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D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

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Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#421

Post by robertlagrant »

LocalH wrote: post #403
robertlagrant wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government's job isn't to cater to business preferences it is to look out for the well-being of the people. Businesses are also run by people. Everything is people. The difference here is the government wants to impose cost on businesses to solve problems it should be solving. It could solve them by issuing every homeless person with a credit card that gets topped up by X a month. It would rather just write a r…

> The difference here is the government wants to impose cost on businesses to solve problems it should be solving. Handling cash has been an accepted cost of business for over a century, but now it’s somehow an undue burden to continue doing so? Hogwash. > It could solve them by issuing every homeless person with a credit card that gets topped up by X a month. That sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Good…

> Handling cash has been an accepted cost of business for over a century, but now it’s somehow an undue burden to continue doing so? Hogwash.

Handling cash is a big cost. You have to store it, get it moved in and out, stop people stealing it, be insured against people stealing it, count it, make sure you have change available, etc etc. Yes people did it, and cash used to get stolen more.

More importantly, this isn't about the cost of cash. It's the mandatory of adding this cost in to businesses that don't want to pay all that money to handle money.

> That sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

It's a solution to a very specific problem: cashless shops.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#422

Post by filoleg »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #380
mindondrugs wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think I have ever encountered this in my adult life honestly. A more common occasion is encountering a business that is cash only (usually small market stalls) and is infinitely more annoying as I have to go and take out a amount of money greater than the product I want to buy, leaving me with a rather annoying amount of loose change.

Agreed. Especially when there's no ATM for 5 miles. Plurality of payment methods is always more desirable and more robust. If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale. The ability to negotiate and adapt is what makes the world go round. One example; I was caught in an emergen…

> why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT […]

Well, all other significant concerns aside, NFTs are not fungible, it is literally in the name. Transactions are made through fungible methods.

Example: a $10 bill is exactly the same as any other $10 other bill or the same as having a $10 in your bank account. Same applies to BTC, any bitcoin is an equivalent of any other BTC.

This fungibility is what gives them the baseline feasibility as a common transaction method. Fungibility is just one of the many requirements for something to be useful as a common transaction vehicle, but it is one of the most fundamental ones, and if it isn’t satisfied, the rest of it doesn’t really matter. Sure, BTC is too volatile to be useful for transaction purposes in a lot of cases, but volatility is further up the chain of concerns, and BTC indeed satisfies the fungibility requirement. Sure, common AAPL shares are fungible as well, there is exactly zero difference between shares of AAPL that you can buy and the ones i can buy, but they aren’t fit as a common transaction method for many other reasons too.

Meanwhile, any given NFT is not an equivalent to any other NFT. They are explicitly intended to be unique and non-fungible/non-replaceable. There is no price for 1 NFT, just like there is no price for 1 painting, each NFT and painting is their own non-fungible entity. So everything else aside, NFTs are explicitly and by their definition are hard-disqualified to be a common transaction medium on the very fundamental level. In contrast, BTC doesn’t have such fundamental problems, but more in terms of practical problems (transaction speeds, transaction costs, high volatility, etc.)

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#423

Post by benja810 »

mariojv wrote: post #415

I agree with most commenters here that cash is useful and that cashless is a step in the wrong direction. I did want to point out, though, that this differs a lot from what at least some commenters on other forums are saying about the ban. All the top voted comments on Reddit about this are against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/washdc/comments/16wacjy/dcs_ban_on_... I find the difference in opinion between the HN crow…

FYI, I used to live in DC (and frequent the Reddit community) and I've never heard of the community you linked. Apparently it's a split from the original with only 8k subscribers:

> Created 2021, free of over-moderation

The more popular community, and the one I'm familiar with, has 332k subscribers. It can be found here https://old.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/

I'd bet there's quite a bit of overlap between the group of users who felt they were over moderated on the original DC community and those that disapprove of these types of regulations.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#424

Post by raffraffraff »

Clubber wrote: post #394
readingnews wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives. Well, that is well on your single data point, here is mine: I live in a bad weather prone area of the united states. I do not know _anyone_ that does _not_ have a meaningful amount of cash in the house for bad weather. Yes, stores here operate with low/no powe…

I also keep cash around. I always put $200 in my wallet around payday and spend it like petty cash. Next payday, I make sure it's $200 again. I always fill my gas tank at 1/2 too. I also have 2 5 gallon containers of fresh water in my garage. It's simple preparedness that is fairly low effort.

