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Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

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Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#121

Post by rootusrootus »

hackyhacky wrote: post #77
debacle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good idea to not assume public representatives are incompetent. I've worked with many people in Congress here in the US, and I haven't met one that wasn't startlingly smart. It feels good to think they're dumb, but it is very dangerous.

If they are so smart, why do they say so many dumb things?

It's like Jeopardy. Notice that pretty much any halfway knowledgable adult can answer most of the questions on the show? Now try to become an actual contestant.

It takes real intelligence to convince millions of people to support you, and the skill to talk at their level and pretend to care about things in the same way they do.

I have to remind myself of this -- when a politician says something stupid, it isn't because they are actually stupid, it's because they know who they are trying to talk to. So my gripe isn't really with the politician. I may not like Trump, but the more important underlying questions are who supports him and why. If not him, it'll just be someone else, because those people have a viewpoint and they'll vote for someone that matches it.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#122

Post by hgomersall »

TekMol wrote: post #8

What makes cash special is that compared to other assets, it puts a bit more power into the hands of the individual and a bit less power in the hands of the government. To count or seize the individuals cash, the government has to make some fuzz. Aka send men with guns. There seems to be some divide in our world between people who consider individual power a good thing and people who consider it unnecessary. Here in…

They can take the value out of it much more easily than printing more. They just need to instruct the central bank to not redeem a deposit for the note. If for some reason a commercial bank continued to accept central bank issued notes, the government can simply require the banks to stop accepting them as a requirement for their banking license.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#123

Post by AnthonyMouse »

peterfirefly wrote: post #72
reaperducer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet millions of businesses have figured out how to make it work for the last thousand years. Cashless advocates are always talking about how "expensive" cash is, but never quantify it. Is handling cash more expensive than credit card fees, for example? If it were, businesses like supermarkets that operate on 1-2% margins wouldn't take cash. But they do. Some near me take cash freely, but charge extra to use debit…

Are businesses allowed to defend themselves in all states in the US these days? What will happen to thieves -- will they be released by the courts? will the police even bother to come and collect them if the businesses have caught them?

Cash registers are essentially a vault and all an employee has to do to protect the money inside is to close the drawer. Self-checkout machines are even better, because there is no "drawer" and they only spit out money as change, which is never more than the amount you put in.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#124

Post by tzs »

For people who are OK with keeping their money in banks but want to take it out as cash so they can spend it anonymously (as opposed to those who want cash because they don't want to have anything to do with the banking system at all) it is possible to design a system that retains the anonymity of cash but has the convenience of digital currency. And no, this does not require a blockchain.

Long before Bitcoin, back in the days before cryptographic currency meant you were probably dealing with geeks bearing grifts, cryptography researchers developed digital cash systems.

One I remember worked like this. Banks could issue digital dollars in multiple denominations. To spend a digital dollar D you would do a transformation on it to produced an altered digital dollar D' that you could give to someone. They could verify that D' came from a legitimate digital dollar, but got no information about which digital dollar it came from. When they deposit D' the bank could tell that it was generated from a digital dollar they issue and the denomination but they could not tell which digital dollar it came from. So even if the bank kept a record of every digital dollar you withdrew they could not figure out that D' came from one issue to you, let alone which particular one it was or when it was issues.

If you tried to double spend by transforming D to produce D' and then did that again to produce D'' you would get two seemingly different altered digital dollars because the transformation includes a random factor.

However if you spend both D' and D'' when they get deposited the bank is able to combine them to recover the original D and can look up who they issued it to and then you've got a lot explaining to do.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#125

Post by AnthonyMouse »

deepspace wrote: post #93
rurban wrote: post #89

It's a purely populistic political move, as their far right party is campaigning against digital money, e-cards, EU. We had the very same campaign a few decades ago, when the EU demanded some overview over tax evasion accounts.

