people enforcing social norms. "We aren't the kind of people that use cash," and so forth.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > The only people who There have been political groups spreading and promoting exactly that concept. "Thieves and junkies", they say. Forgetting completely "people with dignity" - also because that image is fading from aggregate memory.
casperc 3y ago
Well to be fair, in my country (Denmark), that is mostly the case. For normal purchases, using cash is very much not the norm. But paying a carpenter, cleaner or similar, who will give a lower rate (and not pay income tax and VAT), that is very much the norm (though socially frowned upon). Also drugs I guess.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

There are two fallacies I frequently feel the need to debunk in this discussion. - Cash is anonymous - Cash is an "old" or "low" technology. When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Modern cash is high technology. Look at a UK or European note already. Holograms, nano-technology, advanced materials science... It's well past the point of being worth forging, and it is likely that future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash, such as time-out, store variable value, and be more traceable. The function cash really performs is a resilience buffer for person to person transactions that works independently of electrical power and Internet. Smart people at the top are never going to let that slide, because it would be national security suicide and practically inviting civil unrest. Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay, but it may not have all the properties we think it has and defend it for.

coldtea 3y ago
>When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime". Your buying something is not logged anywhere, for example.
- grobbyy 3y ago
  You fell for a simple fallecy. The line isn't that cash is used in a major crime. It's that someone in power wants someone in prison. 1. You might not be involved in a major crime but you might be a suspect. Lots of innocent suspects get convicted. 2. You might be a whistleblower. Lots of whistleblowers get framed. Etc. "If I've done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide" didn't work out well for Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. A lot of the reason many of us want privacy preserved is to prevent a similar path here. Totalitarian governments don't always pop up overnight on a revolution; they often creep up on you. The creeping process is also often: 1. We'll track X with major checks on privacy; it will only be used for terrorism and child abuse investigations and held in a secure vault 2. We're just doing a better job of sharing / using data we already collect Neither off those is objectionable, but together, you end up in a distopia.

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_xivi 3y ago

I think the ongoing banking crisis in Lebanon (similarly in Egypt and maybe elsewhere too) where there are restrictions on people's access to their deposits or making international transactions should be on everyone's mind when talking about eliminating cash. The downside of going cashless aren't hypothetical or as far-fetched as people think. The whole society can be put on hold overnight. We can see this happening in front of us. Using whatever payment method for convenience in itself is fine. But, eliminating cash as medium, without providing a better alternative, one that can still work in disasters where power or network is down, is wild.

xadhominemx 3y ago
What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits? Unless you are saying people should not bank at all and keep cash under the mattress?
- _xivi 3y ago
  > What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits? The difference it makes is that now you only have one way to access your savings. Any failures, technical issues, outage, etc. and you're out of luck to say the least. The principle is that you shouldn't rely on a single system ever. If you're eager to go that way be my guest. I was using a real life scenario of how that turned out bad for people. I don't care about paper vs electronic. I care about relying on a single point of failure.
  - xadhominemx 3y ago
    How is any of this different with cash withdrawals? You're still withdrawing from a digital account.

hasty_pudding 3y ago

I think privacy crypto will be big if cash goes away.

yaky 3y ago

The other day, I paid cash at the local Chinese-American place, and the owner said "thank you for using cash, it helps small businesses", which took me by surprise. So I asked how much card processors charge, and she went on a bit of a rant, listing processing fees for everything from regular debit cards* charging 3-4% to rewards credit cards being around 7% to special international or world credit cards charging something like 17%. And most of them have a very narrow window to correct or void the transaction. With such rent-seeking behavior by banks, I very much understand wanting to keep cash around. * Debit cards charged as debit, by entering a PIN. Some terminals allow you to "bypass PIN" and/or automatically charge debit cards as credit. I don't know, it's shady.

notso411 3y ago
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dazc 3y ago
We have some small traders in the UK who insist on a minimum spend for accepting cards because of the fees levied. It doesn't really make any business sense although I appreciate the sentiment behind it.
infinitecost 3y ago
What part of the world? In the US at least this experience would only apply to a business owner that was getting absolutely fleeced by their processor.
HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
I wish more businesses would (could?) give cash discounts. It's the answer to the convenience and rewards offered by credit cards. If I can save as much or more by paying in cash as I can by paying by card, then I have a great motivation to start carrying cash around!
- yaky 3y ago
  Several small businesses in my city do charge 3% for using a card. So that is like a cash discount. Many gas stations (usually ones serving trucks) have cash discounts for fuel, too. (US, midwest)

switch007 3y ago

Regarding Mr Corbyn's strawberries, if he takes them (or eats them, spoils them etc), is he not then in debt with Aldi? In which case his cash serves as payment of his debt? I guess you'd be in hot water for the prior act of stealing though

HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
Taking something does not legally incur a debt, it's just a crime. The merchant did not agree to lend you anything, so there's no loan, so you can't pay it off with "legal tender".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

A few months ago, Australia’s second biggest ISP died for a few hours. Retailers tied to their network were unable to process non-cash transactions.

mdp2021 3y ago
Months ago, in Singapore, similarly a single relatively small server farm had issues, blocking for a long time a very large number of transactions. (Some details at: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/dbs-digibank-paylah-outage-mobile-payment-qr-code-cash-3384776 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/dbs-digibank-payl... ) The news outlets in Singapore then commented: please, as these things can always happen, do not forget to bring some cash with you...
- canucker2016 3y ago
  Visa Europe had an outage for a few hours in 2018. see https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418684/visa-cards-europe-not-working-network-outage https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418684/visa-cards-europe... Canada's payment network had an outage for over an hour last year, 2023 Sep 23. see https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/moneris-network-outage-1.6976615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/moneris-network-outage-1.6976...

thread_id 3y ago

WHAAAAATTTTT!!!!! “…thousands were queuing in Nairobi to have their eyeballs scanned as part of the “Worldcoin” project, founded by OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In exchange for handing over their biometric data, some 350,000 Kenyans each received 25 free crypto tokens, worth approximately $50. Those tokens were transferred directly via Kenya’s main mobile payments app, M-Pesa.” Actually that doesn’t sound so forward thinking when you consider that the UN has been doing since 2016: “In 2016, the UN World Food Programme trialled a system that issued relief payments through the use of biometrics. Refugees were able to buy items from the supermarket using their biometric data as a credential: all they needed to do was scan their iris to pay for an item. The idea was to improve convenience and prevent fraud. Since that trial, the World Food Programme’s Building Blocks initiative has become the world’s largest humanitarian use of blockchain technology.”

vachina 3y ago
Haha a UUID tied to my biometrics. What could go wrong.

happytiger 3y ago

Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions. I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper. You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the business, the consumer ultimately pays for it in higher prices. Heck, people pay transaction fees on payments they make the to government because the government won’t take cash. Do we really need to make not paying invisible fees in everything illegal? Seems crazy.

noodlesUK 3y ago
There were already costs. There were always costs and risks associated with cash handling: armored trucks doing cash collection, risks of money in tills being lost. If it really were a lot cheaper you wouldn’t see businesses clamouring to go cashless. That’s not to say I think cash should go the way of the dodo, but I don’t think there’s that much difference paying g4s to collect your money vs Mastercard. IMO the benefits of cash are on the consumer, not the business.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  These are even higher for digital, all the associated software development, audits, etc. That processing fee is on top of this, and is easily variable.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    You need exactly the same level of software durability for cash handling; see the Post Office scandal, where the computer system was misrecording cash transactions.
- graemep 3y ago
  I do not think so. Otherwise the British government would not have needed to outlaw charging customers more for card transactions to encourage the move away from cash.

34679 3y ago

The new soccer stadium in St. Louis is completely cashless. Upon arrival, you attach a form of payment to a scan of your face, then the system tracks you and your purchases throughout the stadium. No thanks.

andreygrehov 3y ago

What’s interesting is that cash 10% more valuable than digital money. I wonder if that gap will keep increasing.

svggrfgovgf 3y ago

Does anyone check their credit card bills or bank statements to be sure that all of the charges are valid and for the correct amount? It seems like if you use electronic payment for everything there would be a lot of items to verify. Or do you just assume there's never any errors?

nabeards 3y ago
Yes, we do. But nobody we know does. We are fanatic at tracking our spending too, though, and that seems to be a dying art.
pasttense01 3y ago
I think it is common to check that all the charges are valid--since there is a lot of credit card number theft around. But I think it is uncommon to check that they are the correct amount--instead you eyeball the numbers and don't do further checking unless a charge seems unreasonable.

tupolef 3y ago

You can use a banknote for an unlimited number of transactions, with no intermediary, and no tax per transaction. States and banks benefit by printing this tool for you, because in return they control the movement of money when it comes back to them, and its value. But with digital currency, they've hit the jackpot, realizing that they can have their cake and eat it too: they can control the movement of money, its value and even tax it on a per-transaction basis. And without any advantage other than saving space in your pocket.