My BIL does the low effort stuff. Extremely low effort. He has a bunch of canned fish. Oh, and he got solar panels. But didn't know that they don't actually work if the grid goes down. So we had a regional power cut a few weeks back and he was astonished that his house went dark. He was about to complain to the company that installed it when I reminded him that I told him he had to pay extra for a grid-side battery and some additional circuitry, and he replied that he didn't think he needed that, and would save the money.

At least he had his canned fish. I gave him some candles.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#425

Post by olyjohn »

rtkwe wrote: post #393
Workaccount2 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restaurant I worked at years ago would bust out those old slider-carbon-copy things for credit cards during power outages.

Both my credit and debit cards are instant prints that don't have the embossing those require. Running the old carbon copier over them wouldn't show anything except maybe a vague outline of my credit card.

Then you can just write it down. You don't have to use the imprint, it's just to help reduce error and make it a bit faster.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#426

Post by olyjohn »

FredFS456 wrote: post #331
mdgrech23 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a true shit hit the fans situation cash is you what you need to bribe the official to get you on the boat/plane/train out of the disaster area.

In that case you would often need gold, not cash.

What are you going to do, cut up your gold into tiny bits to give to people? Gonna keep a scale with you and weigh it out exactly based on the market rate? It seems pretty useless for spending on supplies and food if you ask me.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#427

Post by rtkwe »

olyjohn wrote: post #425
rtkwe wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both my credit and debit cards are instant prints that don't have the embossing those require. Running the old carbon copier over them wouldn't show anything except maybe a vague outline of my credit card.

Then you can just write it down. You don't have to use the imprint, it's just to help reduce error and make it a bit faster.

There's a secondary point to the carbon copy machine. It proves the person possessed and presented the card which is a level of proof against fraud.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#428

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

brightball wrote: post #297
jdietrich wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From an operational and strategic security POV, cash is a vastly superior technology. It doesn't need electricity, a network of cables, satellites and routers. If the power goes out, I can't get any cash. I don't keep any meaningful amount cash on hand and neither does anyone I know, including my elderly relatives. Most of the stores I shop at won't actually be able to sell me anything, because none of the products…

I think you might be surprised by how many larger stores and grocery stores especially are prepared to operate in low power or no power conditions if necessary. Another side effect of this DC rule will be to ensure that more are prepared too.

Worked at one. 48 hours of diesel at the location I was at with a supply contract that had stiff penalties for letting the tanks run dry. Besides annual maintenance the contract prints money for the provider in between events. Registers worked without internet but satellite backup to terrestrial internet obviates that problem in most scenarios except a carrington event. Only the gm and another manager could reorder or run a register on paper but that likely would never be needed with their other preventative measures. Is also easy to train someone once you have one person that knows how. Pay and conditions sucked but it is nice to know that the company takes their responsibility to the community seriously.

Re: D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

#430

Post by nonrandomstring »

filoleg wrote: post #422
nonrandomstring wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Especially when there's no ATM for 5 miles. Plurality of payment methods is always more desirable and more robust. If one is serious about business, why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT phone, and bitcoin? Even if some of those are suboptimal, a sale is a sale. The ability to negotiate and adapt is what makes the world go round. One example; I was caught in an emergen…

> why would you not take, cash, cheque, credit and debit cards, contactless, NFT […] Well, all other significant concerns aside, NFTs are not fungible, it is literally in the name. Transactions are made through fungible methods. Example: a $10 bill is exactly the same as any other $10 other bill or the same as having a $10 in your bank account. Same applies to BTC, any bitcoin is an equivalent of any other BTC. This…

Sorry I'm a complete idiot, that was confusing. Meant "Near Field Xfer/Coms = an archaic way of saying "contactless" from about 10 years ago. I forgot there is also "Non Fungible Tokens" for bored apes and whatnot. :)
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