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You can’t pay in cash via an app. An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any
by sneak 1y ago
You can’t pay in cash via an app.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
- bluedino 1y agoBuy a gift card across the street at CVS. Literally had to do that before. I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
- sneak 1y agoYou can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. Additionally, the ability to pay in cash isn’t needed for buying coffee, it’s needed for paying for legal defense, publishing, transport, and a bunch of other things. The issue isn’t that Starbucks is cashless; the issue is that when all of society goes cashless (because places like Starbucks did) then we are all capital-f Fucked. Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
- 542354234235 1y ago>You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. This is 100% false. I do gift card reselling and buy 6 figures worth of gift cards per year. Sometimes places like Dollar General require ID, but CVS, Staples, Grocery Stores, etc. almost never ask for ID. When they do it is to match to the name on the credit card to prevent people buying gift cards with stolen credits cards, not to enter into any sort of tracking database. You can easily buy hundreds of dollars of gift cards in a single transaction with no ID check if using cash.
- sneak 1y agoThey (CVS) require a phone number.
- akerl_ 1y agoI’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.
- sneak 1y agoMost people are, because they don’t realize that when all transactions must be done without privacy and only at the pleasure of the state, the free society that you have come to take for granted will cease to exist. I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago: https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolution-en https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
- akerl_ 1y agoThat’s certainly a possibility. But no, I don’t think a lack of cash will cause society as I know it to cease to exist.
- grishka 1y agoWhat about international travelers who don't have an internationally accepted payment card because their home country was mostly isolated from the banking system in a mostly futile attempt to punish its government?
- akerl_ 1y agoI don't think cash is saving anyone from the knock-on effects of international sanctions on their citizens. The same people who don't have access to a Visa because they're citizens of a sanctioned country aren't in a position to easily turn their local currency into USD, and the ways they'd start to earn money outside of the sanction bubble overlap the ways they'd get an internationally accepted payment card.
- grishka 1y agoYou can freely exchange Russian rubles to US dollars and back. Many people I know travel like that.