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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

#621

Post by walterbell »

modo_mario wrote: post #608
dane-pgp wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

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

#622

Post by peterbraden »

jjav wrote: post #519
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…

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie. The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past.

Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.

If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.

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

#623

Post by walterbell »

Nursie wrote: post #518
walterbell wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the fallacy of quantitative supremacy and human fungibility, that illusory phase of statistics kindergarten. Imagine a fictional universe where Steve Jobs was cancelled in his early career. "But it was only one person". How many human lives would have been impacted if Steve Jobs had been deleted from technology history? 2021 smartphone adoption is north of 3 billion humans. > Very few people will ever hit thi…

Ah yes, the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves. The fallacy of thinking that software engineers as a profession will base what work they are willing to do on any form of ethics rather than getting paid. And finally the fallacy of thinking that because I predicted what I think will happen that I also think it should happen. The post I replied to, to remind you,…

> the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.

According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the general public is using more cash, not cashless.

Are cashless advocates in an HN bubble?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

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

#624

Post by i_like_waiting »

searchableguy wrote: post #601
i_like_waiting wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, but in comparison whats easier, spend 3-5 hours to set up a crypto wallet or few weeks investigating e-residency, applying for it, then opening bank account.

People think that e-residency is just a breeze to do, but people who try, discover that its much harder than thought. Still easier than normal residency, thats true.

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

#625

Post by ladallada »

NhanH wrote: post #603
ladallada wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conti…

> 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 sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?

This doesn't really makes sense to me in a liberal democracy like Canada. Every few years, the citizen get to replace the government with another if they're unhappy with the current one. The opposition are able to have a vote to cast out the current prime minister if they want. The governor general, at any point, if it senses the people are no longer favorable to the government can kick off a new election as well. On top of that, the government is using force within the established limits of the laws and Charter of Rights of the country that are already pre-agreed upon, and the force it is using is itself in order to enforce the laws of the country from being broken, which is kind of its job as a government.

> 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

I'm not really following your point? The government is also allowed to enforce laws, and they can later be trialed. Police does this all the time, they will intervene and perform an arrest, and the trial in front of the court happens after. They are also free to enact the Emergency Act in the case of an Emergency as they did.

The funds from bank accounts are frozen, not taken. What will happen next is they will either be released, or a court case can start and decide what to do with the funds.

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

#626

Post by Aurelius3 »

noetic_techy wrote: post #39

Exactly correct. Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually… Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defe…

>This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually…

Canada will become the largest, longest lived empire of all time, spanning the entire Mediterranean world? That does sound like a dystopia.

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

#627

Post by Sankozi »

jjav wrote: post #527
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…

> With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds But they very much don't have the money yet. The transaction may have posted (if you happened to have connectivity) but it hasn't settled. It may be blocked in all kinds of ways before they actually get the money. Their account might be suspended. The payment processor may simply decide to never pay it (paypal being infamous…

> With cash, the moment the object and the bills change hands, the funds transfer has irrecovably settled without any external dependency being possible.

It isn't even remotely true. You might get mugged, you might lose money, you might get counterfeit money.

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

#628

Post by CryptoPunk »

XorNot wrote: post #315
bko wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be anonymous. Even if the state knows your public address, they can't confiscate your funds without you giving away your key. They can try to prevent people from accepting your funds but that's a lot harder to enforce

Why though? The transaction record is public in every possible way. You can trivially audit the origin of every single funds transfer in the history of Bitcoin. "Just use a tumbler" you say - except this is the government. They can just declare that they'll also be declaring that any tumbler accounts which receive blackballed currency are tainted and blackball everything which comes out of them too.

Cash is effectively a giant tumbler. All the privacy technologies in the cryptocurrency space are just trying to replicate the base privacy functionality of cash.

The reason why surveillance-state-centered interests cannot ban cash is that the public wouldn't stand for it. It's too ingrained in the culture and economy. The same needs to happen with private cryptocurrencies. We need MetaMask to adopt a confidential transaction standard the same way the major websites adopted HTTPS over a decade ago. We still have time as the financial mass-surveillance laws in place were designed for trusted third party financial intermediaries, and not peer-to-peer finance.

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

#629

Post by Quindecillion »

m348e912 wrote: post #481
bally0241 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is hardly cost prohibitive. When was the last time you sent a transaction? The last one I sent cleared at 2sats/byte and was <$1. Are you going to buy your coffee with it? No, probably not, but that hardly makes it a useless as currency replacement. Replace-by-fee doesn't make small transactions any less trustworthy either, since you should never trust any unconfirmed transaction (by definition, if its not on…

Don't you think the custodial nature of lighting network opens it up to the same type of censorship we're seeing with bank transactions in Canada? What's stopping governments from blacklisting wallets and pressuring LN nodes from transacting with them?

Good luck shutting down or controlling thousands of nodes on the Tor network.

Don't see how any government could reasonably pressure enough nodes in that way, particularly ones that are in other jurisdictions.

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