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.
