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Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

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Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#561

Post by hakfoo »

jasonjayr wrote: post #336
Groxx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why that would be any different than credit card payments, which don't itemize every purchase either - they still know how much and to what seller, tracking a seller and banning them seems just as easy. What they don't get is the buyer's information. ...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcemen…

CC's do get transaction information. Check out "Level 3 data" https://www.tidalcommerce.com/learn/what-is-level-3-data

As someone who has implemented code revolving around Level 3 data, the information provided is often of incredibly low quality.

Many shopping carts don't bother sending the data, because they'd rather say "let's support 900 obscure payment platforms in a de-minimis way" than "let's support a handful WELL"

Then there's actually getting the right information into the message to the processor. There's vague and inconsistent documentation on how to tag things like "commodity codes" and data formatting (Should the per-unit price be rendered as $12.79 or $12.7903?)

Even if you have the right intentions, you can easily blow things up by just having out-of-bounds data-- encoding a nonsense discount or tax rate.

What happens is that people set up software that sets up bare-minimum and mediocre data for every order that's good enough to get the "you sent level 3 data" rates, and the actual visibility is still quite poor.

Maybe there are some top-tier merchants who actually do everything right, but there's a hell of a lot of noise amid the signal.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#562

Post by m463 »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

Also all the electronic tie-ins from cashless transactions. I've seen less technical friends getting their email or phone number tied to transactions, or installing apps to complete them.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#563

Post by logicchains »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #439

Honestly I don't really care about the freedom argument anymore. If the government wants they can just black bag you anyway. And we all know how many time leftists have had someone "deplatformed" from money for thinking wrong. It just doesn't make a difference. What it would make a difference with is crime. All the drug dealing, child prostitution and money laundering from those businesses would be fucked overnight.…

>What it would make a difference with is crime. All the drug dealing, child prostitution and money laundering from those businesses would be fucked overnight. Sure they can still do it, but it's a hell of a lot harder when everything is recorded.

"Criminals will stop using cash immediately when we make it illegal" - it doesn't work like that. Criminals would just adopt another method of payment. Even China, the country with the most authoritarian, all-pervasive internet firewall, hasn't managed to stop people using crypto to pay for sex and drugs online. There's pretty much zero chance of the west tightly controlling the internet anywhere near as much as China any time soon, so there's basically no way it could effectively ban crypto either. Even if it did manage to completely ban crypto, however, it still could not stop criminals just resorting to traditional forms of cash, backed by gold/silver/gems/precious metals. Or do you think every country in the world is going to ban all their citizens from owning any precious metals?

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#564

Post by lisasays »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #439

Honestly I don't really care about the freedom argument anymore. If the government wants they can just black bag you anyway. And we all know how many time leftists have had someone "deplatformed" from money for thinking wrong. It just doesn't make a difference. What it would make a difference with is crime. All the drug dealing, child prostitution and money laundering from those businesses would be fucked overnight.…

All the drug dealing, child prostitution ... would be fucked overnight

Then they'll just turn to some virtual currency. Remember, their buyers are highly motivated.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#565

Post by selcuka »

wwweston wrote: post #553
selcuka wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ethical thought experiment is fair. What would you do if you knew that it would be used for illegal activity. The point you are missing is the payment processors should not even try to detect what the payment is made for. It should not be their job. Does postal system open every envelope to see if there is cash inside sent as an illegitimate payment to someone? Because it's easier to do it online should not be t…

> The point you are missing is the payment processors should not even try to detect what the payment is made for. It should not be their job. You're thinking about this as if the question is simply about whether or not payment processors should have the job of examining every individual payment. There's a potential discussion to be had there, but that's the only dimension of the topic, and one of the things we're tal…

I didn't say that the payment processor doesn't have the right to question if the client can prove its legality with paperwork. Doesn't "Doordash Blowjobs Inc" mean that they have been legally allowed to form a company? In that case who is the payment processor to decide that they are "not good"?

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#566

Post by taylorius »

colinsane wrote: post #329
onionisafruit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go further and remove the "lawful" from that. If you pay me $50 it shouldn't matter to the payment processor whether I gave you a painting or a blow job in return.

if the payment processor knew the transaction was for a contract killing but processed it anyway, would they not be facilitating a crime (“aiding and abetting”)? are you saying we should specifically exempt payment processors from being held responsible for crimes that the rest of us — or any other business — could be found guilty of when performing the same functions? or are you suggesting something more broad: that…

It's a sort of grey area, I would say. For example, if people plan a crime over the phone, we don't charge the telephone company.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#567

Post by wiseowise »

johncessna wrote: post #295
willmadden wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornhub? How about the Canadian truckers protest where Canada's handful of banks froze their accounts and their gofundme was seized? How about all of China? There's no way government can be trusted. We would need a bill of rights applied to our money first to protect us and have a check and balance. We already need this!

Or Russia.

What’s there?

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#568

Post by selcuka »

tchaffee wrote: post #452
selcuka wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ethical thought experiment is fair. What would you do if you knew that it would be used for illegal activity. The point you are missing is the payment processors should not even try to detect what the payment is made for. It should not be their job. Does postal system open every envelope to see if there is cash inside sent as an illegitimate payment to someone? Because it's easier to do it online should not be t…

That's not practical. You wouldn't be able to refute charges. Payment processors couldn't price in risk for sprcific industries. You've created more problems than you've solved.

> Payment processors couldn't price in risk for sprcific industries.

That's about the business implications, not about moral ones as the comment I replied to was asking about. Completely different argument.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#569

Post by imtringued »

standardUser wrote: post #251
lottin wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has the ability to employ much more brutal and effective methods of quashing dissidence.

Not really. Elaborate black markets exist and thrive all over the world. Maybe in the most brutally restrictive regimes they can truly ban something people want. But the rule across most societies is: ban something people want, then an unregulated black market will fill the void, regardless of laws, and will probably bring otherwise avoidable violence.

If black markets are your backup strategy then all countries would have to abolish their paper currency at the same time because nothing prevents you from paying with dollars, yen or euros in a foreign country.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#570

Post by mattdesl »

menus wrote: post #519
faeriechangling wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the problem that crypto solved for the most part, independence from a few oligopolistic PROCESSORS. While I am still not a "Buying literal digital currency is a sound investment" true believer, I feel recent events are making people keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the notion of decentralised crypto as a medium of exchange.

After watching Folding Ideas' video on crypto and NFT (1) I am less convinced that is decentralised. It goes over how crypto ended up becoming the very thing it swore to destroy (banks and oligopolies). Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted. (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

> Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted.

Not quite, at least in PoS protocols with off chain governance. If somebody with billions of dollars decided to attack Ethereum, the community would be able to fork the protocol and drain the malicious nodes of funds, basically burning the attacker’s capital over a short time.

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