Tax evasion is my biggest gripe against the existence of cash. As a professional working for a company, I have little or no means of avoiding tax. Rich people can and do pay expensive lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes in tax law, to minimize their tax liability. People in cash-friendly occupations, like contracting, likewise have the ability to hide income through under-the-table cash transactions. Which l…

> just so that a few people can feel like they are evading government supervision. (Hint: they are not).

It seems like you're conceding your own point here. If you live in a mansion and drive a Ferrari and claim you only make $15,000/year to the IRS, you're going to jail like Al Capone.

Whereas what cash allows you to do is keep anyone from knowing every little thing you buy, which is irrelevant to income tax which by then you've already paid and also irrelevant to sales tax which is collected by the seller even if they don't know who you are.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#126

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rootusrootus wrote: post #121
hackyhacky wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are so smart, why do they say so many dumb things?

It's like Jeopardy. Notice that pretty much any halfway knowledgable adult can answer most of the questions on the show? Now try to become an actual contestant. It takes real intelligence to convince millions of people to support you, and the skill to talk at their level and pretend to care about things in the same way they do. I have to remind myself of this -- when a politician says something stupid, it isn't becau…

The other thing to keep in mind with politicians is that they spend all day talking and then reporters choose the six words to quote in a story based on whether they want to make them sound like a genius or an idiot.

Nearly every time you hear a politician quoted as saying something outrageous it turns out to be some ambiguous or inarticulate wording they didn't intend that way or something that was just maliciously taken out of context. Because motivating the opposition isn't in their interest.

Trump is an unusual exception because he says things in context that sound outrageous out of context on purpose in order to get people to talk about him, and reporters keep lining up to fall in the trap like it's a ride at an amusement park.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#127

Post by johngladtj »

dragonwriter wrote: post #94
carlosjobim wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if you hold a bunch of gold and then we find a better non-tarnishing conductor and switch to it, and the price plummets? With metals you can only question "What if?", with fiat currency the only question is "When?", because all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless.

> all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless. No, they haven't.

Name one fiat currency that over a period of 100 years has not lost 99% of its value (or around that percentage)

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#128

Post by dragonwriter »

johngladtj wrote: post #127
dragonwriter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all fiat currencies in history have collapsed and become worthless. No, they haven't.

Name one fiat currency that over a period of 100 years has not lost 99% of its value (or around that percentage)

First, I don't accept “99% decline over 100 years” as collapse of a currency.

Second, even if I did, the US Dollar retains 5.6× the value this standard would set. (Of course, it wasn’t purely a fiat currency over that whole time period, but then, setting a standard for collapse/no-collapse time window longer than pure fiat currencies have been a norm and then demanding counterexamples that have existed and not collapsed in that time is kind of sketchy, independently of whether you have a sane definition of collapse.)

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#129

Post by tmn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #103
deltarholamda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gold-backed reserve notes and even coins made of the metal(s) can still be debased Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable. It's similar to making the argument that while Windows is less secure than Linux, Linux also has security issues, so we should just have everybody use Windows. We have ample evidence that the caretakers of our money supply are, shall we say, less than diligent.…

> Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable. Gold might be better at average value performance over time than fiat currencies which are actively managed for stability and a bias toward slight value decline, but its very definitely not more stable than major fiat currencies.

Over enough time it is more stable than all fiat currencies. But most people don't care to consider that time scale.

Re: Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in country's constitution

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

tmn wrote: post #129
dragonwriter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, yes, but it's harder to play games with, which makes it more stable. Gold might be better at average value performance over time than fiat currencies which are actively managed for stability and a bias toward slight value decline, but its very definitely not more stable than major fiat currencies.

Over enough time it is more stable than all fiat currencies. But most people don't care to consider that time scale.

If you mean “the wide range in which the extremely unstable value of gold varies doesn't move very much over time, so that the value it had a 300 years ago today is likely to be repeated sometime within a 100 year window centered on today, whereas fiat currencies have a more consistent downward value trend”, that’s true, but its not value stability, or a good thing in a currency.

Its not a particularly great thing in an investment asset either.

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