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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

#381

Post by decafninja »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #370
decafninja wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay with my credit card even for In the case where they don't accept credit, and I can't be bothered to go make the purchase somewhere else, I'll just tell them to take the dollar bill and keep the change. Not having to deal with loose coins is worth it. How is carrying, paying with, and managing cash in your wallet more convenient than tapping a credit card or your phone?

In the asymmetric centralised case of a reasonably established business accepting payments from thousands of people (and barely, if ever, issuing payments in the other direction) it's not. It's about the same, barring this hyperbolic stuff about "despising" coins. In the generalised case, e.g. I need to pay my friend, or a builder, or a taxi driver, or someone at a market stall - essentially any standalone human, it'…

I'm not sure I quite understand, but doesn't the bureacratic structure of cashless payments also provide the benefit of automatically documenting all your transactions for you so that you don't have to keep track of them manually?

Unless, as I mentioned in another reply, your intention is to hide such transactions for whatever purpose - i.e. I know quite a few merchants use cash payments to avoid paying taxes.

But that's all from the merchant's perspective. From the consumer's perspective, how does any of what you mentioned above matter? I have an account, a friend has an account. I send him money via Venmo or Paypal or whatever. The middleman might take a trivial fee for the transaction, but it's so trivial I nor the recipient are likely to care, and is outweighed by the convenience factor over using cash.

With cash, we have to meet and exchange the money. Or use snailmail. With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds even if he is physically hundreds of miles away.

If I'm paying a merchant, then I just swipe or tap my card to the reader, wait a few seconds. I get a receipt and I'm on my way. I'm old enough that I made a few online purchases by sending cashier's checks through the mail. It was not a pleasant experience.

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

#382

Post by TigeriusKirk »

BeefWellington wrote: post #247
mark_l_watson wrote: post #145

Excellent article and one that I wish my friends would read. Recently on a hike I mentioned how upsetting Trudeau’s actions are, and none of my friends had any idea what was happening up in Canada, except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. As other people here have pointed out, cashless society…

> except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. Have you sought out the information on whether it is or not, or just decided it wasn't? Re: violence: The scariest to me personally was someone attempting to start a fire in a building nearby to the convoy while duct taping the doors shut.[1] Dependin…

The arson link provided says "At this time, there is nothing linking the incident to the ongoing demonstration"

Has that changed?

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

#383

Post by catgary »

34679 wrote: post #274
BeefWellington wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. Have you sought out the information on whether it is or not, or just decided it wasn't? Re: violence: The scariest to me personally was someone attempting to start a fire in a building nearby to the convoy while duct taping the doors shut.[1] Dependin…

With a large enough gathering of people, for a long enough time, there will always be some violence. That doesn't necessarily make the gathering violent and it doesn't mean the organizers had violent intentions. I've watched a few live streams from people just walking around, talking to protesters at the event and none depicted any violent acts of any kind. There also weren't any swastikas or rebel flags that I could…

The organizers of the protest were all different varieties of white supremacists, and their explicit goal was the dissolution of our democratically elected government.

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

#384

Post by dane-pgp »

tengbretson wrote: post #69
neb_b wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.

What makes Bitcoin any more resilient in this scenario? Govt mandates businesses carry insurance, insurance company releases list of Bitcoin wallets that their patrons are forbidden to have interacted with. Done.

> Govt mandates businesses carry insurance

Insurance against what risk? The risk of receiving money that was once owned by a criminal? If the government is going to make that illegal, then you can just list that as your concern, without introducing the extra complexity of insurance companies.

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

#386

Post by catgary »

BeefWellington wrote: post #369
34679 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a large enough gathering of people, for a long enough time, there will always be some violence. That doesn't necessarily make the gathering violent and it doesn't mean the organizers had violent intentions. I've watched a few live streams from people just walking around, talking to protesters at the event and none depicted any violent acts of any kind. There also weren't any swastikas or rebel flags that I could…

Anyone claiming this was a "peaceful protest" is I think at this point choosing to ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary. Separately, at what point does a protest cease to be peaceful? What percentage of bad apples would satisfy you that this wasn't a peaceful protest? 1%? 10%? 50%? I'm curious because you can make that argument about pretty much any protest/disruption.