Geee 3y ago

My bank freezed my access to my debit card and online bank recently, without a reason. They just sent me a message that I should visit the branch in person. Not going to happen. Fortunately I could open a new bank account online and had some spare cash too. For the first time I realized that I'm a slave to my bank. They can just freeze my money just like that. In a fully cashless system you'd be a complete slave to the system.

unicornmama 3y ago
Yes. Complete a complete slave. LeVar Burton will have to come out of retirement to make a Roots sequel so that the world can understand your harsh mistreatment.
alexpetralia 3y ago
You are a slave to many systems - labor markets, product markets, food markets - all of which are not controlled by you. You can be cut off "just like that" if the powers that be choose to do so. In the modern world you simply cannot survive without depending on other parts of society. Given the alternative, I don't find this to be such a bad compromise.

CommanderData 3y ago

The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying. Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade. Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it. That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems become centralised either through standards or legislation. It will be easy to track someones habits or location globally.

fzeroracer 3y ago
The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse. Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (and I mean PURELY) someone somewhere will know when and how you're spending your money. If you want to deal with privacy concerns then it needs to be codified in law. And that involves dealing with the entire chain, not just point of sale and not just thinking cash will save you.
- jonkho 3y ago
  There are things that are justified to exist whose sole purpose is keeping things in-check. If any of your aforementioned tools gets abused by the authorities we can still fall back to using cash. If you take away the fallback alternative, then abuse is much more difficult to keep in check. This is called Game Theory.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
  There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far more expensive for the government, and the protesters have more options to fight back—run, hide the cash, etc. Not to mention it will probably drum up sympathy for the oppressed. And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.

jas- 3y ago

Be worried when laws get passed against barter systems that would circumvent these systems

HomeDeLaPot 3y ago
I don't think barter is a realistic way to circumvent the disappearance of cash. Sure, it'll work once in a while, when you happen to have something of equal value that the other guy wants—but most of the time it'll be such a drag on every transaction that transactions just won't happen often. Want to get some groceries? Are you just going to hand the cashier a pair of shoes in return? There are good reasons physical currencies have existed for thousands of years, in many forms across many societies. I think rather than barter, we'd have to fall back on something like gold, seashells... Something that's hard to fake, hard to make, easy to appraise, and easy to carry. Like cash.

alkonaut 3y ago

Not used a coin or paper bill for several years now. It’s now at the point where I don’t know what the most common bills and coins look like since they were changed a few years back and I have never owned most of them. I should keep cash as a backup just like I keep some canned food, but I wonder how society would work in that scenario when many stores don’t have cash registers, many bank offices don’t allow cash deposits and so on. The US would be far more resilient in that situation.

apapapa 3y ago

Luckily we still have crypto

thelastparadise 3y ago

I like to stop by the ATM on the way to the store and get a few bills out, then use it at regular stores. It freaks them out every time but I find it is a better money to use.

EasyMark 3y ago

Yeah it sucks. I can't quite put my finger on it, but is seems like giving up every transaction to the government and corps. That seems like a terrible terrible thing just for a little bit more convenience. I have some bit of hope though, it seems like Gen Z is seeing that "tech fixes everything" is bullshit and see to be enjoying less materialistic and "gotta get the latest/greatest". Millennials were likewise less materialistic than Gen X. Hopefully people come around to using tech where it makes sense and use it less in those areas that are detrimental to quality of life and where simple solutions work just fine.

waynesonfire 3y ago

No it's not. In my neighborhood, businesses are starting to offer cash discounts. The credit card companies are getting too greedy with their fees.

