> The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done.
This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried.
Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff online to complain about various issues. I will get the ability to see all your financial transactions, listen to all your communications, track your location, arrest you when I don't like you recording me, smear you online and pressure companies to ban you from literally any service imaginable, including banking.
Both of us will be bound by the legal framework, but when I don't like it, I will have the ability declare the state of emergency and scrap all the rules. Also, I will have sovereign immunity when I break the rules. Also, many of my actions will be secret because of national security.
Oh, and I will be doing all the things described above using your money.
The Emergencies Act does not allow the government to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It must also be agreed to by the provinces. It's use has a fixed duration and scope of action. It was designed to prevent executive over-reach while still allowing the government, at the federal level, to respond to unprecedented situations that require it.
Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation. Everyone arrested is getting their day in court.
I've been involved in many peaceful protests and am not afraid that the Canadian government is suddenly going to arresting people without giving them a court hearing and freezing the assets of dissidents. That would be in violation of our laws and I suspect our democracy is strong enough that anyone trying to get away with that... wouldn't be able to.
> It's use has a fixed duration and scope of action.
Sounds like "15 days to flatten the curve".
> Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation.
"occupation" is an interesting word choice. Others might describe it as a protest against an unwarranted violation of their rights and freedoms. The "occupation" was a response to new (rash) government policies, undertaken to make them reverse those rash policies. This is what healthy democracies do.
> Others might describe it as a protest against an unwarranted violation of their rights and freedoms.
They can call it what they want. The courts will decide whether they were peacefully demonstrating as you suggest.
Section 2(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is what gives Canadians the right to free and peaceful assembly... within certain limits. It doesn't give the right to riot, hate speech, or blockade lawful activities; nor does it give us the right to impede the authorities from managing a demonstration.
It has only been tried a handful of times. If you push the limits or break the rules you can face arrest. But you'll get your day in court and plead your case. We'll have to wait and see what comes of these trials.
I feel like we're overrun by troll and bot farms. Compelling content directly out of the tinfoil hat "freedom convoy" bible.
Canadians are happy to have their cities back. Most of them (90%+), and most truckers (90%+), realize we're all in this together and don't try to hold their fellow citizens hostage.
You need to recognize the sources on these are the same who've been saying that requiring someone to not infect other people when going to public places is the same as being a Nazi.
90% of people disagree. The nazis are the ones imposing their views on everyone else.
I'm all for putting more transparency and reasonable bounds on the process formally, but I think you're missing two points:
1. While having formal bounds would be great, in this case, it hasn't been shown yet that they applied force unreasonably and beyond what those bounds should be. Some people want to believe they froze assets of innocent bystanders or small local donors, but that's just conjecture right now.
2. In your example, am I also blocking the biggest commercial boarder crossing between Canada and US? If so, I'm surprised you've not yet thrown tear gas at me, put me in handcuffs and physically forced me to move. And that instead you chose to simply freeze my bank accounts until I move.
I say that, because again, while I do like what the article points out, yes freezing assets is a big deal, and yes having bounds and guards and protections from abuse is important, I'm all for that. But my impression in this case is actually the government is trying to limit the blast radius and choose the lesser of two evils in order to force the convoys to stop blocking the boarder and major roads.
Instead of tear gas and physical force, which often impact a ton of innocent protesters that are legally and peacefully protesting, they went for a more targeted approach, where by blocking bank accounts you can be more specific exactly who you target, and it is also a more civil way to force you to move.
It should be noted that they did use physical force against the protesters to clear them from the street. That included teargas, pepper spray, batons, kneeing while prostrate on the ground with multiple officers present and no resistance from the protester, horses ridden through a peaceful crowd with at least two people knocked down and possibly injured including a women who appeared to be in her late 60s or 70s who required the use of a walker. There is video evidence of all of this if you care to look.
The response has been somewhat restrained compared to the antics that US police get up to but I would not call it a "civil way to force you to move".
The border crossing was unblocked without much fuss, and without the use of wild emergency powers. Several arrests were made. No "tear gas", wtf.
A Canadian MP has claimed that a small-donor constituent had their bank account frozen. In any case it sounds like despite their rhetoric (calling protestors and their supporters white supremacists and lawbreakers), the government wasn't going ham and using these broad powers on all of them. Good for them. Regardless, it's not encouraging -- the powers granted were very broad, weren't needed when granted, and obviously aren't needed now even though the government won't give them up.
And I'm not sure about how targeted the response has been. Aside from the rhetoric, peaceful protestors have been met with violence. Funds donated to support them have been blocked.
Sounds fair as long as you are representing my views. When the coin flips I will get the unfairness of it. This is what current supporters of the regime (I guess we can now call it that) don't understand yet.
You're talking to one right now. So let's discuss.
My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest about and see how serious you take the matter.
But after people did notice you, and did listen, and after they've asked you to please stop your civil disobedience now and continue your protest within the laws, if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc. And if you still refuse after the treats, then it's normal for the government to follow through with it after all that, and force you to now obey the civil laws.
This I feel is true of all protests, may I agree or not with the protesters.
You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. We can't have people block the biggest commercial boarder between Canada and US all year long because they're protesting. Once the message has been heard, if people didn't care, it means you don't have support, and you kind of have to accept that. You can keep protesting normally hoping to slowly build more and more support, but you can't keep civil disobedience going on until you get support, because that's starting to get closer to coercion.
You describe protests as is they were an election campaign, with a well defined resolution mechanic and oriented to the public. they are not
the target audience of a protest is the people in power, they build on public opinion and wield it as a show against those in power.
also this can happen in many way, it could be a parent chaining themselves in front of town hall or an orderly march.
also a blockade does not sound like civil disobedience, in the face of these restriction civil disobedience would be not following the restrictions and opening anyway. (in civil disobedience you generally break only the laws you are protesting against)
You made a lot of hidden assumptions in both of your replies so it’s a bit hard to response. But let me try one: if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that? (I’m not saying that it is the case, more to question some of your assumptions in this situation)
> if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc.
More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
> if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that?
I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?
This doesn't really makes sense to me in a liberal democracy like Canada. Every few years, the citizen get to replace the government with another if they're unhappy with the current one. The opposition are able to have a vote to cast out the current prime minister if they want. The governor general, at any point, if it senses the people are no longer favorable to the government can kick off a new election as well. On top of that, the government is using force within the established limits of the laws and Charter of Rights of the country that are already pre-agreed upon, and the force it is using is itself in order to enforce the laws of the country from being broken, which is kind of its job as a government.
> More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
I'm not really following your point? The government is also allowed to enforce laws, and they can later be trialed. Police does this all the time, they will intervene and perform an arrest, and the trial in front of the court happens after. They are also free to enact the Emergency Act in the case of an Emergency as they did.
The funds from bank accounts are frozen, not taken. What will happen next is they will either be released, or a court case can start and decide what to do with the funds.
> I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?
I meant that they didn’t have the popular support to shut down the protest (I was not talking about the general popular support to the government as a whole, but just this specific issue). In the previous post, you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.
The specific methods used to shutdown the protest matter a lot. The police are free to arrest them or impound their vehicles. Freezing the bank account is not a standard course of actions, which you seems to think are similar to arresting. Even in the case of arresting, the police can’t even hold you for more than a few days unless they can find a prosecutor to file some charges against you.
They were free to use a plethora of methods to stop the protests, the complaint a lot of people have is they didn’t use other methods, and choose something that a lot of people consider immense overreach.
You are missing a key element of context in all of this. This protest took place "online" as much as in person. This was a giant photo op designed to generate propaganda to drum up support for a burgeoning handful of trumpist/brexit style political movements that largely propagate through social media platforms.
Exercising traditional forms of enforcement (as seen in almost every other protest in Canada in the past 20 years) would have resulted in the generation of sensationalist content that would have stoked a wildfire in the social media support for these movements. (Look at how much the network nodes of the movement pushed the single instance of violence - a horse that got spooked and trampled a protestor.) This is the reason why force was not used, and non violent/commercial methods were used instead.
> you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct
The was a poll and it showed that the majority did not support the protest, by a landslide. IIRC, 72% of responses selected "Protestors have made their point, it's time they went home" (paraphrasing), a minority supported continuation.
> You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever.
One of the reasons the right to protest is a fundamental one is because laws are made by people, for people, in the service of the public good and well-being of the citizens.
If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.
This is almost universally true, and you cannot make the argument of 'shutting down the right to protest' on the pretext of breaking a law, because protests are ultimately motivated on laws or policies being changed.Nobody protests forever.
> If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.
It's not the people's will as a whole though. It's a tiny minority of people that are protesting.
That's arguably true, though I'm also skeptical of any official numbers. The protests are not homogeneous at all: on one hand you have seemingly long convoys that are made up of small number of people, there are also very dense on-foot protests, it's somewhat hard to make an accurate estimation.
Still, making a statement doesn't require a majority.Usually if 0.5%-1% or more of the population starts protesting, the governing body responds, (or at least it should imo, having potentially more than 2-3% of the population actively involved in a political manner it's not a good sign: politicians don't want people too closely involved). This however vastly depends on the country, the culture, the people.Protests are also not accurate representations of the electorate.
I am not the person you were originally responding to, but I believe that this protest has been handled in a particularly poor way.
The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa.
By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to actually listen to them: Trudeau's government refused to speak with the protesters, and instead went into hiding until they could figure out how to use force to get these people to leave. If Trudeau had eaten crow and published his plan for lifting mandates, they may well have dispersed. What seemed to occur instead was that the LPC (in conjunction with the NDP and the CBC) used disinformation to circle the wagons and make excuses for a dramatic escalation in force, while refusing to publish a plan for the lifting of mandates. Contrast that with the BLM protests recently, where you saw a lot of dialogue between the government and the protesters and a relatively peaceful dispersal of the protest.
Make no mistake, "account freezes" are not a normal consequence of protest, even of violent riots. The Canadian government is also talking about similar things like revoking licenses, removing insurance, killing peoples' pets, and selling peoples' trucks and keeping the excess beyond what they need to cover fines. For all of these discussions, the Trudeau government is rightly being panned as tyrannical and dictatorial.
The "win condition" of civil disobedience is usually to get some imagery of the police or the government doing something really brutal in response to your protest. Trampling a Native American elder with a horse (and then lying about nobody being hurt and then lying about someone throwing a bike) and freezing normal peoples' bank accounts are pretty solid win conditions for this particular protest. By that standard, the Canadian truckers have been heard loud and clear around the world, and they don't need to keep it up, but they did need to stay until the government responded with violence.
Account freezes aren't a normal consequence of protest largely because multinational political fundraising isn't a normal part of protest. To the extent it becomes a normal part of protest, I would expect authorities to lean on the powers they have to freeze funds more often. Over the last 30-ish years there have been pretty aggressive moves to stop the flow of funds to wide categories of criminal organizations (some easier to define and more agreeable, others more diffuse and hard to pin down) and in Canada at least there has been broad support across the political spectrum for laws initiated by the Conservative Party to clamp down on political donations more generally. I would expect further laws for parapolitical interest groups engaging in political activity in the future.
None of this is something you have to accept -- and indeed people have been protesting against laws that freeze funds that go to charities that the state argues are connected to e.g. Islamic terrorism for decades now -- but I struggle severely with what I have to assume is feigned ignorance as to why freezing funds is a part of this protest and not others.
You can combine that with the fact that the shelter in question has limited capacity and euthanized 20% of animals in the last year. Roll a 6 sided die, and on a 6 your pet dies. That is absolutely a threat to kill pets.
Read to the bottom, where they specify that they have rated this as "false" because "The city did not threaten to kill any pets 'as punishment.'" The city merely said that they would give your pets to a shelter that kills 1/5 of the animals it takes in - a shelter that kills pets for "extreme fear" which could include separation anxiety from the pet's owner. They don't explicitly say that they are doing this to punish people because they don't say why they are doing it.
Also, make no mistake, nobody is going to outright say "I will kill your pets if you don't leave," but they are going to make threats like this that provide them with some plausible deniability to say "we didn't actually threaten to kill your pet, the shelter was just overwhelmed and couldn't take it."
I see no reference to any particular shelter in that tweet, nor do I see a citation to support a 20% kill rate.
EDIT:
Based on that source, the Humane Society had a kill rate of 20.6% in that year. Of those 10% were due to "due to serious behavioral issues such as aggression and/or extreme fear". So, a kill rate of 2.6% excluding health and/or owner request. That's not really a coin toss -- that's the Humane Society making a judgement call on whether a pet can be rehabilitated. I have no insight into the Humane Society's decision making here, but this number is clearly in the minority.
I don't think the government is being unreasonable here or threatening the wholesale slaughter of animals. They're asking people who have brought their pets to a protest to be responsible pet owners and find a safe place for their pets before the police move in, which is the same thing they wanted responsible parents to do with their children.
Let's assume we're talking about dogs here, unless people are bringing their really extraordinary cats to the protest. Anecdotally, in the GTA it can really hard to adopt a dog. One shelter I tried a couple of years ago didn't have a single dog. As a pet owner I would see the greater threat here that my dog would be taken from me and adopted out to a new family. In Ontario, euthanasia wouldn't be my first concern if I were to lose a dog.
You think that, until one day you wake up to the pounding of the FBI (or CSIS...) on your door at 6am. I thought I was a no one, I literally used the same Lotr metaphor as you, but in 2009/2010 during the occupy and wikileaks protests the US government must have decided I was enough (despite never going to a protest and commiting no crimes) and they raided me and ruined my life. I was never charged with a crime. Never even indicted. Their action was simply to ruin my life and scare me.
It can happen to you too. Even if you think you're a no one.
No, what I am suggesting is that as an "individual contributor" you're unlikely to merit an outlay of resources to do anything about your antics until your actions are somehow significant.
Additionally, you’re making the fair strong assumption that the state has to expend more than a nominal amount of resources to crush you, when is it becoming easier and easier to do so without significant effort.
Not taking anything from it, I’m curious why it bother you so much now, when it has always been that way, in particular for a non negligeable portion of the population (minorities, poors etc.)
And what takes do you see succeeding to improve the situation compared to what these minorities tried up until now (to anchor the conversation, I don’t think “going back” is realistic, the cat is out of the bag)
Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually…
Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defense is crazy overreach. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you"
But that's just it, isn't it? We've stopped caring about improving the fairness and consistency of the process. We only care about the outcome of the most immediate issue today.
It's a lot easier to get people to agree on a fair process for choosing an outcome than to agree on a fair outcome. If you agree to a fair process and it results in an outcome you don't like, well, that's how it goes sometimes and maybe the next time it goes in your favor.
But people are too wound up and partisan right now. Even acknowledging that an unfavorable outcome was generated by correctly applying a process is enough to get you expelled from your tribe.
That's a bit misleading, considering it was replacing the War measures act that was even worse. Mulroney's government didn't "create" the law, they just toned down the original (which is also why we don't call it "martial law" anymore but it's in the same vein). And IIRC, the only two PMs in Canada's history that actually enacted the war/emergency measures act outside of an actual war are... the two Trudeaus.
Actually it's funny since Mulroney never used it either even when it could have been justified. He was the PM during the Oka crisis [0], which was a full on armed conflict between the army and first nations nations that also lead to closed bridges & deaths. I can't imagine what we would call that nowadays if we call the truckers insurrectionists, terrorists, etc. I guess they understood the monumental consequences of enacting federal emergency measures liberally back then
(It lasted 77 days, involved at least fully 100 armed militants, blocked 3-4 bridges around montreal for sometimes weeks, killed police officers, involved a literal 5km frontline between the 2 sides and yet Mulroney was very worried about involving the federal government and even more so playing with emergency measures. Even better: the government actually talked with the protestors and didn't treat them like untouchable non-citizen foreign agents. The crisis was solved with negotiations)
While this is technically true, it leaves out important contextual information and could lead people to get a very wrong picture of the situation. It almost feels like an attempted "gotcha".
It was legislated by the Conservative party to replace the War Measures Act (created in 1914 in response to WW1), which was deemed too easy to abuse if someone wished to suppress civil liberties.
Before the Emergencies Act, there was a broader Act. It was replaced with a stricter Act. It was not used by those replacing it. In combination, these two acts have now been used four times:
- WW1
- WW2
- The October Crisis (also known as the FLQ Crisis)
- The current convoy protest
Its use was also considered during the early stages of COVID-19, but was unanimously opposed.
While I agree with you that we shouldn't think in 'red vs. blue' terms, the Emergencies Act was actually written because Justin Trudeau's father had undertaken even more extreme measures in the 1970s, while leader of the same party that Trudeau currently leads. This is a situation where the Liberal party has consistently taken extreme anti-civil liberties positions.
Protesters blocked multiple international borders between Canada and the US, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per day ($300 million/day for the Windsor/Detroit crossing alone). There is no "civil liberty" that protects the right to blockade an international border, just as there is no civil liberty to park a convoy of trucks in someone's neighbourhood and then stay there indefinitely.
I have family who live in the Ottawa neighbourhood that went through this. They had tractor trailers parked outside their house that honked their horns all day and night for days on end. They literally had to leave and live elsewhere for almost three weeks.
I think we can agree that in a democratic society like Canada, we have civil liberties that allow us to protest, but those same liberties allow us to enjoy our homes in peace, not to mention cross international borders, subject to public health and whatever other restrictions have been put in place by our elected governments.
I'd agree that blocking traffic violates some laws and regulations. Freezing people's bank accounts with no trial or right to appeal still seems like a civil liberties violation to me.
Similarly, the FLQ had no right to kidnap or murder people, but Pierre Trudeau definitely infringed on civil liberties during the October crisis.
The correct solution to Illegal behavior in a healthy democracy is to arrest someone and try them in court. We shouldn't be denying that to to anybody no matter how wrong they are.
Banks were instructed to unfreeze accounts on Monday, Feb 21 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-instructs-banks-to-unfre...). The Emergencies Act that kicked off the account freezes was enacted a week earlier, on Monday, Feb 15. If you were involved in an illegal blockade/occupation, would you honestly choose being arrested and charged with one or more crimes and run the risk of a prison sentence/criminal record, over having your bank account frozen for a week?
Yes, I think the truckers should be charged for their crimes. No, I don't think their assets should be frozen without an court process.
This is because don't support extra judicial asset seizure as a valid policing tool.
You posed your question as an either/or, but I haven't seen any pardon claim that the truckers will never be charged (not that it would Change my position)
Using a legal system to enforce laws is the line that separates legitimate governments from racketeers. I believe that it should not be crossed outside of active warzones.
Separating people from their money is an extremely powerful tool. People capitulate quickly if you threaten to starve their family and children. It should never be used simply because you don't want to go to the effort of charging someone with a crime and arresting them.
I'm pretty sure it won't. This act replaced the older war act on the books and we can look at history that includes governments on both sides to see evidence of its use.
I don't see a problem.
A democracy needs tools to protect itself from elements that wish to destroy it. This is one of those tools. Someone looking to overthrow democracy isn't going to not do it because they don't have this tool. We have plenty of historical examples.
Those that wish to destroy democracy don't get to whine about the tools that prevent them from destroying it. They get to be at the receiving end of these measures. The theoretical possibility of those people ever getting to use those tools for their purpose, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, hopefully never.
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 precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can't give it to them.
I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.
This isn't some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system.
But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal.
By the same token, if you tell me there's been a murder on my street I'll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I'll tell you where to shove it. That's what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why.
Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind.
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision.
Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don't hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it's frozen?
I had my only personal UK bank account frozen without warning for weeks. The first I knew of it was when the call centre wouldnt answer the phone for 45mins from the shop where I had just tried to use the card. Had to abandon the process and go home. Next morning, call the bank call centre, do security get told they cant talk to me. The processes to get the account activated was interesting, I couldnt complain to the govt ombudsman until I had exhausted the complaints process with the bank. Problem was the bank wouldnt talk to me, every time I called the call centre, passed security checks they would tell me they couldnt talk to me, so you are kept in a legal limbo of sorts. Govt ombudsman couldnt do anything until the 1st stage had been completed. So the rules are exploitable as most lawyers will also demonstrate in court.
So yes have some cash but behind the scenes data sharing does go on, it could be a simple conversation down the pub or a contract to process some data or provide a service.
Signwritten vans & trucks give the game away to neighbours as to whats going on.
Get some crypto where you can draw cash out of a machine, there are plenty of bitcoin machines and online crypto currency exchanges to move money around the world. When the Greek govt debt crisis kicked off, bitcoins spiked as people moved their money out of Greece, some events like this will also trigger a spike in crypto because its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.
The less reliant you become on any one entity the less any one entity can mess you up especially when you dont agree with their politics, methods or employer.
This is probably good advice, just remember that crypto is also digital and totally transparent (mostly). If you obtain your crypto via an exchange, then your wallet can be positively linked to your physical person, and (eventually) prohibiting transactions by blacklisting wallets would be trivial. :(
I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and make the effort to anonymise your wallet is now.
Monero is a good thing to look into. Even if you don’t want to hold it yourself, swapping in and out of it will make the “paper” trail that much harder to follow.
I’ve heard a lot of reports of popular exchanges freezing accounts of customers who traded with other exchanges that don’t have strong KYC requirements. How am I supposed to exchange for Monero if Coinbase (and the state of New York) dislike it?
I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know what to do in order to use Monero.
Where are these reports of popular exchanges freezing customer accounts? I'm also genuinely curious, because I've never heard of them, and a cursory Google search isn't turning up much.
As for exchanging for Monero, there's starting to be the option of atomic swaps with Bitcoin. Alternatively, you could also try going through one of the various non-KYC automated swapping services.
Only use exchanges to put in cash or to do exchanges. If you're serious about crypto and want more than a few hundred dollars in there, you should get a ledger and move your money off of the exchanges (hardware wallet).
The first generation of crypto is totally transparent, if people need to start using crypto to have political freedom of expression then no doubt more anonymous systems will gain prominence. There'll be something that draws broad parallels between the HTTP -> HTTPS transition.
I think parent means that by weakening your government's ability to do things without due process is strengthening it. Assuming that your government has at its basis a respect for such things as due process, individual privacy etc.
Or you could use two bank accounts? These things happen even day to day, sometimes cards fail, or a card reader acts up. I find it hard to see that the next logical leap from "one bank account in a country" is "global volatile decentralized currency with incredibly expensive transaction fees"
> its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.
Assuming you completely disregard the computation costs, yes.
Agreed, however it's also an experience that almost everyone has had, and the straightforward solution (carry two cards from two different banks) _also_ tends to resolve the issue of your bank account being frozen.
I've never had that experience, and it is a bit ridiculous of you to claim that. I am sure if everyone had that experience, cashless wouldn't be so popular. Did you have that experience to be locked out of your bank account for weeks?
