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Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

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Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#111

Post by scoofy »

frfsfgxffd wrote: post #76
scoofy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that getting mugged is so uncommon these days shows how naive this comment is to the second and third order effects of a cashless society. I think cash should always be an option, but I don’t pretend that cards haven’t dramatically improved our lives.

Brazil is almost cashless today. first month with central bank digital currency, instant kidnaps were thru the roof. the "solution" lower limits of how much you can transfer. what a joke. now only 100usd per day can leave your pocket. wish i was kidding. even lower at night when traveling i have to wake up at 3am to make payments thanks to timezones. people can raise limits, but if you pay for something expensive onc…

Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by the state. I've been actively against bitcoin and monero exactly because they facilitate kidnapping and other forms of effectively irreversible digital theft.

The best part about living in a society with institutions based on trust instead of non-trust, is that it's trivially easy to eject bad actors from the system.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#112

Post by motohagiography »

In Canada, we saw the main use case for cashlessness last winter during popular protests. It was used to track donors to a popular non-violent movement and freeze their bank accounts. That's all anyone needs to know about it, really. Consider that most people aren't smart enough to apprehend how deeply malicious the architects of cashless policies are. They don't care if you disagree, they just need for you to do nothing.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#113

Post by thebigwinning »

incone123 wrote: post #23
shishy wrote: post #10

Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially responsible with it. Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used. But yeah, nice to h…

There is a cost to handling cash too. Don't know how it compares to cards but with the latter you don't need to have fleets of armored trucks to move money around and robbers can only steal stock.

That security is easy to see. The cyber security and fraud protections on credit card networks are expensive and not visible.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#114

Post by AmenBreak »

raverbashing wrote: post #71
raincom wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost is not so much about paying armored trucks, but most banks don't want to deal with small businesses that deal with cash.

I swear money handling cost will be reduced by one simple thing that some countries like Canada and Ireland have done (and can be improved): ditch the smaller coin denominations (and maybe add higher denomination coins like $2 like EU and UK have) Anything under 10 cents gets rounded down/up accordingly It doesn't matter. Minting and transporting it, even in your pocket costs more than you'll ever get in dealing a mo…

That's an awful idea. Especially the "down/up" part.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#115

Post by orhmeh09 »

danpalmer wrote: post #72
jon-wood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullvad have made it work, but it’s definitely not smooth. I believe their process is to assign a unique ID to your invoice, which you can then write on an envelope stuffed with cash you mail to the correct address. On receipt they match your cash with the invoice and mark it as paid.

This might work but sending cash in the mail is a pretty terrible idea. Most postal services strongly discourage it, or you're using recorded services which are expensive and add all the same tracking issues.

Which postal services? The USPS doesn't strongly discourage it.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#116

Post by onionisafruit »

arcticbull wrote: post #94
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

I'll take this opportunity to advocate for 'payment network neutrality' - given their importance in the economy, I agree payment processors should be required to process all lawful transactions, by law. We should require this of any national payments processor in the US at the federal level - or state, I'm looking at you, CA and NY.

I would go further and remove the "lawful" from that. If you pay me $50 it shouldn't matter to the payment processor whether I gave you a painting or a blow job in return.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#117

Post by rahen »

anony23 wrote: post #93
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

Crypto fixes this to some extent, but would require a chain that could handle a large volume of small transactions.

This is done off-chain with a layer two. Think of Lightning or Liquid on top of the BTC blockchain.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#118

Post by nordsieck »

arcticbull wrote: post #110
powera wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proposal that requires companies to ignore signs of fraud is Dead-On-Arrival.

I literally said 'lawful' transactions. Fraud is not lawful.

> I literally said 'lawful' transactions. Fraud is not lawful.

The problem is, it's almost all allegedly fraud.

No one has the time or money to prosecute all of the attempted fraud in the system.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#119

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

anony23 wrote: post #93
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

Crypto fixes this to some extent, but would require a chain that could handle a large volume of small transactions.

Visa alone processes 100,000,000 transactions per day. All of them with "purchase protection". ie, there's reversibility for fraud via charge-backs, etc. We live in the real world where people make mistakes and need some help to fix it. This is why "crypto", as it is, will _never_ be a reasonable alternative.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#120

Post by cipheredStones »

noduerme wrote: post #46
shishy wrote: post #10

Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially responsible with it. Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used. But yeah, nice to h…

> what are the main benefits of going fully cashless One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card. Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office. At the systemic lev…

> Don't put your groceries on a credit card.

...huh? "Don't use store membership cards that track your specific purchases" is one thing, but in what world does your credit card processor get info about the individual goods on your receipt?

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