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What is the cost of a cashless society?

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Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#81

Post by miracle2k »

lixtra wrote: post #40
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash is the illusion of autonomy and control of one’s financial destiny to those who don’t believe in regulation as a recourse mechanism for financial inclusion. The solution is not cash, it is regulators who will kick the door in when you’ve suffered injury in the course of using financial infrastructure or services.

The reality is sometimes that regulators kick the door in for banks financially including legal stuff: Operation Choke Point [1] The consequence of abolishing cash seems to be total financial control and that is a bit like arming the police: of course you might need military equipment for fighting a cartel. But applying it to daily operation is very cruel to parts of society. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera…

Visa and Mastercard were pressured into cutting of Pornhub ads literally yesterday.

There needs to be a statuary right to be serviced by the banking system. This is in addition to escape valves such as cash and crypto.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#82

Post by dannyw »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #32

Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…

Australia is not cashless, it's just that cash is infrequently used.

You can easily get cash out at ATMs, to buy some weed from a dealer or for buying second hand goods from other people on Facebook Marketplace. You can pay your groceries with cash, or any bill at a post office.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#83

Post by JetAlone »

judge2020 wrote: post #11
JetAlone wrote: post #7

This morning, I had a very new looking 10,000 yen bill at the conbini auto-register that wouldn't go into the register. Looked at it, didn't seem to be folded or missing a corner, which often causes bill insertion into machines to fail. Tried again, wouldn't go in. Had to use another bill. If only we went cashless and installed the app, I wouldn't have to deal with bill and coin recognition failing anymore! What a wo…

Anecdotally Apple Pay on vending machines in the U.S. is amazing and I've only encountered one within the past few years that was erroring whenever you tried to tap, and any debit/credit transaction on that machine didn't work.

Reliability good. I think it's useful to have cash as a fallback. I don't know if the conbini has a manual override where the machine opens like a register at the cashier's behest. I hope it does. And I hope it always will.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#84

Post by JetAlone »

happyopossum wrote: post #47
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks can freeze your account for undisclosed reasons too so I'm not sure I see the point.

> I'm not sure I see the point. That is the point. In a cashless society, you’re one AI-led decision away from having no ability to purchase anything.

Yeah, why should youtubers have all the fun of getting demonetized?

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#85

Post by lixtra »

asiachick wrote: post #69
wslh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a cashless society there is a lot of information about people in few hands and you never know how this information will be used now or in the future. It can be a democracy or a dictatorship. The corruption is everywhere, the threshold is different.

That's probably true in practice but it doesn't have to be. In Japan they have train passes which effectively give you cashless money. They don't require you to register them. To add money you can put them in a machine and add cash. They can be used to buy many things. Most convenience stores accept them for example. That said, most people do register them or use their phones in 2022 so in that case, yes you can be t…

They can also be tracked by their history if you have othe data sources. Let’s say you have cell phone data of someone. You can then correlate that with place (let’s say home and work) and time of a few purchases. This then de-anonymizes the card and the other purchases, even if they had their cellphone turned of in the delicate purchases.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#86

Post by nine_k »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #20
teddyh wrote: post #12

Everybody who talks about how they never use cash and love the convenience of never having to use cash, they all sound just like all the people who loved Google just before their account was terminated for undisclosed reasons.

Banks can freeze your account for undisclosed reasons too so I'm not sure I see the point.

What is on your bank account is not cash. It's a mere promise to produce cash on demand.

Cash is actual bank notes and coins in your pocket. They cannot be terminated for undisclosed reasons. Which is the point.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#87

Post by creakingstairs »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #32

Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…

But you can have almost all of that while still having cash! I can see the benefit of security for some people (eg train lady) and that could be one of exceptions but I believe most places should be mandated to take cash payments as privacy and redundancy should prioritised more than ever.

We know from experience that government, whether totalitarian or not, can abuse any power they have. That’s why we have checks and balances everywhere in our society like judicial reviews or ombudsman. Cash is one of those checks and balances.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#88

Post by zhte415 »

JetAlone wrote: post #37
willnonya wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the most naive comment in this thread. At that bar is set pretty high. Where there's a will there's a way...

Not naive, trolling.

Trolling is not per se bad. A good troll upsets people using their own arguments. A great troll however does this without them realising. A good troll results in downvotes and being called a troll. A great troll doesn't.

So, a good troll, but not a great troll. Not however a bad troll. Nothing mentioned was not arguments people have not used. Perhaps apart from the cannabilism part.

I vote '+3 Troll' if we're doing /. style meta voting/commenting.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#89

Post by 0xy »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #32

Australia's been cashless for a long time now and has no laws requiring acceptance of cash so a lot of places are cashless only. Even the old lady who has a tea and snack cart at the train station is cashless here. I'll state some benefits: Public transport becomes much better. You tap your card or phone and never bother with the hassle of a ticket ever again. You probably never realized just how much of a barrier th…

Given Australia took the extraordinary step of violating UN Human Rights codes it agreed to when preventing citizens and in some cases foreign residents from leaving the country during the pandemic I'd say they're already on the way.

After all, the action was unprecedented, contravened human rights and aligned their response with North Korea and China, the only other countries who have ever had such restrictions.

This action had the result of a number of despicable outcomes, such as denying people from visiting dying loved ones, separating families including parents from children and worse.

After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths -- despite >90% vaccination. Human rights trampled for nothing, apparently.

Australia is also at the forefront of invasive pernicious surveillance, with a previous PM claiming Australian law 'trumps math' (in trying to ban encryption) and huge amounts of spying. The current government's party vehemently voted in favor of mass surveillance on all ISP connections, as well as supported content filtering (censorship) -- including for political content.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#90

Post by hakfoo »

miracle2k wrote: post #81
lixtra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is sometimes that regulators kick the door in for banks financially including legal stuff: Operation Choke Point [1] The consequence of abolishing cash seems to be total financial control and that is a bit like arming the police: of course you might need military equipment for fighting a cartel. But applying it to daily operation is very cruel to parts of society. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera…

Visa and Mastercard were pressured into cutting of Pornhub ads literally yesterday. There needs to be a statuary right to be serviced by the banking system. This is in addition to escape valves such as cash and crypto.

I always thought we should give every SSN/EIN an account at a state-ran bank, structurally obliged to serve all legal uses.

This would ensure everyone had access to direct-deposit payment (eliminating most of the case behind the "it's almost a real bank account" prepaid-card products with exploitative fees) and create a single huge audience to target for "over the top" services to develop.

Perhaps it could be put together as a "portable" service-- you can link your state-bank account with your preferred brick-and-mortar to handle cash and in-person services. There would be phone-number style portability, to encourage them to compete for most features/lowest fee/subsidy requirements.

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