I've been told by Citizen's Advice before that if they don't want to talk to you, the best is to send a physical letter to their registered place of business with a clause such as "You have 7 business days to respond" etc. This then firmly places a time limit on how much stalling they can do.
Thats assuming Citizens Advice will even help you. My local Citizens Advice wouldnt help me, but thats headed up by a retired copper.
Edit: I've always found his ability to track me down in the middle of some woods when I was out walking to be a rather curious use of technology considering he was retired and wouldnt have access to mobile phone triangulation facilities or the gps facilities on my phone. However he outed himself when he went back to get some answers for me!
Different devices for different banking, ie an iphone & mobile data for HSBC, a laptop and ADSL for Lloyds, the library, PC World & other shops with computers on display with net access for other bank accounts, besides the obligatory friend network, doing the above. Being in a city helps you blend into the background, being in the countryside will be like a virtual lock down.
Make sure you have a passport, because myself and someone else spent the best part of an hour or two trying to past Google's I'm not a robot when trying to get a passport. The fact Govt uses Googles I'm not a Robot should also show you there is more to Google than meets the eye.
I can see why the rich have dual citizenship and multiple passports, with the richest having diplomatic passports, making them untouchable anywhere in the world!
It might seem like a lot of effort, but when you realise who easy it is to set people up, buy off judges, police, medical experts, etc, you'll realise blackmail can come from everyone and anyone including your family, because there are some messed up beliefs out there.
> Also always keep £500 rolled up in £20 notes somewhere
This is good advice, always have some cash around; in these uncertain times, I'd even argue to increase the amount. Make sure to have a record somewhere that you have it (a photo on your phone with e.g. ID and a dated newspaper? I dunno) so that IF you get your home broken into, you can prove it to your insurance.
Of course, there's plenty of places to hide a stack of bills, or distribute it across multiple spots.
If you're concerned about the downfall of the economy, you can get 'slabs' of valuable metals as well, that can be broken off into smaller denominations. The downside of going for those (at least in NL) is that you can't really use them to bet on the price of gold going up or down, because as a consumer you have to pay VAT for them (21%).
The "trick" in the UK here is to use gold coins, as they are a currency. There's a plethora of places that will bulk sell you gold coins to use as a store of wealth.
All investment gold is exempt from VAT in the UK, including gold bars etc. However, legal tender gold coins, minted by the Royal Mint, may have additional advantages as they are also exempt from other taxes such as capital gains tax.
Credit unions are also good for this: they won't necessarly have the modern comforts of a bank, but your local one (if you have one) will do cash based accounts, in person. They still KYC but since they're not plugged in to swift etc they might work well as a backup plan in situations like yours.
I'm writing from the UK where most credit unions don't offer interbank transfers or cards. If you need somewhere to stow cash, it is likely they won't be as heavily overseen by regulators here. Some are less basic but many are, I suspect, small enough to fly under the radar.
Unusually I was asked I was transferring some money, never been asked before why I was moving my money, but earlier like 5-10mins earlier I had read on the DailyMail about some US/UK military abuses going on which annoyed me, so when I was asked why I was moving it, I replied "maybe I'm going to join ISIS". That was all I said, nothing else said, but lets face it, you cant even tell if you are talking to the staff in the call centre or if the phone company/security services are doing a man in the middle attack, international phone standards and internal phone standards make so much possible.
People get setup without even knowing it but the setup might not occur until years or decades later.
afaik its complicated to create bank account in country where you don't live no? I always had to provide proof of address or something, from that country, which is complicated if you are not millionaire with property here and there.
Not super complicated with fintech providing multi currency accounts.
You can also get e-residency in many countries like estonia, lithuania, etc and avail their government services digitally. You will be able to open a bank account and sign stuff.
Okay, but in comparison whats easier, spend 3-5 hours to set up a crypto wallet or few weeks investigating e-residency, applying for it, then opening bank account.
People think that e-residency is just a breeze to do, but people who try, discover that its much harder than thought. Still easier than normal residency, thats true.
There are plenty of fintech companies that allow you to keep money without much hassle. Also, when you are on vacation, consider paying a visit to a bank, it's not that hard.
> 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 the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors.
The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn't work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while "digital due process" is slowly constructed.
Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street. If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (https://usa.kinokuniya.com), it's a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews. The online-offline playing field is now less tilted.
Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators.
The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end.
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 happen.
> 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.
In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins.
The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.
We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.
> You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon...
You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by an AI to link you to your government-run wallet.
Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo?
It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.
We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095
> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking.
I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie.
The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.
This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past.
Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.
If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.
> Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path.
I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...)
I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.
> I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely.
I use to think the same but apparently the anti corruption tech is getting every bit as draconian as everything else. Governments will eventually have to go full retard and be openly corrupt or they have to deal with oddities retroactively.
For example, many would love to award contracts directly without holding a proper bidding process but it gets increasingly unlikely to get away with it.
> Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.
It isn't just confirmation bias. We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. It doesn't get much clearer than that. We also had at least two decades where we only ever saw increased surveillance.
And it isn't necessarily cynicism in my opinion, it is realism. It is an fearful older generation that feels it loses control. Sure, government could change course, but I don't see it. To believe otherwise is almost naive at this point. We can be really glad the people that worked on the technology for a global network anticipated such behavior, so I might even want to encourage more cynicism at that point because it provides real safety instead of the fake one that is promised by government.
But it doesn't even matter, because your vote does not count on such topics. Experts in the field do not count on such topics. The older generation is set in their way and we will have to endure it for quite a few years at laest.
Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter.
It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.
> Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state
Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.
This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic.
All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this.
Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.
Firstly, imho the UK reduced it self from a global empire to just the one island though this political funny business. You'd think someone in the right spot would eventually have enough of it.
I like your election formula. My ideas was to allow people to change their vote whenever they like. Crappy decisions would have to be paid for in votes immediately. Ideally after one truly bad move you are out the next day and the bad move is immediately reverted.
The decline of the British Empire is definitely an interesting subject, especially as its territorial peak came relatively close to its precipitous decline. While I don't think the notion of being a former superpower really defines contemporary British politics in the way many outside commentators assume it does, the speed which that decline happened definitely had a marked effect on how our political history played out in the 20th century.
I quite like your proposal for elections too, although its implementation might be difficult when it comes to paper-based electoral systems! It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on the Overton Window, I suspect it would lead to policies becoming more incrementalist and less radical across the board. I would be concerned about it giving more de facto power to the press though.
>Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it,
There are a lot of assumptions about the role of government in society in your comment.
There's a heck of a lot of people out there who think society can be improved by refining, restricting or reducing government's role in specific areas or generally.
Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance.
Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.
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.
> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch
I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.
there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead.
in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)
Automated surveillance enforcement tends to bring the discrepancy between the law and the norms of behavior to light. The state prefers to forgo enforcement and keep the law rather than keep the enforcement and alter the law to reflect norms.
> in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)
Some countries took the opposite approach, and introduced lay-bys just before toll booths, enabling drivers to speed to their heart's content, and then have a rest before going through the next toll booth.
That pretty much makes no sense as an analogy. People opposed to speed cameras aren't advocating for spending more time and effort to write tickets, they're advocating for not getting tickets.
Really? You can't imagine a large populist movement rejecting a newly developed technology based on suspicions about some kind of sinister agenda?
It doesn't matter if lots of people, even most, pay with digital transactions. As long as a substantial minority is using cash, the option will be available for those who need it.
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?
Ah yes, the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.
The fallacy of thinking that software engineers as a profession will base what work they are willing to do on any form of ethics rather than getting paid.
And finally the fallacy of thinking that because I predicted what I think will happen that I also think it should happen.
The post I replied to, to remind you, claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned. But most won't be subject to that. Most will rightly or wrongly think that only affects bad people, and given that, most won't change their behaviour. Software engineers in general will do what they're paid to, very few make any sort of principled stand, if they do someone else will be hired.
Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour in the face of a small minority having their rights or liberties infringed? Because if so I'd like some of your happy pills.
> claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned.
As stated in the original article posted to HN, the potential for change is not with those few who break the law, it's with the much larger group who believe in due process and social contracts. When trust is lost in a system, it affects many more people than the few humans who unexpectedly set a precedent in policy and become an exhibit in history books.
> Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour
When trust is lost in a system, it creates an opening for other systems, with different properties.
People don't choose inconvenience, but the failure of one system can motivate action beyond stable equilibria. People can then consider alternatives which may offer more convenience in some dimensions, less convenience (but other benefits) in other dimensions, and new properties which are not comparable between the two systems.
Most importantly, the loss of trust in one system creates an economic opportunity for competing systems, including investments that can change the calculus of convenience.
A bit awkward for cashless narratives that "behind" Americans are leading the world reserve currency, where cash use is increasing. Is there public data on the decline of cash outside America?
But that's exactly the point people are making in this thread: people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.
> people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.
Yet. Some fintech/crypto/CBDC proposals on the table are orders of magnitude more intrusive than anything in the history of money. Let's see how current events impact public perception. How many people have seen this clip from the IMF meeting in Oct 2020, where Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills.
>We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.
if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments and banks cannot just turn off access to your account, but that is not an answer, you need to explain all of the processes that will need to support this possibility, because obviously banks and governments do need to turn off access to accounts at times.
But if we allow cash as a fallback, then we already have a system that works. All the various rules and processes about cash have been worked out long ago, over generations!
replacing the security that cash provides for people not to starve or freeze because of any number of possible problems would be an incredibly expensive and error prone process.
You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?
What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments.
Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined.
Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be!
The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!
> You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it.
This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.
You mean contactless payment which has been available outside the USA for over a decade, including Android wallet from 2011? Yes the future is unevenly distributed, but when it comes to banking and other payment infrastructure the "developed" country where it is least present is the USA
An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones.
> The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.
No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode.
And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.
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.
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.
Some merchants have influence over both revenue and cost. Some merchants understand the economic value of transaction data ("data about money is more valuable than money") and prefer to utilize their transaction data directly, instead of blindly surrendering it to random observers in the payment supply chain. Some customers, when given a choice, prefer those merchants.
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. But it does nothing to prevent or remedy having your assets stripped from you by the whim of some megacorporation trying to improve their PR spin on a hot-topic.
People need assistance before being thrown to rock bottom by the corporation, not just after.
This is simply not true. Not only is cashless not at all more convenient than cash for minor purchases, and not only are 10% of the US population unbanked, but in addition the access of third parties to purchase records just alarms people.
In my circles, I often see people withdrawing out pocket money on a regular basis for small purchases, and using cash for large peer-to-peer purchases that they're unsure of the tax implications of. Cashless is largely reserved for restaurants and grocery stores.
With government reporting regulations hitting paypal and other fake banks, I bet this pattern will become more widespread. Just let somebody have to fill out an extra form on their taxes because of excessive bill-splitting; they'll change their habits instantly.
I pay with my credit card even for <$1 purchases. It is much more convenient than pulling out a dollar bill and waiting to get change in coins (which I despise carrying).
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?
The inconvenience of credit cards manifests itself after making the payment: when you're filling taxes, or when whatever information derived from your payments is used against you.
You're trading immediate versus delayed inconvenience.
At least that was the argument. I won't argue that most people will never feel these second order inconveniences.
Not sure I understand. Do you mean from the point of view of the merchant?
From the point of view of the consumer, I don't think I've ever done anything differently in regards to tax paperwork with regards to differences in method of payment.
Even from the merchant's point of view, I would imagine credit card payments are easier to keep track of for documenting purposes. Unless, of course, your intention is tax evasion, which I know quite a few merchants (including family) do with cash.
The only thing they could mean is tax evasion. Otherwise the built-in transaction history make credit cards far, far more convenient than cash for record keeping.
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's a complete mess. You need an account, so you need to decide whether you're an individual or a business, then you have that account, then you need a terminal for cards or an app or bank numbers for them to use an app to transfer or...
With cash: here is $20, done.
Cashless payments impose a bureaucratic structure which simply does not exist with cash. You give me thing I have thing, job done, bish bash bosh.
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.
> With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds
But they very much don't have the money yet. The transaction may have posted (if you happened to have connectivity) but it hasn't settled. It may be blocked in all kinds of ways before they actually get the money. Their account might be suspended. The payment processor may simply decide to never pay it (paypal being infamous for this).
With cash, the moment the object and the bills change hands, the funds transfer has irrecovably settled without any external dependency being possible.
> With cash, the moment the object and the bills change hands, the funds transfer has irrecovably settled without any external dependency being possible.
It isn't even remotely true. You might get mugged, you might lose money, you might get counterfeit money.
Meh. I don't really have a reply for this because we just obviously have really different worldviews so it's not going to really work.
There is no consumer, or merchant, or hiding of transactions, or taxes, or Venmo, or Paypal, or any of this stuff.
I'm standing next to you and you have an apple. I give you $1 for apple. I don't care about any of that other shit, it's like this whole invented set of problems that you've got a whole lexicon for.
Yes, if I buy something online I don't send cash in the post. That should be bloody obvious.
Fair enough. I acknowledge people have different viewpoints on this issue.
Believe it or not, my wife is actually a proponent of cash transactions. She has not been able to convince me of the benefits either. We've agreed to disagree. She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.
You don't seem to see the difference in language that you're subtly slipping in without realising. It's like a form of newspeak.
"Accepting" credit card payments or bank transfers is meaningful. Accepting cash is not.
Anyone can by default accept cash. There is no-one who cannot accept cash. You don't even need to have like, hands to count it with, I can put it in your pocket.
In order to "not accept" cash you have to intentionally make the choice to be an arse and decline it.
By contrast digital stuff is this whole web of "need an account, need an app, need a terminal, need this, ...". It's not automatic.
It's like the difference between walking and having a car.
I rarely if ever carry cash. Nearly every transaction I make is via credit card. The only time I'll usually have cash is when traveling overseas (for emergencies, in the foreign currency, not USD). I find cash terribly inconvenient and annoying to use.
Meanwhile my wife loves using cash. I don't understand it. It's not for any privacy or idealogical reason - she says she just likes the old fashioned feel of handling physical money. She doesn't understand my dislike of using cash. As I said, we've agreed to disagree.
Every now and then when we're out together we'll encounter the rare merchant that doesn't accept credit card. Then she'll spot me with her cash. Otherwise we'll typically use our joint credit card. When she is out by herself she's much more likely to use the cash she always carries.
If the only benefit of cash is dealing with cavemerchants, that's covered by keeping some money around for such cases. It's not something you'd normally do so the thought is perfectly congruent.
The only real advantage to cash is avoiding government overreach. It is most definitely not convenient in any way
It can be more dominant. I pay most of my stuff cashless, but really, really love cash. I would always recommend to keep some on you for emergencies and as we have seen that government is quick to freeze accounts, it seems like a very good idea.
The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future.
That doesn't matter. If laws mandate that services must take cash then a cashless society is impossible, so people who choose not to go cashless can't be forced to give up cash. Hence the war on cash has been won, and cashless lost.
> the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash
In SF, despite the laws, many businesses openly had a no-cash policy once the pandemic started. "Sorry, Credit Cards Only. Touching money might transmit Covid" is too easy of an argument, even though it's essentially a non-concern now. And I haven't seen businesses go back to accepting cash as lockdowns have ended. Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually try to enforce this law.
Whole Foods created a dedicated checkout lane for cash during the pandemic, in some stores surrounded by a 6-foot plexiglass walls. It was usually the fastest line. Now they are back to all registers accepting cash.
> Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually start trying to enforce this law or not.
Great opportunity for a city journalist to assemble a news story. Collect footage to document their experiences across a diverse range of SF stores which do and don't accept cash.
If "peer" stores accept cash, have good traffic and happy customers, then cashless competitors may reconsider their stance.
For a lot of businesses, the overhead that comes with handling cash isn't worth it. Especially smaller businesses that would really rather not deal with the risk of being robbed or having a staffer mugged for the nightly drop.
Credit card processors charge a processing fee per transaction, but the overhead of physically managing cash and so on isn't free. I expect many stores will decide to stay cashless for that reason, no matter what their peers decide. Being cash-friendly or cash-only is not free, even if people do tend to think of it that way.
As for SF's law, I think it's worth bearing in mind that it was originally written as a shot at the Amazon Go stores.
Businesses whose existence is contingent on cost management may find themselves replaced by those that can manage both top line (demand, revenue, culture, brand) and bottom line. Especially IF the economy continues to fragment into online escapism for the poor and 3D experiences for those with discretionary spending, aka "inequality".
Yeah. I only saw that sign a couple times during the early COVID days and just payed with cash to see what happened and they took it without questions.
My experience with this no-cash signs was only on owner operated shops. Maybe I was being an asshole, and they were being assholes to illegal immigrants that can't have bank accounts, and maybe we are all assholes but I really don't care. What I do care is about being able to buy stuff anonymously and without banks or the government getting in-between me or my friends and our food.
Any place big enough to afford having retail employees that I've been to in SF was always still taking cash.
But it's really hard to get PAID any serious amount of money in cash, and it's increasingly hard to withdraw or travel with cash. Just because you can still buy groceries for awhile doesn't mean you can function for any length of time if the government and the cashless system is united in unbanking you.
> Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.
I presume this[0] is that story... If i understand correctly, federal law also requires cash to be accepted to repay a debt, which perhaps interesting to some, usually includes restaurants; you eat your meal, and incur a debt doing so. Perhaps with takeout they could refuse to hand over the bag/box until its paid w a credit/debit card, which is their prerogative (except apparently in SF, NYC, ...).
>Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.
It'll be interesting to see how this battle gets affected by the trucker protests. Historically such bills seem to be largely supported from a social justice point of view[1] (ie. "we need to force businesses to accept cash because cash-only shops are exclusionary to marginalized people"). With the canadian government freezing the bank accounts of freedom convoy protesters, this push could be also associated with the (alt-)right as well. This could translate to a bipartisan push to get accepting cash enshrined into law, or a situation where cash/crypto becomes a right wing dogwhistle, eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/bitcoi...
>because of financial circumstances, unwilling to for philosophical reasons or vulnerable to its darker aspects.
>“We are reining in the excesses of the digital economy.”
>But critics of cashless businesses say they discriminate against people who lack bank accounts and credit cards, while also raising the specter of hackers stealing personal data tied to digital transactions.
>Bronx households, the agency said, were around twice as likely not to have a bank account.
>“I worry about the real-world discriminatory effect that cashless business can have on New Yorkers, especially in communities of color,” Mr. Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said.
>“I think it’s incredibly discriminatory not to accept cash because some people can’t get credit,”
>“It is exclusionary,” she said, “because people without means are less likely to have a credit card.”
2 mentions of privacy/security, 6 mentions of social justice
> Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.
In most countries a tax payment that is due counts as a debt so is covered by legal tender laws, which do require that people accept payment in cash. It may not be an option presented to you, but it is usually legally available to you, if someone is trying to enforce a debt such as payable tax.
Note that legal tender laws don't apply to a service or product that has not yet been provided - only debts - and also note that a business that has to enforce a debt and that you pay in cash may decline to do business with you in future.
Finally, note that not all currency is legal tender - for example Scottish bank notes are not legal tender, so you can't insist on paying your debts with them.
Thank you and everyone else for the answers, it's quite interesting.
FYI I'm in France and here cash can only be used for taxes under 300€ [1]
Maybe if you don't pay and they start suing then some other laws allows you to reimburse the debt with cash for any amount.
With that said, I know we have some laws to allow everyone (most people?) to have a free bank accounts ("right to an account" [2]), and some other laws that prevent even the state to seize what you have on a bank account for debt reimbursement if it's lower than a certain amount (565.34€ - it's called the "unseizable amount" [3]).
I don't know if it's possible to freeze bank account as they did in Canada. I'd guess they would have to have approval from a Judge.
In fact, in Scotland, neither are English bank notes. (Technically there is legal tender in Scotland, but only Royal Mint coins, and Bank of England one pound notes, which are no longer circulated).
In the US, public agencies are typically required to accept cash in any denomination. This occasionally makes the national media when a disgruntled citizen decides to pay their substantial tax or fee in bucketloads of pennies ($0.01). Private organizations, however, are not required to do so.[0]
Paying taxes in cash is almost the most important core thing. It's utter violation of basic concepts of fiat currency for that not to be possible. The whole point of cash is that it is legal tender, and it has to be acceptable for taxes. Any country that violates this is really denying the basic concept of cash.
Cash is just the physical representation of a fiat currency. Fiat currencies exist independently of cash.
As long as you can pay your taxes somehow with cash, I fail to see the problem? The tax office doesn't need to accept cash directly. I don't really see the problem if they delegate handling cash to banks or other institutions as long as no one can be denied access to those.
Inability to pay taxes is not tax evasion, of either of the recognized types in the US (evasion of assessment, i.e., concealment of facts that would indicate tax is due, or evasion of payment, i.e., concealment of or movement out of reach of taxing authorities of funds with which taxes that are due could be paid.)
In practice that's bullshit and you know it. The .gov, be it state local or fed, has show time and time again that it's not above prosecuting someone for a "failure to X" crime of which the failure was caused by the .gov's own action.
Presumably, the US government still accepts payment of taxes in cash, so that cash-based businesses that can't get a bank account can still pay. Perhaps the situation could arise in other countries though.
Your link only pertains to one way the IRS takes cash payments. They also take cash payments at Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs). You don't have to pay cash at a private corporation, you can go into an IRS office and pay cash.
The IRS will accept cash.[1] For small payments, they have an outsourced setup with Dollar General, Family Dollar, CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Pilot Travel Centers, 7-Eleven, Speedway, Kum & Go, Royal Farms, Go Mart, and Kwik Trip to accept payments up to US$500. There's a US$1.50 fee. So people who have no bank account and not to pay can pay easily. For bigger payments, cash payments are accepted at an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center, after making an appointment 30 to 60 days in advance.
Sure, if you're willing to schlep all the way to the nearest IRS office to you that has a human in it that will take your cash. Which might be hundreds of miles away.
There are good reasons why most people prefer not to pay most things in cash.
US Postal Service money orders can be purchased with cash and used the same way as a certified check. This works for utility payments. Mobile phone companies take cash as payments, in both their dedicated retail stores and a large network of affiliated airtime merchants. In some countries, there's a mini-economy for the trade of airtime minutes within cellphone networks, based on physical stores that can convert cash->minutes. M-Pesa was one of the earlier success stories, unifying payments and digital identity, but it was anchored in real-world ingress points for cash.
Also as noted in the article, things like electricity, internet and other utility cannot be paid in cash either here.
In the United States you can.
Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses. ("Currency exchanges" in Chicago, or whatever your local equivalent is.)
Also, every utility company I've had serving my last five apartments has had a public lobby where people can make cash payments. I suspect even cell phone bills can be paid with cash at a cell phone company's retail store.
> Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses.
So long as you are on a post-paid account you don't even need this. If you are on a post-paid plan of any sort, it's a debt. You have the legal right (via the Coinage Act) to pay that debt via cash regardless of any systems they might not have setup to do so.
It's a fun game to play sometimes to remind institutions of this fact, and usually rouses some bored corporate counsel from their slumber to first argue with you, then apologize.
Probably doesn't really help build a great business relationship, however.
You still need to have a bank account to do that, and bank accounts are one of the first things law enforcement freezes when they want to take away people's assets. Objecting that the deposits you made into the bank account were cash won't help much at that point.
Lost in the sense of look around how people are spending their money. I'm very happy for that law, and hope common sense will prevail and cash will be around for a long time. But you can't deny that vast majority of money transactions in the modern world is cashless. Hence my point that the battle is lost - if you take away average person's right of using their credit cards or bank accounts, how are they supposed to pay their bills or buy food?
I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell, and that the only choice is to use their regular till but that is staffed by one person so it is always a long wait which is what I am sure Walmart has planned to discourage its use.
> I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash
The machines fall back to credit/debit only when they need to restocked with cash or coins, or if the machine needs to be serviced. Some stores don't want to pay for the labor needed to maintain their cash features.
The last time I was in a Walmart was over a year ago, but their machines took cash.
I looked and these ones do not. I wonder if the helpers could print out a receipt and walk you over to customer service and check out there but these machines do not have the ability to take cash or dispense it like some I have seen at other places. I will bother to ask the helpers next time I am up there.
>I just realized last night that the self check outs at Walmart don't accept cash, as far as I can tell
They do where I live.
All of the purpose build self checkout machines at Home Depot are cashless but all the ones that can be operated by an employee do cash when in self checkout mode.
> How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash.
It's lost because they’re mostly legislating that “storefront” businesses must accept cash when both having storefronts and accepting cash are things businesses are less interested in. So, what they have actually done is accelerate the death of storefronts rather than assure that cash is usable.
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 wallet doesn't randomly prevent me from opening it at a grocery store I have been to a thousand times and stop me from paying for groceries.
> My wallet doesn't randomly prevent me from opening it at a grocery store I have been to a thousand times and stop me from paying for groceries.
One of my least favorite experiences was telling my banks that I was going to travel so that they don't freeze my accounts for "suspicious activity" when I start spending money at my destination, and then having them freeze my accounts anyway when I got there after trying to pay for dinner. Caused a problem with the hotel and the place I rented a car from, too.
Using my credit card in Russia required me to call some poor schmuck every single morning to tell them I was in Moscow. Every morning I'd wake up and my card would be declined.
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 cash and so you don't have cash. Try harder.
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
I guess my note book is less "convenient" than notepad.exe. More moving parts.
We're just not on the same page here, sorry, I don't get it at all. It's like, are we counting the waves of the hands or what? I'm literally here now and I've just pressed about 300 buttons to write this message, are movements rationed?
If you're going to argue that one thing is easier than another, then yes, counting movements and time is part of that.
"That'll be $15.77"
Option 1: I look in my wallet and find a ten and a five, put my hand in my pocket and grab a few coins, hand those over. The cashier takes the cash, taps a number into the till, finds the right change and hands it back. Is it arduous, hard labour and the end of the world? No of course not, but it is what it is.
Option 2: I look at my phone to unlock it and wave it over the thingy. Job done. I don't even have to remember to withdraw cash from the bank before I go.
It's easier and quicker, for you and for the cashier. The shop knows it too, particularly supermarkets - they encourage people to use faster payment methods so they can shave even a few seconds off a transaction and push more transactions through at peak times.
It's kinda funny, it used to be that "can I pay by card?" caused cashiers here to sigh and get a little annoyed by having to process a card payment. Some scolded me that I should've told them sooner (though exactly when was never clear to me). Presumably their POS systems were geared towards cash payments and card payments were bolted on as an afterthought.
You forgot to mention you no longer need to check your change at the end. You have a record of the transaction on your app and you were able to verify the amount before swiping.
I and everyone here accepts that cash is easy. But there is no way whatsoever it is strictly easier than contactless payments. With cash you need to (a) always remember to withdraw and tale enough with you for what you estimate you will need, (b) compute an approximate factorization of the value you need to pay into the bills and coins you have, (c) hope the business has just the right bills to be able to give you your change, and do it in a decent amount of bills (e.g. not trying to give you change for a hundred in 5$ bills).
All this compared to touching the card/phone/watch to the terminal, and perhaps putting in your pin/fingerprint/face ID.
Again, not saying cash is hard, we've all used it and you get used to it. But it's objectively harder than contactless by any definition.
Of course, cash has other clear advantages in terms of privacy, censorship resistance etc.
We just need to preserve the ability to perform an anonymous transaction. Convenience of cashless is predicated on the assumption that you're willing for the tx to be on record. For tx you want off the record, cashless is not convenient at all. If one's position is that there is no need for anonymous transactions, that's a different conversation.
In China almost everything is WeChat/AliPay these days. People almost never use cash, even the street vendors use mobile payments.
It's a problem because if you do something that Tencent doesn't like, they can just shut you out of your life, quite literally.
And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.
I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.
Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.
I wonder how this would impact tourism. Like, if I'm at the beginning stage of planning a trip and I'm choosing where I want to go then "weirdly requires setting up a payment app" is one of the criteria that puts a country quite far down my list.
It used to be worse than that, until only VERY recently you need a China bank account to set up WeChat payments, and you need a China +86 mobile number to set up a bank account.
Granted, if you are fluent in local language you can get a mobile number and bank account in less than an hour if you go first thing in the morning to beat the lines, but for tourists who do not speak Chinese it is basically damn near impossible to navigate setting all that up.
That said, international tourism isn't a big revenue generator, they care FAR more about the domestic tourism market, which is many times bigger. Foreign tourists are largely an afterthought.
Even now, domestic tourists can just tap their national ID card to board trains but tourists usually have to stand in line to buy paper tickets, or even if you get your bank account and all set up to buy tickets online, you'll still need to stand in line to print out the ticket because the electronic readers at train boarding gates don't support reading passports or foreign IDs of any sort.
> "weirdly requires setting up a payment app" is one of the criteria that puts a country quite far down my list.
Goes beyond that. The visa process is the most intense of any major country (if you have a high ranking passport). WeChat (the only way to communicate) requires you to be invited by someone else already in country. Street signs aren't in English, neither are any public transport aids. You can't communicate, can pay for things, can't find your way around (once you leave the cities no one speaks English). It was incredibly hard to travel there.
To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.
There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
> To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.
Does anyone have that as a realistic expectation?
> There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
Except English has a relatively small "native" footprint, not that many speak it as their mother tongue. There are many more secondary speakers of English than primary in the world. If the popularity of English was the result of colonialism, none of the above would apply.
> If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
Are you implying that travelers to China (say with a Latin language as a base) should realistically try and learn basic Chinese for a weeks holiday? Do you have any idea how long that would take?
Just remember that a society without cash is one in which every single member of society requires the explicit permission of multiple unaccountable people they have never met each and every every time they seek food, shelter, or clothing.
Well, considering the "real world" too inconvenient and seeking ways to make it less so is what humanity has been doing for millennia, right? Most people use a washing machine rather than washing their clothes in the river, because indeed, the latter is too resource intensive, difficult and ugly if you have an alternative.
Of course, this doesn't mean that a technology that provides convenience can't come with hidden costs, and the cashless society indeed comes with risks. That's where the interesting debate is IMO, but the fact that people value convenience is quite reasonable and not new.
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 river it would take me literally hours of manual labour every week and they wouldn't be as clean.
> I'm literally sat at my desk inside my house with cash in my jeans pocket now.
Which you, at some point, had to withdraw from an ATM. And which slows down your transaction time at a checkout.
I do have a phone in my pocket. I would have my phone in my pocket anyway. It's great that it now means I don't need to manage bits of paper and metal too.
Lets not conflate "take" and "freeze". There's already enough confusion on that.
Also freezing of your funds can benefit you -- if the bank notices suspicious withdrawals they will freeze your account to prevent you from being cleaned out.
It's never okay to take someone's money/property without any court decision (and that should include civil forfeiture). But freezing shouldn't necessarily be lumped into that because it has valid usages. There just needs to be proper regulations and consequences.
> Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that.
Unfortunately you are probably right. The history of computing clearly shows that convenience beats absolutely everything including privacy, security, and autonomy. The most convenient option almost always wins regardless of any other factors.
Driving is also easier and more convenient than walking but it would be absurd to suggest that everyone should have a car available for them to drive as a constitutional human rights.
Another counter point is that cash is arguably easier and more convenient in some aspects for some people.
5th amendment: "...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." Pretty sure freezing someone's bank account based on some suspicion alone, is depriving them of their property without due process, and not remotely equivalent to driving without a license (or a duly revoked license), so your comparison is really off base.
Maybe you could possibly argue this way if upon freezing their accounts they called them up and said "Hey, your account is closed, come pick up your cash", but I'm pretty sure that is not the case here, and it is rather more like a civil-asset-forfeiture situation, where they'll likely need to go to court to regain access.
Now, all that being said, this is Canada, so I don't honest know whether there is an equivalent to the 5th amendment in their charter of rights, or whether there is some legal weasel word (e.g. "reasonable") that somehow provides a loophole for all this.
Yeah, it's a driver's license that's a privilege not a right. Own all the cars you want. Create a car museum if that's your thing and you've got the funds.
But behave if you want to actually legally drive any of them.
No license is required to operate a vehicle on private land... it is only on public roadways (which are public land) and public accomodations (privately owned parking lots that are publicly accessible) that a license is required.
Bitcoin is useless to the vast majority of people as a cash substitute. If you want people to use your decentralized currency it needs to be an actual currency, which means 1. easy to transfer and 2. predictable store of value. Without monetary policy bitcoin will never accomplish 2. They're a very long way off from 1 too.
A few months ago, it cost $4 in BTC transaction fees alone to buy a $2 bottle of soda. Last spring, it cost $60 in transaction fees to buy a $2 bottle of soda.
You did not mention the Lightning Network, where fees are negligible. You cannot seriously research on bitcoin without coming across the Lightning Network.
Off-chain solutions to the inherent inefficiencies of blockchain applications also sidestep the advantages that cryptocurrency proponents promise blockchains will bring.
Not really. Lightning is build on top of Bitcoin, every Lightning payment is a real Bitcoin transaction that can be settled to the network if necessary. It has all of the benefits of Bitcoin, plus higher throughput, enhanced privacy, lower fees, and faster settlement.
That is no longer true. I recently topped my sim card for $3, then $1 with Bitcoin, while on vacation in Egypt. Either transaction cost me something like $0.001.
There was a burrito shop on my block that had a bitcoin pay terminal (well, they had a bitcoin atm like device to get cash at)... they've gone out of business and I haven't seen another one since - some POS terminals have bitcoin support I've heard, but I haven't seen one yet... Until I can buy a coffee with bitcoin at Tim's bitcoin is not a serious competitor to oppose the cashless society.
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.
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.
So does bitcoin work without the internet? Otherwise, does everyone have internet and the devices to access it? How is bitcoin any better than other digital payments/assets?
Without any internet at all, or without the payment device having constant internet access? Because you can transmit a bitcoin transaction over NFC, Bluetooth, QR codes, etc to the receiver, who can then broadcast it at their leisure.
Yeah with no internet at all, Bitcoin along with all modern financial infrastructure breaks down.
More specifically the dream of bitcoin replacing cash died in 2017 when changes were made to the protocol. Bitcoin became cost prohibitive to use for small transactions (less than several hundred dollars) and the addition of a feature called 'replace by fee' meant that small transactions weren't immediately reasonably trustworthy and you would have to wait for one or more confirmations on the blockchain.
Bitcoin is hardly cost prohibitive. When was the last time you sent a transaction?
The last one I sent cleared at 2sats/byte and was <$1. Are you going to buy your coffee with it? No, probably not, but that hardly makes it a useless as currency replacement. Replace-by-fee doesn't make small transactions any less trustworthy either, since you should never trust any unconfirmed transaction (by definition, if its not on the blockchain its not yet a transaction). Furthermore, the lightning network blows away the competition in terms of cost per transaction, and while not perfectly trust-less (unlike the base layer) it has far less custodial risk than a bank or credit card account. If for example your counter-party goes rogue, at worst you just close the channel resulting in a rollback to the last settled balance state, minus an on-chain fee.
Don't you think the custodial nature of lighting network opens it up to the same type of censorship we're seeing with bank transactions in Canada? What's stopping governments from blacklisting wallets and pressuring LN nodes from transacting with them?
I hate these solutions to all of the various problems. These governments and corporations don't care about any of these laws, make up new laws whenever they want, ignore laws whenever they want. You can't just undo millions of people using a system of physical money, but you can undo laws instantly, or not even follow them. All of the solutions to these types of modern societal problems have to be solved in a way that isn't just a few words in a piece of paper, because the people in charge can never be trusted.
We don't have limited rights. You need to work on understanding that rights are not granted. Rights are inherent. Enumeration of rights is only to emphasize the importance
As soon as some rights are violated, you don't have them any more. The language of "granting" could be changed to "respecting" and it would be an improvement indeed. But rights are only natural and inherent to the extent that people are free to exercise them in absence of interference.
They can be obstructed or denied, yes. This does not mean you do not have that right. It means it is being denied you.
That's the nature of rights and it's important to consider rights in this fashion because it shapes our ideas about what is acceptable in terms of obstruction and denial
> We don't have limited rights. You need to work on understanding that rights are not granted.
That's a definition you accept, which is not a useful definition to me.
There are rights that are not inherent and sometimes the legal and moral mix. eg I don't have the right to take an organ from a human who has not yet suffered systemic death, unless they have gone through a process that includes giving consent to that process that may allow the organ to end up under my purview AND I accept it.
There are rights which are fundamental. Saying "definition", as if it is a flexible description does not satisfy the reality. These rights are defined by the fact that they are inherent.
Your example is a perfectly described granted right. You have been granted the right to something which is not yours and you have no other right to take.
The distinction is important. There is no moral hazard nor wrong committed in preventing someone from harvesting organs without permission. There is a wrong perpetrated when someone has been restricted in their speech or movement.
The usefulness, as you say, lies in the treatment of these things as distinctly different in nature
There is no such thing as an inherent right. Rights are a legal construct. They don't grow on trees and are not laws of physics. There are rights that I may believe should be universal, yet very clearly are not.
We can't be trusted to honour written laws and contracts. We've shown that time and time again. The best way is to remove the possibility or at least the temptation to do it by making it too hard to violate. Physical cash has that property, as does a trustless digital cash based on cryptocurrency (I'm not sure what the best one is in this respect).
"It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision"
Tell that to Justin Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act in Canada and where he immediately started freezing bank accounts of peacefully protesting Cabadians under the falsely built narrative that they are "terrorists" or "funding terrorists" - all without court order.
Yeah cashless is the way to go, but I dont think the problem is as big as it seems. People are also becoming digital nomads, and while citizenships for pay, and more importantly the digital identities that come with them, are still kind of expensive, long term I expect it will become cheaper and more common.
This also directly solves the issue of op. Cryptocurrencies are a stop gap solution to this, but known transaction histories and inherently poor fraud prevention make them poor digital cash replacements. Today Ecuador is shilling bitcoin, but imagine if they instead sold tier 2 citizenships, no taxes no welfare type, with new and independent identities. Pay 5000$ and get a new identity and passport, along with an account in one of our many banks, or which can be used to set up an account in an international bank. Sure you wont get to share credit scores with your main identity... Various international laws mean it wont be called exactly this, perhaps its a fee for the creation of a minimum accounting requirement corporation with hidden controller instead (and trying to prevent these is already ongoing but it does not work), but it does not matter in practice. As long as it satisfies the conditions of being able to make transactions easily, has a dispute mechanism with centralized authority with the self serving interest to remain independent, etc.
I'd wager that the majority of identity thefts arent performed in order to steal money from that identity or ever even cause any damage to the original identity. They are performed in order to get around travel and work restrictions. Lets say you are from ukraine or belarus, now getting a work visa equivalent to germany or france is kindof a pain in the ass, in particular doing so quickly, but buying a stolen passport from e.g. rumania isnt hard, and all you are doing is setting up a single french debit account in that name and working under that identity. Odds are that kind of thing gets discovered 30 years latter when the original identity realizes they are getting a small pension from some job in france they never had. But why would they care.
Massively expanded surveillance states could prevent this, but while that will be the case in china, places like the usa are just to discoordinated, and the eu is actively working against it to the point both google and facebook are no longer asking. How can we make our ads better, but rather how can we keep ad quality with much less information per user.
Whatever your laws will say, the politician will find an emergency to justify bypassing it. We all saw what happened with COVID.
The only viable choice is not to have such powerful governments in the first place.
Contrary to the parent poster, I really think we do need the anarcho-libertarian dream - and it doesn't mean we should't have private justice or private protection: it just means this power shouldn't be wielded centrally (eg. by having private competing companies).
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
Very much this. It is disappointing and scary to see tech people, of all groups, who like this idea.
Cash is a perfect currency. It is strictly peer to peer, fully fungible, can't be blocked or censored by any party, anonymous, has no dependency on anything (still works when the electricity and internet are down).
Cash is kind of fungible, but not really. Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection.
In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.
> Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection.
This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment.
Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.
> 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 currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering.
The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.
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.
There is a distinction between freezing someone's accounts and ability to open accounts for the long term vs. them beginning to starve within days because they don't have any way to pay for anything immediately.
> them beginning to starve within days because they don't have any way to pay for anything immediately
I mean, if that's the only scenario you care about, you can just carry more cash in your wallet.
But when you said "a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button", that sounded like you were worried about more than just not having enough money for groceries for the week.
> It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.
One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now.
The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same.
Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan.
Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%.
The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around.
How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.
How do you even pay for rent or utility bills with cash?
I'm 39; so maybe too young to have experienced that but how does it even practically work? Did your landlord pop round once a month? For utility bills, did you go to the bank and ask them to transfer cash to a utility company; or maybe at a post office? Or did the utility company send someone around to collect cash payments?
> The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.
Unfortunately events like the ones we've just had are what's necessary to demonstrate to people that no, we actually do need technology like this.
Cashless is going to happen. The convenience gain is too large for it not to. Cryptocurrency is the only way to preserve any semblance of genuine sovereignty in a cashless world. It is a technological necessity.
Most cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) do not solve this issue, governments could order businesses (or payment systems used by businesses) not to accept payment coming from some blacklisted addresses, even indirectly; and this is possible thanks to the public ledger.
And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not.
Governments might even ban cash one day.
This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.
Satoshi called it digital cash actually for a reason, not cashlessness. It has similar properties to physical cash, as the ownership can't be taken away trivially.
The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.
The key issue with using Bitcoin as a digital form of cash is that Bitcoin lacks a key property of cash: fungibility. Combine this with the transparent nature of Bitcoin's blockchain and you have a currency which is an authoritarian's dream and not a currency that could/should replace cash.
Bitcoin is not totally lacking fungibility, as there are ways to make the coins more fungible, but it needs more developer support. Wasabi wallet has coinjoin support, although it's not easy to use, not automated, doesn't work on mobile phone and expensive for most people. Also of course exchanges try to AML-KYC them out, as govermnets are trying to fight it.
Implementing Schnorr signatures was a great way to get closer to fungibility improvements, as it paves the path for signature batching, which can make CoinJoin cheaper than a single transaction, and will change the incentives towards making Bitcoin fungible by default for every user.
If it was an authoritarian's dream, powerful countries around the world would be embracing it. But it's not, because they can't control it, only surveil it to the same extent that any other person can. They have a slight advantage because they can compel exchanges to collect personally identifying information about their customers and divulge it upon request, but other than that they have no privileged position like they do with the Fiat banking system.
Bitcoin the network is fully transparent, which makes BTC not really fungible - it can and is traced, which creates better/worse BTC. This is why coinbase (small c) BTC is sold at premium.
Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom.
FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.
> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
We can't. Too many transactions are conducted remotely now, and you can't send cash over a phone line or over the Internet. And having those transactions remote is not just a minor convenience; in many cases the transactions would not happen at all if they had to happen in person, and a lot of wealth creation would not take place.
The simple answer is, as the article says, to view freezing people's bank accounts and credit cards as a punishment at least as serious as imprisonment, and to view doing it without first having a trial as at least as serious as imprisoning people indefinitely without trial. Right now most people do not view it that way, and governments reach for freezing assets as a tool of first resort because they do not view it as having serious political consequences. That is what needs to change.
The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
Agreed.
Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs.
Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal for a retail business to refuse cash.
Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash. But they lost thousands because a fat guy isn't going to buy cookies there in the future.
Small business do not go cashless to save money, nor raaccciiismm
They go cashless because it eliminates the threat of robbery. Them proudly having signs everywhere saying they were cashless is to announce to the would be theif there is no cash payday here..
Most businesses that do that have a history of robbery.
I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway.
So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse.
It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.
On top of that you have to spend a not insignificant amount of manager time counting and running money to and from the bank. If you deal with large amounts of cash then you get to file CTRs frequently.
In addition to all that you have to deal with the physical infrastructure. Cash drawers, safes, money bags, etc…
Having worked in both retail and in banks I can promise that cash is a major pain point.
> Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash.
I'm not sure where you are but in the US the banks will charge a few percent + 10c, its adds up to a lot of money. Plus you dont need to pay people to count/store cash, or get robbed which adds big savings.
Absolutely. For instance, pervasive CCTV isn't in itself a bad thing, but pervasive CCTV which can be (and is) accessed arbitrarily is a major major problem. I'm fine with CCTV which records to encrypted offline storage, which can be unencrypted by court order only, with as strong a probable cause as you would need for a wiretap or a search warrant.
Agree with this all, but I don't think the simple answer is sufficient. Cash as an option must be preserved, but the abuse of this power over cashless transactions will still happen. Cash itself will become even more of a probable cause and associated with crime if the abuse is allowed to preside only over the cashless transactions.
We shouldn't have to reject a major improvement in our quality of life because of abusive governments and their surveillance. What we need is technology that makes their abuse impossible.
This is why cryptocurrencies were invented in the first place. They were supposed to emancipate us by providing private and anonymous digital cash that's free from government and bank control. Most of them failed at actually protecting us from anything but there are projects out there that are still trying, such as Monero. We should support these technologies instead of trying to turn back the clock.
We need to reject them instead. Just start using cryptocurrency for everything and cut them out.
They'll just pressure all businesses not to accept your crypto.
Just the airlines, banks, any payment processor, any gold bullion dealers, any supermarkets, any restaurants, any car rentals, any car dealers. Probably can be done in less than 10 lines of regulation. Nobody is going to risk jail for your crypto.