The protest was organized by white supremacists calling for the dissolution of a democratically elected government! Convoy protestors in Alberta were arrested with conspiracy to attempt murder! The discussion on hacker news has been insane.

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

#387

Post by BeefWellington »

refurb wrote: post #278
BeefWellington wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. Have you sought out the information on whether it is or not, or just decided it wasn't? Re: violence: The scariest to me personally was someone attempting to start a fire in a building nearby to the convoy while duct taping the doors shut.[1] Dependin…

Are you just blaming any and all crime that happened during the protest on the protestors and thus inferring the entire movement is violent? I mean the only thing connecting your first link to the protest was it happened in the same part of the city. That's it. No other evidence. If a guy beats his wife at home do you blame that on the convoy too? Seems like a smear campaign.

> Are you just blaming any and all crime that happened during the protest on the protestors and thus inferring the entire movement is violent?

This is a pretty useless and disrespectful response for a few reasons. Firstly, it's pretty obvious from the links and the locations things happened that these were directly related to the convoy or at least convoy adjacent.

Secondly, I don't doubt that there were nonviolent people involved, I saw many of them via livestreams. I've posted elsewhere that I think if the Convoy wanted to still be protesting today their goal should have been to avoid picking a fight with residents and instead focus on the government itself. The saying goes, one bad apple spoils the bunch. I think it's highly applicable to what happened here.

The word on the street regarding the building arson attempt was that people in the building were blaring music and shouting stuff at the convoy protesters who were parked in the streets below their apartment building.

That was just the first such incidence during the convoy. During a separate day some people were attempting to handcuff a door shut[1] but fled the scene once they were confronted. There have been no other recorded incidents of this behaviour in Ottawa that I can find anywhere, ever. It would be a leap to assume this is just coincidental.

But let's assume it's just some anarchist being opportunistic, what about the literal mountain of other information provided?

[1]: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/mcleod-street-condo-residents...

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

#388

Post by zionic »

beloch wrote: post #287

The most concerning thing about Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act is that it was both unnecessary and, despite the protests being quelled, ongoing . First, the police in Ottawa chose not to enforce even basic laws in the area of the protest for several weeks. The result was lawlessness and a total lack of respect for the police. They were being jeered at for putting threatening flyers under windshield wipers one d…

> It is entirely unclear what Trudeau hopes to accomplish by holding onto these powers.

It’s really quite clear

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

#389

Post by walterbell »

Nursie wrote: post #316
walterbell wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

Very few people will ever hit this. Ever. As a result most are unlikely to care very much. They'll think of those that do care as crackpots.

Ah yes, the fallacy of quantitative supremacy and human fungibility, that illusory phase of statistics kindergarten. Imagine a fictional universe where Steve Jobs was cancelled in his early career. "But it was only one person". How many human lives would have been impacted if Steve Jobs had been deleted from technology history? 2021 smartphone adoption is north of 3 billion humans.

> Very few people will ever hit this. Ever.

And this story has not been #1 on HN for five hours, nor has 500+ comments, and is not being read by journalists in multiple countries, or city-state regulators who care about equality, or engineers who build payment and surveillance systems, whose opinion can't possibly factor into the feasibility of building one of several alternative futures. Not one of those "few" people can change the future of electronic trade, of which payment is only a subset.

Nope, we have a singular cashless trading future and it's not subject to human negotiation beyond surrender. Or is it?

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

#390

Post by staticman2 »

daenz wrote: post #292
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…

Here's David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. He was asked directly whether or not people who donate to the movement should be worried.[0] >If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried. Can you understand now why people may be concerned about the scope of who is being…

Well having googled that quote and found nothing by a normal news site I'm not clear why anyone would think the Twitter account you linked to is anything other than pure fiction.
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