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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

#601

Post by searchableguy »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #531
DeathArrow wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than crypto, you can store some money in a foreign bank account with a debit card attached and withdraw from the ATM when you need.

afaik its complicated to create bank account in country where you don't live no? I always had to provide proof of address or something, from that country, which is complicated if you are not millionaire with property here and there.

Not super complicated with fintech providing multi currency accounts.

You can also get e-residency in many countries like estonia, lithuania, etc and avail their government services digitally. You will be able to open a bank account and sign stuff.

There are many options available.

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

#602

Post by robincpt »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #113
ddingus wrote: post #67

We do, and frankly need to reject the cashless society. Cash is pretty great. I am a fan, and have all the usual, ordinary reasons most people do. Cashless seems like a goal others want, but most people probably don't.

No COVID was the last push. Germs and all that.

That's the point of making coins out of pure silver

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

#603

Post by NhanH »

ladallada wrote: post #589
allisdust wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds fair as long as you are representing my views. When the coin flips I will get the unfairness of it. This is what current supporters of the regime (I guess we can now call it that) don't understand yet.

You're talking to one right now. So let's discuss. My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest a…

You made a lot of hidden assumptions in both of your replies so it’s a bit hard to response. But let me try one: if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that? (I’m not saying that it is the case, more to question some of your assumptions in this situation)

> if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc.

More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem

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

#604

Post by mehdix »

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…

imho, we as a society have been rushing/forced to embrace new technology without really understanding the downsides. I use nowadays cash as much as possible. The notion that every single mundane payment of mine is being monitor, tied to some profile and bid in realtime terrifies me. And no, no payment provider has ever promised me that they won't do this. We had also cash cards in the past in Germany, to my understanding they would provide digital payment without tracking and central control, but they are deprecated.

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

#605

Post by bryanrasmussen »

walterbell wrote: post #594
Cederfjard wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.

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

#606

Post by selestify »

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…

Monero is a good thing to look into. Even if you don’t want to hold it yourself, swapping in and out of it will make the “paper” trail that much harder to follow.

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

#607

Post by onion2k »

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.

That doesn't matter. If laws mandate that services must take cash then a cashless society is impossible, so people who choose not to go cashless can't be forced to give up cash. Hence the war on cash has been won, and cashless lost.

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

#608

Post by modo_mario »

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…

Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo? It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.

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

#609

Post by tibanne »

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…

^ This. Bitcoin Cash (still has low fees and is truly peer to peer) is the way IMO. Try tipping someone on reddit or Twitter. www.chaintip.org

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

#610

Post by the_other »

mortenjorck wrote: post #206
stickfigure wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 App…

An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones.

N=1.

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