What then? You are going to invent some tech that will somehow make totalitarian government impossible?
>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
Oh How the tide have turned.
You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash.
Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.
And I wish instead of putting technology into cashless, we should be doing the old sci-fi stuff which is putting technology into cash itself. Better Anti-Counterfeit money features .
Digital cash can partially solve the problem, the idea has been around since 80s [1]. Blinded signature allows you to have a bearer token without attaching information about the source or identity. It resembles cash in many ways. Surely government can shut it down, but they would not be able to do it in a stealthy way.
Important to note that the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy:
>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.
But you can't as long as the cashless society is forced upon you. At most you can try to take refuge on currencies which aren't controlled by governments like crypto. But since crypto is very volatile, it isn't a practical thing to do. You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises.
Too bad nobody invented a stable crypto currency meant to only facilitate trade as opposed to speculation.
> You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises.
That’s exactly what gigolo chains were designed for. Police would confiscate your cash, but not your jewelry, so carrying around jewelry allowed you to post bail fairly easily (also why bail bondsmen deal in lots of jewelry). The use of gold jewelry as backup money is also common in India where people are less confident in the local currency.
Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them?
I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money?
Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.
This is a disingenuous argument.If you want to pay for software or digital goods you already probably have or want a bank account, a paypal or something.You're already in the ecosystem and nobody forces you to use cash everywhere.By the way >it is< possible to pay for digital goods using cash, without a bank account or digital money service: it's called Western Union/MoneyGram/etc.Yeah there are limits and often way more expensive, but at the same time you don't pay with your transaction data, which the bank uses for more than you know.
Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons.
People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.
My point was that a larger and larger proportion of the things we buy we buy over the internet: it is something like 25% of all consumer purchasing now. Those transactions are cashless.
Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue.
I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet.
I agree, the key point here is the dangers we potentially face if we forcefully remove cash as an option of payment.We should strive to at least keep it an option where possible, and I would base this mainly on the privacy aspect(and secondarily maybe security).
Cashless is great as a convenience option, or when there are time sensitive factors.
I always tend to assume good faith in discussions, so I must ask, are you trolling? Or is it just that HN's general antagonism towards any form of cryptographic currency stems from a dearth of information?
Someone was arguing that we should reject a cashless society, and I was making an argument that it is impossible to do at this point.
The only solution is to have a digital currency as close to cash as possible.
Ethereum (on its own) does not meet this requirement. It is perfectly fungible, but still has a global ledger that can be used to track transactions. It is important that people move to standard L2s that don’t have a record of every transaction.
Bitcoin is actually not fungible in the first place. The Lightning network does provide transaction privacy, though.
By “no global ledger” I should have clarified: there might be a need for a global ledger, but it should be missing all consumer transactions.
Thoughts on Monero? I liked it the best when I started looking into crypto, but with so much momentum behind bitcoin I just kind of went down that path instead.
"But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal."
Dont worry, soon everything from your toaster to your car will be internet connected and will be disabled on command
>I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.
so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending.
Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.
I agree in principle and I am against the disappearance of cash, but the convenience is also a factor and I end up never using cash. I think a cashless society wil happen in any case. With covid many shops didn't accept cash, I don't know how people who got locked out of the banking system dealt with that.
And it was abused fairly quickly. The problem is that people don't really seems to understand that this is a problem even if they do not support the current cause. I hope this is an educational instead of a neurological issue.
How do you reject the cashless society? You need to get so many people on board. Look at Canada. You'd have to get a huge proportion of the population to go on strike, and for a very long period of time.
imho, we as a society have been rushing/forced to embrace new technology without really understanding the downsides. I use nowadays cash as much as possible. The notion that every single mundane payment of mine is being monitor, tied to some profile and bid in realtime terrifies me. And no, no payment provider has ever promised me that they won't do this. We had also cash cards in the past in Germany, to my understanding they would provide digital payment without tracking and central control, but they are deprecated.
somehow people with the cognitive capacity of a rotten potato would call you science denier for being pro freedom. I'm not talking about vaccines and such, but being pro freedom as in being against a survilance state which can fuck you up at any time and has total control using coercion over all aspects of your life.
We got at such stage in history which is impossible even to have an honest debate about freedom without having legal problems and risking our careers to just end. Let's hope internet still a safe place for this for a while.
> The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit
I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the personnel and infrastructure to support all or most of their customers paying in person, in cash, the costs of the things I'm actually paying them for would go way up.
Sure, if you're going out for coffee and you'd rather pay with cash, it's a hassle if the coffee shop doesn't accept it. But that just means you go and find another coffee shop that does. That's a very different issue than the issue of cutting off people's access to non-cash methods of payment, which is what the article under discussion is talking about.
Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.
Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts.
And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.
The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication and I frankly tire of that discussion. You're talking about moving small physical things, it's a solved problem, everything around you right now is a small physical thing.
edit: posters are responding about the businesses that exist in their area. by this token it's "inconvenient" for me to use cash because the japanese place down the road doesn't take it. well no, they're just being dicks, there's no _fundamental_ inconvenience.
> Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.
I've never heard of any bank offering that service.
> no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.
Agreed. But it should also be recognized that there are many people who have good reasons to use payment methods other than cash in many situations.
> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication
No one is claiming that cash is always inconvenient. Just that for many people in many situations, it is.
> You're talking about moving small physical things
If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper. And if I pay my bills electronically while I'm sitting at my desk at home, I don't have to move anything at all.
> I've never heard of any bank offering that service.
I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.
It sounds like you're talking about taking cash to your bank and depositing it into your own bank account, which of course you can do. The original commenter was talking about taking cash to your bank and somehow very quickly distributing it to everyone you owe money to this month.
The original commenter is talking about a solution which would be vulnerable to the exact sort of "digital jail" being referenced in the article. They've added a central authority to their decentralized solution, in the form of the absolute classic way banks are used against people - by freezing accounts and deposits etc.
Nah, because you can just go to any money transmitter. Which is actually just anyone, if we didn't scare people off it by making payments this like, scary bureaucratic taxy AML'y thing.
I have online banking on my phone, if you wanna give me cash to send it to someone, no problem, why not.
Can't you make deposits directly on the ATM? Where I live, the ATM takes your bills, counts them, and directly deposits them in the account you choose.
No need to interact with any of those pesky humans.
Well, yes, but the GP comment was specifically saying that they had "never heard of any bank" offering the service of taking cash and depositing it into a provided account, which is weird because that is very much a standard service that brick-and-mortar banks provide.
Either the other user was uninformed or my sarcasm detector is broken today.
> he GP comment was specifically saying that they had "never heard of any bank" offering the service of taking cash and depositing it into a provided account
No, I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.
You can do so online (which I do for many monthly bills). But that doesn't really solve any perceived problems about maintaining anonymity associated with making cash payments buth neither does anything going through a bank.
In Argentina there's a service named "Pago Mis Cuentas" (Pay My Bills). You can add all your services (gas, electricity, cable, internet, taxes, etc).
When there's a new bill for the services you added, it's displayed on a list with checkboxes right beside each one of them. Check the ones you want to pay, click Pay, and you're done. It's linked directly to your bank account. The website was created by a bank consortium.
It's not, because this conversation is specifically about how much worse it would be to pay all your bills in cash, while you seem to be talking about a digital payment.
> I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.
> this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US)
I wasn't talking about cash deposits. I was talking about paying bills. I can't go to my bank and give them the account numbers of all my bills and have the bank pay them for me. If I wanted to pay each bill in cash, I would have to schlep to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them.
There’s nothing that makes it inherently impossible to put bills this way in cash, though.
For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.
The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.
I'm in the US and have had checking accounts in three credit unions and five banks and they all offered this service. They don't send cash if that's what you have in mind, but they do send checks. They'll send a check to anyone given a name and address, and if I provide an account number, for many businesses they'll also receive a billing amount and pay it each month automatically.
Ooooh, I understand now, and I do apologize for misreading your comment.
Banks do offer bill pay services, you just set it up and they mail a check every month. To your point, I don't think there's a way to get your bank to send the recipient cash every month, but I feel like that's a moot point since your cash is already in the banking system at that point.
We don't have high streets here. All my adjacent banks are in the middle of a parking lot not near anything else I'd want to interact with during my precious Saturday except maybe the grocery store. Sure that's a bad design and I'd prefer to live near UK high streets but that's beyond my control here.
This has nothing to do with sitting at my desk. Using cash would mean spending my Saturday at one of the least interesting location I can think of.
> if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox
I never said any of those things. And the idea that schlepping around all over the place to pay monthly bills in person is the best way to get physical exercise is laughable.
> physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite
IMO your posts read a lot more like GPT-3 than mine.
> If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper.
Coming soon for this market, "brain in a jar". Upload your consciousness into an Altered Carbon simulation, Source Code time loop or immortal-gaming-AI Daemon.
After gig economy workers unionize and raise delivery fees, hopefully they won't hire a mercenary army to enforce Code of Customer Conduct.
I care barely drive to a bank within 10 minutes, which isn't the bank I have an account with. It's only open during my work hours (9-5pm M-F), or I have to go on a Saturday. The wait time to see a clerk alone are often 10 minutes or more. And the clerk can't help me make certain payments that require me to use a web portal or mail a cheque.
> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication.
That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.
>> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication.
>That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.
IMHO, both the original statement and the respond are opinions. It may well be the case that cash is universally not “hilariously inconvenient.” Without some empirical evidence, it is just a shouting match.
In my opinion, cash is actually very convenient to use and encourages reflections on spending habits.
He's saying that using cash is inconvenient because no-one uses cash where he is.
I'm saying that it's not because at its' core it's fundamentally just handing over a bit of paper.
It's not a statement about how many people accept cash where I am. I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.
There also seems to be this bonkers strawman thing going on whereby loads of people seem to think I'm saying "don't ever make a non-cash transaction" which is bloody stupid. It's like, _a priori obvious_ that it's stupid. I hate this aspect of online discourse - if the thing you think I'm saying logically makes no sense, then I probably am not actually saying that thing.
> it's fundamentally just handing over a bit of paper.
No, it's handing over bits of paper at the particular physical location of the person or entity you are paying. For some transactions, like paying for your food at a restaurant, that's no problem because you're there anyway. For other transactions, like paying monthly bills, it is a problem.
Nah because banks exist and can make digital transactions when you give them cash.
Literally, if you were standing next to me, you can give me 10 quid and I can send someone else that ten quid. You have paid them ten quid using cash, reasonably anonymously in a way that cannot be easily blocked or censored as long as cash exists.
This becomes far, far less convenient or feasible if we only have barter and now you need to find someone that accepts some arbitrary valuable object of a value that isn't exactly the amount you want to send.
No-one is arguing that electronic transactions are not useful, this is a strawman. It makes no logical sense, so perhaps you should consider that I'm not making that argument.
> banks exist and can make digital transactions when you give them cash.
And as soon as I use a bank for this, I am no longer protected against law enforcement preventing me from paying my bills and supporting myself, which was supposed to be the whole point of using cash in the first place. Law enforcement can block banks from making digital transactions on my behalf just as easily as they can freeze my accounts at those same banks.
No, it's convenient because anyone can accept or transfer it without a middleman. It's a physical thing you just give to someone. You can't (reasonably) censor it or block it or sanction it without just disabling the whole currency.
I was just describing the fact that it's not some sort of crazy idea to pay bills using cash. If HN weren't full of 21 year olds we wouldn't even be having this chat, it's like these guys forgot that not even that long ago we just paid each other with envelopes at the end of the week/month.
Like, they're literally saying that you can't do X, where X is something that most of us did less than 50 years ago, and no we didn't spend half of our days running around.
> He's saying that using cash is inconvenient because no-one uses cash where he is.
No, I'm not. I'm saying using cash is inconvenient for me for things like paying my monthly bills because it would require me to physically go to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them in person. Whereas with a credit card I can pay all my monthly bills in a few minutes from my desk at home. Even if my utility company, for example, would accept cash in payment (as they probably would since most companies offering basic services like that are required by law to accept cash), I wouldn't do it because of the huge increase it would be in time and effort every month. I have better things to do with my time than schlep around all over the place to pay bills in person.
> I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.
You're shifting your ground. Before you were saying that using cash wasn't inconvenient. Now you're saying it is for some things, like paying your mortgage. Which is exactly my point.
> I'm saying using cash is inconvenient for me for things like paying my monthly bills because it would require me to physically go to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them in person.
We could solve this problem with an a service where you'd be able to pool all the money you intend to spend on bills, and then the service would handle getting the cash to each individual company. :)
That money could even accrue 0.001% monthly interest, while it's waiting to get spent on bills.
Yeah, we could even call this service...a bank. And then we wouldn't be protecting ourselves any more against our assets being frozen by law enforcement without due process. Which was supposed to be the whole point of using cash.
If we can fix "that" (government seizing your cash), why can't we fix a similar with cashless? Maybe the government hasn't technically seized it if they just make it inaccessible, but the effect is the same.
> I do not connect payments to my phone for example. Everyone I know who did has a story to tell about how doing that cost them.
I do this and all my friends have done this, and I haven’t heard any costing stories. I guess you could be in some kind of high risk group or area for digital theft (Russia?), but I’m curious what specific things have happened to all your friends.
Care to address how civil forfeiture is being addressed?
This 2015 post suggests that in 2014, civil forfeiture exceeded burglary.
> Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually... Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, .... According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_...
I'd love to see evidence that the tide is turning, hopefully you have some.
They legally cannot, at least not in the USA, and I doubt in most countries. Thanks to the legal tender laws, businesses cannot legally refuse the legal tender, especially in its cash form. Once a deal is made and cash is offered, service must be rendered or it is considered stolen. A fun way to exploit this (before coin machines) was to go to tow truck lots, offer pennies, and then report grand theft auto to the local sheriff when they refused.
Cash is only legal tender for debts. I can run a business that refuses cash as long as services or products are not rendered before payment. I can say that if you want to eat at my restaurant, you need to use credit or debit cards only.
How precisely do the police seize the assets of tens of thousands of people simultaneously?
They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis.
It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
By ordering the banks to close their accounts. People are not holding significant portions of their wealth in physical cash outside of the banking system. Apart from it being absurdly dangerous, there's also not anything like enough physical currency to do that. Not to mention investment accounts, deeds to property, etc.
Businesses being forced to accept all the risk and inconvenience of accepting cash to protect people from having their assets is somewhere between a security theater and a straight up pipe dream.
Businesses should accept cash as a signal to potential customers that they are not some snobbish high-tech cashless only establishments.
Also, there are a million other regulations that businesses have to deal with from license and insurance to the number of fire extinguishers. Asking businesses to accept cash is not a life-or-death decision from a business cost point of view. If anything, it means more potential customers and better PR.
I believe the point is that it would require orders of magnitude more resources - a prohibitive amount of resources - for an overbearing government to strip citizens of physical assets, vs. the ease and subsequent temptation of doing so digitially
The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. If you think a million soldiers are going to occupy the USA without resorting to obscene levels of violence (such that money is not your concern) you're a bit mistaken.
> The people out number the military by nearly 300-1.
Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.
Factors that push it in the other direction are desertion rates if we're talking domestic military occupation and fighting fitness -- how many police and reservists are actually able and willing to occupy a country with a likely insurgency for an undermined amount of time. Some percentage of that 2.9 mil number are not front line combatants. But also if the occupation is only in a single region then the denominator is much lower or if parts of the population side with the military.
> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture.
If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better.
Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening.
It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.
yep. I really like the system we have in Poland, where you have a full choice. You can live entirely cashless or cash only or hybrid.
You can pay any utility bill with instant transfers using a few clicks or with cash by visiting any post office where they wire the money to the service provider on your behalf.
Having options is always better than not having options and with our history of authoritarian governments who loved confiscating citizen's assets, I hope the current financial system stays as is.
If only there were a digital cash that you can self custody, easily verify and transfer.
In all seriousness, I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. Obviously there's a whole lot of baggage with the current cryptocurrencies out there today, but there's no reason we have to resort to carrying around pieces of paper or voting for the right people to ensure our assets and livelihood are outside of the reach of the state (at least without going through the proper legal channels).
It doesn't need to be anonymous. Even if the state knows your public address, they can't confiscate your funds without you giving away your key. They can try to prevent people from accepting your funds but that's a lot harder to enforce
Why though? The transaction record is public in every possible way. You can trivially audit the origin of every single funds transfer in the history of Bitcoin. "Just use a tumbler" you say - except this is the government. They can just declare that they'll also be declaring that any tumbler accounts which receive blackballed currency are tainted and blackball everything which comes out of them too.
Cash is effectively a giant tumbler. All the privacy technologies in the cryptocurrency space are just trying to replicate the base privacy functionality of cash.
The reason why surveillance-state-centered interests cannot ban cash is that the public wouldn't stand for it. It's too ingrained in the culture and economy. The same needs to happen with private cryptocurrencies. We need MetaMask to adopt a confidential transaction standard the same way the major websites adopted HTTPS over a decade ago. We still have time as the financial mass-surveillance laws in place were designed for trusted third party financial intermediaries, and not peer-to-peer finance.
When I tried to sign up, I had to scan my driver's license, enter my SSN, take a picture of myself and attach a bank account. Doing all of that kind of goes against the anonymity aspect.
> I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state.
If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.
And this is the problem that I see as well. One can buy crypto but how do you convert to fiat currency if the government controls all the off ramps? This is the flaw with bitcoin as far as I can tell. Maybe one day someone on the darkweb will start selling goods like an Amazon style store where you can get anything you could on Amazon, like a drop shipping store, sent to your house for bitcoin. If you can link it on the internet you can have an intermediary ship it to you for bitcoin. I think there is a real market for such a store in the future. How the person who is collecting all the bitcoins exchanges their bitcoins to cash I haven't figured that part out yet. Maybe they do it in a country like Venezuela but I am not sure if that is possible.
That is actually pretty neat thank you for sharing. But I am a little confused after watching the video on it. It seems like you pay less for items with your bitcoin, do the people ordering hope that one day the bitcoin will increase in value and make money that way? Or is it just a way to buy bitcoin with items vs cash? Or a way to convert gift cards to bitcoin and that is the cost of business? I'm going to check it out farther but seems pretty neat. The only issue I see with this one is it is a site on the clear internet you would have to register to and they could be forced by governments to sanction accounts.
As a bitcoin holder you're getting yourself a discount on purchases through sites like that because the people doing the amazon purchases are using stolen cards or stolen accounts.
People who have bought through sites like these have often found amazon refuses to honour warranties etc on the purchased goods, and when they've dug a little deeper it's been because the real cardholder or account holder has flagged the transaction as fraudulent.
In response to the 2012-2012 financial crisis in Cyprus[1], the Cypriot government decided to take 47.5% of uninsured deposits over the amount of €100,000 in the Bank of Cyprus, and all deposits over the amount of €100,000 from the Laiki bank. Greece did something similar with their bonds.
"Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next.
I have a cache of money from Switzerland that became worthless recently (well, I can still exchange it at the Swiss National bank someday). That kind of hurt. Also, I have some Indian money that is definitely worthless no matter what now.
Carrying $50 in my wallet which gets seized with an extremely low probability is not how I "lose it all". It's how I "lose $50 maybe but most likely not".
How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!
Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that.
In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end.
I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.
> I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.
There are a lot of people who are invested via their job, their business or their literal investments, into cashless payments. Big public companies like Apple and Google have made billion dollar investments in cashless payments, and a lot of people hold their stock and/or work for them.
From what I can see, your comment doesn't address the parent's comment at all. Government is not a "profit-seeking enterprise," it's a monopoly on violence. That is an enormous difference. I am not sure why you focus so much on businesses.
WSJ opinion pages actually have a good opinion piece on this yesterday. The general take I got is that all money police or judiciary collect should go into the state's overall general fund, rather than going to the local government.
It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Leaving it in the general fund means the state could just grant that money back to the departments.
>
It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund.
Money is fungible, and if you fund some <good cause> with <particular tax/fee/whatever>, all that means is that funding that was previously earmarked for <good cause> would get spent on <some less good cause>.
The solution to highway robbery and grift is not earmarking revenue, the solution is hanging the robbers and grifters off the mile posts.
I second this. While we are at it, we should have a national registry for corrupt or abusive police and other government employees. Once you get on the registry it stays for some years and you get to enjoy the better salary levels of private employers in the meantime.
That’s why I only carry enough cash for what I need to spend on. This works great as a budgeting tool also. If you only have $50 cash, you would never end up spending more than that. That and a credit card as a backup in case a cop shows up…
I'm not fully understanding your point. Are you saying that we shouldn't have saner laws in Canada because a country somewhere else struggles with corruption?
No, I'm saying civil asset forfeiture on the basis that "cash kinda sus" (to borrow an expression) doesn't seem to be practiced elsewhere in the developed world to the extent that it's done in the US.
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?
Getting detained police after receiving your weekly/monthly cash payment would look very suspicious to Officer Friendly as, surely everyone would agree, only criminals carry that kind of cash around. There are many twists and turns down the slippery slope.
This is a straw-man argument that civil asset forfeiture is a reason to support cashless. Civil asset forfeiture applies to both cash and debit cards(do an AltaVista search about it). Also, I can’t decipher the contextual meaning of your last sentence.
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.
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 is just asking for brutal government overreach.
> 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]
Depending on your threshold for violence, the numbers could vary greatly, from a handful to several hundred.[2][3]
Regarding polling, there were a number of polls showing they didn't have broad support, especially as time went on.[4]
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 see in the huge crowds. This leads me to believe the incidents that did occur were isolated and not representative of the group as a whole.
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.
I don't believe there's a specific percentage, but for reference, I also believe the BLM protests were mostly peaceful, and I have plenty of video downloaded showing buildings burning and police cruisers being destroyed. Most of the BLM violence that occurred was initiated by police attempting to clear public spaces, including roads.
A crowd of people intent on harming others would be violent. I haven't seen any evidence that either protest included such crowds, police excepted.
The organizers of the protest were all different varieties of white supremacists, and their explicit goal was the dissolution of our democratically elected government.
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?
> 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?
Please quote the exact "mountain of evidence" in your link about the arson case.
All I see relevant to the convoy is the quote "when a group of men they believed to be convoy demonstrators". Ok, so they believed they were a part of the convoy. That's it?
If there is no other evidence in the arson case, then like I said it's nothing more than a smear campaign.
Then why did you say "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]" and link to the article as proof of violence committed by the convoy?
It was scariest to me because it was personal - I have friends who live currently adjacent to the building in question. Had they succeeded in their goal it's possible many people would have died and at that point it would have largely been irrelevant if they were members of the convoy or just opportunistic arsonists.