david2ndaccount 3y ago

The issues with physical currency are almost entirely self-inflicted. Governments should retire the smallest denominations and introduce larger coins/bills. In the US, all of the coins are worth so little that the only practical coin is the rare half-dollar. Retire all of those worthless coins, require transactions be rounded to the nearest half-dollar or dollar, and issues with physical currency for the user will go away. Now of course, the government won’t do this as they want physical currency to be inconvenient so they can track you and deny you access to your own money when they find it convenient. We’re in an era of growing authoritarianism. Hopefully we survive this one.

alexwhb 3y ago
This is a really good point. And one of the reasons I hardly ever use cash is having to deal with so much annoying change. If you eliminate most change… cash becomes not a big deal
CSMastermind 3y ago
I would argue the root cause of this phenomenon is inflation and the first step we should take is to make the dollar a stable unit of measure not to consciously allow its value to fall.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  Deflation is worse than inflation, and it's hard to hit a single number, so central banks aim for low, stable inflation. 1-2% inflation isn't very perceptible vs 0 but avoids deflation.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Please explain why deflation is worse.
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      Cash becomes an appreciating asset. It leads people to hoard cash rather than invest in stocks and bonds, and delay purchases stagnating the economy. Japan mid 1990s to mid 2010s is a real-world example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades In the worst cases, deflation causes demand to drop causing a recession, which further depresses demand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation

realcertify 3y ago

The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence. Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong". Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.

yakireev 3y ago
> Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions Which country is it? In many jurisdictions cash transactions are already illegal above certain threshold. It might be that you won't have too many places to go.
yankoff 3y ago
Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash. Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
xadhominemx 3y ago
What are you talking about? Deposits that came in via paper money are treated in exactly the same manner as those deposited electronically.
- yankoff 3y ago
  Cash transactions over $10k have to be reported to the IRS. You'd have to provide ID and TIN. If that weren't the case, criminals wouldn't have had problems with money laundering.

coppsilgold 3y ago

It's technologically feasible to create centralized digital cash that is much more anonymous than physical cash. You can do it by using zero knowledge proofs where you have vouchers & nullifiers. It's virtually the same idea that powers Tornado Cash. It's tractable but challenging, every single transfer of a digital-cash note would necessitate an entry into a public Merkle-tree. You could mitigate this by introducing a multitude of denominations (a separate Merkle-tree for each one) trading some anonymity-set size for the mitigation. Another possibility is to introduce special cash pools that have expiry dates, incentivise their use with lower transaction costs. The transaction costs would have to also be ZKP vouchers but much more flexibility on those, such as rapid expiry. If a government was crazy enough to do this, they would give up all control over how the money is spent. The only control they would have is whether or not to shut the whole thing down. Discrimination would not be feasible, reversing transactions impossible. They could still print money of course.

sneak 3y ago
Governments did everything they could to stop Tornado Cash. Uncensorable, anonymous digital payments is the very last thing the state wants for its citizens. That allows private people to raise (and pay for) an army. Preventing rival armies within their territory is the primary and most important function of a state.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

bookofjoe 3y ago

I've been reading this for going on 30 years and I still have some in my wallet which is accepted everywhere. Seems to me this is just a recurring trope trotted out for want of an article topic.

dfawcus 3y ago

I was in a large supermarket (Tesco) today where they were experiencing "technical difficulties". A repeated announcement over the tannoy stated they could not accept contact-less payments, not by card, not by phone. They were still accepting cash and physical card insertion (Chip & PIN, or Chip & Signature). Despite that lots of people were getting flustered at the checkouts (manned and self service) when they were unable to pay. Always carry some cash!

lawrenceyan 3y ago

Crypto is an electronic replacement for cash that is ideally not dependent on centralized entities incentivized by processing fees (still in progress of course, but we're rapidly getting there!).

DaleNeumann 3y ago

Fees on digital payments by merchants should be banned, if we are going into a digital era without cash and an expectation that everyone pays digitaly then they should come along with us and be more accommodating or atleast more realistic if they want our business, even if it is just a small cup of coffee the convenience of tap and scan is far superior to dragging your feet to a machine in the middle of the night looking over your shoulder always expecting the worst.

soco 3y ago

Crazy idea: instead of fighting the consequences of surveillance society, how about we fight the surveillance ITSELF? Everybody here agrees surveillance is bad, yet I bet right now there a few HN readers working on surveillance tech, and not at least most of us are voters, some even involved a bit deeper in politics. How about we actually do something against that what we know it's wrong?