My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.
I'll take this opportunity to advocate for 'payment network neutrality' - given their importance in the economy, I agree payment processors should be required to process all lawful transactions, by law. We should require this of any national payments processor in the US at the federal level - or state, I'm looking at you, CA and NY.
I would go further and remove the "lawful" from that. If you pay me $50 it shouldn't matter to the payment processor whether I gave you a painting or a blow job in return.
It's a clever setup. Using laws like the Anti-Money Laundering rules, the government nudges credit card companies to avoid high-risk businesses. These companies can then turn away any business without explaining why, all in the name of "security through obscurity."
But when you think about it, this setup skips past important legal protections like due process and the presumption of innocence. It's like the government has quietly asked Visa and Mastercard to play judge and jury.
Quoting a relevant paragraph from the AML post above: Much like KYC, AML policies are recursive stochastic management of crime. The state deputizes financial institutions to, in effect, change the physics of money. In particular, it wants them to situationally repudiate the fungibility of money. (Fungibility is the property that $1 is $1 and, moreover, that you are utterly indifferent between particular dollars.) They are not required to catch every criminal moving money (that would not be a positive result!)
Deputizing payment processors to curb money laundering sounds good on paper. The issue is that the payment processors ban and deny processing for random, computer generated reasons. Their decision is unappealable even if you’re in the right and are selling perfectly legal items.
Normally, if the government suspects you of money laundering, they build a case and bring it to court. The burden of proof is on them to prove you’re laundering money or selling illegal goods. Here, they found a way to not only lessen their work load by deputizing private companies, but also affectively gave payment processors a moat and impunity to decide what people can and cannot sell everywhere.
Visa and MC are well within their rights to deny any person for any reason, but the government should have their own processing network. My gut is saying this will never happen since Visa/MC would lobby heavily against it. Even if one is created, expect it to be neutered.
> Visa and MC are well within their rights to deny any person for any reason
True, but as payment networks take on a more utility-like place in society (I'd argue they're already there), we shouldn't allow them to discriminate for arbitrary reasons.
He is right on point. I recently went through a KYC process and, due to a misunderstanding (and their lack of proper user support), I got kicked out of the service for a while.
What strikes me is how much financial information I had to provide them. Bank accounts, salary slips, savings accounts, etc. I am more than happy to provide that information to my government in the course of, say, a tax audit, but handing it off to a private company abroad just to buy a few shares is not proportionate. And who else will have access to that information? Is it going to be sold to the highest bidder?
The goverment is outsourcing its policing duties and, sooner or later, that will come back to bite us all when a leak outs all this information.
That's my biggest issue with this state of affairs. I am not a libertarian preaching unrestricted Laissez-Faire. But I do think that having your access to a payment system blocked should only happen as a result of a legal procedure with ample defense rights and based on laws voted by a parliament.
Every system can be corrupted. Feels like Americans are so afraid of the slippery slope at every turn, instead of accepting it is there always and the onus is on the people to manage them correctly and participate in the policy decision making that does that.
That's like complaining that Americans are so afraid of house fires that they strive to build their houses from flame-retardant materials and avoid the use of open flame, instead of accepting that house fires just happen and the onus is on the fire department to come by and put them out.
No it’s not. I’m saying Americans are afraid of slippery slopes and it’s leaving them paralyzed to affect any change, instead of accepting that the world is messy and the role of governing is to navigate this. In your analogy it would be like they are afraid to build any houses because a house fire could destroy it.
More generally, large unaccountable bureaucracies are fundamentally against the intent of the Founders, the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and the principles of government by the consent of the governed. That these bureaucracies are powerful private oligopolies rather than formally governmental in nature is mostly just an uncorrected oversight on behalf of those who set up our political and legal systems without the benefit of foresight.
Appeals to the founders are not compelling to me, they intended to have tons and tons of private activity regulated in the purview of private enterprise.
I agree that perspective might have been misplaced, but the founders were not in favor of powerful oligopolies under the control of the government.
Valorization aside, let's remember that the US has only been close to a majoritarian democracy for the last ~70 years or so. We can't necessarily look at the intentions from 200 years ago to decide on how political structures should be made, but we can observe their successes and failures.
Digital money is clearly a downgrade. In the yet ole times, all money (precious metal coins) was decentralized, anonymous and untraceable! It even worked in all world without any exchanges!
/Poe
You kid, but that's a serious attack against crypto, which is that the value is dependant on the existence of a sizeable network with diverse functions.
Whereas gold in the ground is shiny rocks in the ground. You can say, wait out a tax on gold by burying your gold.
Right. No crypto or your money in banks will work once that EMP from (virtually) inevitable nuclear war, Carrington event, societal collapse etc. hits.
Hint: We’re globally headed to The Collapse (with capital C) now. See climate change, resource scarcity, water depletion, or just ecological overshoot.
Which is extra interesting now, because fintrac and US treasury lately had to address issues of derisking ( banks choosing the easy way out from the burden of explaining every instance SAR and UTR was not filed ). Breaking point was coming for a while with crypto being an interesting symptom of the issue, but clearly things did not get bad enough yet.
if the payment processor knew the transaction was for a contract killing but processed it anyway, would they not be facilitating a crime (“aiding and abetting”)? are you saying we should specifically exempt payment processors from being held responsible for crimes that the rest of us — or any other business — could be found guilty of when performing the same functions?
or are you suggesting something more broad: that in the chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a crime, only the “last” party should ever be held responsible? e.g. anyone can sell weapons to anybody, only the person who pulls the trigger should be legally responsible? in this case presumably it’s legal to hire a contract killer, the only illegal part is the killing itself, and a skilled contractor could probably shift that final act onto the victim as well.
> if the payment processor knew the transaction was for a contract killing but processed it anyway
If the payment processor knows what your contract is for, it should have an obligation to report it to you. If the payment processor knew the transaction was for contract killing then it should have an obligation to report it to the authorities.
> are you suggesting something more broad: that in the chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a crime, only the “last” party should ever be held responsible?
No, I think that some parties between the "first" and "last" should be indemnifiable because they provide neutral services that everyone relies on for legal purposes. Without proof that a contract between two parties is illegal, it should be permitted.
Do you have any idea how many employers have unenforceable clauses in their contracts? If you think that payment processors should be held liable for criminal contracts then perhaps we should hold payment processors and banks liable for criminal contracts of all employers.
Literally, innocent until proven guilty. The bank is worried about indemnification, eg civil judgments, which are more akin to 50.1% proof. Criminal judgrments are more 99.9% presumed guilt.
Aiding and abetting (or accessory, more generally) has legal criteria that must be met fully:
1. The accused party must be aware of the perpetrator’s intent to commit a crime
2. The accused then took action to help or encourage the perpetrator in carrying out their intent
If both are not met, the accused person cannot be held criminally liable. I’m sure each of us have met a single one of these requirements in isolation. For example, if you watch a crime happen, you likely met #1 and if you helped out a random stranger and the help you rendered later assisted them when committing a crime, you met #2.
We as a society agree that just the act of solicitation for murder is crime, one that is totally separate from a murder charge. It is also a crime to sell a weapon if you are not licensed to do so in some jurisdictions.
A lot of legal theory revolves around the concept of “mens rea” (which itself has four levels: intent, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence), and “actus rea” which is the subsequent action as a result of the accused’s state of mind. Entities that act as a common carrier are shielded from this because their position in any transaction precludes any knowledge of the specific details of what they are facilitating.
If they knew the payment was for a contract killing, they should be picking up the phone and calling law enforcement.
This isn’t even about individual transactions. The situation here is more like them saying, “your business has characteristics in common with the kind of a business that might facilitate a contract killing and we’re lazy so we just aren’t going to do any business with you at all”.
The knots HN ties itself into bashing "EU regulations", but then easily deciding to impose arbitrary regulations on payment companies is a sight to behold.
if you took a thousand people who adhere to different ethics and polled them on questions of ethics, would you expect the net responses to adhere to any consistent ethics even if each individual's responses did?
This ignores all the justifications that the other commenters have laid out.
You are not "aiding and abetting" by handling the money. There's already a well-established body of law outlining who is and is not culpable for a crime. We don't need to debate it from first principles here.
Don't let these people on HN mislead you. Even the postal service cannot knowingly deliver a bomb to a target and claim immunity. It doesn't work like that. If you know they are committing a crime, then you have to stop them. Or at a minimum try to stop them.
I agree that a postal carrier would be criminally liable for knowingly delivering a live bomb, but I think you’re wrong on the end part. There is no legal obligation to try to stop crimes you know about. In most cases there isn’t even an obligation to report them.
In most US states, it is illegal to fail to report a crime. This is usually a misdemeanor, but is a felony in some states and with some types of crime.
I'm gonna go ahead and claim that laws that incur a penalty for not reporting a crime, are not commensurate with legal obligation. Such a charge sounds like a plea bargain or additional-charges or inconvenience-a-witness tool, than a legal concern. The charges for failing to report a crime are subject to prosecution that includes due process (proof, legal prosecution, etc). It's nearly impossible to prove that you witnesses a crime you didn't report without some paper/video/interview trail. This is partly why you never talk to police without a lawyer, as it can get you caught up in such a charge by your own statements.
They key is, the payment processor would not know, because they should not have the ability to ask. What's needed here, is a replacement for cash. Nothing more, nothing less. The digital dollar wallet, with a number and a passcode that only you have. And you can send that to another wallet number. That is the scope, and the complete scope. Bitcoin w/o the blockchain. This should be provided by a government, not a bank or a payment processor, and should be free - systems paid for by how we pay to mint physical money.
Fun story about the electronic toll pass, which I refuse to use and as a result get to places slower by never taking a toll road, in over 20 years.
We had tolls. You throw a couple of quarters in, and you go on your way. They were replaced by the electronic toll tag. Which is linked to your name, your credit card, and keeps a timestamped transaction history, forever.
