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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#121

Post by walterbell »

quadrangle wrote: post #61
forty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.

Paying taxes in cash is almost the most important core thing. It's utter violation of basic concepts of fiat currency for that not to be possible. The whole point of cash is that it is legal tender, and it has to be acceptable for taxes. Any country that violates this is really denying the basic concept of cash.

Exactly, as we see from the history of fiat currency, where acceptance for taxes was initially a monopoly given only to the fiat currency.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#122

Post by rlt »

Liquix wrote: post #96
encryptluks2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.

I believe the point is that it would require orders of magnitude more resources - a prohibitive amount of resources - for an overbearing government to strip citizens of physical assets, vs. the ease and subsequent temptation of doing so digitially

Well, it’s easier to steal custodial digital asset accounts...

It’s harder to steal properly secured non-custodial cryptocurrency/asset wallets.

e.x. multisig or Shamir’s Secret Sharing, brainwallets or passphrase encrypted wallets, etc

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#123

Post by anonAndOn »

forty wrote: post #36
walterbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient. Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash. However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to t…

Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.

In the US, public agencies are typically required to accept cash in any denomination. This occasionally makes the national media when a disgruntled citizen decides to pay their substantial tax or fee in bucketloads of pennies ($0.01). Private organizations, however, are not required to do so.[0]

[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#124

Post by pessimizer »

stickfigure wrote: post #89
walterbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient. Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash. However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to t…

> Incorrect, the battle is partly won... Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can't force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. So let's figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. "Everyone decides to use cash again" just isn't going to ha…

This is simply not true. Not only is cashless not at all more convenient than cash for minor purchases, and not only are 10% of the US population unbanked, but in addition the access of third parties to purchase records just alarms people.

In my circles, I often see people withdrawing out pocket money on a regular basis for small purchases, and using cash for large peer-to-peer purchases that they're unsure of the tax implications of. Cashless is largely reserved for restaurants and grocery stores.

With government reporting regulations hitting paypal and other fake banks, I bet this pattern will become more widespread. Just let somebody have to fill out an extra form on their taxes because of excessive bill-splitting; they'll change their habits instantly.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#125

Post by sneak »

brandonmenc wrote: post #80
ummonk wrote: post #70

What happens when it's not the government doing it? What happens when Facebook's algorithms decide to cut you off from your friends? Or when Google decides to cut you off from your emails and cloud storage? When payment processors decide to kick your business off their network?

What happens is we make laws to outlaw this behavior.

The laws always have carve-outs for national security. What if the orders to deny you banking or travel or communications that come prior to a trial come from the state itself?

Laws can't fix this.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#126

Post by romaniv »

chowells wrote: post #59
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture.

If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better.

Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening.

It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#127

Post by bgirard »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #116
pdonis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the pe…

Nah, you're just not thinking about it. Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes. Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts. And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do…

I care barely drive to a bank within 10 minutes, which isn't the bank I have an account with. It's only open during my work hours (9-5pm M-F), or I have to go on a Saturday. The wait time to see a clerk alone are often 10 minutes or more. And the clerk can't help me make certain payments that require me to use a web portal or mail a cheque.

> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication.

That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#128

Post by wvenable »

jakobdabo wrote: post #13
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is tha…

Lets not conflate "take" and "freeze". There's already enough confusion on that.

Also freezing of your funds can benefit you -- if the bank notices suspicious withdrawals they will freeze your account to prevent you from being cleaned out.

It's never okay to take someone's money/property without any court decision (and that should include civil forfeiture). But freezing shouldn't necessarily be lumped into that because it has valid usages. There just needs to be proper regulations and consequences.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#129

Post by pdonis »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #116
pdonis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the pe…

Nah, you're just not thinking about it. Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes. Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts. And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do…

> Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.

I've never heard of any bank offering that service.

> no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.

Agreed. But it should also be recognized that there are many people who have good reasons to use payment methods other than cash in many situations.

> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication

No one is claiming that cash is always inconvenient. Just that for many people in many situations, it is.

> You're talking about moving small physical things

If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper. And if I pay my bills electronically while I'm sitting at my desk at home, I don't have to move anything at all.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#130

Post by throw0101a »

john_moscow wrote: post #97
adriand wrote: post #57

I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…

I actually looked into the incident with the donor's account being frozen. From what I could understand: 1. The person made a donation to the Freedom Convoy. 2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse. 3. The person's bank account got locked due to an unrelated reason (false positive on the fraud check system). 4. The person either di…

> 1. The person made a donation to the Freedom Convoy.

> 2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse

The Emergencies Act is not retroactive. If this was the order of operations then their account was not locked because of the EA.

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