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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

#591

Post by Cederfjard »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #575
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…

> But convenience always wins. It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills. >We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out. if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments an…

You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?

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

#592

Post by koonsolo »

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.

That's why we have Monero

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

#593

Post by ekns »

sgjohnson wrote: post #540

Trudeau's bank account freeze is the reason why the next time I'll be in the United States, I'll open a US bank account and transfer some savings there. (I'm a European, and not a US person). I've heard that US banks are extremely friendly to non-residents (at least the ones who know to deal with them and hand out a W8-BEN form to fill) Then my money will be safe. Unless I piss off the United States Federal Governmen…

Inflation is likely to remain high for a while, and perhaps for good so the value of your USD will go down. Rents and stuff rose 20% or so in the US which ought to be indicative of the real rate of inflation. Euro seems to fare better so far but the ECB printed even more euros than the US printed dollars so I'm minimizing my own euro exposure.

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

#594

Post by walterbell »

Cederfjard wrote: post #591
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But convenience always wins. It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills. >We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out. if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments an…

You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?

> You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it.

This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR

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

#595

Post by loceng »

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…

"It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision"

Tell that to Justin Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act in Canada and where he immediately started freezing bank accounts of peacefully protesting Cabadians under the falsely built narrative that they are "terrorists" or "funding terrorists" - all without court order.

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

#596

Post by loceng »

zivkovicp wrote: post #588
Terry_Roll wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my only personal UK bank account frozen without warning for weeks. The first I knew of it was when the call centre wouldnt answer the phone for 45mins from the shop where I had just tried to use the card. Had to abandon the process and go home. Next morning, call the bank call centre, do security get told they cant talk to me. The processes to get the account activated was interesting, I couldnt complain to the…

This is probably good advice, just remember that crypto is also digital and totally transparent (mostly). If you obtain your crypto via an exchange, then your wallet can be positively linked to your physical person, and (eventually) prohibiting transactions by blacklisting wallets would be trivial. :( I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and…

Once there are laws in place to force a check at a central service for blocked funds, certainly very easy them.

We must fix and strengthen our governments - there's no way around that.

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

#597

Post by walterbell »

(2018) https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/11/are-we-moving-toward...

> There’s a lot of talk that the U.S. is moving toward a cashless economy…at least in the sense that people are using more and more “plastic” (credit and debit cards) for transactions and that cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular. One test of this theory is to look at currency in circulation. If this measure stops growing while the economy is growing, it would be an indication that other forms of money have become more important and are serving as substitutes for currency. The graph above tells a different story: Currency in circulation is consistently growing more than the economy is.

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

#598

Post by sgjohnson »

ekns wrote: post #593
sgjohnson wrote: post #540

Trudeau's bank account freeze is the reason why the next time I'll be in the United States, I'll open a US bank account and transfer some savings there. (I'm a European, and not a US person). I've heard that US banks are extremely friendly to non-residents (at least the ones who know to deal with them and hand out a W8-BEN form to fill) Then my money will be safe. Unless I piss off the United States Federal Governmen…

Inflation is likely to remain high for a while, and perhaps for good so the value of your USD will go down. Rents and stuff rose 20% or so in the US which ought to be indicative of the real rate of inflation. Euro seems to fare better so far but the ECB printed even more euros than the US printed dollars so I'm minimizing my own euro exposure.

Virtually 100% of my assets are USD denominated anyway, I keep very little savings, everything that I don't spend goes straightly to the stock portfolio.

So inflation and FX isn't really a concern for me, it's just a fact of life. If you're keeping a decent investment portfolio in Europe, it's almost certainly mostly in USD.

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

#599

Post by Animats »

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.

The IRS will accept cash.[1] For small payments, they have an outsourced setup with Dollar General, Family Dollar, CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Pilot Travel Centers, 7-Eleven, Speedway, Kum & Go, Royal Farms, Go Mart, and Kwik Trip to accept payments up to US$500. There's a US$1.50 fee. So people who have no bank account and not to pay can pay easily. For bigger payments, cash payments are accepted at an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center, after making an appointment 30 to 60 days in advance.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

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

#600

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Cederfjard wrote: post #591
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But convenience always wins. It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills. >We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out. if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments an…

You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?

What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments.

Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined.

Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be!

The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!

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