In praise of cash • Hacker News Board

Re: In praise of cash

#211

Post by sparrish » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

baccredited wrote: post #162

sparrish wrote: post #13

After having my card skimmed for the 4th time (at a gas station pump, at checkout at grocery store, etc), I decided to pay for everything with cash. It's not worth the hours it takes to clear up things with the bank and I get a better understanding of where my money is being spent when my wallet gets light.

I get roughly 2% back on every credit card transaction. For me, worth the hassle of occasional identity theft I'm not liable for.

The 2% is a good point but for me the savings of not wanting to part with my Washingtons has been more than 2%.

You're not liable, but that doesn't mean it doesn't cost you anything to get it straightened out (time).

Re: In praise of cash

#212

Post by otakucode » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #9

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…

And don't forget that 'payment processing' is never free. In fact, it is never even a flat fee despite the fact that it does not actually cost anything more to transfer a larger number over a network than it does a smaller one. Yet people seem to have no problem handing over the majority of their economy to 'processed' payments which empower banks with the ability to do nothing less than levy taxes and exert the same sort of control over the economy that was previously reserved to the federal government. If they wish to restrict the availability of money in the economy, they can simply raise the payment processing fees. If they wish to boost their own profit margin, they simply raise the payment processing fees. They show favoritism by giving large companies big discounts on those fees, revealing them not to be fees actually needed to pay for a service being provided but merely a chunk of money they take simply because they can.

Re: In praise of cash

#213

Post by jk563 » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #205

jk563 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I'm living in a village outside Leicester in the UK and I've paid <£0.50 on a card/using Android Pay on multiple occasions.

Historically a lot of restaurants and retail establishments in the US had minimum charges for credit cards. My anecdata is that this is far less common today (Brooklyn notwithstanding). There's also just been this psychological shift that makes it generally OK in most places to put that $3 salad on a credit card. I'd never have done that 10 years ago. Now I routinely charge my lunch or a cup of coffee. I don't know h…

We had that in the UK for a while too. It seemed that the big corps ended up absorbing the fee and then most others had to too. There's still the occasional merchant that has a minimum but I see less and less as time goes on.

In theory, our interchange fees were reduced, but from what I saw it just resulted in most decent cashback schemes disappearing. This seems to have resulted in issuers making the same margin as they no longer pay out a part of it to the customer.

Re: In praise of cash

#214

Post by nommm-nommm » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:20 PM UTC

frandroid wrote: post #34

koolba wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you're not using an ATM to get your cash ...

ATMs are more hardened, and you visit less of them (and you keep visiting the same ones) so you can spot skimmers more easily.

ATM skimmers are not always easy to spot and sometimes aren't even viable from the outside, for example, Bluetooth skimmers.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/

Re: In praise of cash

#215

Post by otakucode » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

M_Grey wrote: post #78

CPLX wrote: post #9

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.

Can you even conceive of how radically different that would look? In order for barter to be possible, you must be face-to-face with the person you are exchanging goods with. Unless Amazon really stepped up to the plate and hired agents in every neighborhood in the nation, I couldn't see it being anything but a reversion of society to pre-Industrial-Era structures.

Shit. You just made me realize something. This would be bliss and perfection and salvation for the current status quo. The Internet has come along and taken distribution, the source of basically every existing accumulation of significant wealth, and made it a worthless problem to solve. It took the primary economic engine, something only huge sophisticated organizations were capable of accomplishing with any effectiveness, and turned it into something any clever 12 year old can do in their spare time for a lark and run circles around those large organizations whose pre-existing distribution chains are now a weight drowning them.

They feel that noose tightening and know their days are numbered unless they can stop things from progressing any further. The death of any not-in-person transactions, especially any transactions over the Internet, would give them rebirth. Their distribution networks would once again be the single most valuable structure in the entire economy. They could continue to skim 90% of every transaction between creator and consumer for performing the long-valued task of distribution.

Shit.

Re: In praise of cash

#216

Post by eric_the_read » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

thraway2016 wrote: post #178

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how Bitcoin solves the anonymity problem cash does. If anything, banks and intelligence agencies would love a world where everyone transacts on a distributed ledger.

Cash isn't really anonymous either. Serial numbers make it traceable, albeit with large time granularity. All banks and many large retailers track deposits and payments by serial number. That plus CCTV and cell tower data will usually be enough to identify someone with a pattern of spending dirty money.

But cash can move around quite a bit in a day. Spend $14 at merchant A, get $6 in change, spend $3 at merchant B, who hands that out to customer C as part of their change, who gives it to a bum, who in turn uses it to buy lunch... seeing a deposit of a suspect serial number at a merchant doesn't mean a whole lot. At best it gives you one more place to look through their CCTV and not find the guy you're looking for.

Re: In praise of cash

#217

Post by nommm-nommm » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

mamon wrote: post #175

matthewmacleod wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just not sure you can construct a coherent argument around that though. Obviously a seller isn't obligated to accept cash; is there a suggestion that we should legally require sellers to do so?

>> a seller isn't obligated to accept cash Isn't he? I don't know how it works in US, but at least in Poland every banknote has printed statement that it is "the legal payment method ". The law institutes a fine for any seller that refuses payment in cash.

In the US airplanes (that I've personally flown on) stopped taking cash and are card only onboard. ( example: http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/blog/morning_call/2015/01...

Apparently Citibank stopped handling cash in Australia: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/citibank-is-the-first-aust... (not sure how that works out)

A coffee shop in Maryland stopped taking cash after several robberies https://consumerist.com/2017/02/03/sick-of-being-robbed-coff...

Salad chain Sweetgreen also stopped taking cash https://consumerist.com/2016/12/22/seeking-sweetgreen-salad-...

Also most landlords won't accept cash.

There's others, but that's just off the top of my head. I've been in card-only situations before.

Re: In praise of cash

#218

Post by otakucode » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

colorint wrote: post #118

M_Grey wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's two things working against this theory. First, such systems only work in the presence of a unit of account, because otherwise it's impossible to coherently price items in a pure unlike-for-unlike barter system. The unit of account would, of course, be money. So what you're talking about isn't a collapse of the money system, but black markets. When you say "people who want to keep their transactions off the bo…

It seems that you know a good deal more than me about economics, so allow me to ask a question please. You say this:

>Second, the value of state money is maintained by the state's ability to levy taxes

Does that also hold when the state allows the vast majority of the transactions within the state to be mediated by banks and payment processors who charge a proportional "processing fee" on every single transaction which becomes essentially indistinguishable from a tax? Does that not put banks in the position of having as much, or at least nearly so, control over the value of the money of that state?

Re: In praise of cash

#219

Post by nommm-nommm » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:43 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #51

nunez wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

Well, if you look at it from a bigger picture, its actually good business to accept card. The reason being is, as I mentioned in another comment, people spend more when they use card than if they use cash. So you may have to pay a 3% fee to the CC companies but you may get 6%+ more business. Especially in the restaurant/bar industry. The last thing you want to do is allow your customers to feel "pain" when they order that third or forth drink (pain being their wallet getting physically thinner)

There's also costs to handling/processing large amounts of cash, it's not "free."

Re: In praise of cash

#220

Post by carapace » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

M_Grey wrote: post #78

CPLX wrote: post #9

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.

I think it was Giordano Bruno who first claimed that whatever has the most value and the least cost of storage will become money.