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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

#651

Post by goodpoint »

chowells wrote: post #59
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…

Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption

In US but not in other developed countries! Do not generalize.

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

#652

Post by globular-toast »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #157
lhorie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper curren…

No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction. It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.

> It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.

One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now.

The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same.

Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan.

Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%.

The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around.

How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.

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

#653

Post by BoxOfRain »

peterbraden wrote: post #622
jjav wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter.

It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.

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

#654

Post by walterbell »

Nursie wrote: post #646
walterbell wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A bit awkward for cashless narratives that "behind" Americans are leading the world reserve currency, where cash use is increasing. Is there public data on the decline of cash outside America?

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

#655

Post by aembleton »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #157
lhorie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper curren…

No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction. It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.

How do you even pay for rent or utility bills with cash?

I'm 39; so maybe too young to have experienced that but how does it even practically work? Did your landlord pop round once a month? For utility bills, did you go to the bank and ask them to transfer cash to a utility company; or maybe at a post office? Or did the utility company send someone around to collect cash payments?

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

#656

Post by sofixa »

peterbraden wrote: post #622
jjav wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance.

Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.

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

#657

Post by pepesza »

MithrilTuxedo wrote: post #17
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…

I thought cashlessness without a trusted third party was a solved problem. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Bitcoin the network is fully transparent, which makes BTC not really fungible - it can and is traced, which creates better/worse BTC. This is why coinbase (small c) BTC is sold at premium.

Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom.

FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.

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

#658

Post by sofixa »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #653
peterbraden wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the…

> Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state

Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.

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

#659

Post by fleddr »

avs733 wrote: post #508
fleddr wrote: post #155

Young people may have never experienced actual freedom and privacy. Here goes. I grew up in the 80s, in Europe. The only thing the government knew of me was that I existed and which school I attended, and absolutely nothing else. There were no recording devices anywhere. My actions, my communication, my spending, all private. I was still a kid though. My dad worked and got cash in hand. It was also common to obscure…

> If you believe this is warranted, flip the script and apply this arbitrary power to a protest that you do agree with. Say a right-wing government is in power, and there's new BLM protests. Would you be OK with the government tracking every protesters, arbitrarily requesting private data from private businesses you interacted with, and then financially wipe you out without any process at all? Like this: https://www.…

Yes, like that. Your point?

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

#660

Post by NhanH »

ladallada wrote: post #625
NhanH wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

I meant that they didn’t have the popular support to shut down the protest (I was not talking about the general popular support to the government as a whole, but just this specific issue). In the previous post, you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.

The specific methods used to shutdown the protest matter a lot. The police are free to arrest them or impound their vehicles. Freezing the bank account is not a standard course of actions, which you seems to think are similar to arresting. Even in the case of arresting, the police can’t even hold you for more than a few days unless they can find a prosecutor to file some charges against you.

They were free to use a plethora of methods to stop the protests, the complaint a lot of people have is they didn’t use other methods, and choose something that a lot of people consider immense overreach.

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