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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?

#121

Post by zizee »

0xy wrote: post #115
zizee wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After massive sacrifice, the country is now topping the charts in COVID deaths You sound so out of touch with what the Australian experience has been. Australia has had 14k deaths from COVID, vs over 1 million for the US. Percapita that is about 1/5 the deaths of the US. We've also had about 1.5 times the reported cases per capita than the US. The strategy was to lock down until the population was vaccinated. Once…

I explained how Australia trampled on UN Human Rights charters, including by essentially imprisoning foreign residents. What does that have to do with lockdown policies? There's a pretty big leap between mask mandates (a pretty common response) and preventing foreigners from leaving, a UN Human Rights violation that almost no other country engaged in other than dictatorships like North Korea and China.

> essentially imprisoning foreign residents

This sounds hyperbolic. Can you provide a link to a reputable source that shows foreign nationals being imprisoned?

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#122

Post by jasonvorhe »

athrun wrote: post #74
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the next time there's a major network outage, whether because of incompetence (like the recent national outage in Canada), natural disaster, sabotage, or even war, access to all of those conveniences will be frozen solid. One won't be able to purchase so much as a stick of gum. James Burke, in the series Connections , warns of the "technology trap", where our dependence on various high-tech systems becomes so hea…

newsflash: point of sales transactions can usually be processed offline, and settled at a later point in time. Merchant A might be unable to process while offline, while Merchant B next door will have no such issue.

Merchant B won't be able to serve the unexpected surplus of new customers due to supply chain constraints and JIT delivery/lack of storage.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#123

Post by saltharp »

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…

I rarely carry cash (or even a wallet) around anymore and I agree it's convenient. But one thing that bothers me is that we've allowed something like one percent of our entire retail economy to go directly towards supporting a rent-seeking American duopoly (Mastercard and Visa).

The crazy thing is that we've got a payment system that is free (Osko) but we can't be bothered moving to it.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#124

Post by Denvercoder9 »

imwillofficial wrote: post #65
DavidKarlas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with cash is not free either, you need security truck and drivers that come pick up cash at end of day... Afaik in EU debit cards are capped much lower than 3%.

If they weren’t turning a profit, they wouldn’t be pushing this.

It's not mutually exclusive. For example, if the operating costs of a cashless system are 1%, the operators charge 3% and cash costs business 5%, the operators turn a profit while it's advantageous for businesses as well. If businesses lower prices with the 2% they saved, it's advantageous for consumers too.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#125

Post by 16amxn16 »

rjbwork wrote: post #119
16amxn16 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Not an appropriate comment for HN. You should read the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know the guidelines. I decided to break them to get my point across, at the cost of this throwaway.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#126

Post by grecy »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #91

New Zealand has gone largely cashless (and entirely chequeless). Everyone is paid by direct credit to their account. You pay your bills via direct credit / debit. I don't think any bank is charging fees (for customers) for electronic transactions via card, or direct credits/debits. They don't even charge a fee for using another bank's ATM anymore. I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. NZ r…

>I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques.

Banking in the US is like going back in time 20 years. Even when I flew through Dallas and LAX during the height of COVID I had to hand my credit card over for someone to swipe, then pickup a pen that thousands of others had touched to sign a piece of paper. I've been tapping to pay exclusively for years and forgot about all that ancient stuff.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#127

Post by jillesvangurp »

I think this article just really highlights how badly the Canadian banking system needs to be modernized. Is it really that bad? I think I saw my parents use cheques a few times. That was in the nineteen eighties. Banks stopped accepting them in much of Europe decades ago. The cost of processing those became just prohibitively expensive and they offered no benefit whatsoever. There's no logical reason to be doing anything with cheques in 2022. That's just bureaucratic inertia and stupidity.

You could turn this question around as well. What's the cost of cash? It's not zero. Cash logistics are expensive. Companies that hold cash need security, the cash needs transport, it needs to be printed and distributed, insured, etc. And there's the black economy which means losses in tax revenue. A lot of shops in e.g. the Netherlands went cashless so they make less of a target for armed robberies.

Bank accounts are really cheap these days. Some banks charge for them but that's just greed. The nominal cost of tracking a few million integers in a computer is pretty low. That's why there are so many online banks these days. Creating a few billion bank accounts is not a technical problem. Same with transaction cost. There's no logical reason to charge multiple percents on every transaction. That kind of scam only works if banks have a monopoly on their markets, which of course in some markets is very much a thing. In market with competition, that cost goes away pretty quickly.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#128

Post by tayyab7891 »

mcv wrote: post #77
beebmam wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of situations where someone should have their bank account closed. Watch a Kitboga video for an entertaining example.

Outside the US, "accidental US Persons" may not be able to have a bank account. These are people who are not US citizens and have no real ties to the US, but are nevertheless considered to be US Persons by the US, which means they are required to file taxes. The US has no way to enforce that directly of course, but it can require banks who want to do business with the US (which is every bank in the world) to report o…

Bitcoin solves this

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#129

Post by kurthr »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #91

New Zealand has gone largely cashless (and entirely chequeless). Everyone is paid by direct credit to their account. You pay your bills via direct credit / debit. I don't think any bank is charging fees (for customers) for electronic transactions via card, or direct credits/debits. They don't even charge a fee for using another bank's ATM anymore. I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. NZ r…

In the US checks (cheques) are used mostly for significant transactions, because it acts as a contract. As a consumer you can easily get away with using electronic or credit/debit transactions for almost everything. However, some transactions over $5-10k are worth using checks. If you get a car loan, you don't need a check, but if you pay "cash" then a check is most likely preferred by you and the dealer. For house down payments, cash is illegal (note that it says DEBTS public and private) in the US, but checks are accepted and ACH/wire transfers are most common.

By using a check and filling in the note properly you can create a legal requirement that a service or product be delivered on payment (which is different from asking for your money back from a bank or card company through their resolution procedure), if you need to go to court.

I'm sure there's a grandma out there using checks at the grocery store, but it's quite rare. And except for very small grocery purchases ($1-5) cash is pretty rare too.

Japan seems like the most culturally cash based (and China the least) place I've been. Europe and US are in the middle. South America may still be fairly cash based, but I haven't visited recently.

Re: What is the cost of a cashless society?

#130

Post by kurthr »

grecy wrote: post #126
EdwardDiego wrote: post #91

New Zealand has gone largely cashless (and entirely chequeless). Everyone is paid by direct credit to their account. You pay your bills via direct credit / debit. I don't think any bank is charging fees (for customers) for electronic transactions via card, or direct credits/debits. They don't even charge a fee for using another bank's ATM anymore. I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. NZ r…

> I am always amazed at how often people in the US mention cheques. Banking in the US is like going back in time 20 years. Even when I flew through Dallas and LAX during the height of COVID I had to hand my credit card over for someone to swipe, then pickup a pen that thousands of others had touched to sign a piece of paper. I've been tapping to pay exclusively for years and forgot about all that ancient stuff.

Wow, that's pretty rare. TTP and chip are basically required now. Unless your card fails, I don't know many places that would have desire or even equipment to swipe. Even square doesn't do it now.
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