141–150 of 717 posts
To add to the concerns, imagine a small town which mostly conducts transactions within the community. Why should they effectively pay a +2% that will never return to it and go to a processor far away?
On a recent trip to Europe I didn't take out cash once over 3 weeks across 3 countries. I brought 50 euros with me and that was all I needed! Everything else was just a quick tap of the phone, including every metro system outside of Paris. My only hesitation to getting rid of cash entirely - how will I buy drugs? I don't gamble illegally or pay for sex, but I imagine those services would also struggle in an increasin…
> how will I buy drugs? A decade ago my friends were already paying for drugs with Venmo. The dealers aren’t very careful because they’re rarely caught on the financial side. If the recent revelations are anything to go by, they’re probably using Cash app now. Ironically it’s the legal dispensaries that have problems accepting digital payments - they usually require cash with an ATM on-site.
https://fortune.com/2022/04/01/cashless-atms-at-cannabis-dis...
The law needs to be updated to add penalties and exceptions for businesses that have no physical presence.
There is an initiative to prevent cash from going away[2] but it's too little to prevent the above. Also organized by the people that are against vaccines, 5G and don't believe in climate change so the support is probably quite limited.
The SNB is also under pressure from the rest of the world regarding the CHF 1,000 notes but decided against getting rid of it. I also don't understand why a CHF 1,000 note today is such an issue when it existed already in 1907 and back then CHF 1,000 was a lot more than in today's money.
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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?
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…
And there's just so much nonsense involved, like a cashier discovering they're $25 short at the end of their shift, and how do you deal with that. Unlike digital transactions, people are constantly making mistakes with cash, which one side or the other is losing out on.
And then obviously theft as well -- if there's no cash in a cash register, there's less incentive to hold up convenience store clerks at gunpoint. (You can still steal merchandise, but it's a lot bulkier and harder to handle.)
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How could a website function with cash payments at all?
Indirectly. Uber "accepts" cash in some countries, as do major online retailers in those same markets like Jumia. It's essentially cash on delivery, but it works AFAICT. I've only used my card with Uber a handful of times in 2016.
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.
Also the threat to civil liberties was exposed in Canada when the government saw it fit to freeze people's bank accounts. I believe this is being reviewed and maybe something will come of it so that the gov is not allowed to cavalierly freeze accounts in the future, but you can see how even liberal people are ready to violate people's civil liberties when they see it fit. It's like principles are only followed when t…
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> 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.
Same exact process as now, except you have a guaranteed right to appeal.
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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?
Ie make it legal for the provider to report it, perhaps anonymously.
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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.
But when you think about it, this setup skips past important legal protections like due process and the presumption of innocence. It's like the government has quietly asked Visa and Mastercard to play judge and jury.