Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 717 posts

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

#501

Post by lazide »

crote wrote: post #442
lazide wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you reading what you are writing? People can (and do) know things without having enough evidence to stand up in court. It’s how 99% of everything works, frankly. Banks right now are denying transactions because they ‘know’ it’s fraud, based on ML models and probability and no other evidence. If you require someone to not ‘know’ something until they have enough evidence they could prove it in court, they won’t be…

In other words, they don't know. They just have a fuzzy feeling, nothing more than that. Would you be okay with the police being allowed to randomly enter your home and seize whatever stuff they want, just because they have a hunch? Or would you rather they have to get a search warrant first, which requires at least some form of evidence?

What makes you think I’m okay with any of it?

You might also want to look up ‘exigent circumstances’ and ‘parallel construction’.

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

#502

Post by midoridensha »

lazide wrote: post #380
kortilla wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t have evidence or due process, then you don’t know it’s for human trafficking.

And yet, people know things all the time without evidence and due process.

They think they know. Many times, they're right too, but sometimes they're wrong. That's why evidence and due process are important.

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

#503

Post by jojobas »

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…

Surprise, the ATM is bound to the same people that excommunicated Hatreon, Gab and whatever else. You did not give your cash to the website, you gave it to a bank.

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

#504

Post by darkmighty »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #195
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.

I think, in hindsight, we should have known better, but I was probably too young and naive like everyone else: it's really a form on anarchism that tends to fly in the face of several realities.

One of them is that this kind of anarchism tends to quickly turn into a plutocracy.

Another is that systems don't exist in a vacuum.

https://xkcd.com/538/

https://xkcd.com/927/

If third parties want to regulate you, they will. So we've just added a layer of indirection that may be harder to manipulate by governments, great, but is manipulated by mining cabals and cryptomillionaires.

I don't mean to say it's all bad, there are very valid fringe use cases for cryptocurrencies. But it was never supposed to replace mainstream currency. The government is already a system for consensus, and frankly one that would be deeply unwise, to say the least, to throw away (in particular one in favor of money voting or mining voting). Specifically democracy is the best invention of mankind in my opinion.

(Weirdly enough, I think all big crypto thinkers have been trying to invent, using arcane cryptographic techniques and a lot of algorithms, something slightly (or significantly) worse than what we already have, which is a democracy where every real world individual is given a voting right. In their credit democracy is great, but it's already here, use it!)

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

#505

Post by lisasays »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #14
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…

> Is it mostly crime related shenanigans? Not having to carry a wallet anymore. Never going to the ATM. No need to pocket loose change. Quicker checkout times.

Not having to carry a wallet anymore.

And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home? Or it's blocked for some random reason? Nevermind the services that just don't take cash, or the fact that their card reader might be down, etc.

Doesn't seem tenable to leave the house without at least some cash in a back pocket somewhere.

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

#506

Post by DiscourseFan »

noduerme wrote: post #468
DiscourseFan wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well many (not sure if all) strip clubs are basically legal brothels that run on cash specifically because a) they are (usually) in with local organized crime and b) so when the girls get their "tips" they can't be scrutinized about what service they provided to acquire it.

I know a lot of women who work at or have worked at strip clubs (including my partner of many years). While there's sometimes an organized crime element, those are often the safer ones for girls to work at. The blanket statement that they're "legal brothels" is far from the truth. In fact, most will fire girls for any sort of illegal contact, onsite or offsite, with customers. I've heard myriad stories of girls being…

Its the same case with massage parlors: they either have very well-trained masseuses and take cards, or they are just brothels that may or may not actually give you a massage. I don't think its a bad thing at all...but I can't imagine the working conditions are always great. The thing that makes people uncomfortable about prostitution is the idea that some of the girls might actually be doing it completely willingly (they might even be enjoying it): I don't think the problem, then, is with the existence of these types of establishments, but the complete lack of regulation.

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

#507

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lisasays wrote: post #505
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it mostly crime related shenanigans? Not having to carry a wallet anymore. Never going to the ATM. No need to pocket loose change. Quicker checkout times.

Not having to carry a wallet anymore. And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home? Or it's blocked for some random reason? Nevermind the services that just don't take cash, or the fact that their card reader might be down, etc. Doesn't seem tenable to leave the house without at least some cash in a back pocket somewhere.

I barely ever use my card, so dropping it is less likely. It’s just a backup in case the payment terminal doesn’t support NFC. If their card reader is down, I just go somewhere else. If it’s a restaurant, well, that’s their problem if they didn’t warn me before hand (but it’s never happened before).

A lot of people (esp under 30) these days are running around without any cash at all. Pickpockets and muggers, or even just panhandlers, have been suffering as a result.

I do have some cash in my car I think. I put it there a few years ago for emergencies. I haven’t touched it since then.

If I really need cash for something that I can’t get somewhere else, like a visa from the Japanese consulate, I go to the bank and withdraw cash. It’s a weird request for tellers, but I only do it once every two years or so. I’ve forgotten the pin to my ATM card.

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

#509

Post by milsorgen »

theturtletalks wrote: post #500
er4hn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

patio11 covers this a bit in a series of blog posts in his newsletter: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-... . Quoting a relevant paragraph from the AML post above: Much like KYC, AML policies are recursive stochastic management of crime. The state deputizes financial institutions to, in effect, change the physics of money. In particular, it wants them to situationally repudiate the fungibil…

Deputizing payment processors to curb money laundering sounds good on paper. The issue is that the payment processors ban and deny processing for random, computer generated reasons. Their decision is unappealable even if you’re in the right and are selling perfectly legal items. Normally, if the government suspects you of money laundering, they build a case and bring it to court. The burden of proof is on them to pro…

>the government should have their own processing network

Not government per se but isn't this what FedNow is all about?

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/fednow

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

#510

Post by tiedieconderoga »

gloryjulio wrote: post #161
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…

What's wrong with junk food?

Health insurance companies could buy the info, charge you more.

Same reason why, if you insist on installing an app from your auto insurance company, you should not let it access location data.

Post reply on HN