There was a custody battle, and the divorced husband got the kids. The court looked at the wife's toll records, showing she comes home from work real late, and that would impact the quality of life for kids. Boy, I bet she never thought she'd lose her kids by using a toll tag. I bet she did think after the divorce she'd have to start coming home earlier and probably set it up with her manager. We'll never know.
Thing is, it should have been an anonymous electronic RFID wallet you reload, to replace the function of the quarter coin, and it became a government tracking device attached to your car.
Now answer me this: is your ISP responsible for you downloading that torrent full of child porn? Well, that's probably a bad example. Is Cisco, the maker of the network switch that ISP uses, legally responsible for it?
> The court looked at the wife's toll records, showing she comes home from work real late, and that would impact the quality of life for kids. Boy, I bet she never thought she'd lose her kids by using a toll tag.
Do you have a source for that? Google wasn't being helpful.
This got me interested as well. I couldn't find the specific incident they were referring to with a brief search, but I did find this, which implies that toll data can be and has been used in child custody disputes, etc: https://familylawyermagazine.com/articles/i-pass-tollway-dat...
I unfortunately do not, as this was over 20 years ago. I guess "trust me" that it happened, because - again "trust me" - this was the thing that over 20 years ago got me to never take another toll road. I did give google a go as well, and after a full 45 seconds could not find it.
"many of the requests for I-Pass records in civil matters were divorce cases"
This is from the first search result linked in the other reply.
"In child custody disputes, a parent who believes the other parent is not fulfilling their parental duties may use this data to establish the parent is not caring for the child. A parent may use the data to establish the other is not with the child, but instead on the road headed to a different location, such as a race track. The parent who believes the other is not meeting their obligations may be able to use this information during custody litigation or as support for a modification to an existing agreement"
"“We routinely utilize I-Pass records in discovery,” says Maureen A. Gorman, a divorce litigator at my Chicago law firm."
Now, let me spread some more anger, because let's face it, people love being angry. Road tolls were supposed to be temporary, to finance building the roads. They were never supposed to stay permanent. Toll revenue is more than road maintenance. In fact, over 50% of toll revenue, is redirected to other uses, and increases close to 100% per decade. Some of it is used for mass transit - so people in cars, pay for people on the subway. Many toll roads (and city parking meters, and red light and speed cameras) are run by private companies, with taxpayer-paid city staff enforcing that private corporation's profit.
What can you do? Only thing I've found is to not participate, at a great inconvenience to yourself. No, I don't use city parking meters. I pay way, way more, for private parking - although I'm only in a car a few weeks per year, usually in a work-paid rental. The benefit - for me - is to fall asleep fast, without laying there for hours in the dark getting more and more pissed off at things I can't fix.
Limiting access and monitoring financial services is one of the most powerful tools against organized crime, terror and corruption, tax evasion etc.
So yeah, I think the lawful part is crucial. There is of course lot's of room for discussions about what should be legal.
I didn’t mean to say that a court shouldn’t be able to order a payment processor to not service a customer or a particular transaction. What I meant was that the payment processor shouldn’t be the one identifying the crimes.
And if it's for human trafficking? Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross. The real problem as I see it is that payment processing is a near monopoly. Better competition and smaller players would almost guarantee that every transaction except the most egregious would have a willing payment processor. Diversity is so often the best answer over a one size fits all rule.
How do you know it's for human trafficking? Are you deputized by the government to act as judge and jury?
If you think something might be for human trafficking, you report it to law enforcement and let them deal with it. They'll gather evidence, build a case, make arrests, and hand things off to a DA/prosecutor who will file charges. Or, at some point, someone will decide it's not human trafficking, or at least that there isn't enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and drop the case.
All that is just due process, and a payment processor should not be given that responsibility. Both because I don't think they'd want it (it costs money and carries liability), and because we shouldn't trust them with it (private corporations shouldn't be allowed to apply the force of law).
It's a thought experiment. There are surely cases in life in which you know for sure that crime is being committed. What you're asking for though is that due criminal process be a part of denying a payment. Which seems extremely heavy handed.
If my payment processing company doesn't want to help sell guns, or help with human trafficking, or hell, doesn't want to support the meat industry, then I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.
Should it be illegal to start a vegan payment processing company?
> There are surely cases in life in which you know for sure that crime is being committed
These are the cases of having evidence, right? Which should be reported.
> I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.
And if two or three large businesses cover 99% of a given market (payment market), how about some anti-monopolistic legal protections? Them colluding to stop the meat industry, continuing your example, would be a monopolistic practice.
> if two or three large businesses cover 99% of a given market (payment market), how about some anti-monopolistic legal protections?
Yes, that's the actual problem. Breaking up the existing near-monopoly and creating a functioning market with thousands of competitors would be a far better solution than trying to force the existing payment processors to process all payments, regardless of risk or ethical considerations.
Evidence and due process are important for convicting someone of a crime. You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction. The requirement for evidence and due process should be far lower, if even needed at all.
> You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction.
This doesn’t work when it’s something basic like payment processing. It’s the same reason we decided as a society that people can’t “trust their gut” and deny housing to people based on the color of their skin.
Housing is a basic human right. However you can deny housing to someone because they belong to a hate group.
Running a profitable online business is not even a basic human right. No one owes you payment processing. Forcing someone to be a supplier to a hate group violates their basic human rights. If payment processors were discriminating against a protected class such as race or age then you might have a point.
The whole reason we have notions of due process and evidence is because people are very commonly wrong when they make these sorts of judgement calls from their gut.
Are you reading what you are writing? People can (and do) know things without having enough evidence to stand up in court. It’s how 99% of everything works, frankly.
Banks right now are denying transactions because they ‘know’ it’s fraud, based on ML models and probability and no other evidence.
If you require someone to not ‘know’ something until they have enough evidence they could prove it in court, they won’t be able to function. Even investigators don’t have to meet that bar.
> People can (and do) know things without having enough evidence to stand up in court.
But "people" cannot use that knowledge to deny access to money to other people if they don't have evidence that can stand up in court. Yet banks can. That is wrong. That is giving banks too much power without accountability. Yes, some of the entities they cut off will "deserve it", at least in your eyes; but many others won't. We already know how this plays out: it's the same every time a centralized entity wants more power. They claim it's to "protect" us against something, but it's really just to enrich them at our expense. Don't take the bait.
Since banks are the ones who control access to money, and banks are doing it, who are these other people that you are talking about that aren’t allowed to do it?
Banks are doing this at the behest of the gov’t.
Oh, and those sanctions and the like - what do you think they actually look like paperwork wise?
You seem to be arguing that what is, isn’t?
If you want to say that what is, is bad, then hey I’m not arguing against that! I’m just pointing out what is going on right now in front of us, and has been for a very long time.
Sanctions are a different animal. I have no problem with a government producing a court order or other legal instrument ordering that some entity be cut off from the financial system. (Certainly sometimes this is done for political reasons, rather than cases where actual harm is being done, which is unfortunate, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be fully able to prevent things like that.)
KYC and AML laws require private corporations to deny people access to essential services for arbitrary reasons, without due process. These laws are garbage.
I don't think anyone is arguing that what is, isn't. They're arguing that it shouldn't be.
In other words, they don't know. They just have a fuzzy feeling, nothing more than that.
Would you be okay with the police being allowed to randomly enter your home and seize whatever stuff they want, just because they have a hunch? Or would you rather they have to get a search warrant first, which requires at least some form of evidence?
The entire point of this subthread is that this way of doing things is garbage. Banks shouldn't be allowed to deny transactions because they "know" it's fraud, but we've allowed our governments to force them into the position of doing law enforcement, something we should not want them to do. But people who think the government should outsource its responsibilities seem to think this kind of thing is a good idea.
Similarly, a payment processor shouldn't be allowed to deny a transaction because they "know" it's human trafficking. Evidence of such a thing should be given to law enforcement, and due process should determine what, if anything, is done.
Denying a payment isn't the same as putting someone in jail and therfore shouldn't require the same standard of due process. Allowing a business to accept credit cards is not a basic human right.
> Because arresting people requires evidence and due process, which is work.
Such work is paramount in order to maintain the foundations of an accountable society. The alternative being suggested here is no better than witch hunting in the worst case, wherein certain groups/classes of people are barred from doing their business online just because of the sensitive nature of a given topic. (drugs/medicine, pornography, gambling, political donations, etc.)
Doing business online is not a basic human right. Access to a fair trial and due process before throwing you in jail is a basic human right. Comparing the two is a major false equivalence.
And frankly, you can’t run a business meeting the judicial bar required to really he sure, not that the courts are usefully right here either. Did OJ Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman? That depends on which court you ask, and how many asterisks you’re willing to allow on the answers. And that took 10’s to 100’s of millions to get there.
The banks get the ‘privilege’ of being fined for transactions that occurred and were later judged ‘bad’ based on the results of a in-depth, very expensive investigation after the fact that determined they didn’t try to ‘know’ well enough who they were dealing with.
Pretty cozy for regulators. Pretty impossible position for banks.
It's odd to me that the way to combat this is to freeze money. Yes, money is the lifeblood, but that means you can also follow the money to the source. Wouldn't you want to do that instead of freezing it and killing the lead?
Well, it looks like a lot of this is designed to make the job of law enforcement easier because politicians that seem "tough" on crime have better election prospects.
Freezing the money is far more dramatic and provides nice numbers for said politician's re-election campaign.
Depends on the case. If you already know who belongs to a terrorist organization then maybe stopping the money and limiting the ability to terrorize would be a higher priority.
> Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross
Not for services deemed important enough:
> U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who cited her religious beliefs in refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples
Same way it's handled now, you charge a higher processing fee proportional to the chargeback risk in the industry. My only argument is that networks shouldn't be able to capriciously deny transactions that are legal, even if I disagree with them. I don't believe in the 2nd amendment, but to the extent it is lawful to buy a gun, you should be able to buy it with your Visa card, imo, and a lot of payment acquirers do not permit it. Similarly, legal drugs.
