Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash • Hacker News Board

Re: Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash

#251

Post by lazide » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #246

lazide wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civil asset forfeiture requires some degree of at least suspicion that things are not above board, AND they need to know it’s there. A receipt for a cash withdrawal sitting on top of the stack of cash that 100% shows every dollar came from a legit bank? And it was in a place you didn’t give them consent to search, and you can show there was no probable cause to search? Someone’s gonna lose their job over that, at lea…

It requires no such thing. Police have argued (successfully) many times in many jurisdictions that the mere possession of large amounts of cash is suspicious in and of itself, and being able to show legal sources is pointless because the argument is that it COULD be used for a crime.

Mere possession WITH NO PAPERWORK. This is an important distinction.

Show me a case otherwise.

Re: Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash

#252

Post by mdp2021 » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

leppr wrote: post #249

mdp2021 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> privacy-respecting contactless payment setup Do you know any? If I could vet its security and """reasonably total""" privacy, the idea could be tempting - e.g. to buy a cheap device to only do monetary transactions. I am not sure, first of all, how you would transform cash into credit into a personal device.

I don't know of a way that's both widespread, cheap and legal. * Country-specific: prepaid cards like Suica in Japan, purchasable with cash from ATMs. * Not that cheap: offshore bank account. * Not legal: crypto card with "borrowed" KYC. So basically unless you're lucky to be living in a country with a privacy-respecting culture, you have to act like a criminal to regain the basic right to privacy.

Do you mean that you obtain a card, go to an ATM, insert the card and the cash, and recharge it - without the ATM knowing it is you?

Because I also know of systems which are related to banks, but explicitly come from your account, invisibly to the seller - but the bank knows everything.

I have seen anonymous pre-paid cards which had in the back the space for a signature, and were accompanied by instructions such as "must be signed to be valid".

Re: Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash

#253

Post by spiralx » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #112

There is the interesting history of Mansa Musa whose lavish spending of gold caused a recession. So it's not like gold is an absolutely safe asset either. It's possible we will find much more gold in Earth's mantle or on some asteroids. Then what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa#Islam_and_pilgrimag...

Europe had the Great Bullion Famine in the 15th century causing deflation across the continent, which was ended by the Spanish flooding Europe with gold from the Americas, causing massive inflation instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

A long period of deflation followed by a long period of over-inflation doesn't scream stability to me.

Re: Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash

#254

Post by hunterb123 » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

knownjorbist wrote: post #244

hunterb123 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's the official story. The ulterior is it was basically a ransom payment for hostages released at the same time. But really I was just noting how we love sending pallets of cash to our adversaries. We have no way of knowing how they spent those pallets of bank notes in either exchange. The whole point was our government loves to use cash in deals yet label civilians with too much cash as criminals!

The former was not sending pallets of cash to our adversaries. Agreed that asset forfeiture should be illegal.

> then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

> Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States.

Literally in the article GP linked. You could argue that we don't know for sure, but the point is the US sends cash around willy nilly that can easily fall in the hands of terrorists while treating Americans like criminals if they have anything above pocket change.