> I don't like not being able to participate in society when the bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I am committing fraud.
Now imagine when you are too poor to have a bank account, your credit history prevents you from getting a credit card in the first place, or you don't have a permanent address to associate with a digital payment card.
A cashless society is one that will only further exclude those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder:
depends on what the replacement for cash is. If it's private credit cards that lock the marginalised out then yes. If It's some frictionless digital cash replacement like a few of the central bank currencies that have been floating around I'd welcome it. Seeing how long it took for people to receive covid relief funds, if you could just distribute money to everyone in a country instantly it'd be a step up.
even homeless people these days often have a smartphone. (and I have for a while argued that we should give every person without a residence one so they have access to basic digital services). It's for sure easier than to bring bank services to them. Also, stealing digital money is much harder than stealing cash, which is very easy to steal.
There's obviously problems with this, mostly revolving around identity, but that's true for all forms of banking. But getting someone a phone and an account and being able to trivially send them money is pretty safe and realistic to set up.
> I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash
It's the opposite for me. It is much more difficult for me to keep track of cash expenses while budgeting and it is easy to forget individual transactions. So much that at this point if I ever take out cash, I consider that money spent as far as my budget is concerned.
Societies need to implement rules so that any sharing of a user's data needs to flow through data repositories that are controlled by the user and so they can authorize and audit each of these flows. Sort of like an oAuth dialogue, "Mortage Lender A wants access to your 2020 after-tax income" and you'd give them limited access so they could underwrite the loan and it'd be illegal to store the user's data any longer than necessary for that purpose. This would give companies cleaner data and common API while eliminating the possibly for anti-consumer data middle men like credit bureaus who could be then be summarily launched into space.
Cash isn't dead. Even in a pandemic, there's a lot of stores that still accept it. This article seems more like clickbait FUD for pumping cryptocurrency.
Philadelphia recently passed a law outright requiring stores to accept cash; they viewed requiring a bank account and credit card to be an accessibility problem for homeless residents. A couple of fast-food places I (pre-pandemic) used to frequent switched from requiring credit cards to accepting both afterwards, which was kind of nice.
There is reason in general to be concerned about the lack of good, private digital payment systems, but there are still plenty of cities where a pro-cash sentiment is strong, or at least a pro-"cash should be an option" sentiment. And I suspect (but can't confirm) that rural areas might also bias towards more cash transactions as well.
The general trend away from cash is something to pay attention to, but depending on where you live, it may not be an emergency right now.
This actually got me thinking.... What if someone utilized GPT-3 to write incoherent garbage that can pass off in front of Quant firm's sentiment analyzers as trending topics? If one were invested enough, one could certainly pump all sorts of stocks too.
This is the real killer app of cryptocurrency. Monero is a decentralized, untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy. All the arguments against cryptocurrency can also be applied to cash, but that doesn’t take away their main value proposition, which is a mathematically secure way to send payments while protecting the sender’s privacy.
>Monero is a [...] untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy
Not exactly. A single transaction might be untraceable but over repeated transactions it's possible to deanonymize people with a high degree of confidence. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o the good part starts at 10 minutes.
I skimmed the response and the linked paper. It looks like the paper and the article was mostly talking about deficiency in the decoy selection algorithm, whereas the video I linked was talking about the wider problem of taint trees on repeated transactions. That aspect doesn't seem to be addressed in the response.
As a monero contributor, I can say one problem differentiating it still from the capabilities of cash is the inability to give Monero to someone who doesn't already have a wallet. there's trust involved in every solution we know of so far.
I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a few years haha.
That doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me, it sounds like an investment vehicle. The reason cash is cash is that there's no inherent benefit to sitting on it. No one is going to be able to trade 10 $5 bills they put in the drawer this year for 5 $100 bills in a year or two, and we all understand that and operate on that shared understanding. If there's a hope and a real chance that I could get rich by just sitting on a cryptocurrency, I'll have to weigh its divestment against holding it. And the people or entities that have the biggest counterweight to investment are likely to be those who get some additional benefit besides its monetary value that they'd have to pay mightily for with cash anyway, like anonymity for practical rather than political reasons.
Would someone define privacy, please? I have searched far and wide and can only find scholarly articles on the various approaches to privacy but there is no commonly accepted definition. What I’ve found, however, is that people often implicitly define privacy as the right to lie. Nobody should know how much money I have and should be relying on my statement alone. True, not all governments or other institutions are worthy of the full truth. But it is also true, that any cooperation involves a level of trust hard to reach when one side reserves the right to lie without consequence.
There is a third way to have a government issued electronic currency that provides privacy for the purchaser. So the government can't cut off an individual but they can still collect sales taxes.
As long as it's framed as a way to cut off immoral right wing extremists from the financial system, Silicon Valley will enthusiastically embrace dystopian government control of currency.
And 20 years ago, neo-cons embracing dystopian government control to make sure muslims didn't use cash.
It's all control. But instead of seeing it as right vs. left, its better framed as authoritarians (historic and modern left [1], Silicon Valley, FBI) vs. people who value their freedom and privacy either because its innate to their being, or because their particular group is kept under a watchful eye (gays in the 80s, muslims 20 years ago, christians people today).
Avoid getting ensnared in the identity trap the way you just did. Once you do, you've accepted the basic premise of identity politics and, therefore, things like CRT; which is just 's/class/identity/g' for Marxism.
[1] that is all of the left's history from the Jacobins until today minus twenty or thirty years centered around the early 90s.