The reason the networks started denying service to firearms dealers is that the (Obama-era) Department of Justice pressured them to. They also went after pornography and marijuana dealers.
You can cap the effective margin with even a very generous limit — say, processing fees no more than 3x the cost of servicing chargebacks — and mostly eliminate the concern about "quietly banning" businesses via processing fees.
But the thing is that there isn't much incentive to do this kind of skulduggery, because the companies are only protecting themselves from lawsuits and protests when they ban businesses, but imposing high processing fees would probably not satisfy the would-be tyrants who were trying to force these "bans".
No idea where you got "237%" but no, of course, the rule I have in mind would require charging fees proportional to the risk. This is well-worn ground. And if somehow the risk is double what the charge is (?!) then that's the risk. They'll have to step up their customer validation at PornHub.
The poster was noting there is historic precedent for parties to charge punitive fees to the point it’s defacto banned for things they don’t like. It would be challenging to stop without mandating some explicit formula too, which can be gamed.
> The poster was noting there is historic precedent for parties to charge punitive fees to the point it’s defacto banned
Obviously, the answer is to disallow that.
And if people break the law, and do it anyway, by trying to be "clever" then a judge and jury can punish them.
This punishment works especially well, with this thing called "discovery", in which the legal system can parse through your internal communications, to see if you are intending on defacto banning it.
> It would be challenging to stop without mandating some explicit formula too
No it wouldn't be.
Just do it, like we do many other laws. Give a vague description of whats not allowed, and let the jury figure it out. And give a large fine if they lose the court case.
That's enough deterrence to stop people from gaming the system. Just give them a huge fine if they try to do that.
Well, what do you mean by "people"? If you mean "a majority of voters", then I doubt that's actually true, for quite a few types of businesses and transactions that are currently banned from payment networks.
If you mean "those in power who can and do make decisions that a majority of voters wouldn't actually support", then sure, I think that's the case, but that doesn't make it right, and that doesn't make it inevitable, either.
Who gets to define the risk, though? Currently the payment processor gets to decide what's risky (and how risky) and what isn't -- with no need to justify it to anyone -- so they could just say that online pornography companies' risk justifies a -- totally proportional -- 237% fee (or whatever high number they want that makes using them infeasible).
Or does someone have to sit down and write a law or regulation that says "the risk for providing payment services to an online pornography company is X, and thus the processing fee is Y%"? I guess that could work?
I would go the other direction. You list the painting on the gov website, they do the transactions and all of the weird taxes, fees & vat around the world, check if is stolen, where it did come from, if it is real etc etc what ever weird shit they want, all you get is the after tax money. No need for accountants nor quadruple book keeping, just do the business.
Would you feel differently for someone hired to break into your home and retrieve valuables or information? Or perhaps hired to perform a hit on the life of someone you care about?
Transactional sex might not be something you want people drawing lines around with financial regulation, but usually people have a line.
There are other mechanisms to target illegal actions, such as sending the police to arrest the person. Those actions are guarded by due process and the right to trial.
Using the financial system to target people is not.
But we're not talking about "using the financial system to target people."
We're talking about whether it's worthwhile to say something like "hey, maybe we will not allow legal markets for some things (say, murder) in our society" on top of "maybe we will ban make some activities crimes (say, murder) themselves."
Do you believe markets for murder should be legal?
Do you believe private corporations should be in charge of deciding -- with no oversight or ability to appeal -- whether money changing hands is for a legal or illegal purpose?
I guess "yes" is a defensible answer to that, but for me it's a hard "no". As flawed as the US justice system is, I prefer due process over arbitrary action.
Your ethical thought experiment is fair. What would you do if you knew that it would be used for illegal activity. The point you are missing is the payment processors should not even try to detect what the payment is made for. It should not be their job.
Does postal system open every envelope to see if there is cash inside sent as an illegitimate payment to someone? Because it's easier to do it online should not be the base for justifying it.
Would you be happy if your email provider scanned all your emails using ML systems to detect illegal activity? For some reason we value the privacy of our communication more than other types of transactions.
> The point you are missing is the payment processors should not even try to detect what the payment is made for. It should not be their job.
You're thinking about this as if the question is simply about whether or not payment processors should have the job of examining every individual payment. There's a potential discussion to be had there, but that's the only dimension of the topic, and one of the things we're talking about entire classes of activity.
If prospective clients like "Assassination Central" or "Doordash Blowjobs Inc" approach you as a payment processor, you might have some idea of what's going to happen. And in general payment processors have both an incentive and regulatory obligations to understand what kind of business they're facilitating, not to mention whatever individual inclinations they might have.
When it comes to something like Venmo, I'm not really sure how to handle that. I suspect invasivity isn't the only issue, it's also probably practically difficult to police effectively, but at the same time, if there were means by which reasonable correlations could be made, it's not clear to me that there's no activity whatsoever for which there's a case for flagging, however controversial which cases meet that criteria might be.
I didn't say that the payment processor doesn't have the right to question if the client can prove its legality with paperwork. Doesn't "Doordash Blowjobs Inc" mean that they have been legally allowed to form a company? In that case who is the payment processor to decide that they are "not good"?
> In that case who is the payment processor to decide that they are "not good"?
Should it be illegal to start a vegan payment processing company that won't allow butchers to be paid through them? If so, then why should it be illegal?
That's not practical. You wouldn't be able to refute charges. Payment processors couldn't price in risk for sprcific industries. You've created more problems than you've solved.
Forcing processors to be neutral and to not know their customers has both business and moral implications that both need to be included in the argument.
If you have evidence that a murder is about to occur, you report it to the fucking police. You don’t just remove yourself from the pipeline and hope it doesn’t happen.
But you don't -- and can't -- know that the payment is illegal. You merely suspect it, and since you are not a court of law, a judge, or a jury, you should have no business arbitrarily cutting off someone's ability to transact.
It's a thought experiment. The question is about a case in which you know for sure. It's a big world and this is likely to happen at least sometimes. If you don't want to play along with the thought experiment, no problem. But it's a useful and interesting question if you can.
And there are also cases in which you can clearly know something is illegal. Someone purchasing guns in a country where guns are not legal doesn't need a judge, jury, and court process for a payment processor to decide they don't want to be involved. It's not arbitrary. And your right to make purchases using a credit card is not a basic human right.
That was my comment. I intended it to mean the government shouldn’t be deputizing payment processors to do its dirty work. There were some good points in the responses and a few ridiculous scenarios. Even the ridiculous scenarios point out real issues.
In reality I don’t think there is any chance of a law requiring payment processors to process all legal transactions and definitely nothing about illegal transactions. If that were a possibility, I would back off my statement that they should be forced to process illegal transactions.
What I asked is specific: if you know the money is for a hit job will you still accept the business and take your fee or is there a moral line you personally won't cross? Yes, it's the job of the police to investigate but do you want the freedom to not engage in business that you consider evil?
And I think what many of us in this thread object to is that your specific question is irrelevant, because it's hypothetical and unrealistic. You do not know the money is for a hit job. You just don't. You may think that's what it's for, but you don't actually know, and you -- as a random employee (or worse, algorithm) of Payments R Us, Inc. -- should have no business playing judge and jury.
As for moral lines you are curious as to what people will and won't cross, those lines will be different for different people, and that's exactly why we shouldn't be putting these sorts of decisions in the hands of random unaccountable corporate employees (or, again, worse, algorithms).
You clearly want someone to say "no, of course I wouldn't allow a transaction to go through if it was for a hitman contract". But what if someone said "I see no problem with contract killings; I'd let it through"? That person could be working at Payments R Us, and clearly we don't want someone making that decision! So take it out of their hands.
The contract killer is of course an extreme example, but we already have real-world examples discussed here that illustrate the problem with this. Pornography is legal, and yet payment processors boot online porn companies from their networks. Someone who thinks pornography is immoral might have made that determination (I don't buy the "high risk of fraud" argument; you can always control for that with higher fees). Regardless of how you personally feel about pornography, do you think it's ok for a company to deny another company access to a big chunk of the financial system for entirely legal activities, just because they don't like them? I would sincerely hope that we can agree that sort of thing is bad.
> do you think it's ok for a company to deny another company access to a big chunk of the financial system for entirely legal activities
A vegan credit card that only works at vegan companies should not be illegal.
> to a big chunk of the financial system
Here's the actual problem! We have a handful of giant payment processors that make up a near monopoly. That's the problem you want to fix. More competition and more choices (e.g. vegan credit card) means you'll for sure find a way to pay for your vegan porn.
> That person could be working at Payments R Us
I'm not talking about employees making a decision. I'm talking about the owners of a payment processing company being able to decide on a policy that is applied to all customers.
Last time I checked both Visa and Mastercard have no problems being used to buy cigarettes or alcohol.
I'd bet that orders of magnitude more people die because of cancer caused by cigarettes and in episodes of domestic violence or traffic accidents caused by alcohol abuse than the number of people assassinated by hit killers hired online and paid with credit cards.
In many jurisdictions, the electric utility is a private corporation. Is it ok for the power company to turn off power for a business they think is immoral, like, say, a strip club? Obviously it's not; laws prevent that sort of thing.
So at this point we agree (as a society at least) that some businesses should not be allowed to conduct business according to their ethics, but instead must do business with anyone who shows up at their door. At this point it's just a matter of deciding which businesses that rule should apply to. I would argue that payment processors are approaching utility-like levels of essential use in our society, if they aren't there already.
> In many jurisdictions, the electric utility is a private corporation. Is it ok for the power company to turn off power for a business they think is immoral, like, say, a strip club? Obviously it's not; laws prevent that sort of thing
This is due to a physical limitation. Payment processors have no such physical limitation.
