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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

#641

Post by makeitdouble »

romaniv wrote: post #164

> The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done. This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried. Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff…

This is a great representation of the situation.

Not taking anything from it, I’m curious why it bother you so much now, when it has always been that way, in particular for a non negligeable portion of the population (minorities, poors etc.)

And what takes do you see succeeding to improve the situation compared to what these minorities tried up until now (to anchor the conversation, I don’t think “going back” is realistic, the cat is out of the bag)

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

#642

Post by paypalthrowaway »

I made a throwaway account just for this, because shame and stigma for being poor is super real.

My PayPal got permanently banned because I owed them money. The reason I owed them money was because I lost my job and became permanently disabled due to COVID, and I took advantage of the fact that they floated money for a little bit before the ACH posted to my checking account in order to still be able to eat.

Anyway, I just started the first job I’ve been able to work in two years with enough salary to pay the debt off with my first paycheck, but because I couldn’t for so long they have permanently closed my account and banned me from their service.

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

#643

Post by EL_Loco »

dijonman2 wrote: post #615
loceng wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m confused. Shouldn’t we weaken our governments ability to freeze an account without due process?

I think parent means that by weakening your government's ability to do things without due process is strengthening it. Assuming that your government has at its basis a respect for such things as due process, individual privacy etc.

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

#644

Post by YeBanKo »

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…

Digital cash can partially solve the problem, the idea has been around since 80s [1]. Blinded signature allows you to have a bearer token without attaching information about the source or identity. It resembles cash in many ways. Surely government can shut it down, but they would not be able to do it in a stealthy way.

[1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...

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

#645

Post by globular-toast »

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…

> We need more constitutional human rights.

And those can't ever be breached, right?

We can't be trusted to honour written laws and contracts. We've shown that time and time again. The best way is to remove the possibility or at least the temptation to do it by making it too hard to violate. Physical cash has that property, as does a trustless digital cash based on cryptocurrency (I'm not sure what the best one is in this respect).

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

#646

Post by Nursie »

walterbell wrote: post #623
Nursie wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know, but Americans almost certainly are, US payment systems and attitudes to them are generally far behind other countries.

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

#648

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hughrr wrote: post #634
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…

Had the same thing with HSBC. I opened another bank account and keep a spare one going all the time. Also always keep £500 rolled up in £20 notes somewhere. And make sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

> Also always keep £500 rolled up in £20 notes somewhere

This is good advice, always have some cash around; in these uncertain times, I'd even argue to increase the amount. Make sure to have a record somewhere that you have it (a photo on your phone with e.g. ID and a dated newspaper? I dunno) so that IF you get your home broken into, you can prove it to your insurance.

Of course, there's plenty of places to hide a stack of bills, or distribute it across multiple spots.

If you're concerned about the downfall of the economy, you can get 'slabs' of valuable metals as well, that can be broken off into smaller denominations. The downside of going for those (at least in NL) is that you can't really use them to bet on the price of gold going up or down, because as a consumer you have to pay VAT for them (21%).

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

#649

Post by paypalthrowaway »

selestify wrote: post #606
zivkovicp wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve heard a lot of reports of popular exchanges freezing accounts of customers who traded with other exchanges that don’t have strong KYC requirements. How am I supposed to exchange for Monero if Coinbase (and the state of New York) dislike it?

I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know what to do in order to use Monero.

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

#650

Post by sofixa »

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…

> 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.

No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode.

And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.

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