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Japan has tap payments for public transit and restaurants for decades, while simultaneously being very cash driven. Will be interesting to see how the cash meta

Japan has tap payments for public transit and restaurants for decades, while simultaneously being very cash driven. Will be interesting to see how the cash meta evolves with different countries and cultures.

TheChaplain 2y ago
Afaik drug deals are often done cash, so as long as that market exist cash won't disappear I believe.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Big ones, yeah, I bet. Venmo’s huge for the “retail” side. See John Mulaney’s bit in his recent post-rehab standup about (paraphrasing) being confused what all these straight-laced people are doing on his drug payment platform.
livueta 2y ago
An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible. This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.
kredd 2y ago
Japan’s government is also pushing towards cashless society right now. Younger generations are accepting it as well. My friends at PayPay and similar companies are pretty set on increasing their userbases YoY. I live in Canada, and honestly, nobody in any of my circles carry cash. The only use cases I can think of ate casinos and drugs. All the comments about “privacy, freedom and etc.” sounds like noise, and highly unlikely for younger people to even care about.
makeitdouble 2y ago
Cash is progressively disappearing, in particular as PayPay has gotten foothold. The main gaps that were filled: - interpersonal payment is now easy. 10 people eat together, splitting the bill is now sharing a QR code and 30s of operation for each, no exchange of contact, nothing finicky, and it can also be done later (no tap needed) - phone networks are fast enough to make the transactions near instaneous. We're talking 3s at most in a sheet mobile environment. 1s with a wired POS. - phone are secure enough, being already the central part of our electronic life. All in all, cash will always be used somewhere, but even grandma's vegetable stands are starting to accept QR codes.
no_way_1209567 2y ago
Here in Canada, Metro Vancouver implemented a tap payment system with gates for its transit system about ten years ago. They started by generating outrage about fare evaders (the previous system was an "honor" based proof of payment, at least for the train). They claimed to be losing ~3 million $CAD yearly to fare evasion. Then they made a plan to retrofit all the train stations with fare gates, and get new machines for the buses. The cost of this work was ~100 million $CAD. I thought, well that will take some time to amortize. Then I learned that the maintenance cost of all this extra crap in the stations was on the order of $3 million/year. Clearly it was never about fare evasion. You can buy a card with cash, and charge it with cash at machines in the stations, but there are strong incentives to link your account with a credit card. The truth was confirmed several years later when I read an article in a local paper quoting someone at Translink who said their policy is to share trip data with police on request, without a warrant.
- xethos 2y ago
  > Then I learned that the maintenance cost [...] was on the order of $3 million/year. And you assume the previous system cost $0 annually for maintenance?
  - no_way_1209567 2y ago
    53 stations with a couple dozen robotic fare gates each sounds like about $3mil/yr to me. If they really did it to stop fare evasion, it was ideological, not pragmatic. They spent pounds to save pennies. Mass surveillance, on the other hand, is a motivation that makes sense, just not something you can really sell to the public when looking to spend a hundred million of taxpayer money. On the other other hand, the kind of government that attempts to stamp out petty crime, at any cost, is the same sort of government that tends to want to surveil everyone. They were teeing up introducing a "road pricing" scheme that would have also happened to record every vehicle trip on the local highways when their government was defeated.

TheChaplain 2y ago

Afaik drug deals are often done cash, so as long as that market exist cash won't disappear I believe.

vundercind 2y ago
Big ones, yeah, I bet. Venmo’s huge for the “retail” side. See John Mulaney’s bit in his recent post-rehab standup about (paraphrasing) being confused what all these straight-laced people are doing on his drug payment platform.

livueta 2y ago

An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible. This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.

kredd 2y ago

Japan’s government is also pushing towards cashless society right now. Younger generations are accepting it as well. My friends at PayPay and similar companies are pretty set on increasing their userbases YoY. I live in Canada, and honestly, nobody in any of my circles carry cash. The only use cases I can think of ate casinos and drugs. All the comments about “privacy, freedom and etc.” sounds like noise, and highly unlikely for younger people to even care about.

makeitdouble 2y ago

Cash is progressively disappearing, in particular as PayPay has gotten foothold. The main gaps that were filled: - interpersonal payment is now easy. 10 people eat together, splitting the bill is now sharing a QR code and 30s of operation for each, no exchange of contact, nothing finicky, and it can also be done later (no tap needed) - phone networks are fast enough to make the transactions near instaneous. We're talking 3s at most in a sheet mobile environment. 1s with a wired POS. - phone are secure enough, being already the central part of our electronic life. All in all, cash will always be used somewhere, but even grandma's vegetable stands are starting to accept QR codes.

no_way_1209567 2y ago

Here in Canada, Metro Vancouver implemented a tap payment system with gates for its transit system about ten years ago. They started by generating outrage about fare evaders (the previous system was an "honor" based proof of payment, at least for the train). They claimed to be losing ~3 million $CAD yearly to fare evasion. Then they made a plan to retrofit all the train stations with fare gates, and get new machines for the buses. The cost of this work was ~100 million $CAD. I thought, well that will take some time to amortize. Then I learned that the maintenance cost of all this extra crap in the stations was on the order of $3 million/year. Clearly it was never about fare evasion. You can buy a card with cash, and charge it with cash at machines in the stations, but there are strong incentives to link your account with a credit card. The truth was confirmed several years later when I read an article in a local paper quoting someone at Translink who said their policy is to share trip data with police on request, without a warrant.

xethos 2y ago
> Then I learned that the maintenance cost [...] was on the order of $3 million/year. And you assume the previous system cost $0 annually for maintenance?
- no_way_1209567 2y ago
  53 stations with a couple dozen robotic fare gates each sounds like about $3mil/yr to me. If they really did it to stop fare evasion, it was ideological, not pragmatic. They spent pounds to save pennies. Mass surveillance, on the other hand, is a motivation that makes sense, just not something you can really sell to the public when looking to spend a hundred million of taxpayer money. On the other other hand, the kind of government that attempts to stamp out petty crime, at any cost, is the same sort of government that tends to want to surveil everyone. They were teeing up introducing a "road pricing" scheme that would have also happened to record every vehicle trip on the local highways when their government was defeated.