> I would argue that payment processors are approaching utility-like levels of essential use in our society,
Correct. And the problem is not that they are utility-like essential. But that they are a near monopoly. There is zero reason for payment processors to be a near monopoly and that's the actual problem that needs fixing.
at best you suspect it, you don't know it unless you're on the sending or receiving side of the transaction.
it shouldn't be my decision whether i want to allow the transaction, even if i wouldn't want to allow it.
i'm not in a position to perform due legal process to determine whether you're indeed being paid for a hit job.
I asked a specific question and you refuse to answer it because your entire premise is based on not being able to know if someone is engaging in unethical behavior. That's premise is seriously flawed.
The problem you're trying solve is caused by lack of competition and near monopoly players. The fix isn't to force those businesses to ignore ethics. The fix is hugely increasing the competition.
> your entire premise is based on not being able to know if someone is engaging in unethical behavior. That's premise is seriously flawed.
No, it's not. It's literally the facts on the ground.
Additionally, it's telling that you used the term "unethical" rather than "unlawful". Whether or not a credit card works should have nothing to do with someone's arbitrary ethics.
It's literally not. Your claim is that I suspect the local butcher sells meat rather than knowing that they sell meat. If my vegan friend doesn't want to do their accounting, that should be within his basic human freedoms. He's not the only accountant in town and the butcher will surely find an accountant who enjoys eating meat.
> Whether or not a credit card works should have nothing to do with someone's arbitrary ethics.
It shouldn't be illegal for someone to start a vegan credit card that only allows purchases at businesses that don't kill animals. More choice is better and you want to make all payment processors follow a one-size-fits-all rule. That's the opposite of the direction we should be pursuing.
The real problem is the near monopoly control of the handful of payment processing giants that currently exist. Fix that problem and increase the competition and offer more choice and you no longer needs to force payment processors to be neutral. Forced neutrality in the end means the government decides. Which makes sense in a handful of cases, but not when markets can do a better job.
even though not explicitly, i have already answered your question.
you should pass the transaction, as you should be in a neutral position.
edit: to clarify, payment providers/processors nowadays are a core utility function in our society. imo this is not something you can consider a regular private business.
My basic human freedoms should include the right to not do business with a hate group for example. You want folks to give up that freedom because you got the problem wrong and you're applying the wrong fix.
you're free to decide who to do business with if you're not providing a core utility service.
would you like to no longer receive water or electricity at your home because your utility companies don't like you, despite (being willing to) paying the bills like any other citizen?
Due to limited infrastructure resourcess, water and utility companies are a near monopoly which is why they need these types of regulations. There is no physical limitations to the number of possible payment processors so the actual fix is more competition and more companies. No need for neutrality regulations when you have thousands of companies competing.
Ok got it, so this means that your previously statement, where you said "My basic human freedoms should include the right to not do business with a hate group for example", is not true, or not your full opinion.
You actually think that there are certain situations where it is OK to force basic utilities to transact with everyone.
You just disagree where exactly the line is. But at the end of the day, yes you also agree that some companies should be forced to engage in certain transactions.
Interested in the topic but not interested in your aggressive style and putting words in my mouth and telling me what I believe. You can have the last word if you'd like.
Yes, people usually don't want to engage when the contradiction of your new statement is put so clearly in contrast with your past statement.
I wasn't really expecting you to engage with the point in any way. It is so rare that people do.
The fact remains that you now admit that yes you want to force certain businesses, specifically utilities, to sell to people, and this contradicts your previous statement.
You even did one of the most effective forms of non engagement, where you say "you can have the last word" thereby making it so either your statement remains unchallenged, or making it seem like you "win" because I responded, which is what you told me to do.
No not for the reasons you claim, I don't want to continue because you're aggressive. I've happily engaged with people who point out what they think is a contradiction in my thinking. But not with people like you.
> non engagement
I didn't say I'd never speak to you again lol. Just that this topic is over because you can't seem to discuss it in a way that doesn't include personal attacks. Not interested in that style of debate in the least.
That’s a bit of bullshit because these payment providers accept transactions for the government which consistently kills people at the local, state, and federal level every day.
If you “know” the money is for a hit job, you contact the FBI or local police and they can mobilize protective services and arrest forces.
I'm not claiming payment processors are moral. I'm asking if the freedom to refuse unethical business should be your right. I was responding to the position of a parent comment that processors should accept even illegal transactions.
Of course you contact the police in the situation I described. Do you accept the payment though or do you refuse the transaction? You keep avoiding a specific yes or no question.
There is a massive difference between "unethical business" and "illegal business". As banks provide critical infrastructure, they should absolutely not be allowed to refuse business they consider "unethical", just like a power company should not be allowed to cut someone off because they think they are behaving "unethically".
As to "illegal business", the simple fact is that the bank doesn't know enough to make a meaningful distinction. It is simply impossible for a bank to know for a fact what a payment is for. They only know the source account, the destination account, the payment value, and a user-provided description. That's just not enough data to make a decent judgement. Plenty of jokers out there who will label their rent transaction as "extortion payment", after all.
Sure, if they have reasonable suspicion they should forward the information to the police, but they should not be allowed to block it unless given a court order.
> There is a massive difference between "unethical business" and "illegal business"
Can you explain the massive difference? For example, easy access to guns is legal in a handful of countries and illegal in most countries. Where it's legal to easily obtain guns but also illegal to buy alcohol on a Sunday, what does that imply in terms of ethics?
> As banks provide critical infrastructure,
There is no physical limitation - like a local electricity generator - that requires this "infrastructure" to be dominated by a few huge companies.
> the simple fact is that the bank doesn't know enough to make a meaningful distinction. It is simply impossible for a bank to know for a fact what a payment is for.
That's wrong. The bank reasonably knows what I'm buying from Porn Hub or the local butcher. Even if they don't know exactly what I'm buying, they do know how the local butcher generates the bulk of its profits.
What you're suggesting is that it be illegal to start a vegan credit card - only works at businesses where they don't harm animals. What we need instead is more choice, not less choice. Break up the near monopoly and reintroduce competition and you fix the actual problem - which is that a handful of payment processors can collude against a business or industry.
Banks don't know what you're paying for at Porn Hub?
Banks do know enough to price in risk. And there is your problem. They must be allowed to price in risk and if they are allowed to do that they can effectively deny business by making the price too high.
PayPal isn't a bank but does payments. The real problem is there aren't enough alternatives like that. The solution to banks having so much power is to give them more competition.
What does "give them more competition" mean? The fact that the landscape looks like it does is a strong suggestion that more competition might not actually be viable.
Another possible solution to banks having so much power is to regulate them more. I know a lot of libertarian types don't like that answer, but it is a valid answer.
It means you have far more choices in who to give your business to. For example, in a big city you can eat at thousands of restaurants. Or cook at home. However, I cannot choose from thousands of payment processors. With more payment processors competing for my business, I would get a better product and more choice.
> Another possible solution to banks having so much power is to regulate them more. I know a lot of libertarian types don't like that answer, but it is a valid answer.
I'm firmly not libertarian. Not even close. But I don't like to pull out the regulation stick until we see that more competition and a functioning market can't solve the problem. Since these transactions are now all digital, the potential for highly functioning markets has barely been explored.
You accept the payment, absolutely. It should not be your responsibility to do the required due process to ensure that a decision to deny the transaction is actually fair and correct. And more than that, I don't want to have to trust an unaccountable private corporation with that responsibility.
So it should be illegal to start a vegan payment processor? Breaking up the current near-monopoly and giving you more choice would give the maximum possible freedom to everyone including you.
> unaccountable private corporation with that responsibility.
That's the beauty of a functioning market. With lots of choice the corporation must either be accountable or lose your business. The real problem is that you currently don't have much choice due to a non-existent market with almost no real competition for business.
In this hypothetical situation you've set up in which Visa somehow knows that one of their billion+ payments is for the contract killing of another human, then no, it's probably better to not let the payment go through.
However I find the argument you're posing apparently in favor of allowing a business like Visa to decline transactions on ethical grounds to be missing some important rigor. It's honestly kind of boring to argue about very clear-cut and extreme example like a credit card payment that is clearly for a contract killing. That's not where the meat of the issue lies.
If you'd like to make the argument that a business like Visa should decline transactions based on the ethics (as opposed to legal & financial risk, which appears to be how they do it now) of that transaction, then I think you need to come out of the gate with a bit more rigor. Here are the questions that immediately come to mind for me:
1. Can we agree that the rules applied to a multinational corporation with billions in income utilized by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis to exchange legal currency for goods and services should be different than the rules governing the bakery down the street?
2. If yes, then within the context of multinational financial corporations, what is "ethical"?
3. Who decides what that definition is for a multinational financial corporation?
4. Is that definition industry-wide or specific to a corporation?
5. Is a corporation expected to hold to a consistent definition of "ethical"? If they are, how is that enforced?
6. If a corporation is not required to hold to a consistent definition of "ethical", how is this different from "for any reason or no reason at all"?
7. If an individual's small business is deemed "unethical" by a monopoly or near-monopoly, such that it is impossible _in practical terms_ for the business to exist based on an extralegal decision by a multinational financial institution, should there be any recourse for that individual? What would that be? Over what timeline could it be reasonably accomplished?
8. Remaining firmly in the context of applying your above answers to multinational financial corporations: how do your answers create a net boon for society? Who is likely to benefit from your policies? Is there any apparent harm from your policies? Is that harm a net boon for society? How and why?
Without some thought put towards these questions, or ones like them, your (apparent, there's not a lot to go on here) proposal of universal ethical freedom for all businesses looks a lot like "unlimited freedom without regard for how that unlimited freedom affects others." Which, if you are seriously putting that argument forward, I'd like to circle back to contract killing and ask what damn right does Visa have to limit one's freedom to run a contract killing business?
> 1. Can we agree that the rules applied to a multinational corporation with billions in income utilized by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis to exchange legal currency for goods and services should be different than the rules governing the bakery down the street?