You'll also note I was careful in my wording ("nearby to the convoy") because that part is unclear. It's coincidental timing if it wasn't people participating convoy people. I already addressed this part though. I also provided a plethora of other examples.
I also didn't suggest that alone was "proof of violence committed by the convoy" -- Why have you avoided comment on the other links I provided?
No, poll after poll has shown that Canadians were overwhelmingly against the truckers [1], and a strong majority supported the use of the emergency act (there was even a point where bringing in the military polled quite strongly with Canadians). There have also been a multitude of reports of violence, including at least one case where protestors attempted to burn down an apartment complex with its residents locked inside [2]. I don’t think it’s possible to understate how poorly informed you are about this, and as a Canadian I really beg you to stop spreading misinformation like this.
Protections for rights like this don't exist to protect speech that is popular. They exist to protect speech that is UNPOPULAR, because that's the very speech that needs to be protected. Early civil rights movements were not popular, blocked roads, and sometimes ended in riots. The idea of "MLK led a march on the capital and everyone agreed because he was so peaceful :)" is propaganda. Creating inconvenience for people is the POINT of a protest - the freedom to "protest" as long as the police are OK and you stay in your protesting zone far away from where it would be too much trouble isn't a right to protest at all.
The fact that Canadians are largely against this has absolutely zero bearing on anything.
> at least one case where protestors attempted to burn down an apartment complex
On the footage, he described seeing two individuals lighting a fire in the lobby shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday. After the suspects leave, another individual is seen coming into view and quickly extinguishing the fire near the elevators, Munoz said.
...
Police have not confirmed any link between their investigation into this incident and the ongoing convoy protest.
>Police have not confirmed any link between their investigation into this incident and the ongoing convoy protest.
I invariably see some version of this post every single time somebody posts about the attempted arson.
Are you of the opinion that in order for something to be true that it has to be publicly confirmed by police? Do you consider the statement that you posted to be positive proof that the arsonists are _definitely not_ involved with the silly trucker tantrum?
No, I assume the arsonists might be from any population, not excluding the truckers. I think the facts of the matter don't support the claim that "protestors attempted to burn down an apartment complex."
Looking at the photos of the arsonists, I see one is ear-wearing a mask. Having a mask at all seems out of character for the trucker-protestors given other photojournalism. Maybe it was a disguise?
Why would anyone think it is rational to tie the arson attempt to protestors? Have other incidents of arson been coincidental to the protests as in Minneapolis and elsewhere?
In fact, arson attempts are so common in Ottawa that you could probably make the argument that the convoy was preventing arson from occurring. /s
The news reported that someone in the building had a confrontation with some of the protesters that day, and then there is video of someone trying to burn the building down. I wonder if it could be related. The facts of the matter are that there is no linkage to the truckers because the cops don't know who it is. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why don't we say instead that the occupation instead created an environment of lawlessness where the police had no control.
My anger isn't really placed at you, but I'm really sick of people from all over the internet telling the people who actually live in Ottawa that the protests have been peaceful. I wrote about this on my blog earlier this week: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/makeottawaboringagain. Everyone is keen to talk about what the truckers want, or what the government wants, but no one wants to talk about how the only people directly affected by the occupation are the people of Ottawa, who are faced with things like:
These things are obviously not okay and not signs of a peaceful protest. They should be beyond the pale for everyone. I'm working on a new article about the Emergency's Act and freezing bank accounts, and I think the government went too far, but that doesn't mean that any of the things that came before are acceptable.
> I'm really sick of people from all over the internet telling the people who actually live in Ottawa that the protests have been peaceful.
Your sickness is regrettable. It’s such a shame not everyone is on board with your pity-train of first world problems. Are you so out of touch that you even know what not-peace is?
An epistemologically closed assertion without evidence deserves pushback. I think you might agree with that given your lengthy response that barely addresses the claim at hand.
I doubt there was significant violence. If there had been, there'd be lots of criminal charges or video and photo evidence. The story you linked is vague and there's no evidence that people starting a fire in a building are linked to the protestors.
I agree with your other point, that Canadians largely oppose the protests.
What I don't understand is why the Emergency Act was invoked. I've heard no reasonsble explanation for why police couldn't disperse protestors blocking roads or arrest them and impound their vehicles if they refused to leave without the act.
You link to CNN and globalnews though. Not really unbiased sources. And I think we have learned about "polls" over the past few years, at least I have, in the US elections.
I have no doubt many Canadians are not happy about the protests. Maybe even most. But I don't believe these polls for one second. It looks like propaganda saying "see, everyone believes XX thing thing the government in power would like you to believe".
Jesus Christ, just go look at the Ipsos/Nanos polls. Do you think CNN made that up out of thin air? Those are reputable polling agencies. Barely 50% of CPC voters supported the convoy protestors methods.
I think those things are true, and I live in Canada.
I strongly support Trudeau's actions on this, and I'm sad that the government took so long to crack down on the "truckers". It's deeply damaging to civil society when a few extremists can shut down a city without consequences.
Suspending basic rights, the constitution, and due process without consequences over a protest is what's damaging to civil society. I'm genuinely baffled by how you can see protests as damaging to civil society but reacting to them by suspending the charter and using an act that has only been used in wars and armed insurrection before is perfectly healthy for our system. When has that ever happened in the western world before over a protest?
The gilets jaunes were miles ahead in terms of disturbance and there wasnt even a debate about "suspending" everyones rights until they stopped dissenting and being annoying. What a complete shame for canada and the nonchalant reactions like these make me even more impatient to leave this country as soon as I can get a new job. The recent events have been really eye opening.
> I'm genuinely baffled by how you can see protests as damaging to civil society
Protests that shut down cities and piss off residents for days/weeks at a time can be, particularly when the protestors break a ton of laws, urinate on the memorial to the unknown soldier, and the police aren't interested in fixing any of that.
> suspending the charter and using an act that has only been used in wars
The act has never been used before, AFAICT it's a new one, and it's specifically not about wars.
The current act is literally the replacement to the War Measures act... and of course it has never been used before since it was only created during the Mulroney era partly because Pierre Eliott Trudeau abused the original one during the October crisis. Kind of a pattern here.
So yes technically it's not the war measures act anymore but if let's say there was a war, they'd enact the same emergency measures law. There is no seperate law for war iirc but at least we get to say that we technically aren't under martial law (because we renamed it)
As a resident of the city in question, lets talk facts(whatever that means) if you care to read on..
Almost nothing was shut down as a result of this protest. You could travel over 99.5% of the city and forget a protest was taking place. Almost anything that was shut down, was shut down voluntarily.
Only the 3-4 blocks immediately adjacent to the Parliament buildings (where else do you go to protest your federal government's policies?) were partially blocked with parked vehicles (Mainly trucks, again very relevant to protesting a policy involving trucking.) This area is 90% + unoccupied government office space ( they work from home ). Almost all roads had at least one lane open for local traffic, and a route was cleared for members of parliament to be able to drive into work without obstruction.
A few residential side streets and a few high priced condo buildings were on the edge of this area. Those people did hear a lot of honking :( and perhaps had to see what people look like outside of their shiny city. I personally think that the important people in the high priced condos were a big reason why our local politicians were foaming at the mouth to wipe this group off the face of the planet.
The honking was mostly resolved by a court order to stop honking and after 2 weeks, the mayor actually talking to them to ask them to move; which they then did (pretty much).
While I had not been paying much attention, on Friday, my wife (muslim) who reads the news, was completely beside herself at the invasion of horrible violent people into the city and how minorities would have to go into hiding etc.. really total fear..
On Saturday, I took my wife and our kids to the protest to see this for ourselves (hard sell.) I was able to find parking without any issue or traffic about 10 minutes walk from parliament (there was space closer but blocked by police.) Once we got into the area near the parliament it was very loud and chaotic with the truck horns blasting (my kids enjoyed) and the smell of diesel fuel in the air (my wife did not enjoy.) But what we found were not angry people, but happy people. People made way for our stroller, help carry it up snowy stairs and thanked us for coming.
While I don't think my wife became a supporter, she certainly didn't have any further (irrational) fear of this group over the next 3 weeks, which we lived completely normally.
I'm not sure why it is so easy to hate people you have never met or care to meet, but it certainly not making this world a better place.
You must have skipped the parts of the "protest" that stretched way down streets like Kent St. and Metcalfe St. No fancy condos down there. Just cheaper apartments. That's where the problems were happening. If it had just been limited to the stretch of Wellington in front of Parliament, it wouldn't have been a big deal.
But streets like Kent, Metcalfe, and O'Connor (and the cross streets between them) where the noise and diesel exhaust were messing up people's lives. I'm sorry, but honking your air horn for 10 minutes in a residential neighbourhood is a criminal offense. And it's not like you're sticking it to the elite, here. Somerset Ward is one of the lowest-income wards in the city. Only Vanier is lower, and not by much.
Your dismissal of this as only affecting a few high-priced condos and side streets is shocking. The affected area was nowhere near 90% government buildings. For example, this section of Kent was full of protest vehicles making noise at all hours:
I know it's easy to dismiss the people living downtown when you live out in Barrhaven or Kanata, but I'm saddened by your callous disregard for your fellow citizens living in a low-income part of the city. Just because you don't notice them, it doesn't mean they aren't there.
I don't mean for any of this to be pejorative; it just sounds like you're someone living in a suburban part of the city who went to the protest, walked around the party zone, and assumed that stretch of Metcalfe/Rideau represented the entire thing.
There are many many low income housing buildings in Centerrown. It's interesting to me that you characterize the condo inhabitants as rich people while it's actually cheaper to buy a condo downtown than to buy a house in Barrhaven in the suburbs! All the rich people are actually living in mansions away from Centertown.
The injunction worked for 2 days, but the lack of enforcement meant that it was blaring horns again in no time. I'm glad your children enjoyed the brief trip. I think a lot of people there were actually just curious spectators there for a few hours to party. I live about a kilometre from the parliament and I could still hear the honking. A friend of a friend had to arrange for their kid to relocate because it was impossible to sleep.
I'm not sure how you read hate into this. It's pretty simple. You break the law, you pay the price. I can't stop my car on a local bridge or by the border and block the road. The police will come and if I don't move my car they'll eventually smash the window and drag me out and then tow the car away.
Nobody hates anyone. Well, that's not true, some people do hate and we've seen some of that. But hate or not hate is orthogonal.
Protest is fine when you don't break the law.
And happy not angry people, seriously? You gotta be at least a little bit angry to park your truck on the street for 3 weeks? You'd think anyways. The things people do when they're happy.
Protests mostly happen when the law sucks. My country also only allows permitted protest, but it also is a shitty country regarding civil rights. Trump would call it a shithole country and some would be offended by that. He is technically correct though.
If I don't like traffic laws, let's say it really annoys me to drive slowly on residential streets, is it ok for me to go downtown and start smashing the windows of all stores on main street? I'm protesting so it's fine to break the law?
People implying that Canada doesn't have civil rights seem to mostly not be from here and they've no idea what they're talking about. Rights are balanced with responsibilities. I too would prefer not to have police, not to have laws, and just have everyone behave themselves. Unfortunately people have a tendency not to do that. That's why we can't have good things.
So I assume you were equally outraged not long ago at the blocking of rail lines by indigenous / environmental activists?
The truckers were not violent. For real violence, look at the ax-wielding attackers in the recent incident at the gas pipeline site in BC.
It is frightening how you and many other people so easily absorb state propaganda. Try thinking a bit about the circumstances here. Why did Trudeau go out of his way to falsely characterize the truckers as homophobic racist Nazis, while refusing to discuss any of their legitimate concerns? Why did Trudeau invoke the Emergency Act after the the peaceful resolution to the blocking of Ambassador Bridge (which was the most economically damaging part of the protest)?
It seems quite likely that Trudeau was hoping for violence. Hoping that insulting the truckers would provoke them. Hoping that clearing the Ambassador Bridge blockage would involve violence. But when that failed to happen, he invoked the Emergency Act anyway, even though clearing the remaining protesters from Ottawa was then accomplished more-or-less peacefully with ordinary police tactics. Trudeau (or his handlers, he's not particularly smart himself) are clearly delighted to have the opportunity to establish a precedent for increasing state power, and for making everyone think twice before offering any support for any dissent group, lest their life be destroyed. Of course, "dissident" groups that are actually in line with the government's agenda are safe...
Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack. It's hard enough to keep these threads from incinerating themselves even without that.
Yeah I think people forget that the protestors were making life miserable for tens of thousands of people with their incessant honking at all hours of the night. The rail protests just gummed up supply chains, this was actually harassing people.
not to mention the cancer patients in their death beds at the bruyere hospital... fighting to stay alive with 90+ db horns going for multiple hours along the streets
Mark, I respect you and I enjoy reading your thoughtful messages on HN. I think you're missing a bit of context.
I doubt many truckers were violent, but the truckers weren't the only one there. Their presence created a center of gravity that attracted many hangers-on, and from what I have seen, they've been the source of most of the problems.
Also, it's not really about violence. It's about needlessly harming innocent citizens. Although this is happening right near Parliament, it's one of the poorest wards in the city. This isn't a neighbourhood full of the liberal elite sipping lattes while they work from home. It's students, and shift works, and retail workers just trying to live their lives.
Turn your sound on/up to get a sense of what that was like. Do you want to live in a society where that is ever okay in the name or protest? I sure don't.
And that was filmed from a building a couple of hundred meters away from the trucks that were parked up Kent St. How do you think it felt for people living in these apartments right on Kent:
For what it's worth (and I realize it's a small sample of a small portion of the population, so maybe it's not worth much), my friends in neighbours in my small Ontario town were initially generally supportive of what they saw as the truckers' core message, because "it's time to end vaccine mandates for truckers re-entering Canada" is a completely reasonable topic of protests. It's a good time to have that conversation.
But the protest quickly evolved into something larger and messier than that core message, and sentiment in my small town quickly soured against the protest. What I've heard is recent conversations is that people feel the protest had lost the plot, the actions of some of the attendees in harming local citizens were beyond the pale, and it was time for the protest to end.
There have been some objections to the way police ended the protest, but it looked relatively tame in comparison to other protest breakups here in recent memory like the Toronto homeless camps last summer, or the Montreal student protests, or the G20 protests. That's not to say it was done perfectly.
I used to live a few blocks from Parliament Hill, and everybody living there is used to protests. We think protests are good and healthy and even necessary, even if we disagree with the protestors. This one quickly evolved into something beyond mere protest and turned residents against the protest who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its message.
Lists like that are, of course, one-sided. It's up to you how much of that information you choose to see as credible. Just realize that as someone from outside Canada, you're probably seeing a filtered version of events. That list above is also a filtered version of events, but it's a very different filter. Look at it through enough filters and you'll probably end up with a more complete understanding.
Personally, I watched some of the live streams to learn more about the protests and hear from some of the actual truckers. Danny and Czaba and the couple from Saskatchewan with the puppies seemed like good people with legitimate grievances to protest about. At the same time, no amount of goodness makes the harm caused to local residents okay. I know it's easy to come down strongly on one side or the other of this, but I see the whole thing as a crappy tragedy for everyone involved.
As for the government's response to all of this - we'll have plenty of opportunities to voice our opinion at the ballot box. Municipal and Provincial governments should have been able to manage this protest from the start without needing the feds to step in, and we have municipal and provincial elections this year. And with a minority government federally, we could have an election there at any time as well. Realistically it's unlikely we'll see one before next year - but we'll still get to express ourselves soon enough.
There's something I've learned about the HN crowd through this, that's for sure. Many here were supportive of the attempt at a christo-fascist uprising in Canada. Very thiely of y'all.
In Canada, popular support for the convoy was around 30%, but it's a little more nuanced than that. Most are sick and tired of the health measures (duh) but very few actually approve of the way in which the protesting was carried out.
EDIT: The downvotes kind of drive my point home. Thanks!
Bitcoin increases the chances of a dystopian authoritarian future happening, precisely because for the most part the use cases where it actually works better than the regular banking system are when someone is trying to evade the law.
Proponents like to imagine that people using it to evade the law will mostly be using it to evade unpopular laws such as laws that restrict civil rights, but I thinking they are being way too optimistic. There are far more people who are simply criminals and fraudsters who need to evade popular laws in order to blackmail or steal from or scam ordinary people than people who need to evade unpopular unjust laws.
This will lead to public support for laws that extend things like KYC down to even small ordinary transactions and the government knowing how much you have and how much you spend and where it all came from and where it all goes. To make that work the government will need a lot more surveillance but the public will be fine with that.
"This will lead to public support for laws that extend things like KYC down to even small ordinary transactions and the government knowing how much you have and how much you spend and where it all came from and where it all goes. To make that work the government will need a lot more surveillance but the public will be fine with that.'
Just recently we've had scandals with Credit Suisse and HSBC banking criminals and laundering drug money, add in all the tax heavens which are fully in UK/US jurisdiction and I think total volume of bitcoin transactions willvpale in comparison
> There are far more people who are simply criminals and fraudsters who need to evade popular laws in order to blackmail or steal from or scam ordinary people than people who need to evade unpopular unjust laws.
Bless your heart. I hope you can preserve that innocence for many years to come — nobody in Venezuela or Argentina has the luxury of such ignorance†. So, even though I hope you can, I hope you choose not to.
One correction, though: the people who were donating to the truckers' protest weren't evading any laws. Rather, the government is evading laws in its illegal crackdown, and Bitcoin is providing a means to limit its unlawful powers.
______
† Of course, not all of them think Bitcoin is a good idea! And they might be right.
> But the why are crypto and NFTs bad? It's like they're socially destructive and they represent crypto. I really want to stress that NFTs are an extension of crypto and crypto is a socially destructive experiment that goes to great lengths to concentrate even more wealth and even more power into the hands of the few. They're deflationary by design, which traps -- so the long-term outcome of these would be that late comers, which -- you have to consider that, oh, well, what does a late adopter look like in crypto? And it's like well, if we're talking on a timeline, its people who are kids right now. So let's imagine this hypothetical future where where crypto becomes like mainstream. Let's say it wins and it takes over. Well, it's like, oh, well, you should have bought in early. It's like, well I couldn't buy in early. I was five. I now have to buy in late because the passage of time dictates it. And it's like, Ok, how is it going to behave when those people have to buy in? And it's like, oh, not good, not well. It's going to be terrible. And deflationary economies trap ordinary people into irrecoverable cycles of debt that just leads towards serfdom.
Bitcoin probably is deflationary, though, like gold. We should take seriously the prospect that Bitcoin will return us to some aspects of the economic regime that was in effect during the time of the gold standard, roughly 700 BCE to either 1933 or 1971 CE.
How are there so many comments that don't seem to understand you can have both. YOU can keep using cards for literally everything. Cash just need to exist and businesses should be forced to take it. That doesn't mean YOU have to use cash. YOU can live happily without it and use cards but the less well off should still have the right to use cash. But just because they may sometimes use cash that doesn't mean that YOU will be forced to carry cash. If cash exists that doesn't mean you have to use it. Why does it need to go into a permanent record that I gave my friend $10? Just to reiterate one last time... you can keep ignoring cash and live happily even if cash is around.
As a small business owner, why do I need to deal with the extra expense of taking cash? I need to hold a float, take security measures to protect it, take time to count up, take time to go to a physical bank to deposit, all sorts of extra costs in staffing or just plain time. And all for a fraction of a percentage of my customer base.
It just doesn't make sense and I don't see why I should carry that burden.
So cash not only grants people freedom and anonymity, it also creates local jobs instead of moving money as arbitrary transaction fees into the pockets of a credit card duopoly? Sounds terrible.
Something just short-circuited here. So, plain act of talking money from your customer is... inefficiency?
What kind of business are you thinking about? Online-only?
> So, plain act of talking money from your customer is... inefficiency?
Hey, bit of a late reply, but yes.
You need to keep a float to provide change, you need security measures around your float and your takings. You have to count and reconcile the cash at the beginning and end of the day. Someone has to take it to the bank. Banks charge businesses for handling cash deposits. You need a cash register too! Which implies space as well as expense. There are many costs around a business taking cash.
Clearly, taking cards isn't free either, but it's often missed when people moan about card fees that sure, if someone gives you the cash for your goods, you have the cash now. But you don't just stuff it in your pocket forever, and credit card fees often come in cheaper than the cash handling costs mentioned above. People like to say that hiding card fees is evil, and cash customers are subsidizing credit card prices, but often it's the reverse that's true. While there may not be a per-transaction charge you can point to, overall costs to a business for cash are non-negligible.
Apparently this was a major driver behind the "Cashback" model in the UK in the 1990s when supermarkets started to be able to perform a cash withdrawal as part of your food purchasing transaction - it saved you a trip to the ATM, but more importantly for them it cut their handling costs and security requirements.
I've interacted with a few IRL businesses that don't do cash at all. Many food vans in London when I worked there were operating with a phone and a square reader only. This morning I bought a doughnut from a new doughnut shop here in Western Australia, and they run the business from an iPad on a stand and a similar reader. Any lost business from not taking cash is clearly not important enough for them to take on the added costs and problems.
As a small business owner, why do I need to deal with the extra expense of accepting handicapped customers? I need to build a ramp, take preemptive measures to make it accessible in the weather, take time to wait for them to wheel across the office, take time to teach my employees how to be accommodating of them, all sorts of extra costs in staffing or just plain time. And all for a fraction of a percentage of my customer base.
It just doesn't make sense and I don't see why I should carry that burden.
And if we put 'black people' in there you could make me look like a racist too! Wow.
There are many reasons your allegory doesn't apply - 'people who want to pay cash' are not a protected class. Serving people with disabilities doesn't put me at risk of theft either, nor does it increase my banking costs.
You're going to have to show some pretty good evidence of a positive social outcome to make this persuasive, because it is adding a big burden to business. (And unbanked figures in the US are not that - US society is very backward in its attitudes to banking and payments, and in giving access to banking to everyone)
All protected classes are protected classes because society agreed that they should be and codified those beliefs into law.
The argument that is being made is that people who want to pay cash should be a protected class, with their ability to transact protected in law, so that every participant in society may benefit from those rights should they ever be needed.
If you're not going to service black people I might just have to think you are a racist. Just like if you refuse to serve the handicapped or LGBTQ I might think you are bigoted. And if you refuse to service people that use cash I might also make some further assumptions.
I don’t know how Trudeau/Freeland could possibly be this idiotic. The protestors played it smart - they were peaceful yet strategic in blocking major import/export roads so the government actually felt the pain. Instead of even talking to them, the government permanently damaged a large number of peoples trust in any financial institutions.
