181–190 of 369 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the government needs to print cash to pay off debt, that's why the Federal Reserve exists.
I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about the government issuing digital money. To make it clear, I don't think it's an entirely good thing, but it would be a much easier path to the kind of surveillance they want to create.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. And many of the mom and pop shops around me require a minimum purchase or charge a 50 cent fee for using a card.
> Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. The store passes the cost right back to you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. You didn't just think they absorbed the cost out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?
The core concept to remember I think is that there are two ways to pay for things: * Ways that involve cash or cash equivalents * Ways where a purchase requires the permission of someone else Just think of the word authorization, which is a required element of essentially all non-cash transactions. It has the word authority embedded right in it. If you're OK with that concept, you are necessarily OK with the idea tha…
A cashless society would be an attempt to create a society that lacks basic economic freedom, but it would also fail. People will simply return to barter, and the use of whatever precious metals/stones/etc are hot that year.
http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/index.cfm/newsletter/a...
I would never support getting rid of cash, it's a basic right to spend money without being tracked.
it's a basic right to spend money without being tracked. No it's not. I very much want there to be a way to spend money anonymously, but I can't frame that as a 'basic right'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but it generates a perfect paper trail.
Not so perfect. Take, for example, using a tumbler - the prosecution can't prove that the coins going into the tumbler were yours, only that you got some coins from the tumbler and exchanged them for dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because the restaurant was "too cheap" to handle processing and transaction fees. I applaud businesses like this. The fact we slowly let a few giant private corporations enact a 1-3% fee against pratically the entire consumer economy would be ludicrous in any other situation. Plus the privacy concerns just are not worth the convenience. Whenever possible I use cash, simply so I slow the day coming where I can't fun…
I'm not a big fan of credit cards, but cash isn't free.
While I agree that cash is extremely convenient and largely anonymous, it is still much more of a hassle to manage than credit or debit cards are. I lived in NYC for a bunch of years and the one thing that I absolutely do not miss is paying for >$100 dinners, entirely in cash, because the restaurant was "too cheap" to handle processing and transaction fees.
> because the restaurant was "too cheap" to handle processing and transaction fees. I applaud businesses like this. The fact we slowly let a few giant private corporations enact a 1-3% fee against pratically the entire consumer economy would be ludicrous in any other situation. Plus the privacy concerns just are not worth the convenience. Whenever possible I use cash, simply so I slow the day coming where I can't fun…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're also sending a 3-5% tithe to the payment processor (credit card company, bank, electronic payment provider) with every transaction instead of giving that money directly to the service provider.
Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. And many of the mom and pop shops around me require a minimum purchase or charge a 50 cent fee for using a card.
The core concept to remember I think is that there are two ways to pay for things: * Ways that involve cash or cash equivalents * Ways where a purchase requires the permission of someone else Just think of the word authorization, which is a required element of essentially all non-cash transactions. It has the word authority embedded right in it. If you're OK with that concept, you are necessarily OK with the idea tha…
I can go weeks without touching cash these days. Nonetheless, I find the idea that I could be prevented from making a person-to-person financial transaction for even a modest amount without a paper trail pretty unsettling.
Many ATMs already have the hardware. To improve counterfeit recognition, most ATMs which accept cash now take a high-resolution image of both sides of the bill and do considerable processing on it. It just takes a software upgrade.
Some bank counting machines also have this feature. Cummings markets their cash counter to law enforcement, so they can capture all the serial numbers from a drug bust and track them.[4]
[1] http://www.grgbanking.cn/en/chinaATMs/images/H68NL.pdf [2] http://hkmb.hktdc.com/en/1X09V6YK/hktdc-research/ATMs-to-pro... [3] http://en.yibada.com/articles/35951/20150601/china-worlds-fi... [4] http://www.cumminsallison.com/us/en/products/currency-handli...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe this is harsh, but why would I care? It sounds like a problem for the store. The store passes the cost right back to you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. You didn't just think they absorbed the cost out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?
Of course not. But some percentage of customers still use cash. So the store might raise prices by 1.5 pct instead of the 3pct that Visa charges them. This essentially means those who use cash are subsidizing the card users. If they raise it the full 3 percent then the cash users are paying extra for a service they don't even use!