Yes. The core of the problem is the near monopoly that the small list of current payment processors have. As an aside, these companies have less global control than someone from the US or Europe might think.
2. If yes, then within the context of multinational financial corporations, what is "ethical"?
A vegan credit card is entirely reasonable. Any ethical stance you want to take is reasonable. As long as you fix the actual monopoly problem.
3. Who decides what that definition is for a multinational financial corporation?
It shouldn't matter if you fix the actual problem.
Etc.
Solving the actual problem instead of the perceived problem very often answers a bunch of doubts all at the same time.
> I'd like to circle back to contract killing and ask what damn right does Visa have to limit one's freedom to run a contract killing business?
The same right that I have to not be a contract killer. If your contract killing business can't find enough suppliers - be that the killers themselves or the payment processor - then that's a problem that no one should be compelled to solve. You don't have a basic human right to run any business you choose and force others to be suppliers to your business.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the assertion that the contract killing example is boring and doesn't really expose any of the grey areas or nuance that is necessary to really think about this issue.
But even ignoring ethics, I don't think multinational corporations should be unilaterally deciding on questions of law, either. I don't think they will ever make legal determinations based on any sufficient amount of rigor, either. Sufficient in this case, to me, is "would be the same decision reached by a court of law after engaging in due process". And even if they could theoretically apply that level of rigor, why should we trust an unaccountable multinational corporation with that power?
Forcing companies to neutrally process all transactions is in itself a decision around ethics. You're not ignoring ethics. You're pushing for your own ethics around payment processing.\
> I don't think multinational corporations should be unilaterally deciding on questions of law,
They aren't really. Deciding to refuse a payment is not jail time. The business can also accept cash.
Attacking a significant part of someone's ability to function in society instead of attacking the the perceived injustice itself on its merits, by informing law enforcement, who's job is to carry out due process, suggests lack of confidence in the merits, or lack of trust in the justice system. It doesn't seem to argue for fairness, unless the one arguing for it accepts being at the receiving end of the argument.
> Attacking a significant part of someone's ability to function in society
I never said to attack the ability of someone to function in society. That's a side effect of a near monopoly. The actual problem is that a handful of companies control payment processing so it's easy for them to act together. The fix is more freedom not less freedom: far more companies that process payments and more choice. This allows companies to choose who they do business with and customers to find a payment processor who allows the types of purchases they like to make.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a payment processor to refuse to allow gun purchases. Or that it should be illegal to start a vegan credit card. Likewise it's not unreasonable for a payment processor to accept even very high risk businesses and make that their claim to fame. The fix in this case is to break up the monopoly and reintroduce competition.
Do you truly believe that when you'd make the decision to categorize a transaction as such, that decision would hold up in court, beyond a reasonable doubt, every time?
If not, then you have no place making it. And I would argue that even if you do, you still have no place making it, as unaccountable private corporations should not be given the ability (or requirement) to enforce law.
Certainly we can legally require you to report suspicious transactions to law enforcement, but it should be up to people bound to follow due process to actually do something (or not do something) about it.
I think a reasonable compromise might be to allow payment processors to put a transaction on hold until it's reviewed by law enforcement, but even this has some significant downsides.
> Do you truly believe that when you'd make the decision to categorize a transaction as such, that decision would hold up in court, beyond a reasonable doubt, every time? If not, then you have no place making it
What if I want to start a vegan credit card that only allows payments to vegan businesses? You're saying that should be illegal?
The best compromise is to not have a compromise and fix the actual problem instead of trying to fix side effects: make it far easier for companies to enter the payment processing space. With thousands of payment processors you'll very likely be able to find a company that is willing to process your credit card payments for vegan porn.
The real problem is a few huge players with near monopoly control.
I understand the pitch here, but different industries (and organizations within industries) pose dramatically different fraud risks. There are "anything flies" payment processors today, but the fee premium you pay is massive due to the risks involved. For example, CCBill specializes in high-risk transactions and will handle anything legal, but the fees can be as high as 14.5%!
So why doesn't Visa and MC also allow high-risk transactions, and similarly charge 14.5% (or whatever they need to keep their profit margins where they'd like) for the privilege?
Nearly everyone with a credit or debit card will have one with one of the major payment networks (that just all happen to disallow these sorts of high-risk businesses). No one has the ability to pay with CCBill unless they've run into a high-risk business and have decided that's a (possibly pretty big) hurdle that they're willing to jump. And many people won't want to sign up with CCBill... the end result is that these high-risk businesses are less viable. Maybe they should be less viable, but I don't think unaccountable corporations should be making that decision for us.
Because a) Visa/MC’s core competency isn’t navigating the fraud-ridden waters of high risk transactions and b) Visa/MC are scared of possible legal consequences of engaging with these businesses. It’s just not predicted to be profitable for them.
Visa/MC are relentlessly profit-oriented. If they’re not engaging with entire market sectors it’s because they don’t predict it to be profitable.
I’m a bit confused by your second paragraph. You can still transact with CCBill from MC/Visa. CCBill is like Stripe for high risk orgs.
Define law and lawful transaction. For one example, law is a changing thing and rapidly changing one. What was pretty legal activity at Canada for pretty long time was changed at the hands of the government into illegal activity quite quickly and, what is mostly concerning to me, that law even has a retroactive nature - accounts can be frozen based on the activities prior to the date law enacted.
In my not so humble opinion, payment processors should be transaction-blind - they should process any transaction and all transactions.
That's hardly "changing the law" - that was invoking an existing law in the face of a valid national security risk. Granted law makers voted to extend the law slightly, never the less, the law has always existed in Canada.
I would never want to live in a Canada where payment processors are blind to transactions and the government couldn't freeze accounts of extremists/terrorists.
Why would I be sure to define it in such a way that I can't be labeled as such in any circumstance? I'm not afraid to work against my own self interest in the name of a better situation for the collective. What happened in Ottawa as a bunch of self-centered ego maniacs with extreme views terrorizing the people of that city. Never mind the bank accounts: they should have been jailed for life.
Up there you disagree with the (part of) collective and you show no intention to work against your self-interest or otherwise to work in the name of better situation of the (part of) collective.
Thank you for thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion with you.
I personally feel if the business is legal, then CC issuers should have to process it. If they want to be the top 3 or 4 gate keepers, they absolutely need to be completely neutral as long as the payment is legal.
While I understand that, how do you square that with one category of business causing way more chargebacks than average?
Do they just have to eat it? Or can they charge higher fees to those merchants? If the latter they could quickly use that to discriminate. $100/tx fee would kill most any normal business.
Perhaps the problem is the government doesn’t provide a non-cash lowest common denominator, so people are basically forced to use Visa/MC?
I'll preface this by stating that I work for a large bank, and the opinions I express herein are my own.
> ... how do you square that with one category of business causing way more chargebacks than average?
Simple: Liability shift.
The liability shift is what spurred merchants in the U.S. to finally, albeit begrudgingly, modernize by upgrading their terminals to take chips and NFC. They did so because the cost of not doing so was too high. Some hold outs exist, but they are quickly realizing their error in calculation.
Liability for card-not-present transactions and your typical our-word-against-theirs dispute has always been entirely on the merchant. The card issuing bank just facilitates the dispute resolution. Banks pocket the interchange fees either way, so who cares about the rest? About as neutral as you can be, setting aside the fact that the cardholder is the bank's customer (because they are also the merchant's customer).
Liability for fraudulent in-person (card-present) transactions was on the bank, which is why banks make such a big deal about fraud detection. There's no liability for a transaction that is denied. However, since the liability shift, fraud liability for card-present transactions is only on the bank if the merchant is using a new chip or NFC terminal when the customer presents a chip- or NFC-capable card. Swipe a chip card, and it's back on the merchant.
In the end, theoretically, you have merchants and banks both interested in quality of service and fraud prevention.
I don't see how this applies to enforcing payment processors carrying all 'legal transactions' despite risk of chargebacks. Are you saying that the payment processors should be able to say 'for certain transactions, you are liable'?
> Then remove all liability for payment processors.
Yep. If you make me liable on some legal matter involving some third parties that use me as a service, I have no choice but to brush up on law and defend myself the best I can.
The problem is that the government loves cracking down on crime through the financial system - terrorism, drugs, IP issues, firearms, etc, etc. It's the one tool they've used again and again...because it works.
So they'll never give financial institution carte blanche immunity, because they rely on them to choke off the money for illegal activities. And even if they did give immunity, you know they'll turn around a say "well, we didn't mean you could just ignore blatantly illegal activity" and the banks will fall into line.
The meta-problem is that both liberal and conservative politicians are on board with with cracking down through the financial system for one reason or another.
If you see comments calling for payment processors to be dumb money pipes free of liability, those are likely coming from libertarians.
How so? Currently if your transaction isn't permitted there's nothing you can do. Networks aren't required to process any transaction they don't want to process, or any kind of transaction they don't want to process.
You can appeal and talk to payment processors today, and they essentially tell you that your category of transactions has high fraud rates or exposes them to legal risk until you do XYZ impossible or arduous things to mitigate the liability or risk. They will use the same motte that they use now to justify their bailey reality.
That's a cop-out, fraudsters don't announce themselves so naturally retail businesses look for proxy markers from which to draw inferences. There's an entire money-laundering industry that aims to handle this issue for organized criminals. If you don't engage with this fact than you're just handwaving away the problem, undermining any pro-cash advocacy you engage in.
The real cop-out is that HSBC and friends launder more money for terrorists and human traffickers on a bad day than your typical local racket does in a year, and they only ever receive a token fine and slap on the wrist.
It’s germane in the sense that what you’re arguing against is a rounding error by comparison, consequently, not a material argument against cash-based money laundering in any meaningful sense.
Then it wouldn't have protected Pornhub. The payment processors pulled out due to CSAM, revenge porn, and copyright infringement, none of which are legal.
