In praise of cash

Post by Symbiote » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 9:16 AM UTC

ersii wrote: post #314

Symbiote wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Nordic countries, you can certainly pay admittance to a club and shop in a thrift shop with a card. You can pay by bank transfer done with a phone app (MobilePay in Denmark, Swish in Sweden, etc) at a garage sale. At the last garage sale I went to, there wasn't anyone around -- just a sign saying everything was priced, and to transfer the money to 12 34 56 78 with MobilePay. In fact, trying to pay cash can cau…

> It's not normal to tip in a restaurant (or anywhere else). Um, what? It's still normal and people do tip at resturants in Sweden. To be fair, neither you or I have any numbers to back it up and have to chalk it up to experience/intuition.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 9:36 AM UTC

joshontheweb wrote: post #350

icebraining wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple European countries already forbid cash payments over a few thousands euros. In my country the law is just being proposed: anything over 3000€ must be done using electronic systems (read: banks) or you risk getting a fine equivalent to 25% of the amount over the limit.

What is the reasoning behind this?

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 9:47 AM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #338

pedrocr wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you give out its address for someone to send you what they owe you they will know, which is not the case with your physical wallet or your bank account.

They'll know how much is in that address, but a wallet consists of many addresses. How do you find all of the other addresses? If you watch for long enough, you can wait for a transaction that spends from the address you know, and you might find some other addresses that were spent with it. It's true that a non-zero amount of information about your Bitcoin holdings is leaked. But it's not true that that amount is 100…

Post by ksec » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 12:55 PM UTC

__jal wrote: post #254

kolinko wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of better governance though. Ideally, anti-trust government entities should monitor how companies like PayPal operate.

So, "ideally", we'd 1) ban cash, so that humans need permission to interact when an exchange of value is involved; 2) improve the oversight of the permission-givers, so that the permission-giver-watchers are less arbitrary and annoying, in order to fix the problem that never existed before point 1. Other than lining the pockets of poor, underfed bankers and giving busy-bodies veto power over our interactions with oth…

Post by coldpie » Mon, Mar 06, 2017, 1:45 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #303

coldpie wrote: post #169

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.

There are still costs to handling cash, which will vary in each case based on business size. Hiring those armoured vans to move it around, loss by theft or error by staff, time spent counting money, making cash deposits or withdrawals from the bank, and perhaps higher insurance. Whether those costs are more or less than cash presumably varies. A public transport operator seems the obvious case where cash costs are hi…