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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

#131

Post by hgsgm »

onionisafruit wrote: post #116
arcticbull wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you handle chargeback claims? Should all users of the system share in the fraud risk?

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

#132

Post by arcticbull »

rahen wrote: post #117
anony23 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lightning requires an on-chain transaction to create a channel, which means that you would need about 75 years, trillions of dollars of electricity and the entire remaining block reward to set up a channel for everyone alive now, assuming no births or deaths. Stop thinking about lightning, it's just meant to distract people from the actual scaling issues.

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

#133

Post by VoodooJuJu »

I can't believe how willingly people submitted to going cashless. I was at a trendy rivertown restaurant, went to pay with cash, and the shock on people's faces was unbelievable, like I was some ancient alien. It honestly feels pretty forced, like there's a hyper-fashionable status attached to paying digitally. It's not the first time people lapped up a status marker hawked to them by some globocorp, just like iphones, luxury cars, etc.

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

#134

Post by medler »

harimau777 wrote: post #88
medler wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only argument against getting rid of cash is that it would make it harder to commit crimes, that sounds like a good reason to get rid of cash. I like cash because I like my privacy but cash making it easier to do crime is an unfortunate side effect, not an end in itself.

The problem is that the government often creates crimes that citizens don't agree with. Or the majority uses the law to try to force their preferences on the minority.

So should everyone simply disregard any laws they disagree with, provided they can get away with it? Where does it end?

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

#135

Post by efitz »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17
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.

How could a website function with cash payments at all?

It has been happening for years. You go to 7-11 or Target and buy a “ points card”, it gets activated at the register when you pay with cash, and then you use the code on the back to get Minecraft coins or Xbox points or Fortnite bux or whatever. It’s how kids and people with no credit or a distrust of banks participate online.

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

#136

Post by willmadden »

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.

Pornhub?

How about the Canadian truckers protest where Canada's handful of banks froze their accounts and their gofundme was seized?

How about all of China?

There's no way government can be trusted. We would need a bill of rights applied to our money first to protect us and have a check and balance. We already need this!

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

#137

Post by atdrummond »

Groxx wrote: post #109
itake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what is different though is they don't know what you're buying (I think).

Not sure why that would be any different than credit card payments, which don't itemize every purchase either - they still know how much and to what seller, tracking a seller and banning them seems just as easy. What they don't get is the buyer's information. ...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcemen…

CC certainly has the capability for extremely granular and personal details. For now, this is usually restricted to hotel stays and airline trips. But the tech exists to encode quite a bit of information about both sides of a transaction and its nature.

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

#138

Post by phpisthebest »

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.

Postal services deny liability. If you send cash and it is stolen you can not sue or get redress from the postal system

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

#139

Post by smilespray »

cipheredStones wrote: post #120
noduerme wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Pretty sure the data about individual goods is up for sale.

Didn't Google start buying this kind of data to match up online purchase intent with real-world purchases?

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

#140

Post by jameshart »

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…

What's the basis for this advice?

Personally I'd be far more interested to learn that someone running for office refuses to use a credit card to buy groceries because they fear having that information collected and used against them... than that they once spent $500 in a single month on Twinkies.

If someone wants to use your spending history against you they don't actually need your credit card bills these days, they can just make something up. Look at the insanity that people managed to create out of John Podesta's office pizza orders.

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