Not sure how you got that from my comment. I'm not the one arguing for "payment nuetrality". I'm just saying that such a provision wouldn't apply in the Pornhub case if it allowed for a suspected illegality escape hatch.
Businesses are one thing, but what I find truly dystopic about the idea of 100% cashless societies is that you could off people in the same way.
If today, you lose access to your bank account for whatever reason, you still have various options how to purchase necessities: If you got some spare cash, you could use that; otherwise you could ask a friend to lend you some cash.
In a cashless society, that won't work: Even if the friend wants to help you, they have nothing to wire the cash to. They'd literally have to buy the individual goods for you.
The only way to fix this would be to get a new temporary bank account until the old one is accessible again. But if you got banned for whatever reason, chances are the bank will ban the new account as well.
5% of the US population is unbanked. A "cashless" society would shut out a massive number of poor, undocumented, homeless, etc and make life even more difficult for them. It would also cause skyrocketing issues with burglary, mugging, etc.
Many porn actors have been blacklisted from the US banking system.
Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases over censorship laws and regulations and shifted to enforcing their morals via the private banking system.
Ever notice that there's no law or regulation requiring banks provide even basic checking service to anyone who can establish a valid identity?
Going cashless cannot happen unless either the government starts providing essential (checking, savings, credit card, and home/personal/auto financing) services they are mandated to provide to everyone (which will never happen because the banking industry would lose a ton of control) or banks must be mandated to provide non-lending services to anyone and provide lending on an identity-blind basis (ie, only metrics may be used, none which identify the type of banking or business or employment or spending you do.)
A side effect of this for the unbanked is probably that a new currency emerges that is used among those without access to banks. That could be just regular goods, or some other form of fiat money.
> Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases over censorship laws and regulations and shifted to enforcing their morals via the private banking system.
The same thing has happened to conservatives. [1] [2] [3]
It's more of an establishment/anti-establishment phenomenon than a left/right phenomenon.
My guess is most of the % that is unbanked is either undocumented, has a history of bank/credit fraud, or has some alternative bank-like structure they are relying on (when I attended an inner city black high school, a lot of (largely black) people used cashapp seemingly in place of having a bank)
Your assumption is that only Government and Banks can process payments, which is not true. You must think outside that overton window to realize there are ways of paying people that don't require either.
BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of career civil servants hired rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. They answer to the government, not a political party.
The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term for the nine members of the BCB’s Board of Governors that does not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the dismissal of the Board’s members.
The personal information and the information related to the operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
All transactions take place through digitally signed messages that travel in encrypted form.
Ever notice how the US government was set up as a group of competing powers? Or how parliamentary systems have similar competition between parties, a senate, and the monarchy or wtvr? It’s almost like you can’t trust any one group with power no matter where they derive their power from.
I usually chalk that up to "if that happens I have bigger issues" because such a government could just seize my bank accounts and suddenly I have nothing.
I say that as someone whose government currently doesn't like them.
The big difference is that in a cashless society where everyone is on the same digital banking system, an abusive leader can delete large minorities of people from participation in the system with the stroke of a key. If they wanted to do that today, it would require a much larger commitment of resources that's going to be harder to justify and execute on, and more easily fought against.
Many of the arguments for privacy focused technologies is not that it should be impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt your life, but that it should be somewhat impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt millions of people's lives for the tiny cost of some compute cycles. The former is necessary for law enforcement. The latter is a recipe for genocide.
Also, thinking of it from a systems reliability perspective it’s a massive Single Point of Failure.
That system stops working (due to kleptocracy, or shitty rules, or a mistake) and literally the largest economy in the world grinds to a halt nearly instantly.
It would make the days of dealing with cash (which has it’s hassles) seem like Utopia.
I'm not familiar with Brazil's system, but moving a central bank to being democratically controlled is betterbthan leaving this in the hands of a private company. The US central bank isn't currently democratically controlled, but it could be. Then collectively we could decide how a Brazil type system should function. People are better served when their banks aren't run for-profit.
Until it’s politically uncool to be you, and the gov’t bans your ability to buy food. The Nazi’s got elected in their first time, democratically (ish).
If the nazis take power, and you happen to be one of their targets, having cash won't help much when your photo is being displayed everywhere with wording saying there's a bounty on your head as a dangerous terrorist.
But guess what makes it easier to identify and target individuals? Being able to do something like SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient like ‘synagogue’
All the transactions are controlled by multiple independent parties, whose interests do not align to do that as they’d lose their customers to their competitors when it came out what was happening.
Some of the data does go through central clearing at some step (ACH, Fedwire), but credit card charges, Zelle, cash, checks deposited at the same bank, etc. do not.
Since we are talking about nazis, it doesn’t really matter what is in the interest of independent banks and CC companies. The nazis will simply send the storm troopers to them and get the lists of people donating to synagogues, easy peasy.
With cash, you stay out of those databases in the first place.
Which takes time, so records can be disappeared. And since they don’t control the format of the records (yet) or what’s in the records (yet), they are also a ton of work to use.
Definitely not impossible, but much harder than if there was a single centralized system - dramatically harder.
Brother fckn nazis taking the government is a much bigger systemic problem that no financial system can protect against.
The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.
No, making it so you can’t buy anything without the gov’ts permission makes it not only more tempting for someone like Nazi’s to take over, but also much more effective for them to keep it and far more damaging when they’re in. Germany is a strongly ‘cash’ society partially because of this, but also because of what the Stasi did to East Germany.
You really don’t want the folks in power to have even more of that kind of power, no matter how convenient it is most of the time.
At least Visa/MasterCard, etc. mainly just care about making money. The gov’t doesn’t even have to care about that!
Using ‘we’re currently in a democracy’ to justify creating an even more tempting and likely to be abused tool of oppression is not a good idea.
A central payment system is absolutely not a tool of oppression. Case in point: don't like it? Don't use it. People are still free to not use it just like it even didn't exist. For everyone that chooses to, there is now an instant and free payment method. Where is the oppression?
In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoying a really nice service.
Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.
Look into the efforts of individuals within Nazi controlled territory during the war to save Jews and other persecuted people. When the SS comes knocking, if you’re a good person, you have a chance of “losing” some records before you hand them over. If it’s all in one government controlled database then there is no chance for individuals to work against the system. Hey, I think they even made some movies and books about this stuff.
Important comment: PIX is not a bank killer and isn't designed this way. Banks still exist in Brazil and they rake in pornographic profits just like everywhere else. The absolute majority of the banks profits here does not comes from payments processing fees. The fees exist to cover the transaction operating cost. Since for PIX there is a much much lower operating cost, it makes the service free for people and businesses! The ones losing here aren't banks, but credit cards companies.
Brazil Central Bank has a well paid and competent bureaucracy. The very successful PIX payment was its initiative, but the gov in power tried to pretend it was their.
BTW, Brazil Central Bank now is "independent", that is, their president was indicated by the looser candidate can do what he wants. In USA at least they respond to Congress.
3 million ops in 1 month, 30 days per month = 100,000 ops per 24 hours (on average) = 4166 ops per hour = 69.4 ops per minute = ~more than 1 op per second. I think we really should have such a system (Vietnam has something like this) but I wouldn't use it as an example just yet.
CBDC is being evaluated by pretty much every countries central bank. Governments are eager to roll out Central Bank Digital Currency as it will be the ultimate form of control on citizens.
CBDC will allow govts, at their discretion, connect your money to your ‘good citizen score’ (much like China’s Social Credit Score) and lock you out of society.
Which is the problem that crypto solved for the most part, independence from a few oligopolistic PROCESSORS. While I am still not a "Buying literal digital currency is a sound investment" true believer, I feel recent events are making people keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the notion of decentralised crypto as a medium of exchange.
After watching Folding Ideas' video on crypto and NFT (1) I am less convinced that is decentralised. It goes over how crypto ended up becoming the very thing it swore to destroy (banks and oligopolies).
Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted.
They can't though. Firstly NFTs and their image storage location are unrelated to tokens.
In regards to 51% attacks they aren't going to happen to Bitcoin or Ethereum.
For possible flaws, to put it in terms that technical non-crypto people understand, his arguments are like saying "well Heart Bleed happened and this could happen again thus all computers are unsafe and you can never trust them to be secure" which is technically true but that doesn't mean we should abandon storing our own data and give it all to google to keep it safe for us (which we do with money today). Blockchain developers are very smart and build defense in depth against attacks, there's a reason why Ethereum has tens of billions of USD stored on it.
There are protocols for transferring cash on Ethereum (LUSD, RAI) that you can use that no one, not even nation states spending billions of dollars can stop you from using.
The tradeoff is they won't scale to the world. But then there are less secure protocols (DAI, USDC) that do scale which will be fine for 99.9% of people (who aren't terrorists or being targeted by the government).
Tech is all about tradeoffs and you can learn about them from experts in the field rather than an obviously anti-crypto YouTube video to understand them.
All of these are far more censorship resistant than any banks or traditional financial services.
> Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted.
Not quite, at least in PoS protocols with off chain governance. If somebody with billions of dollars decided to attack Ethereum, the community would be able to fork the protocol and drain the malicious nodes of funds, basically burning the attacker’s capital over a short time.
Yea stablecoins (fiat tokens) are by far the biggest successful use case of crypto. It's unfortunate that so many on Hacker News still think crypto is Bitcoin and other wannabe currencies (which never made sense as mediums of exchange) so don't notice the solution to these issues is already here and being adopted all over the world already.
Also consider Operation Choke Point, where the government pressured banks not to do business with firearms dealers, tobacco dealers, and a variety of other firms they didn’t like.
Also the threat to civil liberties was exposed in Canada when the government saw it fit to freeze people's bank accounts. I believe this is being reviewed and maybe something will come of it so that the gov is not allowed to cavalierly freeze accounts in the future, but you can see how even liberal people are ready to violate people's civil liberties when they see it fit. It's like principles are only followed when times are easy. In reality principles earn their keep when they persist in the toughest of times.
