Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thehub.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 849 posts

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

#411

Post by busymom0 »

defaultname wrote: post #330
JPKab wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are forgetting a few key details: 1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to neve…

> You are taking a government's word for it Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and the current governing party -- the ones who take all of the heat for every abuse -- are a minority government. They can fall at a moment's notice. Prime Minister in Canada isn't King, and instead is far less powerful than, for instance, the US president. Yet *not a single case has been brought forward*. A couple of Conservative MPs h…

No post body was provided.

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

#412

Post by scythe »

Supermancho wrote: post #236
walterbell wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.

Really? You can't imagine a large populist movement rejecting a newly developed technology based on suspicions about some kind of sinister agenda?

It doesn't matter if lots of people, even most, pay with digital transactions. As long as a substantial minority is using cash, the option will be available for those who need it.

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

#413

Post by busymom0 »

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…

Important to note that the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans...

Despite this, the government has been able to do this.

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

#414

Post by decafninja »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #393
decafninja wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I quite understand, but doesn't the bureacratic structure of cashless payments also provide the benefit of automatically documenting all your transactions for you so that you don't have to keep track of them manually? Unless, as I mentioned in another reply, your intention is to hide such transactions for whatever purpose - i.e. I know quite a few merchants use cash payments to avoid paying taxes. But th…

Meh. I don't really have a reply for this because we just obviously have really different worldviews so it's not going to really work. There is no consumer, or merchant, or hiding of transactions, or taxes, or Venmo, or Paypal, or any of this stuff. I'm standing next to you and you have an apple. I give you $1 for apple. I don't care about any of that other shit, it's like this whole invented set of problems that you…

Fair enough. I acknowledge people have different viewpoints on this issue.

Believe it or not, my wife is actually a proponent of cash transactions. She has not been able to convince me of the benefits either. We've agreed to disagree. She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.

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

#415

Post by zaptheimpaler »

I don’t know how Trudeau/Freeland could possibly be this idiotic. The protestors played it smart - they were peaceful yet strategic in blocking major import/export roads so the government actually felt the pain. Instead of even talking to them, the government permanently damaged a large number of peoples trust in any financial institutions.

As a practical matter, how do I begin to move towards unseizable assets? Crypto is popular but several crypto wallets were frozen as well, including a Monero wallet. All crypto exchanges in Canada require KYC. Literal cash or precious metal is maybe an option but getting through an airport with a bag of $50K in cash wouldn’t be easy or safe, especially when you land in another country which might have open corruption and you’re not a citizen.

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

#416

Post by thfuran »

bobthepanda wrote: post #346
Supermancho wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.

it kind of depends. there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead. in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get…

That pretty much makes no sense as an analogy. People opposed to speed cameras aren't advocating for spending more time and effort to write tickets, they're advocating for not getting tickets.

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

#417

Post by dheera »

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…

In China almost everything is WeChat/AliPay these days. People almost never use cash, even the street vendors use mobile payments. It's a problem because if you do something that Tencent doesn't like, they can just shut you out of your life, quite literally.

And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.

I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.

Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.

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

#418

Post by lawn »

fuckcensorship wrote: post #85
xiphias2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi called it digital cash actually for a reason, not cashlessness. It has similar properties to physical cash, as the ownership can't be taken away trivially. The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.

The key issue with using Bitcoin as a digital form of cash is that Bitcoin lacks a key property of cash: fungibility. Combine this with the transparent nature of Bitcoin's blockchain and you have a currency which is an authoritarian's dream and not a currency that could/should replace cash.

How lucky we are that cryptocurrencies have evolved since Bitcoin.

Monero is fungible.

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

#419

Post by caylus »

tshaddox wrote: post #246
caylus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything this reinforces the author's point about the dangers of lack of transparency of "digital jail". How do we know that statement is true? It's hard to hide who has been jailed (though "disappearances" come close), whereas we have no choice but to take the word of the entity which we have granted unchecked power that it has not abused that power. There's also plenty of wiggle room in their statement - they sa…

> If anything this reinforces the author's point about the dangers of lack of transparency of "digital jail". How do we know that statement is true? If a crucial part of your argument is the epistemological claim that we obviously can't trust anyone who presents evidence or arguments that we don't like because they could be lying , then there's clearly no way of having a reasoned discussion.

My claim is that when evaluating when an authority's actions were reasonable, we should lend little to no credence to statements by that same authority claiming the actions were reasonable, especially when it is impossible to verify even who exactly was targeted, let alone why.

As a contrasting case, if a police department arrested some people during a protest and released a statement about why, a journalist could verify that against the public records and even follow along the criminal proceedings. How can we verify claims made by the RCMP about their extrajudicial actions?

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

#420

Post by thfuran »

dane-pgp wrote: post #312
mortenjorck wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 App…

> 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... You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by a…

It's all fun and games until you get a new hat and glasses and cease to exist.
Post reply on HN