In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:19 AM UTC

bgirard wrote: post #200

throwaway22032 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox, this is an unsolvable problem. Got me. I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.

We don't have high streets here. All my adjacent banks are in the middle of a parking lot not near anything else I'd want to interact with during my precious Saturday except maybe the grocery store. Sure that's a bad design and I'd prefer to live near UK high streets but that's beyond my control here. This has nothing to do with sitting at my desk. Using cash would mean spending my Saturday at one of the least intere…

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:19 AM UTC

api wrote: post #31

I'm really happy to see that many people from many places on the political landscape see "debanking" as a line that should not be crossed. A great point I overheard recently was that this precedent is likely to be used in Canada against indigenous peoples protesting resource extraction and other incursions onto their land. Now a blockade can be a "terrorist act," etc., and their finances can be frozen among other thi…

> likely to be used in Canada against indigenous peoples

Actually the emergency powers declaration specifically excludes indigenous people - that is, they can protest, but others can’t.

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

#203

Post by phil21 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:19 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #133

casion wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite in my experience. If I go to the welding shop, it's cash only. Similar for other local shops that I frequent.

I'd be surprised if that were the norm in most places in the US. I have a $20 bill stuck in my wallet--which I carry mostly as a backup in case something goes wonky with my phone--but I mostly don't carry cash except on trips and I expect I'm more careful than many.

You'll find a strong blue/white collar divide here, which also tends to follow rural/urban lines.

Once you get into the trades and workshops, cash is king for obvious tax avoidance reasons. It's rare someone in such regions doesn't at least imply you can pay a portion of an invoice/bill with cash for a moderate discount.

Small shops in those areas might be more apt to only accept cash, and you'll notice at chain stores like Dollar Tree the cashiers actually have cash handling skills vs. the affluent areas of the cities.

For most places within the airline network, you can easily avoid paying cash these days. I still recommend anyone who travels keep enough cash on them to get back home in a pinch, if at all practical.

This is personal anecdote, but I make it a point to pay cash whenever at all possible (to the point of being "that guy" in my friend group) so I likely pay attention to it more than most.

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

#204

Post by aksss » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

throwaway22032 wrote: post #83

jaredandrews wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence sounds like civil forfeiture and I certainly think it should be outlawed. As far as cashless society winning, I dunno, I'm definitely worried about that outcome, but it's straight up illegal in my state to not to accept cash in a retail establishment and a good number of bars I go to don't accept cards at all. I use cash all the time and I find it way more convenient than a credit or debit card. My…

Agree with this. I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me. Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper. There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cas…

We just need to preserve the ability to perform an anonymous transaction. Convenience of cashless is predicated on the assumption that you're willing for the tx to be on record. For tx you want off the record, cashless is not convenient at all. If one's position is that there is no need for anonymous transactions, that's a different conversation.

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

#205

Post by heavyset_go » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

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.

In response to the 2012-2012 financial crisis in Cyprus[1], the Cypriot government decided to take 47.5% of uninsured deposits over the amount of €100,000 in the Bank of Cyprus, and all deposits over the amount of €100,000 from the Laiki bank. Greece did something similar with their bonds.

"Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)

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

#206

Post by mortenjorck » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins.

The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.

We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

throwaway22032 wrote: post #136

pdonis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox, this is an unsolvable problem. Got me. I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by obviouslynotme » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #78

chowells wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can fix that, and it is being addressed. Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting. The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics. One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance. Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abus…

>The problem IS businesses refusing cash.

They legally cannot, at least not in the USA, and I doubt in most countries. Thanks to the legal tender laws, businesses cannot legally refuse the legal tender, especially in its cash form. Once a deal is made and cash is offered, service must be rendered or it is considered stolen. A fun way to exploit this (before coin machines) was to go to tow truck lots, offer pennies, and then report grand theft auto to the local sheriff when they refused.

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

#209

Post by throw_nbvc1234 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

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?

"They're a private company they can do what they want"

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

#210

Post by mrleinad » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #163

pdonis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I've never heard of any bank offering that service. I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.

Can't you make deposits directly on the ATM? Where I live, the ATM takes your bills, counts them, and directly deposits them in the account you choose.

No need to interact with any of those pesky humans.