The US has wantonly applied “sanctions” all over the place, which in lay terms means “we take your money electronically and/or prevent you from moving money”. This has been applied both against governments and individuals, even individuals not accused of any crime in the US.
Yes! We have faithless actors as well. Civil forfeiture is another one. They should not be able to confiscate people's property until they have had due process and found to have unlawfully come to said property.
I use Canada as an example because it was a vast and wanton act by the government affecting and threatening thousands of accountholders at once.
It's a shame we don't have more libertarians representing the interests of the people in the Congress.
Can only hope whomever might be the next president would have the Coglioni to reform civil forfeiture.
But as long as the people who are victimized first are unsympathetic, no one's going to complain about it. They were rednecks and vaccine deniers and white supremacists and blue collar workers, all the sorts of people who are bad.
Thus, doing this to them was justified and good. Meaning the government should have such powers.
If only there were some sort of clever computer algorithm that could create a money system that no one can track of block.
The usage of the Emergencies Act didn’t end any blockades — those had already ended through other means.
It was used to disperse people from protesting at the capitol, because the government wanted to crush people protesting without talking to them and not any imminent threat. People who were only parked in the street with signs, gathered together to demand a change in policy.
> Would you prefer if they ended the blockades through more forceful means, even if that would escalate into violence?
As an outsider looking in on that debacle I have two points to make:
1: What I wanted to be addressed above all was why Canada went so much further than any other country in N. America in response to COVID, and what purpose did it serve when it's biggest trading partner (The US) was also starting to pressure it from it's border restrictions?
2: As a former street demo activist, I can tell you violence doesn't always have to resort to physical altercation; it takes many forms, and those impacts can take just as long if not longer to recover from. Financial censorship is a form of violence, you are depriving people of their own property and personal agency. It compounds further when their way of living is being stripped from them and they are unable to feed themselves or their families, thus causing further discord and strife in Society--be it in bankruptcy or divorce etc...
The vaccine-mandate is just one response to a litany of others that proved to have efficacy in combating COVID; better diets, exercise, sunlight and Vitamin D proved an even bigger boon for people's health and well being and yet those are OPTIONAL even to this day.
My point is why did it even come this? And why are so many proponents of the State being able to ruin the lives of fellow members of their class (non-elite/political class) with such fervor in Canada?
I've personally never understood the plight of Montreal as anything that mattered, most French I've encountered see their dialect as uncouth and their culture entirely divorced from their own; but after all of this I can surmise that it's they have been in a forced marriage with an abusive partner who is prone to take everything it has under the constant threat of violence as a likely POV they must have.
Perhaps not unlike Ukraine, Catalunya or Pais Vasco for a more European example that spans Centuries of needless bloodshed.
> 1: What I wanted to be addressed above all was why Canada went so much further than any other country in N. America in response to COVID, and what purpose did it serve when it's biggest trading partner (The US) was also starting to pressure it from it's border restrictions?
Some of it might be due to the current administration's "double allegiances" to China. [0] [1]. Notice Beijing too is set on it's "0 Covid Strategy". Canada was notorious for having delayed vaccination the Trudeau administration funneled 44 million dollars [2] and months [3] of taxpayer funded research work to CCP controlled CanSino, with little to show for.
> most French I've encountered see their dialect as uncouth
What? We have an office in Montreal with French-Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never heard of such thing.
> Some of it might be due to the current administration's "double allegiances" to China. [0] [1]. Notice Beijing too is set on it's "0 Covid Strategy". Canada was notorious for having delayed vaccination the Trudeau administration funneled 44 million dollars [2] and months [3] of taxpayer funded research work to CCP controlled CanSino, with little to show for.
That does make sense, Tornoto and especially BC has always been an enclave for the Main-lander to setup shop in Real Estate and then eventually educate their children or eventually expat to, and the place is rife with abuse, and at times violence, towards HKers while the local government or schools not doing much in response.
> What? We have an office in Montreal with French-Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never heard of such thing.
Its work enviorment, and the line of thinking you're taking follows as:
I don't see passive-racism in my office, where we pay people to work cordially for a salary with people they otherwise wouldn't be around, therefore racism doesn't and mustn't exist.
Racism is an over-used word in the modern lexicon, but ultimately this is a racial thing: you speak my language and are white, but clearly not from our specific ilk therefore we will ridicule you for it in order to show how inferior you appear to me/us.
I lived and worked in European/N. American kitchens, and restaurants frequented by all of the above; God help you if you only knew what they think about people from Angola or Mali. I was first there during the refugee crisis during the latter part of the financial crisis (11-14) when they couldn't house them so many just lived in city parks in any major town.
Swiss-French, specifically from Geneva, always got a pass for some reason: must be the Banker money/wealth thing attached to it. My friend was from Bern (difficult native mundart speaker even by Swiss German standards) but spoke French with that accent for work as a corporate worker at SBB at dinner parties. Whereas Vaulis always got a strange look if it were in earshot.
But You honestly cannot be oblivious of the way the mainland French perceive it's various dialects, hell even Alsace or Marsille dialects/accents get the cold shoulder from Parisian speakers at a table: but personally, Normandy sounds the best to my ears when spoken by a woman.
Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap immigrants labors while raise the property value sky high.
They would give the plebs some scraps of coz. It's better to be homeless with some food than being hungry
Because I am typing in the phone browser and it's not convenient? What's the problem with that? U haven't seen abbreviations before? U think toddlers type like this?
That was not a good excuse even for numeric keypad phones, thanks to widespread T9 (predictive text), and is an even worse excuse today with qwerty (albeit non-physical) keyboards with much smarter prediction.
Ok. So how is that related to ur post? Did u just switch the account to change the topic? So u just commented again completely avoiding the questions. Did u forget to switch back?;)
> Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap immigrants labors while raise the property value sky high.
This is what I found to be the case too, it was really alarming; it was like MAGA was sped up and shipped to Canada despite it being supposedly a US-thing, whereas the US was dealing with Police brutality via the BLM movement, Canada just seemed to welcome it's draconian police state because it carried all those other features if you were from that 'class.'
How about the Canadian truckers protest where Canada's handful of banks froze their accounts and their gofundme was seized?
How about all of China?
There's no way government can be trusted. We would need a bill of rights applied to our money first to protect us and have a check and balance. We already need this!
Or the US. Look at Operation Chokepoint or all of the people locked out of payment processors for wrong think. It's a theme that seems to transcend national boundaries that is accelerating. It's even on this forum. I just had a mod threaten me for making a snide but perfectly G-rated comment about NPR. It's not good!
I also feel strongly we need some sort of semi-local payment system that connects merchants, local banks and customers. Sending a payment to my local municipality should not involve wall street.
I think there's a lot of value in a big payment network. It is very convenient to be able to take my Visa card across the country, or to another continent, and it's accepted everywhere.
Visa alone processes 100,000,000 transactions per day. All of them with "purchase protection". ie, there's reversibility for fraud via charge-backs, etc. We live in the real world where people make mistakes and need some help to fix it. This is why "crypto", as it is, will _never_ be a reasonable alternative.
Lightning requires an on-chain transaction to create a channel, which means that you would need about 75 years, trillions of dollars of electricity and the entire remaining block reward to set up a channel for everyone alive now, assuming no births or deaths. Stop thinking about lightning, it's just meant to distract people from the actual scaling issues.
- 96% reduction in block space over the naive approach, per the paper. (EDIT: the signature aggregation being referred to is Schnorr signatures, and it's become reality since the paper was published)
- 7 transactions per second, 86400 seconds per day, 365 days per year
8000000000*(1-0.96)/7/86400/365 = 1.45 years
Current transaction fees are $3. Assuming that stays constant, every group of 20 users would need to come up with $3 between them.
Are you assuming the chain does nothing else at the time? And that fees wouldn't explode the second people actually tried to use it, and block space would dry up? Seems like using only the free portion of block space would allow you to arrive at a more realistic conclusion. Blocks seem to be going out pretty full thanks to ordinals.
I expect lightning adoption (to the extent it happens) to take place over decades, not just 1.45 years, so there's plenty of buffer already.
In the past, fees have at times been both lower than today and higher than today. That will be true in the future too. Satoshi Dice didn't ruin bitcoin in 2013, and neither will ordinals in 2023.
BTC's Lightneing Network solves the scaling issues; admittedly work still needs to be done but the infrastructure is sound; where it fails is entirely outside of the technical sphere.
Admittedly, I was more focused on Kazakhstan's populace uprising more than Canada's issues for personal reasons when the two occured--I can share why but are entirely moot for this argument.
As time went on and Bitcoin was used to bypass this egregious example of financial censorship I started to realize that this was a milestone: we can solve the technical issues with our technology, as we had in Ukraine in 2013/14 during the Maidan Revolution and would later do again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in '22. But this is only a part of the solution.
What bifurcates it as a success or as a failure is often not even the goals it has accomplished but rather sadly it is entirely on the Governing body and the narrative the population that it governs adopts to said Governments actions; in the case Ukraine it was a complete success and has led to things like United24 because of it's immense impact in the early days of the war in the case of Canada, an incredibly draconian society masking as a liberal democracy as seen during COVID, showed its true face.
Many were aghast to see not just how myopic, but how absurd the laws they were enforcing were regarding seeing family or traveling even within provinces, but stood idly by and thought that nobody would resist and it was only a matter of time before things went back to 'normal' if they just obeyed (and things got extended further and further); it was a complete shock to me! I was working on a side-project with mainly people from Toronto and it was shocking to see the sheer brutality and contempt they had for their own from within...
Activism and street demos only work if they derail Society from it's normal operations, that is what it's intended goal is: to make Society pause and address the internal affairs of it's supposed Social Contract. Failing to do so, and let 'business as usual' continue while letting them 'vent' is the exact ultimatum most authoritarian and despots desire, as they can manipulate and shape it to serve it's own end: think the '2 minute Hate' illustrated in 1984.