Neither party values freedom or privacy. Who can I vote for who even pretends? I'm gay and largely agree with leftist ideals, but completely disagree with modern tactics by both parties. But the left controls technology, and so I criticize them more because there's more at stake.
So I'm an identitarian for criticizing Silicon Valley for constantly engaging in that kind of discourse? Are you identitarian for assuming I am one?
I criticize Silicon Valley because they are worthy of criticism. You say they aren't?
Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations? Transactions are slower than sending money electronically, the paper is subject to decay, and if your cash gets stolen you have no recourse to getting it back. The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
Cash is easy for simple informal transactions (e.g. garage sales, farm stands and the like) and where connectivity is poor or nonexistent.
A lot of the alternatives involve unnecessary infrastructure (e.g. PayPal etc have various controls to block money laundering, which isn't the purpose of your once-a-decade garage sale) or are siloed, making it hard to quickly do business with someone who has a different brand of phone or doesn't have the right app installed.
And asynchronous transactions are hard (I used to buy a newspaper by leaving a quarter on a board and grabbing a paper...and this setup was next to a busy subway station!). And farm stands are often simply goods left out on the honor system.
> Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations?
That sounds like a restatement of 'who needs privacy if you have nothing to hide'. I use cash because I don't feel like making my purchase history available to anyone with deep pockets. If someone wants to figure out what I buy, I'd rather they just go ahead and hire someone to follow me around.
>Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal operations?
I’ve gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have no cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.
>The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
Or, you know, because the government says that it’s worth 100$ and lets you pay 100$ in taxes with it.
> I’ve gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have no cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.
This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty than to argue for keeping cash around. Last time I traveled Chilean Patagonia, I was impressed that even the most isolated communities now have 4G and the village general store has a card terminal. In Finnish Lapland, too, where there are almost no people, you almost never lose a mobile phone connection in the national parks, and the shops take cards like anywhere else in the country.
> This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty than to argue for keeping cash around.
Is there a timeline for when America will get perfect, reliable connectivity in rural/isolated areas? Is it OK if we keep cash around in the meantime until that problem is solved?
Just let us know when that 4G rollout is completely done, and then we can revisit this conversation.
>This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty
I cannot state how strongly I. disagree. Part of the appeal of these places is that you are completely cut off. Destroying that for something as banal as credit card payments is abhorrent to me.
I’d also much rather that the organizations that run these areas spend their money on things other than paying for and maintaining PoS systems. I’ve yet to see one that’s as reliable as a steel post that you jam cash into.
I know there are many downsides to it, but I enjoy these places where you can get away from the 24/7 always online world. There are so few left anymore
I'd explain it as being irrelevant to this particular conversation since credit/debit cards would also be affected by hyperinflation. Though you'd have the advantage of not having to push a wheelbarrow full of cash around.
Even that is becoming more and more rare. The makeup of a 30-checkout supermarket here (Sweden) is probably 20 self-checkout, 5-no-cash manual ones and 5 that can handle cash.
Many if not all small businesses like hotdog vendors, flea markets etc have completely dropped cash because it's expensive and inconvenient.
Once the costs of cash management is higher than that of cards or digital transactions, there is no incentive.
It's easy to say "we need cash for privacy" but if people are doing better business without cash, it's hard to convince them.
You've never traveled around and used cash because you are at a small shop of some kind with no ATM around? I guess you welcome the Great Reset then. I would rather keep the option, no matter how obsolete. Even crypto can have an equivalent, it's just more options, more flexible. Why would you want a more rigid system with less options? (unless you want absolute control)
Legitimately surprised at sibling comments missing the subtext here. s/cash/cryptocurrency of parent post and you have word for word the standard complaint against cryptocurrency, which I believe is the point @camjohnson26 is trying to make.
Calling out the subtext would probably lead to completely different responses. The truth is most people don’t understand money or the very real reasons why cash and digital currency are important.
Thankfully some brilliant souls pointed out you can buy things with cash. The comments about donating to political parties are especially ironic. Hacker News is great for technological information but way off base when it comes to finance and economics.
Literally backed by the government. Cash is a government-backed store of value.
What kind of hoops do you have to jump through to say "my federally standardized central currency that only the government is allowed to print is a tool of the anarchist anti-state fanatics?"
Cash can be stolen but it can't be data breached. Steal my wallet and get $40. Steal my card and I have hours of work todo to get back to whole even "getting any stolen money back". I prefer cash for small transaction walking around money.
And as a general principle I don't like having all of my transactions logged and tracked. That's the same fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide, then submit yourself to complete tracking"
I think cash is a failsafe against potential tyranny - so if you value that then there's a need to maintain the cash system and requiring accepting cash as an option.
You can't be stopped because Visa and MC don't like what you're doing.
EDIT: here's a quote from when this was discussed in HN last time:
> A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
This article is very flawed. It mentions two scenarios: decentralized, uncontrolled money, versus government control. But it is missing the third scenario, which is the on that is actually happening in most places: plain old privatization.
The Chinese government might be trying to build a state-backed digital currency, but as the article states it is already almost cashless. And in Europe, as far as I know, each country already has one or a few de facto standard app-based solutions for digital payments between private persons. My country has instant bank transfers between banks and one mobile payment app. And at some point, the (American) smartphone solutions are likely to allow person-to-person transfer. This is all based on existing, privatized banking infrastructure which, while obviously not completely outside government control, is certainly not a public resource like the cash-based infrastructure was.
Taking away cash puts me at the mercy of these systems, which is uncomfortable.
I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash, and there are never any 'pending' transactions.