As a practical matter, how do I begin to move towards unseizable assets? Crypto is popular but several crypto wallets were frozen as well, including a Monero wallet. All crypto exchanges in Canada require KYC. Literal cash or precious metal is maybe an option but getting through an airport with a bag of $50K in cash wouldn’t be easy or safe, especially when you land in another country which might have open corruption and you’re not a citizen.
The emergency wasn't a bunch of churchy rednecks blocking roads, silly.
The emergency was Ottawa police doing nothing, Windsor police doing nothing, OPP doing nothing, RCMP doing nothing, Ontario provincial govt doing nothing, Alberta provincial govt doing nothing -- for almost a month. We came really close to a crisis of faith in our system of governance. The federal govt (in my opinion) didn't have much of a choice but to bring out the big guns.
It just demonstrates to me how broken politics are in this country, that individual politicians are so focused on their own advancement that they could not see they were endangering the very system they're parasites of.
>The protestors played it smart - they were peaceful yet strategic in blocking major import/export roads so the government actually felt the pain.
You have to understand that this is not one group of protestors. The border blockades were cleared without the emergency act. The emergency act was used specifically against the protestors by parliament in ottawa. The government used using a CBC article talking about threat of border blockades to justify using this emergency act against the protestors in ottawa who had nothing to do with the border blockades.
It's like using actions of a third party in new york to justify quashing protestors in washington DC. and the NDP helped the Liberals pass it. The Liberals should be required to change their party name to something else, because they aren't.
I am not a believer in crypto but the current government here is convincing me quickly.
What happens when it's not the government doing it? What happens when Facebook's algorithms decide to cut you off from your friends? Or when Google decides to cut you off from your emails and cloud storage? When payment processors decide to kick your business off their network?
The laws always have carve-outs for national security. What if the orders to deny you banking or travel or communications that come prior to a trial come from the state itself?
Agreed. Laws work when there is a shared ethical base between the People and the governments that represent them. Unfortunately, there isn't, if there ever was. The very idea that just because there's a law means 1) it's ethical, and 2) it'll be ethically enforced is foolish. I wish it weren't as I consider myself a highly ethical person. That doesn't mean I'll deny reality.
I'm in agreement with the article and the linked Twitter thread about the dangers of a cashless society. Cashless is a place where I've definitely done a 180 - even 5 years ago I would have been 100% for a cashless and crypto based society.
In addition to the power it would give governments and mobs as the article points out, there's already a growing group that's increasingly locked out of society as we transition to a more digital world: people in poverty and the undocumented (often one and the same). You can imagine how a cashless society can create increasing feedback loops of poverty as more and more goods and services are unobtainable to people on the bottom rungs of society.
Some seriously questionable decisions have been made by executive branches in the last few years. Just to name one other that sticks out to me, though less severe, IMO the mayor of LA should not be able to unilaterally order utilities to turn off water and power to peoples' houses.[1]
I'm really happy to see that many people from many places on the political landscape see "debanking" as a line that should not be crossed.
A great point I overheard recently was that this precedent is likely to be used in Canada against indigenous peoples protesting resource extraction and other incursions onto their land. Now a blockade can be a "terrorist act," etc., and their finances can be frozen among other things. This power is not just going to be used against some wacky antivax truckers this one time and then forgotten about.
I dislike the term "financial deplatforming" quite a bit as it minimizes the severity of freezing someone's assets. This isn't like being kicked off a media platform. Having your assets frozen doesn't just deprive you of your livelihood but also prevents you from defending yourself since lawyers cost money. It's one step short of imprisonment.
It's also being done by the government. Get kicked off a private platform by the owners and you can just go elsewhere. That's not the case if the government is seizing your assets and also says its illegal for anyone else to do business with you.
I think this is a misinterpretation. The exemption applies only to the new regulations regarding entry to the country, probably because there are some cross-border reserves.
It is, however, very likely that these new powers will be applied selectively, not according to how disruptive protesters are, but according to whether their message is congenial to those in power.
> I'm really happy to see that many people from many places on the political landscape see "debanking" as a line that should not be crossed.
It depends on the politics of the people involved. The Obama DOJ executed Operation Choke Point nearly a decade back.[1]
> Critics of the operation accuse it of bypassing due process; the government is pressuring the financial industry to cut off the companies' access to banking services including access to capital, without first having shown that the targeted companies are violating the law. Critics also say that "it's a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn't like, such as gun sellers and coal producers."
The danger from being infected from germs or viruses through cash is highly overrated.
Studies have shown that among bank notes, microorganisms can survive for a significant time only on bank notes made of polymer. Most bank notes in the world, including US dollar bills, are made of cotton, linen or a blend of the two whereon microorganisms tend to dry out more quickly.
Copper is antimicrobial, and that includes "gold" coins, of copper alloy. Most "silver" coins, including those in circulation in the US and most of the EU are of copper alloys too. Steel coins are not so good though.
The antimicrobial effect doesn't work if the coin isn't freshly polished. Be that as it may, money is just as much a disease vector as anything multiple people touch. Risk of life and all that...
> The CDC said people generally don’t get COVID-19 from touching surfaces. People generally get COVID-19 from direct contact with someone who is infected or through airborne transmission.
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 day, and the next they brought in armoured vehicles and riot squads. If the police had consistently written tickets and made arrests from the start of the protest it likely would not have grown as large as it did.
Presently, Trudeau is keeping the Emergencies Act in effect, not because there is an ongoing emergency, but because there might be. He's argued that some of the protesters have not left Ottawa and might return to the protest site if given the chance to do so, but there is nothing in the Emergency act that is required for the police to maintain peace and order. Trudeau wants the act to remain in effect for other reasons apparently.
The opposition is introducing a motion in parliament to end the Act, but that will likely fail unless Trudeau loses the NDP's support. However, the senate could also end the Act at any time. Given that the emergency is over they should do just that. It is entirely unclear what Trudeau hopes to accomplish by holding onto these powers.
Is it really unclear? There are examples from other countries. Erdogan got emergency powers during a coup and continued to hold on to them for a long time and before finally giving up, he made enough changes in the constitution and law that effectively he retains all of them.
I see the same pattern here. I would be surprised if there is going to be another PM ever in Canada. If it sounds ridiculous, think about the fact that current government is a Minority one. The way they gather support is by showing carrot and stick to the rest of the parties. And these emergency powers are a big stick just waiting to be used at the right time.
I'm sorry but it does sound ridiculous, ridiculous beyond belief. I think the words "get a hold of yourself" are appropriate here. Using emergency powers to clear away a disruptive protest (which stretches the definition substantially, in that it was blocking streets and border crossings) is hardly dictator for life material.
Do you know what "minority government" means? It means that if he loses support of the other parties he's toast.
Come back to us and tell us about "no more PMs in Canada" when he's had his mob stage a January the 6th style event and he refuses to step aside in the face of an election.
It was suspicious from the get go. Trudeau insulting a movement which are peacefully against specific government programs (legit by any democratic standard), virtually disappearing (modulo sporadic casual insults) and then refusing to re-assess the mandates, or even talk to the organizers – despite the pandemic getting better and research showing vaccines being close to worthless for preventing spread. It's not uncommon that politicians are so tonedeaf and insulated from the people they govern, but with Trudeau's background, I find it hard to believe he would misjudge and respond to the situation so badly, if he genuinely wanted a resolution. It almost seems like they were welcoming civil unrest in order to suddenly show up as saviors once regular people with no dog in the fight got tired enough, and use the opportunity to expand their authority – a "bring it on" mindset. In either case, the timing of such reckless politics couldn't be worse, given the toll the pandemic has had on all of us.
I don't generally agree with these protestors, but the government's approach to shutting them down is a major threat to freedom in Canadian society.
Freezing their bank accounts when they have not been proven guilty of any crime is an abuse of power.
Interfering with the social funding drives of a political resistance movement sets a precedent that might affect all political protest in the future.
I don't know what to think of the staged media campaign smearing people for bringing their kids to a protest. Should the state be able prevent you from exposing your kids to your deepest convictions? Maybe they should have smeared my parents for taking me to church, women's centers, and union picnics.
If the police and government had taken the appropriate steps at the outset of this protest (parking tickets, towing vehicles, laying charges for blocking streets), none of this would be even close to necessary now. But as the article points out, that would be very visible, and would require a bit of political courage.
Freezing bank accounts when you have not been convicted of a crime happens all the time and is the way things have to work. If you let money flow freely in the banking system contingent on criminal convictions any old drug cartel could pay you a million bucks after you serve your time to let 100 million flow through your accounts or whatever. If you can't freeze accounts without an arrest that is already too slow. It is the way the banking system already works.
There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders. Kids come to protests all the time, it is not a big deal, but when the cops hand out flyers telling you that you have to leave and you don't, keeping your kids there with you, you are going to get some extra attention - it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable.. if the cops had handed you a flyer saying they were going to forcibly remove your picket line soon.
I agree that early enforcement may have made a difference - but it is clear from the reporting that towing vehicles at the outset was never an option - the towing firm that moved a shack /at the request of the protestors/ received a huge amount of harassment. In other cities pre-emptive measures were successful - sometimes by the police and sometimes by citizens. In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.
>Freezing bank accounts when you have not been convicted of a crime happens all the time and is the way things have to work.
>It is the way the banking system already works.
Okay, sure. So your argument boils down to that's the way it is and it's practical.
>There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders.
At the point when the reporting on kids began on every network, there were no emergency orders.
>it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable..
Fair. Point taken.
>In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.
I remember the police presence at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, and the WTO in Montreal. It seems like these protesters got a lot more leeway.
So there may be people that usually don't use cash, that made a small donation for something they believe in (a non violent protest), and are now unable to pay for their food, rent, car gas, medication… All of this without any trial, without being able to defend/explain themself. How is this a democracy?
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 Emergencies Act to help authorities deal with convoy protests do not affect donors to the protests, despite unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP that a constituent had her bank account frozen over a $50 contribution.
> “At no time, did we provide a list of donors to Financial Institutions,” the RCMP said in a statement Monday. [1]
If anything this reinforces the author's point about the dangers of lack of transparency of "digital jail". How do we know that statement is true? It's hard to hide who has been jailed (though "disappearances" come close), whereas we have no choice but to take the word of the entity which we have granted unchecked power that it has not abused that power.
There's also plenty of wiggle room in their statement - they said they froze the accounts of "influencers" and people they "suspect" committed illegal acts. If it turns out they did in fact freeze someone who just donated, they didn't technically lie if they can fit them into one of those vague groups.
It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse. How many more examples do we need before the opposite is assumed?
Eh. With 7.8 billion people on this planet, there is so much going on that you can find examples to support any narrative.
Want examples to show governments tend toward corruption? Easy. Want examples showing governments working well? Sure! Examples showing citizens exercising power? Yep. Examples showing citizens being crushed under the heel of their government? We have that too! Black people being killed by police? Sure! White people being killed by police? That happens too! How about police getting attacked by civilians? Google has you covered.
> How many more examples do we need
If you go looking for examples to support your narrative, you'll always find them. We need data and analysis. And no, the plural of anecdote isn't data.
I feel like if this actually happened to any one of the protestors, that person would be all over social media publicizing this. So far, to my knowledge, that has not happened.
> It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse.
Shouldn't we be talking about what actually happened, though, instead of buying into a false narrative that is being intentionally pushed by people with an agenda? I agree that freezing the bank account of a student in Halifax because they made a small donation to the convoy protest would be an abuse of power. But since that's not what happened, despite the fact that various people with a beef with Canada/Trudeau/liberals/etc. are claiming it did, what exactly are we debating here?
We know that, after a period of weeks and after economic losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the government has gone after the principal people organizing and financing the blockades and occupations. They have used force and arrested some of them. They have frozen the accounts of others. We can argue about whether or not those actions constitute "egregious human rights violations", because then we're arguing about actual facts and actual decisions, not strawmen.
We are arguing that government is lying as it has done over and over and 1000 * over and that it did freeze accounts of random donors. Maybe they call them influencers lol because they have a IM account and 100 followers
I also feel logically, I don't see a motivate, small donors would only be cause for political complications. Logically it would make sense for them to restrict it to the people actually blocking roads with their trucks and to big donors financing large sums of money.
Where else should we go to but the official information? I agree it's not great and as faulty as humans so where can I find information about these things that is great and not faulty?
> If anything this reinforces the author's point about the dangers of lack of transparency of "digital jail". How do we know that statement is true?
If a crucial part of your argument is the epistemological claim that we obviously can't trust anyone who presents evidence or arguments that we don't like because they could be lying, then there's clearly no way of having a reasoned discussion.
My claim is that when evaluating when an authority's actions were reasonable, we should lend little to no credence to statements by that same authority claiming the actions were reasonable, especially when it is impossible to verify even who exactly was targeted, let alone why.
As a contrasting case, if a police department arrested some people during a protest and released a statement about why, a journalist could verify that against the public records and even follow along the criminal proceedings. How can we verify claims made by the RCMP about their extrajudicial actions?
But that's not what happened? The authority did not come out and say "we did this and we were right to do so!", they came out and said "this did not happen".
In this case, the statement was backed up by an ADM in front of a parliamentary committee. If she lied, someone will be able to show proof of that. At minimum, it would end her career.
The claim isn’t that broad. The democratic model of society has never trusted executive government to dispense justice unilaterally. Having due process and an open system of courts is a mandatory feature of the democratic society, and when a government decides to suspend those safeguards, that governments own commentary about how little harm it’s decisions are causing do not have any credibility.
Not a single charter right has been overridden. Every act undertaken under the EA is on the official record (available to the opposition parties). Parliament can revoke or partially revoke any component of the EA at any juncture. Then it has a followup discussion/analysis phase built in.
Let's be clear -- there is no silencing component to this act. If someone has unfairly seen their accounts frozen, do a tell-all sad tale to every media outlet you can find. Rant on twitter. Share those Facebook pages. There are plenty of outlets that would love it. There are political parties who would make this their battle cry, using it to seal their own ascension.
But there isn't a single case. Not one. No sad tales. Now accounts have been frozen -- we know that for sure -- but the people whose accounts have been frozen have been organizers and direct participants. People who knew what was coming and had literally weeks of warning to stop or face consequences. There isn't a lot of sympathy there. But the poor waitress in some small town who gave $20...boy, that story will give this country a new government.
> Nobody called the EA when BLM was destroying businesses
You've mentioned BLM multiple times. BLM protests in Canada were a momentary point event and the total sum of damage was minuscule (not the "billions" you claimed in another post). Why would the EA or SoE be called for a momentary event? One that isn't making promises about not leaving. Of "holding the line". Sorry, your own rhetoric and bombast got used against you.
A single day of the Windsor bridge blockade eclipsed that total in damages by magnitudes. As did a single day of the Ottawa insurrection. They might not have been breaking windows, but the damage was enormous. The cost to businesses, in policing, and to commerce was enormous. Now add that the convoy and its supporters were openly advocating terroristic threats against service providers that cooperate with the police (e.g. towing companies), which it should be noted is itself an incredibly serious crime, but that just got normalized.
> Or this tweet by the Ottawa Police?
Are you referring to the sadly pathetic lawyer basically police-car-chasing for clients to grift? Because you know the Ottawa Police tweet was spot on. Just as they gave plenty of warnings. And just to be clear, it is critically important that defense lawyers and civil liberty groups push the government and fight for every right, but citing this guy and his obvious grift, or his pander-to-the-crowd "but you can't do that!!!" routine, is not convincing.
As a protip, when you put dozens of links -- most of them completely unconvincing nonsense -- in your posts, it just looks crazy. It doesn't make your point.
This is indeed a problem. We have major news outlets who function as propaganda mouthpieces of regimes. They're happy to carry the water for the regime and declare "nothing to see here!" and these days, they often do it with a "fact check". For the unsophisticated reader, this is very effective.
I have a hard time following this discussion because people are throwing around pretty dramatic statements without pause.
> It's hard to hide who has been jailed
None of the “influencers” we talk about are jailed. Nor does having your money frozen mean “jail”. It sure can be really bad and not without consequences, but even fully IRL we wouldn’t describe someone having all his possessions taken as jailed.
Then govs have been freezing account under many pretenses for decades, except we now have a chance to get the affected people to come forward and explain they’re getting shafted. That wouldn’t happen a few decades ago, there was no way the local news would touch a story about some random peeps getting frozen under a terrorist charge for instance. Do you really think it’s worse now for activists than decades ago ?
Facts are important, and so is language. The RCMP claim they provided a list of "influencers". The problem with that denial is that the set of all people who influenced the protest includes the set of all donors. In other words, it doesn't matter if they didn't share a list of donors if the list they did share includes all of the donors.
You can get yourself all twisted up in semantics if you want.. lots of people seem to be arguing all sorts of goofy stuff - Canadians that work in the banking sector actually know the government is telling the truth. That is what is actually going on.
Except most mainstream news said that the frozen accounts were made for donations made retro-actively before the Emergency Act. This is a matter of public notoriety as this point.
The media may have reported what the person said / claimed happened. What actually happened may have been different.
> However, Jacques said some bank account holders may still be subject to other court orders freezing their assets.
> The province of Ontario won an order on Feb. 10 that froze the distribution of funds raised through the American online funding platform, GiveSendGo. And on Feb. 17 a group of Ottawa citizens, businesses, and employees who are suing key organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy 2022 won a sweeping order to preserve their ability to recover damages.
[…]
> The emergency financial orders took effect on Feb. 15, and Jacques made clear it has no retroactive effect, so that anyone who donated to crowdfunding platforms prior to Feb. 15 should not be captured by the order, she said.
Hangon. The reason this shitstorm kicked up in the first place, and was getting retweeted by PG, Sam Altman, and lots of reasonable people (not to mention provoking the libertarian wing to frothing at the mouth), was that the deputy PM said:
"The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts will be frozen."
So I think it's not fair to dismiss this as fake news coming from "unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP" as your comment seems to do. The story came from the government's own deputy PM!
In the video, the deputy PM sounded like she was being vague, either obfuscating or because she was out of depth on the specifics. So if this statement wasn't true as-quoted (maybe she mis-spoke or wasn't precise), then that's great news.
So, maybe it is actually true that they did not share names with the banks. But I think it would be quite naive to take the latest claim at face value, after all they did make a contradictory claim previously. This is the sort of thing governments lie about and try to spin their way out of all the time. It's entirely plausible that they did share the info, did not expect the blowback they got, and are now in damage control mode trying to walk this back and pretend it didn't happen.
It's not fake news, they did freeze some accounts, people are arguing which account was frozen, was it only that of people who illegally block major roads and boarder crossings as part of the tricker protest, and/or did they also include small donors to their funds, and/or only large donors, but then what is the threshold for small/large, and/or did they also include collateral of people who might have been peacefully protesting alongside the truckers illegally blocking roads and boarder crossings.
The article makes the point that it's is dangerous to not have some limitations on over reach in this case.
For example, in a protest, you might get physically tear gased or jailed, but it's temporary, and eventually you get due process and can be released, and your tears from tear gas will dissipate. Yet the nature of it is that police punishes you before you've been convinced in a court, so there's collateral damage, people who did nothing wrong are hit and tear gased and arrested by the police, and it's a big deal each time it happens.
Here too, there could very well be this sort of collateral, but the article worries that since it's less visible in nature, that people might not see it as a big deal, the same way that they would if they'd see police throwing tear gas, hitting people and arresting people left and right.
So it's saying, there's a possibility of overreach and collateral, but it might create less of a concern from citizens towards the government, since they won't notice the blast radius, as it is harder to notice it.
It's a good argument to some extent, even if in this case there would have been zero overreach and collateral, it is still a good argument for next time where there could be some.
1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.
2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.
The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.
> 1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this.
This is a fundamental mistake. Just as you can't take your experiences from (let's say) IBM and assume that Google (or a startup, or a family business) operates in the same way, you can't take your experiences from the US government and assume that every other government works in the same way. As the only (mostly) democratic superpower, the US is a category of its own. It has global ambitions, and its government serves many purposes apart from the interests of its citizens. Other governments exist for other reasons and serve other purposes.
I'm not familiar with Canada. I don't know how its government operates or whether you should trust its word. However, I know that in another country, it's never "the government" that speaks but a specific agency or a specific official. Those all have known reputations and known biases. An informed person can often say with reasonable certainty whether you can take the government's word at face value.
As a Canadian it’s like living with a bunch of lunatics and I can not believe so many people are okay with this. All I can say is I will never miss an election again. We need Trudeau gone badly but he has a lot of support from the east and no other party is positioned to beat him in an election. The ndp have sided with him on so many things I can no longer vote for them and the choices are limited.
The fact that they are so angry at these truckers they are willing to give up due process in a court of law and think it is such a good thing the government can swoop in and freeze someone’s money. I think it is very dangerous and worry some unhinged person will lose it and go from protesting to attacking. I didn’t donate to these truckers and I never participated in any protests so suppose I don’t have to worry this time. I also like to point out that yes the truckers were breaking the law. This angers people so much. I always like to remind them breaking the law is actually an unsung right we have as Canadians. Yes we can go to jail but we are not put in a chair and tortured or killed or have our family rounded up and executed. And this is a good thing. It was only in the 1970s that Canada last locked up a man for life after his third offence for being gay. So thankfully people fought those laws and protested in the streets openly gay which was illegal. So personally I don’t know if I support these truckers but if they are willing to break the law and be arrested for what they believe in by defying an order to leave then I think it is great. I do not condone violence however and the few fringe protesters doing dumb things should be arrested and charged. But standing in the street refusing to leave that’s something we should be thankful we can do.
I think it's important that we draw a line in the sand about what is acceptable behaviour in society.
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
Would you have supported the US government applying the metrics for when protests should be shut down, and all financial supporters have their accounts frozen without due process. for the BLM protests in summer 2020?
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero
career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
He speaks in this syrupy, soothing voice that makes me think I'm listening to NPR (it's the public news radio here in the states, infamous for its sleep inducing qualities). But that NPR voice is saying incredibly misleading, demagogue-like statements that are the hallmark of authoritarian leanings. It's almost preferable if someone who sounds like Trump says he's going to implement a program to freeze bank accounts with no court review, because at least you expect it from a guy who speaks like a dictator. With Trudeau, it's like the optics of his appearance and demeanor blind a large subset of the population to what he's actually doing.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and the current governing party -- the ones who take all of the heat for every abuse -- are a minority government. They can fall at a moment's notice. Prime Minister in Canada isn't King, and instead is far less powerful than, for instance, the US president.
Yet *not a single case has been brought forward*. A couple of Conservative MPs have vaguely alluded to cases -- ones with almost no details, yet the few details that are brought up don't match any known donor lists (e.g. "Briane from Chilliwack") -- yet despite this being such an incredible hammer to take down this government, crickets.
So yes, I'll take the government's position on this.
