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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

#221

Post by dc-programmer »

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…

At the individual level, the cost of using cash is that you are subsidizing the other consumers who are paying with a credit cards that offers cash-back or other rewards

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

#222

Post by wwweston »

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.

Would you feel differently for someone hired to break into your home and retrieve valuables or information? Or perhaps hired to perform a hit on the life of someone you care about?

Transactional sex might not be something you want people drawing lines around with financial regulation, but usually people have a line.

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

#223

Post by Melting_Harps »

gloryjulio wrote: post #159
mc32 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap immigrants labors while raise the property value sky high. They would give the plebs some scraps of coz. It's better to be homeless with some food than being hungry

> Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap immigrants labors while raise the property value sky high.

This is what I found to be the case too, it was really alarming; it was like MAGA was sped up and shipped to Canada despite it being supposedly a US-thing, whereas the US was dealing with Police brutality via the BLM movement, Canada just seemed to welcome it's draconian police state because it carried all those other features if you were from that 'class.'

Terrifying and sobering to say the least.

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

#224

Post by red-iron-pine »

hbn wrote: post #50
3pt14159 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't be tracked If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you…

> if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked. Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000 on a used car from another guy who then used that same money to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not in the bank's hands.

Your statement is true as long as it stays out of the bank.

A motorcycle is a bad example, too, because there are licensing and registration requirements.

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

#226

Post by LewisVerstappen »

wwweston wrote: post #222
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.

Would you feel differently for someone hired to break into your home and retrieve valuables or information? Or perhaps hired to perform a hit on the life of someone you care about? Transactional sex might not be something you want people drawing lines around with financial regulation, but usually people have a line.

Nope.

There are other mechanisms to target illegal actions, such as sending the police to arrest the person. Those actions are guarded by due process and the right to trial.

Using the financial system to target people is not.

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

#227

Post by asdff »

SoftTalker wrote: post #12

I encounter more businesses that only take cash than I do those that refuse it. A couple of local restaurants, and my barber. Though one of the restaurants recently also started accepting Zelle. I can't think of anyplace local that refuses cash but there are several others that offer a discount for cash.

Small businesses pay a lot in cc fees. I am happy when they give me the fee back as discount. One restaurant I frequent its 4%. Imagine losing 4% on all revenue just to be a participant, what a sham, its like being taxed by the mafia.

It's also interesting how you see more knowledge on making it work with cash in communities where its common to have small businesses, like working class immigrant communities. A greasy spoon burger joint in socal might be open for decades, no marketing budget, cash payments, interior is what it is when it opened, word of mouth and line of sight customer base, no website.

Meanwhile you have these "modern" hip restaurants that might have no paper menus nor tableservice let alone not take cash, have impressive marketing and social media operations, big grand openings, an entire merch line, brewery partnership, all this fanfare, complexity and overhead, just because that's what all these sort of restaurants tend to do. Then they tend to fail in like 2 years because its hard to sustain this costly model even if they are ostensibly bringing in customers and good reviews. As they say, the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

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

#228

Post by anigbrowl »

scoofy wrote: post #158
thebigwinning wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have something to do with an increase in surveillance and criminal record keeping.

It might, sure, but it might also have to do with the fact that people carry almost nothing in cash compared to 40+ years ago. In 1985, when I was a child, my father would care around $300 on him effectively at all times. Credit cards were still new, and checks were a limited option, most places you still needed cash. That's the equivalent of $850 today. I rarely carry more than $200 on my person today (less than the…

It's easy to use a stolen credit card, nobody asks for ID. Mugging isn't that uncommon, I interrupted a robbery just over a week ago.

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

#229

Post by EscapeFromNY »

arcticbull wrote: post #199
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Back of the napkin math:

- 8 billion people

- 96% reduction in block space over the naive approach, per the paper. (EDIT: the signature aggregation being referred to is Schnorr signatures, and it's become reality since the paper was published)

- 7 transactions per second, 86400 seconds per day, 365 days per year

8000000000*(1-0.96)/7/86400/365 = 1.45 years

Current transaction fees are $3. Assuming that stays constant, every group of 20 users would need to come up with $3 between them.

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

#230

Post by asdff »

standardUser wrote: post #9

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…

You don't have to do anything that seems illegal to participate in the illegal cashless society. A person selling ice cream out of a cooler at the beach is an example of a business that probably would not exist if they couldn't take under the table cash payments, considering the business model is a simple arbitrage opportunity on wholesale ice cream that probably wouldn't pencil out with the overhead of credit card fees or taxation.
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