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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

#191

Post by syngrog66 »

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.

"lawful" is doing a lot of work there

"lawful" is the rub

not all laws equal and not all nations are democracies, or equally moral or enlightened

I do agree we should have less "meta-crimes".

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

#192

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #150
onionisafruit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a clever setup. Using laws like the Anti-Money Laundering rules, the government nudges credit card companies to avoid high-risk businesses. These companies can then turn away any business without explaining why, all in the name of "security through obscurity." 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…

Which is extra interesting now, because fintrac and US treasury lately had to address issues of derisking ( banks choosing the easy way out from the burden of explaining every instance SAR and UTR was not filed ). Breaking point was coming for a while with crypto being an interesting symptom of the issue, but clearly things did not get bad enough yet.

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

#193

Post by tehCorner »

londons_explore wrote: post #56
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could a website function with cash payments at all?

If you visit Georgia (the country, not the state), they have a cool system for cash payments to websites. You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa, you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that number into…

Brazil has a similar system called “boleto”, you chose that option and the systems promts you a barcode you can use to pay with cash in ATMs, paharmacie and some other stores with no comission AFAIK.

It has some limits (10000 BRL when i used it) but thats more than enough for most purchases

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

#194

Post by EscapeFromNY »

arcticbull wrote: post #132
rahen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can fit more than one operation in a transaction.

The paper from 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320247611_Scalable_...

The general idea is called channel factories.

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

#195

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

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.

And this was one of the key hopes that I had for bitcoin.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by ramblenode »

danpalmer wrote: post #68

Something often not spoken about (as the discussion often focuses on privacy and "power") is the price. As someone who uses card for most payments (maybe paying in cash a couple of times a year), cash is expensive to use. It requires time out of my routine to take the cash out, unless I can take out an exact amount there I'm then left with change, and then because I don't want the change I normally spend it on things…

> On the other hand cards are effectively free to me

The average card merchant fee in the US is 1.5-3.5%. You're paying that much more for everything you're buying. That applies even if you use cash. So it's effectively a private sales tax.

You absolutely pay for the convenience. It's just not on any receipt.

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

#198

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

That's a cop-out, fraudsters don't announce themselves so naturally retail businesses look for proxy markers from which to draw inferences. There's an entire money-laundering industry that aims to handle this issue for organized criminals. If you don't engage with this fact than you're just handwaving away the problem, undermining any pro-cash advocacy you engage in.

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

#199

Post by arcticbull »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #194
arcticbull wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can fit more than one operation in a transaction. The paper from 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320247611_Scalable_... The general idea is called channel factories.

So how many years do you think it'll take to onboard people? And how many dollars?

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

#200

Post by sramam »

kredd wrote: post #74
londons_explore wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you visit Georgia (the country, not the state), they have a cool system for cash payments to websites. You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa, you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that number into…

That is still depended on some sort of payment rails though, no? Bank, government or whoever can decline transactions to that “cash” action.

But this is a remote transaction - no matter the form of currency, an intermediary would be required.
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