Live data from Hacker News

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

thehub.ca

771–780 of 849 posts

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

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean to suggest that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear?

No, what I am suggesting is that as an "individual contributor" you're unlikely to merit an outlay of resources to do anything about your antics until your actions are somehow significant.

Unlikely implies non zero risk.

Additionally, you’re making the fair strong assumption that the state has to expend more than a nominal amount of resources to crush you, when is it becoming easier and easier to do so without significant effort.

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

#772

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…

I am not the person you were originally responding to, but I believe that this protest has been handled in a particularly poor way.

The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa.

By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to actually listen to them: Trudeau's government refused to speak with the protesters, and instead went into hiding until they could figure out how to use force to get these people to leave. If Trudeau had eaten crow and published his plan for lifting mandates, they may well have dispersed. What seemed to occur instead was that the LPC (in conjunction with the NDP and the CBC) used disinformation to circle the wagons and make excuses for a dramatic escalation in force, while refusing to publish a plan for the lifting of mandates. Contrast that with the BLM protests recently, where you saw a lot of dialogue between the government and the protesters and a relatively peaceful dispersal of the protest.

Make no mistake, "account freezes" are not a normal consequence of protest, even of violent riots. The Canadian government is also talking about similar things like revoking licenses, removing insurance, killing peoples' pets, and selling peoples' trucks and keeping the excess beyond what they need to cover fines. For all of these discussions, the Trudeau government is rightly being panned as tyrannical and dictatorial.

The "win condition" of civil disobedience is usually to get some imagery of the police or the government doing something really brutal in response to your protest. Trampling a Native American elder with a horse (and then lying about nobody being hurt and then lying about someone throwing a bike) and freezing normal peoples' bank accounts are pretty solid win conditions for this particular protest. By that standard, the Canadian truckers have been heard loud and clear around the world, and they don't need to keep it up, but they did need to stay until the government responded with violence.

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

#773
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Those are pre/post-transaction risks, not settlement risks.

Cashless systems also have their own pre/post-transaction risks.

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

#774
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a small business owner, why do I need to deal with the extra expense of accepting handicapped customers? I need to build a ramp, take preemptive measures to make it accessible in the weather, take time to wait for them to wheel across the office, take time to teach my employees how to be accommodating of them, all sorts of extra costs in staffing or just plain time. And all for a fraction of a percentage of my cus…

And if we put 'black people' in there you could make me look like a racist too! Wow. There are many reasons your allegory doesn't apply - 'people who want to pay cash' are not a protected class. Serving people with disabilities doesn't put me at risk of theft either, nor does it increase my banking costs. You're going to have to show some pretty good evidence of a positive social outcome to make this persuasive, beca…

If you're not going to service black people I might just have to think you are a racist. Just like if you refuse to serve the handicapped or LGBTQ I might think you are bigoted. And if you refuse to service people that use cash I might also make some further assumptions.

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

#775
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Argentina there's a service named "Pago Mis Cuentas" (Pay My Bills). You can add all your services (gas, electricity, cable, internet, taxes, etc). When there's a new bill for the services you added, it's displayed on a list with checkboxes right beside each one of them. Check the ones you want to pay, click Pay, and you're done. It's linked directly to your bank account. The website was created by a bank consorti…

It's not, because this conversation is specifically about how much worse it would be to pay all your bills in cash , while you seem to be talking about a digital payment.

Yes, because of this statement in the parent:

> I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.

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

#776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tend to assume good faith in discussions, so I must ask, are you trolling? Or is it just that HN's general antagonism towards any form of cryptographic currency stems from a dearth of information?

No, I did not mean to come off as trolling at all! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441804 Someone was arguing that we should reject a cashless society, and I was making an argument that it is impossible to do at this point. The only solution is to have a digital currency as close to cash as possible. Ethereum (on its own) does not meet this requirement. It is perfectly fungible, but still has a global ledger t…

Thoughts on Monero? I liked it the best when I started looking into crypto, but with so much momentum behind bitcoin I just kind of went down that path instead.

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

#777
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.

Bitcoin is useless to the vast majority of people as a cash substitute. If you want people to use your decentralized currency it needs to be an actual currency, which means 1. easy to transfer and 2. predictable store of value. Without monetary policy bitcoin will never accomplish 2. They're a very long way off from 1 too.

> Without monetary policy

You are the enemy.

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

#778
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.

A few months ago, it cost $4 in BTC transaction fees alone to buy a $2 bottle of soda. Last spring, it cost $60 in transaction fees to buy a $2 bottle of soda.

Conveniently ignoring lightning payments.

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

#780

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…

I am not the person you were originally responding to, but I believe that this protest has been handled in a particularly poor way. The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa. By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to a…

> killing peoples' pets

Citation needed.

Post reply on HN