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

Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

prospectmagazine.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 498 posts

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#351

Post by graemep »

noodlesUK wrote: post #255
graemep wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think so. Otherwise the British government would not have needed to outlaw charging customers more for card transactions to encourage the move away from cash.

I strongly suspect that the reason cash is seen to be cheaper for these businesses is that they don’t report all of their cash income to their tax authority, rather than because cash is actually that much cheaper. Alternatively, they were counting the time they spent cash handling as a business owner as zero cost, which isn’t really true.

Those are reasons some people prefer cash, but it does not explain the need to ban passing on card fees.

Someone willing to take the risk of the severe penalties for dodging taxes would not be deterred from offering discounts for cash payments because they broke another law by doing so. They can also avoid the law by not taking card payments at all. I have found that many people in businesses traditionally took cash payments do not take cards but are happy to be paid by bank transfer (which is usually free on both sides in the UK if the sender is not a business).

The value of the time spent on cash handling may be very low. What is the opportunity cost of the time if it can be done in otherwise dead time? It is worth what value they attach to it.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#353

Post by yankoff »

realcertify wrote: post #333

The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence. Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the…

Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash.

Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#354

Post by dahart »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #102

There are two fallacies I frequently feel the need to debunk in this discussion. - Cash is anonymous - Cash is an "old" or "low" technology. When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines. Modern cash is high technology . Look…

What are you responding to?

Cash is anonymous, by and large. That’s a fact, not a fallacy. I’ve never in my life seen any shops track serial numbers of cash transactions, nor associate them with me. I’m skeptical that anyone does it, but I welcome any evidence of this dubious claim that you’d like to provide. Having your face capture by a camera does not track the bills you used, nor the items you purchased. You’re spinning a mostly false tale.

E-money on the other hand tracks everything you buy, what you buy, when you buy, what you paid, where you bought it, and that information is used to construct a valuable profile of your purchasing habits. That profile is used for advertising. But it could also be used to deny insurance claims. Should be illegal, but I knew someone who worked for a credit card company that informed me they were thinking about how to do this legally.

E-money is tracked on everyone for everything by default, and cash does non of this. It’s insanely expensive for the police to try to trace cash, and they can only do it for one criminal at a time. They do not, and cannot, track everyone’s cash.

Spending profiles captured via e-money tracking are captured by private corporations and they are offered for sale. Any criminal cash tracking by police is used solely for capturing criminal and is otherwise not available to anyone else.

> Modern cash is high technology

Again, who’s even arguing? This is a straw man, the context is digital money. There was no debate about how much technology is used for printing bills.

> Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay

So you say? I’m not going to argue or pretend to make predictions, but one thing we know for absolute sure is that there is a downward trend of cash transactions globally.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#355

Post by [deleted] »

jason-phillips wrote: post #169
ta1243 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was given a chequebook when I opened my current bank account in 2004, I've written 8, all of them in the first 10 years.

Same, until I moved to a rural area. I did a lot of research about this place but didn't discover the pervasiveness of the cash society until I moved here.

[deleted]

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#356

Post by marcosdumay »

happytiger wrote: post #148

Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions. I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper. You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the…

I pay a fixed monthly fee for my bank that comes with full access to the interbank payment system. Every business on my country does the same for the other side, and we get unlimited transactions with no marginal cost.

Anyway, as somebody else said, a 3% fee on transactions is just ridiculous. If you get any bit of competition, transaction-value based fees tend to be on the order of 0.5%.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#357

Post by marcosdumay »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #276
fzeroracer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse. Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (…

There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far mor…

What kind of dystopian dictatorship are we talking about really?

But well, no, there isn't much of a difference.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#358

Post by coppsilgold »

It's technologically feasible to create centralized digital cash that is much more anonymous than physical cash. You can do it by using zero knowledge proofs where you have vouchers & nullifiers. It's virtually the same idea that powers Tornado Cash.

It's tractable but challenging, every single transfer of a digital-cash note would necessitate an entry into a public Merkle-tree. You could mitigate this by introducing a multitude of denominations (a separate Merkle-tree for each one) trading some anonymity-set size for the mitigation. Another possibility is to introduce special cash pools that have expiry dates, incentivise their use with lower transaction costs. The transaction costs would have to also be ZKP vouchers but much more flexibility on those, such as rapid expiry.

If a government was crazy enough to do this, they would give up all control over how the money is spent. The only control they would have is whether or not to shut the whole thing down. Discrimination would not be feasible, reversing transactions impossible. They could still print money of course.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#359

Post by hasty_pudding »

timruffles wrote: post #192
hasty_pudding wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just rich people flexing under the BS guise of sticking it to the man.

Not so - it was the majority of their music industry earnings, and they are apparently quite haunted by it to this day!

They sound to me like astronomical idiots the likes of which will rarely be approached in the past, present, and future of the human race.

Re: Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry

#360

Post by Gare »

caldarons wrote: post #328
happytiger wrote: post #148

Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions. I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper. You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the…

maybe we should start thinking of payment infrastructure as a core public service if we move away from cash? Just like there is an official entity that can "print" cash, we should start doing the same with digital payments (I believe the EU is doing somethig similar). That way you don't have a duopoly taking a cut of every transaction.

This is called CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and it is being worked on. But there are concerns about state surveillance and misuse.
Post reply on HN