"seal-clapping"
Ah, yes, "seal-clapping". That surely conveys the sincerity of your comment. Or we saw mass financing of public mayhem and realized that yes, this is a very real problem. It's a real problem that needs considerable solutions.
"purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years"
A "minority"? This is perverse. By this measure, every deplorable subset is a protected minority that you will pearl clutch about. Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?
Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope.
Can you quantify this? Because I've seen zero quantification of this. Do you know the numbers? I have yet to hear anyone with your point of view point to a single specific number. Just hand-waving about FOREIGN MONEY that MIGHT BE FROM RUSSIA and TRUMPERS! Never is a single percentage mentioned in this regard. If it was remotely significant, mentioning the quantity would bolster the government's claim, and they would do so. They don't, which almost certainly indicates it's an insignificant amount.
"Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope"
Here in the US in the summer of 2020, we had entire city blocks burned to the ground, multiple police stations burned, a Federal courthouse besieged by suburban white kid radicals in Portland, a church set on fire across the street from the White House, had armed radicals occupy a neighborhood and police station in Seattle (mostly peaceful, but there were a few dozen incidents of minor violence and then a couple of murders towards the end) for months. The bad actors setting fires and perpetrating violence were a minority of the protesters. Most were simply exercising their first amendment rights. At no point did anyone freeze bank accounts, despite massive outpourings of donations from individuals for things like food, and more nefarious things like bailing out jailed rioters. It was a GOOD thing that nobody had their accounts frozen. It was immoral and wrong to allow a small number of bad actors to be used to delegitimize the entire movement. Therefore, the US government didn't do anything to rob these protesters of their rights to protest. And at no point, not for a single second, was the news media rooting for the police over the protesters. Certainly not the mainstream news in the US that has the vast majority of the mindshare. Not NPR, not CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC/NYT/etc.
By contrast, the truckers have been entirely peaceful. In a world where every human has a video camera in their pocket, there are no viral videos of violence perpetrated by the protesters. No viral videos of protesters hurling racist epithets. Instead, 2 videos showing lone actors carrying hateful flags (Confederate flag in Canada???? Really?) A few statues got vandalized in minor ways, but they got far more coverage than statues of Lincoln in the US did when they were vandalized and toppled by rioters.
"Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?":
So the truckers are Nazis? One person was photographed with a Swastika flag, and they are all Nazis? Do you apply the same judgement when you see protests in line with your laptop-class fashions carrying hammer/sickle flags? Or left-flavored anti-semitic flags, which always pop up in the fringes of fashionable left-wing protests?
It's blatantly obvious you have dehumanized all of these people based on propaganda and political bias. We all know why this is:
The truckers are part of a highly unfashionable political movement. And amongst the laptop class, fashion is king. If you dissent from the government in a manner that is fashionable to the elite class, you are a hero. Fringe elements who perpetrate violence are depicted as not representative of the movement. Maximum sympathy is provided. But unfashionable? Suddenly, a single incident of violence doesn't deserve the label "mostly peaceful", you get zero sympathy, and the media is aggressively cheering on the removal of your rights. You get labelled "deplorable" (that's the word you just used above) which is subjective and revealing of dehumanization.
I'm a lifelong liberal, I've never even voted Republican. I always hated the censorious, rabidly illiberal echo chamber of the GOP that was created by them allowing themselves to be taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The constant judgement, the constant othering and dehumanization of political opponents. Today, the center left parties in Europe/Canada/US are all on this train. I'm reminded of the old Black Panther Party quote: "Scratch a liberal, and you'll find a fascist."
I will not be voting Democrat in November, and look forward to ending all support for the party until they stop championing aggressive violations of civil liberties and government/corporate allied censorship. I say this as a person who has spent cumulative weeks volunteering for campaigns, including writing software for the Obama 2012 campaign as well as the 2014 midterms in Florida, where I did 5 figures worth of free labor for targeting applications for minority registration drives. I'm done, and people with your illiberal belief system inhabiting the center left is why. I'd rather vote for dumb rednecks who treat me like an adult than folks like Trudeau who think that an NPR-like soothing voice can cloak the authoritarian, paternalistic inclinations of their actual words.
If you keep this up we're going to end up having to ban you, especially because you appear to be using HN primarily for this. That's a clear abuse of the site, so please stop.
What is the line here? Isn't the entire thread, including comments I'm responding to, political? I've had an account for 10 years.
I get the sense that whenever I'm in any thread where many others are making similar, political comments, somebody gets upset and flags mine and I'm the one punished. The parent comments are all political. So what is the line between flame bait and commenting on politics?
The most recent occurrence listed was me stating to someone they were suffering from cognitive dissonance in June. If you actually look at that comment, it's not exactly a brutal insult.
I think you do a great job moderating and I don't envy the task. I just feel like there are certain kinds of users who flag everyone that disagrees with them and gives me the impression that political comments that do not go against certain dominant ideologies never get flagged but mine do.
My recommendation is that if HN does not want political discussion on the site, they shouldn't allow political links to be posted. My comments were directly related to the digital jail article's contents. I don't really see how any conversation around a government freezing people's bank accounts as a form of digital punishment cannot be political.
> If you dislike democracy because your guy isn't in charge, you don't like democracy and should just accept that fact and save the rhetoric.
You think the war measures act like the Emergencies Act is "democracy"?
Blacks, indigenous and hispanics have the lowest rates of vaccination in both Canada and US. If you think they are all "attempting an insurrection with daily QAnon rallies", you are living in alternate universe. I was there at the protest for 3 weekends and many of the people I met were vaxxed but opposed mandates. My buddy I was there with was also vaxxed but he took it because of coercion from the federal government because he works for them. There were nurses who took care of COVID patients for 2 years, gained natural immunity from infection and then were fired for not taking an unnecessary shot. There was even a vaxxed lady whose grandmother is 108 years old, had been given 4 shots and yet the nursing home isn't allowing them to meet in person due to COVID. These aren't political points which you are trying to make.
The second part of your comment tells me you aren't able to have a civil dialogue without ad-hominem attacks. Please read HN's guidelines before making such comments:
Would you please stop doing political/ideological flamewar on HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that do it, regardless of what ideology they favor or disfavor, so please don't.
> Yet Trudeau invoked the same act which was renamed in 1980
You seem to be profoundly misinformed.
> When BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses
BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses in Canada? Wow, I guess I must have missed that news cycle.
The "whatabout BLM" tactic is so tired.
> I don't know why you care about skin color so much
Right.
> No clue what Qanon has anything to do with vax mandates
You know, I asked myself the same question. I wondered "why does the stage in Ottawa keep talking about WEF, the Rothschilds, poisons in children's cereals, child sex rings, Donald Trump, 5G, the conspiracy that all of the media is lying to you and some guy grifting off your cause is telling you the truth, etc". Why did so many participants keep talking about so many things but vaccine mandates. Why is the entire ecosystem, and so many supporters and supplicants of this movement so caught up in QAnon nonsense among other conspiracies? Glad you share the confusion.
> You are basically spouting corporate media nonsense
Here it is. I literally stated what I directly observed, and have heard (from people like you), and you wave it off as "corporate media". Did you perhaps spit at CBC reporters while you were busy honk honking?
Would you please stop doing political/ideological flamewar on HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that do it, regardless of what ideology they favor or disfavor, so please don't.
Edit: you've been posting about nothing else for literally weeks now. That's seriously uncool, and we've had to ask you more than once before not to do this:
Worse than that, it appears that you've abused HN badly with many previous accounts and been banned many times in the past.
All that put together is so egregious that I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
"Edit: you've been posting about nothing else for literally weeks now."
This is beyond parody. It's as if your moderation is purpose driven to elevate and amplify disinformation, and that actually useful, meaningful discussion has disappeared from this site.
Congratulations, HN continues its descent to utter irrelevance. Now featuring literally daily QAnon nonsense, which you never moderate or threaten bans about (even after the few reasonable users try to flag and moderate). It's incredible that every one of my comments, in response to grossly ignorant nonsense, were highly upvoted by users. Then along comes dang, enabler of alt-right QAnon horseshit.
Cheers.
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 targeted, regardless of what the RCMP claims they're doing? A high ranking official made it clear that donators are under the microscope based on their political affiliations.
I took it to mean if the "movement" (of which you are a member) is donating that much money, but I can see your interpretation as well. It's ambiguous, which is not a good look for an official on such an important topic.
Reasonable people can disagree but I do see what you mean - I thank you for your honest consideration of my opinion, a rare treat!
Subsequent statements and clarifications have made it clear that these donors were not subject to any action, this freaking government.. they just can't quite figure out how to make a clear statement about anything, despite seeming like they are constantly reading talking points - it drives me up the wall.
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.
It's a video. Unless you claim the video is somehow deep faked, his words corroborate what the comment says. And if you don't want to trust that, then here's direct link to CTVNews where he says those words at 3:26 mark:
They could ban those donors from ever entering Canada but that's about it. If they successfully pull off equating the truckers with terrorists, then they could request the US extradite them but that's pretty far fetched. Then again, pretty much everything they've done has been far fetched so who knows what they'll try next.
Why would he be talking about US people? He has zero jurisdiction over that. And even if he were talking about US people, that still wouldn't make such comments okay.
Canadians donate to US protests all the time and vice versa.
Plus, the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy:
Of course he has jurisdiction over that - Canadians don’t have jurisdiction over drunk driving in the US, but if you have a DUI you’re going to have a tough time getting into Canada.
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
While the linked article and the twitter thread it links are both quite good, your core point is absolutely correct.
As stated elsewhere, this is a minority government. If there is a single actual case of someone donating some small amount and having their account frozen, with the corresponding life mayhem, may the Conservatives use it to bludgeon the Liberals.
But there hasn't been one. Not a single case. A couple of opposing politicians and twitter personalities have invented vague claims of cases, but these are clearly a fiction (or have been clarified as "but it could happen" scenarios).
The banks contacted the government to seek advice on what to with these funds before the Emergency Act. They have these funds they know belong to multiple individuals, including the account holder, and don't know what to do with them. Just because 100,000 people dumped money into your account for cause doesn't mean it belongs to you personally.
No individual protestors accounts have been frozen. If you donated to this cause you literally have no idea where your money went. If you participated in the protest and feel entitled to these funds, how would you get them? Freezing the accounts, at this time, is neither pro-protest or anti-protest. The government isn't seizing this money -- it's keeping it from being moved until somebody can figure out who even owns it.
> Just because 100,000 people dumped money into your account for cause doesn't mean it belongs to you personally.
This is the first time I've seen someone make this completely true point about the banking system.
It's not right or just, but money in the bank is not your money. It is your bank's money, and they may or may not allow you to transact it at any given time. Your recourse's are few and extremely expensive.
If anything positive comes out of this, I hope it's more folks realize this.
I think actually you will find in the normal course of life your recourse against a financial institution that freezes your funds in Canada are many and very affordable, even free.
It is a highly regulated sector, there is frequent reporting and quick reviews. In the specific case of the GoFundMe money TD Bank was immediately at the courts begging for someone to tell them what to do.
If you consider this a reasonable thing to have some concerns about, doesn't Moxie looking at anonymous digital cash in signal start to make a lot more sense.
Not endorsing any details of the what or how of it on the basis that I don't understand it. But if criticisms of it start with "Having some fallback for digital monetary transfer seems like a good idea." Then what can you actually do if you're signal. Criticise what could really in a practical, pragmatic way work better to that end seems more worthwhile than most of what I've read about it.
>We don’t yet know how wide the government and the banks will cast their electronic dragnet, but the potential reach is enormous, which means the potential for overreach is significant.
This is exactly what they did in Russia. If you consistently punish 100% of dissidents, you will end up with a large number of people that have nothing to lose, that will unite against you.
If you instead make it clear that anyone demonstrating dissent would face a low (but non-negligible) chance of disproportionally severe consequences, most people will shut up and comply.
Ironically, this is what terrorists do. They don't try to physically kill every citizen in the affected area, instead they demoralize the public by making them accept the fact that the next random bombing could be near their house.
Things like due process, burden of proof and separation of branches of power were not invented our of nowhere.
If the problem is that accounts were being frozen without due process, then couldn't it be solved by adding some due process to it, instead of just banning freezing accounts outright? Treat it more like an arrest. People who are arrested still have rights; it should be the same here. It should be strong enough to limit criminals while still allowing the innocent proper recourse.
Have a version of the writ of habeas corpus (habeas numus?) to quickly undo unlawful freezing. Maybe allow small amounts of money to be released to the accused, large enough to live on but too small to be of much use to criminals. Have an exception for paying for a lawyer. And if they're cleared, require banks not to keep records of the freezing to prevent discrimination.
(Discussions of this topic should also all include a mention of civil forfeiture, which is effectively when police officers are legally allowed to rob you. This is a thing that already exists and happens regularly.)
It was lawful freezing, in the sense that the Emergency Act allowed them to avoid due process, and was passed by the major left leaning parties in Canada.
You don't need to add due process, it was already there. They decided this was worth declaring a war level emergency to clear out some protestors in ottawa. The border blockades had already been cleared by then.
It's telling that so little of this conversation is conscious of who does and does not have access to 'a cashless society' and the myriad of ways the poor and working class are abused by it.
Digital Jail? Seriously? Show me the concern when the feds seize the assets of someone they accuse of being a terrorist or a drug kingpin.
HN suddenly cares about this because of some generalized hatred of Trudeau, but I can't remember a thread generating thousands of comments about companies trying to force employees to accept pay on fee heavy debit cards.
The way that discussing a Canadian protest about vaccine mandates has come to take over HN feels bizarre, agenda pushy, and like a bunch of crocodile tears.
There are a few that won't take cash, especially in the more COVID-conscious areas.
Nominally it was because during early pandemic people were worried about handling cash with virons on it, or otherwise bringing infected peoples' bodies nearer to cashiers' bodies than strictly necessary.
Then many realized that their profits didn't take a hit since card payments are common now and nearly everyone has a card.
Now it seems simply to be a convenience thing. Probably businesses are happy with prompting every customer with a tip request, rather than expecting them to remember to drop some money in the jar before they leave with their goods.
There were some non-cash businesses in L.A. before covid hit. My favorite was a boba shop. They mostly cited that the cost of the Armored truck to count/move the money + risk of robbery/theft (including by employees) cost them more than the CC fees and now it's all digital.
The state of Massachusetts no longer operates toll booths along some of its toll roads. You either have an EZ Pass, or (for +$0.60 more) you get a photo taken of your plate, and a bill mailed to you, which is online or check only, no cash option.
Or you stay off the toll roads, I guess.
IDK what NY's policy is, but it is rather hard to cross the southern Hudson without toll.
If you're renting a car, and you don't have an EZ Pass, some rental agencies will also charge some pretty ridiculous fees (we were once charged ~$25 for a single toll!), which pretty much forces you down the EZ Pass route, or onto some really odd paths to avoid incurring that charge. (In our case, we didn't even realize we'd driven on a toll road, and actually requested proof of such when the bill came. Sure enough, we had.)
If Massachusetts says you owe money, they must accept cash. That's the point of cash being "legal tender", you cannot refuse it if someone is trying to settle a debt. That said, it might be really hard to figure out how to pay in cash.
EZ Pass website says debts can be settled in cash at their service centers. So yes you can settle in cash, but it is likely a massive pain to do as you suggest. Their site also says you can prepay your tolls in cash, to have account in credit, using the same service centers. I suspect almost no one does.
"Cash or Credit/Debit cards are accepted at any of our Customer Service Centers."
… so at the time of the example, I would have needed to travel ~3,000 mi, then.
And… you have to sign up, get a transponder, keep said transponder in your car and allow them to track your movements with it. (Which, admittedly, they can probably already do by reading license plates. Might as well just broadcast it on radio?)
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 settle a debt (plus possible penalties) in cash, but they don't have to make it convenient.
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 the driver. However, contracts are made to be broken and any damages would be payable in cash so we're back to the start.
The legal tender thing has nothing to do with the agency being part of the state. 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.
I live in a "not affluent" city, and cashless is common. Many restaurants will not take cash. No hotels take cash. Some gas stations do not take cash. Grocery stores actively encourage cashless payments. etc...
Is it more likely that you frequent places which are cash-centric? Coffee shops, independent retailers and the like?
I'd be surprised if that were the norm in most places in the US. I have a $20 bill stuck in my wallet--which I carry mostly as a backup in case something goes wonky with my phone--but I mostly don't carry cash except on trips and I expect I'm more careful than many.
You'll find a strong blue/white collar divide here, which also tends to follow rural/urban lines.
Once you get into the trades and workshops, cash is king for obvious tax avoidance reasons. It's rare someone in such regions doesn't at least imply you can pay a portion of an invoice/bill with cash for a moderate discount.
Small shops in those areas might be more apt to only accept cash, and you'll notice at chain stores like Dollar Tree the cashiers actually have cash handling skills vs. the affluent areas of the cities.
For most places within the airline network, you can easily avoid paying cash these days. I still recommend anyone who travels keep enough cash on them to get back home in a pinch, if at all practical.
This is personal anecdote, but I make it a point to pay cash whenever at all possible (to the point of being "that guy" in my friend group) so I likely pay attention to it more than most.
I'm far from the biggest crypto enthusiast but pretty hard to buy home, purchase car, get business loan etc. without a bank account. Obviously you can still get food and clothes no issue but I think the larger point stands.
It's become common in many restaurants and stores throughout North America during the COVID pandemic. It seems unlikely that all these businesses will revert. Other places such as China and some Nordic countries have gone further.
many Walmart and other grocery self-checkouts began only accepting cards due to a ""coin shortage"" during covid, and it seems like they now have no reason to revert.
No need for scare quotes; it was (still is?) a real thing. My local rural grocery store has had a hard time getting coins for making change basically since covid started.
A super quick search on google reveals two causes:
- The US mint slowed production to protect workers
- The shutdowns slowed circulation of existing coins
Given that a large percentage of coins are irredeemably damaged or lost each year (I once knew a particularly spoiled college student who would simply throw change away rather than deal with keeping them) it doesnt seem like much explanation is owed beyond that.
In Australia, covid basically kicked it off. Now several regular businesses have stopped taking cash. Not high end rich people stores. Places like IKEA and chain restaurants.
In the Netherlands it's not terribly uncommon. It used to be more the other direction in the UK but it has become more common to be card only here as well.
I'm not really sure where class comes into accepted forms of payment? But I'm also not sure what class you're talking about.
I've never been to a business that can't take cash.
It's becoming more and more common here in Sweden. Especially smaller shops and restaurants don't take cash anymore since it's so expensive and annoying (and potentially dangerous) to deal with.
With the "coin shortage" many businesses I've seen have required exact change. I still see a few oscillating in and out of that state today -- but somehow, the less corporate places don't have this problem.
Inflation all by itself is already effectively creating a cashless society over time, at least if no new notes with larger denomination are being printed (and historically speaking, the trend has even been the opposite, namely there used to be 500, 1.000, 5.000 and 10.000 dollar bills up until 1969 [1]).
So this has been a long time in the making, really.
This is why I roll my eyes every time someone goes off on some tirade about how cryptocurrency is a scam. Yeah, grifters exist. No, that doesn't make the most viable alternative we have to these centralized digital monetary systems any less vital. My BTC can't be frozen, and my ADA can't be seized during a traffic stop.
I strongly disagree with the antivax protestors currently the subject of these measures; I think they're all plague-enthusiast morons and should go home already. I also recognize that using such measures against these protestors makes it that much easier to use the same measures against protestors with whom I do agree (like, say, First Nations folks trying to reassert their right to the lands stolen from them), and that it's absolutely prudent to prepare for that eventuality should my government on this side of the US/Canada border opt for a similar strategy (as police here in the US already do rather routinely via civil asset forfeiture).
Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it. And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated). Your bitcoins become frozen and/or worthless to 3rd parties.
Yes, you can try and operate outside that system by only transacting with wallets that are also frozen (or that are happy being frozen, transitively). Good luck with that.
Bitcoin's key functionality (all transactions are infinitely traceable) is the main reason it is so easy to regulate in the real world.
(The simplest approach for regulators implementing this system is to declare ALL wallets frozen, and to require public registration of wallets to unfreeze them, e.g. by being on an exchange with existing KYC laws. This makes all new private wallets useless prior to registration, and makes it a felony to transact with unregistered wallets. Exchanges would then literally prevent people from transacting with unregistered bitcoin wallets. Existing KYC laws are sufficient for governments to regulate bitcoins in this way.)
>Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet
BTC >> Monero >> BTC.
I take take <10 minutes for small amount and a few hours if you need to wait for multiple confirmations.
There is plenty of reliable exchange platform that do not require IDs or even creating an account because they do not deal with fiat.
Bitcoin is NOT anonymous by default if you don't know/care how to use it, but it is extremely easy to get full anonymity if you need it. It would also be very hard to prove that you own a BTC wallet in a court of law.
> It would also be very hard to prove that you own a BTC wallet in a court of law.
Regulation regimes will work on a whitelist system: only wallets that are "approved" are allowed. All other wallets ("anonymous") are preemptively frozen/tainted until they are approved. Result? No more private/anonymous wallets in the "legal" bitcoin system.
> There is plenty of reliable exchange platform that do not require IDs or even creating an account because they do not deal with fiat.
Sure, and regulators would make them illegal under pre-existing KYC laws.
> Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it.
Governments already make it a felony to possess various illicit substances above a certain quantity. That hasn't done much to curtail the drug trade.
More to the point: if a government attempted this, it would open up every other Bitcoin user to a DoS attack; I would just need to send some money around to well-known addresses to "freeze" those wallets, too.
> And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated).
They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation. Tokens are the property of whomever actually controls the wallet; the feds can "freeze" however much they like, but there ain't really much they can do outside of a very targeted attack (i.e. one such that the costs of performing that attack vastly outweigh the benefit unless I'm some Bitcoin millionaire and I'm careless enough to keep everything in a single wallet).
> (The simplest approach for regulators implementing this system is to declare ALL wallets frozen, and to require public registration of wallets to unfreeze them, e.g. by being on an exchange with existing KYC laws. This makes all new private wallets useless prior to registration, and makes it a felony to transact with unregistered wallets. Exchanges would then literally prevent people from transacting with unregistered bitcoin wallets. Existing KYC laws are sufficient for governments to regulate bitcoins in this way.)
All that would accomplish would be to shift traffic to exchanges that operate outside KYC (which was always possible, given that there's nothing stopping two people from exchanging cryptocurrency for other things in meatspace, including fiat currency or actual goods/services). It would also, again, open up the KYC wallets to a DoS; if even so much as a single transaction from an unregistered wallet is enough to feloniously taint a registered wallet, then a malicious actor with even a tiny amount of money to burn could do so pretty easily and turn all sorts of innocent people into felons overnight - rendering such a regulation useless.
