Swedes turn against cashlessness • Hacker News Board

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#351

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #249

dalbasal wrote: post #173

Good. The cashless drive gives me the creeps. 1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending. 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto an oligopoly. Cashless gives this system a 2% tax on all spending (+ fraud, which retailers pay for). 3 - Government control is creepy too. Liberty reasons, privacy reasons, single-point-of failure reasons. Just simple competency reasons. 4 - It advantages big…

I keep waiting for the government to realize that "payment processors" have far more power to regulate the monetary supply than the federal central bank does. We've handed over the majority of transactions to these groups that charge a percentage based, I suppose, on the notion that transferring a larger number over a wire is significantly more difficult than transferring a smaller one. So if they want to set the nat…

The EU is no stranger to heavily regulating them https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#352

Post by otempomores » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

nv-vn wrote: post #76

Wow. No comments on how crazy this viewpoint is? They're not just talking about eliminating cash, they want to nationalize all private banking. They're arguing that a monopoly of the state is better than a "monopoly" of four different companies, that private firms cannot be trusted to manage financial transactions despite the massive history proving they can, and that the state is somehow going to be able to handle t…

Silicon valley and the internet as statr sponsored military projects? States are in competition among one another and have by nature a longer breath then all companies combined. Finally crypto currency came to be as a attack on the mone printing monopoly.. so reaction is understandable and expected.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#353

Post by ragequitta » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #220

dalbasal wrote: post #173

Good. The cashless drive gives me the creeps. 1 - First, I like cash. It's tactile and gives me a feel for my spending. 2 - Cards are an duopoly, layered onto an oligopoly. Cashless gives this system a 2% tax on all spending (+ fraud, which retailers pay for). 3 - Government control is creepy too. Liberty reasons, privacy reasons, single-point-of failure reasons. Just simple competency reasons. 4 - It advantages big…

In addition, I like the finality of a cash transaction. For anything other than cash, I have to keep records in case something goes wrong. Example: A hotel might double-bill my credit card, and this has actually happened twice to me. If you pay cash, it's impossible to be double billed at some future point. Perhaps you still want a receipt, but you never need to check it against statements. The finality of cash avoid…

The finality of cash is also why I typically have none on me. Getting robbed, while rare, would suck real bad if I had more than $20 in my wallet.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#354

Post by mnw21cam » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 9:18 AM UTC

cjg wrote: post #328

mnw21cam wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that in the UK, legal tender has a very narrow definition - it applies only to paying a debt at a court. It doesn't apply to your local shops. This is a common misconception.

It would apply in a restaurant. I've eaten the food and want to settle up, here's the cash. They have to accept it.

Not true. Say for example you went to a restaurant, a nice fancy one with a few friends, and ran up a £1000 bill. Now £1 coins are legal tender for any amount, which simply means that if you are trying to pay off a £1000 debt at a court of law, you could dump a pile of 1000 £1 coins on their desk, just to be awkward. However, the restaurant is not bound by legal tender rules, and is quite within its rights to ask you to pay using a more reasonable method, like say £20 or £50 notes, or a bank card.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#355

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #350

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC used subway tokens until the 1980s, which are effectively cash. So did pretty much everything else up to that point, since not long before that electronic payment systems didn't exist. The obvious solution for extremely high volume systems is to have the fares come out to even numbers so there is no need to make change. How long are you imagining it takes to drop a coin or two into a turnstile?

The obvious solution is the status quo contactless payment system that can collect £4.90 from your wallet faster than the ticket holders can find the slot. Even if London Underground decided to upset millions of commuters by raising the price to a round £5 in the most expensive attempt to rescue an incorrect HN claim yet, the contactless system would still be quicker than the machine that scans a fiver. Trust us, we'…

Your claim was that it isn't possible, but it is possible as evidenced by the fact that it has actually been done in the past.

> Even if London Underground decided to upset millions of commuters by raising the price to a round £5

If people would really be so upset with a 2% fare increase then imagine how happy they would be to round it down rather than up. It's even good policy -- encourage mass transit over driving.

For that matter you could issue single ride transit tokens for whatever exact price you like. The point of cash isn't to use a specific currency, it's to allow people to travel and make small purchases anonymously.

Even what NYC does now is better than using contactless payments, because you can buy a Metro Card for cash without providing a name. It's not quite as good because they still track the cards, but it's still better than having all of everyone's movements perfectly tracked by an Orwellian state computer.

> the contactless system would still be quicker than the machine that scans a fiver. Trust us, we've actually used both...

Comparing the fastest available electronic system to some kind of anachronism with paper tickets and slow readers is obviously going to favor the newer system -- although even then it's still a matter of seconds. But how is that the fair comparison? The comparison has to be between the best available electronic system and the best available cash-equivalent system that preserves privacy.

And dropping a dollar coin or a transit token into a slot in a turnstile is as close to instantaneous as makes no difference. Certainly not enough to justify tracking everyone's movements.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#356

Post by kzrdude » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #276

kzrdude wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice. In Sweden various retailers and others that sell services claim that cash is a nuisance, a cost or a danger. For example, bus companies have had "cash strikes" after robberies, claiming cash is a danger against their working environment, and as a result nowadays most buses are cashless. Retail shops and banks alike publicize and complain about the cost of handling cash transports securely. We can guess t…

Sadly, people aren’t replacing cash with EC (a very cheap interbanking card standard that’s local to Germany) but with VISA/MasterCard, foreign companies that demand foreign laws be followed in Germany, holding an oligopoly, and having massively inflated fees. I’d be the first proponent of a cashless society if we’d ban VISA and MasterCard from operating here.

Hopefully EC will survive. I used it while living in Germany and I understood the point, there were some that didn't accept anything else, obviously, because of the fees with other payment cards.

German banks were also very accessible for foreigners.

Re: Swedes turn against cashlessness

#357

Post by arghwhat » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 9:11 AM UTC

hocuspocus wrote: post #330

arghwhat wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when it is effectively forced as only means of payment. The idea of having to pay a fee to a series of private companies in order to be permitted to use money is absurd.

As long as money creation and handling is delegated to private banks, how can you avoid this? Dealing with cash isn't free to merchants either. And that cost is passed on to the customer. Sure, governments that are pushing for a cashless society have ulterior motives. But you can't blame them for capping fees that used to be just spread onto everybody, regardless of the payment method. Now at least they're supposed t…

Dealing with cash is technically free to merchants.

Banks have gotten more and more greedy, and come up with new and creative ways to charge extravagant fees, and thus charge merchants for cash orders and deposits (even though it is free for private customers).

These fees are however a very different concept, as the bank here is only a storage service. The fees are entirely avoidable by buying a safe, and the fees are not related to money changing hands.

With a credit card, fees are unavoidable and part of the transaction itself, and they're not even going to your bank, meaning that they want a slice of the cake from elsewhere (despite them technically earning money on your stored money through investments).