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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#181

Post by ska »

henryfjordan wrote: post #90
ska wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's potentially interesting: legal tender means it must be accepted to settle certain debts and contractual obligations, but it doesn't mean you must accept it for transactions. Something like EZ pass seems potentially gray area; can they just say "well don't use these roads if you don't like the payment terms" ? I suspect you are right that with a state agency they probably have to provide some way for you to set…

If there was a gate at the entrance to the road and they verified you had an EZ Pass before letting you drive onto their road, sure. It's the same as a coffee shop not giving you any coffee until you've paid using a credit card. If they put up a sign that said "don't use these roads if you don't like the payment terms" and then you drove on the road anyway, that would technically form a contract between EZ Pass and t…

> Private debtors must also accept cash.

Right, debtors do but merchants don't. And merchants can put terms on it, which was the point I wanted to make.

If the sign says, "you can use this toll road if you either use EZ pass or accept our pay-by-mail system", then there seems to be no reason you have to include "cash" as one of the options.

Of course if you fail to pay, then you do owe them a debt (fee + penalties + whatever) and I think you are right they have to somehow accept cash, but that doesn't have to be made easy for you. Agree its not a state vs. private issue, I should have been clearer.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#182

Post by walterbell »

rektide wrote: post #168
walterbell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need "everyone" to use cash for "everything", just some people to use cash for some transactions. It is legal in most jurisdictions to give discounts when paying with cash. That is enough motivation to use cash for larger purchases, since it saves costs for both the merchant and the customer. The only loser is the now-redundant payment processor.

The problem as stated by the topic is that those who are cashless (which is a vast & growing amount of people) are subject to having their digital assets frozen on a moment notice. These proposals that we need to focus more on cash-ed people are mishearted & distracting from the core topic. Sure, a more cash-ready society is better able to help someone who has to rebuild their life, forced into a cash-carrying state.…

As stated in [1], we need to fight this battle on both fronts: cash-equivalents and cashless-regulation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435574

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#183

Post by rtpg »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #83
jaredandrews wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence sounds like civil forfeiture and I certainly think it should be outlawed. As far as cashless society winning, I dunno, I'm definitely worried about that outcome, but it's straight up illegal in my state to not to accept cash in a retail establishment and a good number of bars I go to don't accept cards at all. I use cash all the time and I find it way more convenient than a credit or debit card. My…

Agree with this. I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me. Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper. There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cas…

It's handing over multiple pieces of paper, getting back of mix of paper and coin, and then having to futz around with that. Compare with just tapping a single card against a machine, having records of the payment for yourself (for keeping track of spending, etc), etc. It's obviously not all "objectively better" but "strictly easier" is not true if you amortize across all usages of cash vs non-cash (going to ATMs after figuring out you don't have enough on you?)

I'm not going to argue against cash existing, but "swipe the machine" works 98 times out of 100. For the other 2 times, yeah carry some cash on you. I think it's a very good system of last resort, but especially in places with contactless payments cash is less practical

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#184

Post by lhorie »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #157
lhorie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper curren…

No-one is talking about banning the concept of a transaction. It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash. This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.

But surely you must realize that there's more to money than just paying bills. Japan still has a strong cash culture, but even there people put their money in a bank. A cash society cannot be resilient to an evil government if you consider that said government could theoretically freeze funds at the bank level. In fact, this scenario sort of happened in Brazil in the 90s, and that's a country that had a very large portion of the population that was unable to transact digitally (because credit cards/ApplePay/etc weren't really a thing back then and a lot of people were poor to begin with).

If you want to argue for a world where said attack vector isn't possible, then you're implicitly arguing for a world where people literally stash money under their mattress as a standard model of security, but that implies constructs like mortgages can't exist. Point being, how money is represented has a big impact on how society is able to function.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#185

Post by syshum »

adriand wrote: post #57

I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…

Notice the Canadian government did not in fact say they did not freeze the accounts of donors, only that they did not "provide lists of donors to Financial Institutions"

Those are very different statements, and they can both note have provided a list specifically of donors, while including donors on a list of "suspected criminals whom accounts need to be frozen"

Facts do matter, and I do not trust the RCMP, nor the Canadian government to provide those facts

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#186

Post by throwaway22032 »

Koshkin wrote: post #170
throwaway22032 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Using cash is not actually inconvenient though. I often find that people use the term "convenient" to mean "more pleasing to me" which is completely different. It's not more convenient for me to buy milk from Amazon than it is for me to get it from my corner shop, it might be more pleasing if I didn't like seeing or talking to people. Those are two different things. By contrast if I had to wash my clothes in a…

Having to carry pieces of paper around, and getting pieces of metal as change is inconvenient. Come on people.

I'm literally sat at my desk inside my house with cash in my jeans pocket now.

It's a total non issue. You probably have a bank card or phone in your pocket or on your desk.

Some of us even use _note books_. Insane, I know.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#187

Post by me_me_mu_mu »

chowells wrote: post #59
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

I get what you're saying but isn't that fairly rare? Yes it obviously sucks when it happens, but an outlier in such a system vs everyone in the digital system isn't that hard to decide upon.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#188

Post by jerf »

stickfigure wrote: post #89
walterbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient. Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash. However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to t…

> Incorrect, the battle is partly won... Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can't force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. So let's figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. "Everyone decides to use cash again" just isn't going to ha…

Part of that "more convenience" is that people think it is all benefit and no cost. If a lot of people come to the conclusion that cashlessness is risky due to the easy with which the powers that be can flip a switch and steal it from them, the cost/benefit analysis changes. That is not to say everyone everywhere will suddenly and uniformly hate it. It just changes. The more people get hit by capricious actions, the more people will find their cost/benefits analysis changing.

The CBDCs are inevitably going to fail for the exact same reasons the central banks want them. The more control the central banks have, the more the CDBCs become merely 21st century company scrip and not currency. The more the central banks can arbitrarily reward and penalize you for political reasons, for social reasons, for economic engineering reasons, the more their "currency" fails to be currency on the most fundamental level of being a reliable store of value. People will realize they don't want them and they are too dangerous to hold.

But ye gods will they damage the world on the way to realizing this is too much control, because the once the elites think they have this, they aren't going to give this power up. They'll do everything they can to "ban" any other attempts at having ways of storing or conveying value until the whole system breaks, and they won't care, because even a failing system that they're still in charge of will be better than a system they aren't in charge of.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#189

Post by commandlinefan »

chowells wrote: post #59
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all

If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#190

Post by [deleted] »

stickfigure wrote: post #89
walterbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient. Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash. However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to t…

> Incorrect, the battle is partly won... Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can't force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. So let's figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. "Everyone decides to use cash again" just isn't going to ha…

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