> I would just need to send some money around to well-known addresses to "freeze" those wallets, too.
Easily solved by sending illicitly obtained bitcoins to the government—which they can trivially ask you to do, or automate on the exchange that you're on.
Note: people can already deposit illicit funds into your regular bank account without your permission, and it causes no difficulties.
> They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation.
They're not confiscating them except from private citizens complying with the law, they're freezing those wallets and the bitcoins they contain out of the legal bitcoin system entirely. The government has no need to confiscate bitcoins when it can prevent their legal use without confiscation.
> Easily solved by sending illicitly obtained bitcoins to the government—which they can trivially ask you to do, or automate on the exchange that you're on.
Which means I can easily launder my own money by claiming that "someone" sent frozen cryptocurrency to me "maliciously".
> The government has no need to confiscate bitcoins when it can prevent their legal use without confiscation.
The government has no more ability to prevent use of Bitcoins than it does to prevent use of cash or gold. Again, making something illegal doesn't prevent it from happening anyway.
This is exactly what Maajid Nawaz was talking about on the JRE recently. There is a big push for a centralized digital currency that your employer or the state can prevent you from spending money on certain things.
But even without that, they can still freeze your accounts. Just look at GoFundMe handled the donations intended for the Canadian truckers. This is the infrastructure for turn key totalitarianism.
I made a throwaway account just for this, because shame and stigma for being poor is super real.
My PayPal got permanently banned because I owed them money. The reason I owed them money was because I lost my job and became permanently disabled due to COVID, and I took advantage of the fact that they floated money for a little bit before the ACH posted to my checking account in order to still be able to eat.
Anyway, I just started the first job I’ve been able to work in two years with enough salary to pay the debt off with my first paycheck, but because I couldn’t for so long they have permanently closed my account and banned me from their service.
Tanks in the streets make people uneasy, and filling jails with people who have, at most, an attenuated connection to illegal activity is not a good look. A smidge authoritarian, a tad dictatorial. So, faced with a three-week street protest that clogged downtown Ottawa, Trudeau did not follow his father’s example and call in the army or round up ideological sympathizers. He opted, instead, for less visible tools. But less visible doesn’t necessarily mean less severe. There’s more than one way to ruin someone’s life.
...
* The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done. When we can’t see the consequences of government conduct, the risks of government misconduct increases. A government that sends in riot troops to dispel a crowd will rightly pay a price if the police commit abuses. But the diffuse and anonymous nature of financial enforcement mean that sweeping repression can easily go undetected. It is the political equivalent of using drone strikes instead of boots on the ground.*
...
The fact that weaponizing the financial system against nonviolent protestors and their distant supporters was the government’s tool of first resort should worry anyone who understands the role of civil disobedience in democracy
Canada's democracy was seriously wounded by the people currently controlling its government. What's going to heal it?
Ive seen KYC/KYB in action lately - it has long left the financial sector, police is now virtually behing every door.
Policing at every corner benefits a few and seriously treaten equal opportunities.
So I've came to some beginning of a conclusion. The idea would be to have a constitutional right to a grey area. The phylosophical rational would be that it's useful to human life, democracy and equal opportunities. Some extreme policing practice (like KYC, banking and digital policing, even adn in some cases) couldn't be used against you unless you're commiting a very (very) serious crime (5-10+ years of imprisonment for example). That would work with what ive seen lately, that would work against terrorism and money laudering and it would work for those canadian protesters as well. If police would want to catch a 2 year crime, they got to roll up their sleeves or wait for it to be become more severe. Im starting to like the idea a bit more (though its certainly quite a rough diamond if it works at all).
> There’s a lot of talk that the U.S. is moving toward a cashless economy…at least in the sense that people are using more and more “plastic” (credit and debit cards) for transactions and that cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular. One test of this theory is to look at currency in circulation. If this measure stops growing while the economy is growing, it would be an indication that other forms of money have become more important and are serving as substitutes for currency. The graph above tells a different story: Currency in circulation is consistently growing more than the economy is.
The thing about "non-custodial-money": Unless someone is willing to literally hide a small fortune under his mattress, there is really no such thing;
What's most peoples primary source of money? Jobs.
How are these jobs paid? Usually as a wire transfer to some bank account.
Custodial Money.
Sure, someone could go to the ATM every payday and then actually hide the money. But this comes with lots of serious drawbacks: physical cash can be damaged, stolen, even forgotten. The Blorkchain is only the digital form of the mattress; drives can get damaged, hacks can happen, keys can be forgotten. Plus, with its volatility, even if no catastrophe strikes, it may well be that the money lost a lot of its worth at the point when it's needed.
Governments have a nearly perfect record of moving towards tyranny. Who could have anticipated Canada's move? I would have guessed Donald Trump would have attempted such a move against BLM protestors, but the move came from the Left. The media, is almost completely silent, and not one western government condemned Canada's actions.
Trudeau's bank account freeze is the reason why the next time I'll be in the United States, I'll open a US bank account and transfer some savings there. (I'm a European, and not a US person). I've heard that US banks are extremely friendly to non-residents (at least the ones who know to deal with them and hand out a W8-BEN form to fill)
Then my money will be safe. Unless I piss off the United States Federal Government that is. But I don't plan on doing anything that would put me on OFAC list, so I should be fine.
The US is actually a tax haven for non-residents. They have made every country in the world (that matters, anyway) to comply with FATCA and OECD CRS, yet they themselves don't do OECD CRS.
Inflation is likely to remain high for a while, and perhaps for good so the value of your USD will go down.
Rents and stuff rose 20% or so in the US which ought to be indicative of the real rate of inflation.
Euro seems to fare better so far but the ECB printed even more euros than the US printed dollars so I'm minimizing my own euro exposure.
Virtually 100% of my assets are USD denominated anyway, I keep very little savings, everything that I don't spend goes straightly to the stock portfolio.
So inflation and FX isn't really a concern for me, it's just a fact of life.
If you're keeping a decent investment portfolio in Europe, it's almost certainly mostly in USD.
I've got a friend who just walked into a Wells Fargo branch, and basically all he had to do was to fill out a W8-BEN form. No SSN, no ITIN. His passport number was apparently a perfectly fine substitute.
This was some years ago though, but assuming not much has changed, I don't think it'd be too difficult.
Since I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the comments so far, it's worth noting that the author has clear political allegiances.
From the author's bio near the bottom of the article:
> Howard Anglin is a post-graduate researcher at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
I don't think this invalidates the argument in any way. I do think that it should raise a red flag however. Comparing the October crisis to the freezing of trucker funds partially raised by Nazis still seems a bit far-fetched to me after reading the article.
I remembered reading this in the Globe and Mail article about the leaked GiveSendGo list of donors, but it seems I was wrong. I'm sorry for not checking my sources when posting this. I'm not sure why I can't edit the original message.
I could confirm however that the movement including its leaders had ties with neo-Nazi groups and that Nazi flags were flown in the convoy.
Come on, this is a partisan hit piece. Which is too bad because it's a legitimate and serious issue, but any pretense of objectivity went out the door when we get to "Howard Anglin... was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney"
"For most of history, we have thought about deprivation of liberty in quite literal terms. Short of execution, which Canada hasn’t done in 60 years, locking someone up has been the ultimate state sanction."
To open with such a statement is, frankly, ridiculous coming from anyone in Canada in this day and age. No mention of the genocidal tendencies towards the indigenous populations? No? Jail is clearly the worst thing that can happen to anyone.
Fact that whole of liberal caucuses and NDP voted for this aberration is bad news.
It is an open season on anyone who is member or supported People’s party. Totalitarians having tasted the pandemic power do not seem to want to relinquish it(surprise! lol)
Its being forced though - its partly choice, partly lack of choice (forced).
In my area there are shops that do not accept cash. How is that even legal?!
Also, supermarkets have automated tills that only take cards. They also have ones that take cash - they all used to take cash - but the ratio is definitely swinging to card.
Not to mention all the ATMs that are disappearing.
So, this is a form of coercion.
If you put all that together with a govcoin, the scene is set for tracking of everything.
The Reserve Bank Of New Zealand recently said that it's going to cost about NZ$100/per person, per year to continue maintaining NZ's cash 'system'.
It's beginning to research how that cost should be minimised, and how it should be recouped, because if vendors start charging cash-handling fees, it's likely to be unfairly distributed.
Climate activists often blockade things. (Some are currently blocking access Germany's three biggest airports and say that they want to disrupt cargo and passenger traffic at said airports.)
When should their access to money be blocked?
"what-aboutism" is what we used to call equal protection under the law.
I would argue the contrary. Governments need to take the concept of a digital jail very seriously.
Every use of the financial stick to silence dissent and protest makes all the more cogent an argument for cryptocurrency, especially untraceable forms such as Monero. traditional Kissinger style flexes of soft power, while effective in the past as KYC turned the fiat world into a tool of state, only serve to galvanize actors in the crypto sphere.
the astute would argue that KYC ingress and egress control take some steps to extend the stately stick of monetary policy to where it could act similarly. freeze a protestors exchange account and youve accomplished nearly the same thing. However this merely stokes an arms race at the expense of a well funded industry of exchanges that are neither keen on enforcing arbitrary rules of a countries law, nor are they comfortable with the inevitable outcome of such enforcement: exodus and loss of trust. overzealous enforcement, or even the perception of such in this case could result in the collapse of the inroads to crypto altogether at a certain point, with industries simply dealing in crypto entirely as new means to earn $coin emerge at the state and local level, for example, companies that pay in $coin.
Related is people being booted from their other online accounts without any recourse. Banned from Google when it’s their mistake? Tough luck. What about Apple and you’re an iPhone user? Who could live without Amazon’s convenience?
Are there anonymous prepaid card networks I could use? It’s the best of both worlds, convenience of using a card but refill it with cash at a CVS or whatever.
A google search shows the Netspend cards (cards for people without bank accounts).
Excuse me for my pessimism but a short while ago I was reading and digging deep about the infamous Gulag-system in the Soviet Union roughly from 1920-1960. And after endless unimaginable suffering, excess of violence which just roamed free in those "zones" spanning over decades after it fizzled out when Stalin finally died - some little insight about human nature dawned upon me after striding through untold personal accounts: Those things begin and also end.
So, yeah it roughly began in 2001 with the attack on civil liberties (Patriot-Act) and it will continue as there is no real opposition to it, the vast majority simply don't care, and after 30-40 years, one or two generations it will end.
[0]The prospect of arrest and trial weighed heavy even on the highest-ranking Party member. Following their arrest, aware of the fate
that awaited them, many immediately asked to sign their ‘confession’. Others, unable to comprehend what was happening, remained
loyal to the Party, believing that it would eventually realise its mistake and reinstate them. ‘They were all tired men. The higher you got
in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians,
among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling
on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that
demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called
them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to
the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.’
Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, 1945, (quoted by: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 1990).
As for whether the Emergencies Act is over-reaching, I disagree. We're not talking about a lawful protest here. We're talking about a well-funded occupation of public lands with an indefinite duration to the demonstration. Where those funds came from is going to be really interesting to the courts, as we've seen in the bail hearings today, because if they came from foreign powers with the intent to disrupt economic or democratic processes in Canada -- that definitely pushes the needle away from peaceful protest and towards occupation.
I think people implying that this now gives the government the ability to put down protests by freezing everyone's accounts is misinformed. The Emergencies Act still requires any government action to be bound by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada -- everyone arrested is getting their day in court, those who are not directly involved in the occupation will eventually get access to their funds again, I'm sure. It also require co-operation from different levels of government. It gives the government extra powers to deal with unprecedented circumstances which is exactly what has been happening in Canada.
It was a very targeted response and the most infuriatingly peaceful ones I've seen. Everyone involved in this occupation was given more opportunities to leave than I've seen given to actual, legal protestors in similar demonstrations. The key story seems to be that there was no intention to ever disperse and leave. And the folks organizing this occupation were encouraging more people to stay and were accepting funding to help ensure they could stay.
Is getting your account frozen devastating? Absolutely. No question. Was it the right response for the government to freeze the accounts of people supporting this occupation? Absolutely. Violence wasn't going to solve this and would incite more violence. Most people who donated a few bucks to their fundraising drives will get a shock and life will go back to normal. It's the people who funded this occupation that the authorities are after and it will come to light soon I'm sure.
Cash hasn't gone anywhere yet either. Merchants in Canada are still legally required to accept it and ought to -- I can agree with that.
Young people may have never experienced actual freedom and privacy. Here goes.
I grew up in the 80s, in Europe. The only thing the government knew of me was that I existed and which school I attended, and absolutely nothing else. There were no recording devices anywhere. My actions, my communication, my spending, all private. I was still a kid though. My dad worked and got cash in hand. It was also common to obscure parts of your income that way, but only "party money", as you don't want to overdo this.
Society worked just fine, just to make the point that this supposed chaos of having pretty much no surveillance or data at all, did not lead to an abundance of crime, terrorism, or other issues conveniently folded under "national security". Which just shows that justifications for surveillance really are razor thin. Same for their effectiveness in actual stopping all that bad stuff.
We all know what happened next, the rise of computing in business and government, and 9/11 as a perfect excuse to do the largest data grab ever, and to never ever dial that back.
Then social networks and smartphones happened and anything ever is recorded, in the hands of private businesses, with back doors to the government. From knowing zero to knowing everything, it didn't take long.
Same for finance. Where everybody freely transacted in a cash-based society, now it raises suspicion. You can't just withdraw a lot of cash, send an amount to a friend, cross a border or even pay with big bills. There's KYC and capital controls, you don't transact with privacy, are you nuts? The world would fall apart.
We've all silently went along with it, because we're all good people and only criminals are affected by this. Furthermore, we live in stable democracies under the rule of law.
Canada broke this expectation severely. Under the disguise of an "emergency law" they seized assets, redistributed them, forced private businesses to give up personal data, freeze bank accounts and block credit cards. Supposedly, even for second-hand interactions with protesters, such as donating to them. And shockingly, they do all of this with a straight face.
I don't care how you feel about the protest itself. If it is indeed an illegal protest, you arrest the protestor, tell them which law they broke, and put them through the legal process. Which includes rights like the right to a defense, clear claims, a process by jury (or judge), and then a fine or prison time, based on earlier precedents and the book of law.
You don't go and digitally "cancel" citizens without any form of process. If you believe this is warranted, flip the script and apply this arbitrary power to a protest that you do agree with. Say a right-wing government is in power, and there's new BLM protests. Would you be OK with the government tracking every protesters, arbitrarily requesting private data from private businesses you interacted with, and then financially wipe you out without any process at all?
After this historical fly-by, we've learned that surveillance is additive. It never gets dialed back. We also learned that your private data is in no way private, also not when interacting with private businesses or your peers. We've learned that if technology allows for more surveillance it will be used and it will be abused.
Digital level abuse is a sight to behold. A cop doesn't need to find you and carry you to jail and go through this annoying delicate process. No, a politician pushes a button and thousands of you will be dysfunctional. This thought is supposed to scare you, a lot.
All this while, your personal freedom and privacy is shrinking. Rapidly.
And we're not done yet. We're now entering the territory of what formerly would be considered conspiracy theories. I used to laugh at the following, but not anymore.
There's crypto, which can be considered private, unregulated money. Digital money is inevitable so the government is waking up to the idea of digital (crypto) money issued by central banks.
This version would not be anonymous, hence this marks the death of cash and transaction privacy. Everything you will ever transact from here on out is known. And can be blocked from a single point, or subject to approval.
It also marks the death of private commercial banks. The central bank issues the currency as well as holds your "wallet".
With this, some serious monetary policy can begin. Because crypto is programmable and monetary policy is running out of instruments, such is the health of our financial system.
Are you hoarding too much money? Let me turn that dial of interest rate to negative 20%. Low consumer demand? Here's 100 new money for every citizen. Major environmental problems? Let me block the buying of oversized televisions directly from your wallet.
Far-fetched? I don't think so. Think back of the 80s, the starting point. Think it won't happen? Think Canada.
Let me remind you of the Panama papers. Did this huge group of people have their assets seized? Do any jail time? No. The big fish are cleared. All of this is for idiots like you and me.
> If you believe this is warranted, flip the script and apply this arbitrary power to a protest that you do agree with. Say a right-wing government is in power, and there's new BLM protests. Would you be OK with the government tracking every protesters, arbitrarily requesting private data from private businesses you interacted with, and then financially wipe you out without any process at all?
A truly cashless society is impossible to create. Nature abhors a vacuum. Capital is for capitalists. Others will use other, old, familiar means of exchange; the media will be visible or not. Attempts to keep good neighbors from good-will sharing of their time and energy will fail. Noone can pile up enormous stores of caring to stand on and crow.
I think the article brings good points, but I also think it ignores something important, the alternatives...
You can agree or disagree as much as you want with the current situation, but at some point, there has to be ways for a society to enforce its laws.
Ideally you want to be in a society that define laws collaboratively, where you have a say in them, with a vote for example, and where the laws are applied fairly to everyone, without preferential treatment or specific targeting. And you'd want a process for people to asses and review if the law needs to be enforce in a particular case or not and what that looks like.
But you still need a way to enforce them somehow.
Ok, so let's say a group of people is indeed doing something that isn't right by the laws, and let's accept for arguments sake that you agree with that.
Now how do you enforce the laws on that case?
You could tear gas them, hit them with batons, point guns at them, handcuff them, and physically force them to comply, and lock them up if needed.
Or you can use softer methods, like temporarily freeze their accounts and funds, starving them of resource until they comply.
Yes, both methods are serious, they're meant to force you to follow the laws. So I agree that both are a big deal, but between the two, I think the latter is much better overall, and a lot more civil in my opinion.
Bob 1: We can’t actually find a record of [Milton] being a current employee here.
Bob 2: I looked into it more deeply, and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago, and no one ever told him about it. But, through some kind of glitch in the payroll department he still gets a paycheck.
Bob 1: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Boss: So, Milton has been let go?
Bob 1: Well, just a second there professor, we fixed the glitch. So he won’t be receiving a pay check anymore, so it’ll just work itself out naturally.
Bob 2: We always like to avoid confrontation whenever possible. The problem is solved from your end.
Ok, fine, perhaps we need to take Trudeau's measures more seriously, and the ramifications of his measures, but guess what else we need to take seriously?
The current threat of Trump-inspired fascism worldwide. Of which the "protests" in Canada are but one facet.
Fascists and dictators alike have used banks as weapons against classes of people they disagree with. [1] [2] [3] It seems you are okay with these methods as long as they're used on your political opponents.
There's an enormous hole in this conversation. Everyone is talking
about malevolent government, data collection and cybernetic social
control as the great threats. Yes, these things are frightening.
Authoritarianism/fascism or surveillance capitalism, whatever you want
to call it, is in the rise. But malevolence is the lesser of our
worries with regard to the prospect of a "cashless society".
Cash is important not only because (as others have said) it is a
mature, near perfect technology that provides fluidity, anonymity etc.
It's important because it's a distributable store of highly resilient
wealth.
Physical cash is one of the greatest defences a society has against
total civil disintegration - the kind of "worst fears" we are all
terrified of when the pandemic or Capitol riots were looming. People
in the streets with guns killing each other over a loaf of bread. It's
the sort of thing we worry EMP attacks, nuclear war, overnight
hyper-inflation would bring. When chaos comes it can come very
quick.
One of the surest and fastest routes to a totally precarious
civilisation is to create a "cashless society" than runs on these
highly unstable and very new-fangled things we call computers (we've
had them "properly" for about 20 or 30 years).
Imagine that there is no physical cash at all. Cash acts as a buffer,
like power-supply smoothing capacitors. One day the systems all switch
off (a very likely scenario (some time - we don't know when) by all
cyber-threat accounts). Modern people, within one or two generations,
are losing the ability to value or barter things, or do simple mental
arithmetic in many cases. That level of dependency is catastrophic.
Fortunately we still teach how to add up money and caculate change at
schools.
When no-one can buy food, and no-one can fuel vehicles because the
"system is down", watch it all descend into madness within 24 hours.
And no, the police/national-guard won't help. They'll all be shitting
themselves too and worrying about their families, getting paid.
Ayn Rand (not someone I am very fond of) made at least a few rather
intelligent philosophical observations, one of which is that (I
paraphrase) "money is a peace-keeping instrument". Cash gives a
society it's own form of distributed "power" which allows a momentum
of local exchange and flexibility. There only needs to be a few tens
of millions in circulation. Right now most folk have a few hundred
bucks at home or on their person. Without it your fallback is, within
days, only people who have stores of gold, medicines and weapons being
fucntional. That might be great for "preppy" survivalist types, but
it's not a world I'd like to live in.
Any government that eliminates physical cash entirely would be
clinically insane and playing a very, very dangerous game. Given all
the cyber-threats movement toward a "cashless society" is utterly
premature from a safety perspective, regardless any social politics.
This author is saying that we all need to 'accept the new reality' of digital money... but they won't accept the new reality of COVID and vaccinations. Seems like the author is just picking and choosing what aspects of reality to accept based on politics.
I like the idea, but can’t they get around it with prepaid cards or (eventually) crypto? And rich people aren’t punished at all, they can always get someone else to do it. I think they would need to use an equivalent of a no-fly list, which would be hard to make every business to use, and also privacy crushing.
Freezing the assets of anarchists rioting in the streets is wonderfully Canadian, and I salute you. But locking people out of the banking system is not just limited to digital realities, I know because I had my bank account taken away from me 30 years ago. The practice of locking people out of the banking system, usually because they deserve it, is in fact exactly what is fueling the check cashing industry. It is what creates a subclass of homeless people. So I guess I'm just trying to say that this is nothing new, and it is certainly not unique to the experience of a few anarchists who don't want to wear their masks.
If he’s concerned with rights derived from fungible instruments, I have to wonder why he chose the example of a group already able to raise millions and paints them as victims, while ignoring the millions of existing victims across society who, through homelessness or the injustice of the legal system, find themselves without bank accounts or credit cards, and suffer the material consequences of not being able to use many basic business services.
The author could have chosen to stand in solidarity with those actually suffering, but instead clutches pearls over a theoretical wrong done to a group who never needed nor deserved that concern in the first place.
This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried.
Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff online to complain about various issues. I will get the ability to see all your financial transactions, listen to all your communications, track your location, arrest you when I don't like you recording me, smear you online and pressure companies to ban you from literally any service imaginable, including banking.
Both of us will be bound by the legal framework, but when I don't like it, I will have the ability declare the state of emergency and scrap all the rules. Also, I will have sovereign immunity when I break the rules. Also, many of my actions will be secret because of national security.
Oh, and I will be doing all the things described above using your money.
Sounds fair?