As an early adopter of this tech, who has made most of his entire tech career in this space: I think Crypto has no real utility if it cannot secure it's own providence: and 99% all fail at that, even the best funded (ETH), whereas Bitcoin does solve this--when people see energy being mispsent what they fail to realize or take into account is the true cost of REAL verifiable security with an immutable record (ledger).
They never consider what this is for until things like this happen, often far too late, and they seem to undervalue the immense need for providence and trust in an ever-growing digital World until it directly harms them--most here never really ever experiencing this hence the prevailing sentiment of 'its all just grifters' not realizing that it is the VC and Ivy Leagues who start or hi-jack projects that actually do the most grifts.
Sadly, where this technology comes short is to ensure that tyrants do not suspend constitutions via decree, threaten legal action against legitimate businesses (exchanges), and ensures that the serfs/plebs who make Society function have a valid legal recourse to dispute and arbitrate these matters.
That's why street demos and activism is a fundamental part of being a Citizen in Western Society: minor disruptions to daily Life pale in comparison to reverting to the barbarism of living under authoritarian and despotic regimes: some of us are (un)lucky enough to have living generations who survived/lived through this first hand so we have a working memory to base our out-views on.
I don't want to be associated with illegal activities. Crypto transactions are traceable so I could receive tainted coins from some criminals and become a suspect myself. Cash and traditional banking don't have this problem.
If you visit Georgia (the country, not the state), they have a cool system for cash payments to websites.
You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa, you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that number into the ATM, feed the cash into the coin and note slot, and then your goods will be ordered.
The same system is used for paying taxes in cash, utility bills in cash, etc.
They can do refunds in cash using the same system.
You do pay a fairly hefty (10% if I remember correctly) fee for using that service though.
Or it's accessible for those who operate without banks. I think there is a term for it, "unbanked" or something like that... there's some decent chunk of the population that doesn't have a bank account / can't get a credit card / etc.
Not sure why that would be any different than credit card payments, which don't itemize every purchase either - they still know how much and to what seller, tracking a seller and banning them seems just as easy.
What they don't get is the buyer's information.
...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcement-capturable.
As someone who has implemented code revolving around Level 3 data, the information provided is often of incredibly low quality.
Many shopping carts don't bother sending the data, because they'd rather say "let's support 900 obscure payment platforms in a de-minimis way" than "let's support a handful WELL"
Then there's actually getting the right information into the message to the processor. There's vague and inconsistent documentation on how to tag things like "commodity codes" and data formatting (Should the per-unit price be rendered as $12.79 or $12.7903?)
Even if you have the right intentions, you can easily blow things up by just having out-of-bounds data-- encoding a nonsense discount or tax rate.
What happens is that people set up software that sets up bare-minimum and mediocre data for every order that's good enough to get the "you sent level 3 data" rates, and the actual visibility is still quite poor.
Maybe there are some top-tier merchants who actually do everything right, but there's a hell of a lot of noise amid the signal.
I've done payments too, and I agree. But I'm assuming all the major retailers in the USA (Target/Walmart/Supermarkets) all do this. (And probably more with the data from the register not going through the CC machine).
Absent any information, I just assumed that any supermarket that can handle EBT/SNAP etc was sending transaction details anyway -- the computer will refuse or only partially pay the transaction if any items not elegible for benifits is on the order.
CC certainly has the capability for extremely granular and personal details. For now, this is usually restricted to hotel stays and airline trips. But the tech exists to encode quite a bit of information about both sides of a transaction and its nature.
If they have the account number. Ideally you would only need a bank account with any bank for this to work. That would allow anyone to receive payment this way.
Brazil has a similar system called “boleto”, you chose that option and the systems promts you a barcode you can use to pay with cash in ATMs, paharmacie and some other stores with no comission AFAIK.
It has some limits (10000 BRL when i used it) but thats more than enough for most purchases
Switzerland has (or had?) those red and blue slips that you could pay online or at a bank or perhaps an ATM. It made online payments virtually zero overhead, not sure if it was anonymous.
I don't think Georgia has copied what I think of as the mistake of KYC, yet at least.
I feel KYC regulations as they exist today are a big mistake, that does little good, more harm than good and causes a lot of extra work and annoyance.
People always seem to think that de-anonymizing things will always make things better.
As I get older I feel the more someone wants to know my real identify the more likely I am to be abused somehow.
Meanwhile, talking to thousands of absolute strangers here on HN or via an anonymous reddit account or something feels relatively safe.
I have also with time started to think that in the long run the risk from governments harming me or my family is a lot bigger than the risk that someone else does it.
Perhaps expand on this into a blog post and post it here on HN...?
Even if the ship has sailed on living in an identity-optional society, at least in most of the world, I still think it's good to record the benefits of such a society.
At least in Thailand, no, you do not have an account with the ATM provider to use the cash deposit functionality. The closest thing to KYC is that most ATMs have a security camera.
KYC is not needed as cash is still a thing. It’s accepted that pretty much anonymous physical transactions can and will occur and the police will need to do old fashioned detective work to find the criminal.
No - you don't give your identity to the ATM, or to the website. Which is lucky, because Georgia doesn't even have a good record of every citizen's name....
Surprise, the ATM is bound to the same people that excommunicated Hatreon, Gab and whatever else. You did not give your cash to the website, you gave it to a bank.
Mullvad have made it work, but it’s definitely not smooth. I believe their process is to assign a unique ID to your invoice, which you can then write on an envelope stuffed with cash you mail to the correct address. On receipt they match your cash with the invoice and mark it as paid.
This might work but sending cash in the mail is a pretty terrible idea. Most postal services strongly discourage it, or you're using recorded services which are expensive and add all the same tracking issues.
I think you're missing the point of the example. It wasn't that websites can't function without cash payments, but that without cash you're held hostage to the whims of a few gatekeepers (like PH).
Money order physically sent to a mailing address. Slow, and a bit inconvenient, and there is no support for automatic recurring debits. But it does work, and it worked before the Internet.
Interesting. We could probably sell cards with crypto on it with immediate resolution by simply transferring the passphrase/wallet rather than on the chain.
> The comptroller would also be required to create a mechanism that would allow the new gold-backed digital currency to be used by citizens for their daily transactions. “In establishing the digital currency the comptroller shall establish a means to ensure that a person who holds the digital currency may readily transfer or assign the digital currency to any other person by electronic means.”
Then there are the people defending the steps to the cashless society because those steps happened to be on people they didn't like: canadian truckers and pornhub.
I recall one explicit comment I can't find now so I am willing to believe I hallucinated it.
My bad. I completely misread your comment. I am sorry for that.
Let me be the first to argue for it. Electronic money is horrible. It obscures how much you're really spending on things. It requires a middle man in every transaction skimming a bit off the top. One company runs all the debit payments here. Mastercard and Visa used to split the credit card market but I assume they colluded to monopolize on on MC here. The government has passed laws demanding business partake in the racket but nothing to require acceptance of cash. Cash not accepted for public transport. Laws stating a maximum value of a transaction that is permitted in cash but have never increased the limit while they've been inflating the value away.
Indirectly. Uber "accepts" cash in some countries, as do major online retailers in those same markets like Jumia. It's essentially cash on delivery, but it works AFAICT.
I've only used my card with Uber a handful of times in 2016.
I love using cash for Grab in Singapore, seeing as non-residents are capped on how much they can spend on a card weekly (and it is an extremely low amount).
It has been happening for years. You go to 7-11 or Target and buy a “<app name> points card”, it gets activated at the register when you pay with cash, and then you use the code on the back to get Minecraft coins or Xbox points or Fortnite bux or whatever. It’s how kids and people with no credit or a distrust of banks participate online.
Cash is nearly impossible to use on the internet. The web is a window into what the physical world will look like without cash. Incidents like Pornhub's show us the power a few companies will wield over us when the transition to cashless happens.
Here in Spain it is still relatively common to make a bank transfer and show the receipt. Especially for anything government related. Stand in queue, talk to person. You need to pay 12 euros. Go to bank, pay, get receipt. Go back and stand in the queue again.
We don't need to be giving our governments any more control over the way that we spend our own money. And we certainly don't want to give them the power to shut people out of the system.
The website could hold it in escrow while they wait for your cash? It isn't hard actually, just a couple more steps. I mean not everyone needs 2 day Amazon shipping.
cdnow.com or Amazon used to accept money orders. You'd place your order and they would give you a slip to print and send with your money order. Once the payment made it there, they would ship your item.
Not just that but the fact that in order to simpy exist your transactions must be tracked by some company! Screw that. That society should not exist. Period.
It is everything people on HN deride. Smart contracts. Web3. But it is necessary to save us from a future of CBDCs and Big Tech payment systems being the only choice.
Also all the electronic tie-ins from cashless transactions. I've seen less technical friends getting their email or phone number tied to transactions, or installing apps to complete them.
I order something online.
Get asked to confirm the purchase on my bank app.
Log in to my bank website from my laptop as I am already there, enter my password. Then I get prompted to open my phone and enter the same password to confirm that it is me logging into the bank app. I am allowed into the banks web app, where I tell it, yes it's me and I want to make that purchase.
It's at the stage where physical shops might actually be quicker and less hassle, especially if you have forgotten or mistyped the password and need to go through the process of resetting it.
has the supreme court established if a vendor is free to turn down business? (i do not claim to know the answer, but i believe there was some recent such issue they saw)
I mean... due process, by definition, is process that is due. Due process exists in the legal context (especially judicial), but also ethical/moral. Different schools of ethics have a lot to say about ethical due process before depriving someone of liberties.
the most worrisome part is that the legal system is apparently to lazy to just follow the process. Fearmongering big tech companies into doing their job for them should be banned by international treaty.
If we/the voter wants a copyright monitoring system or transaction monitoring bolted onto every tube we should get a bill for it. We should pay for every bit of work done at our request by the companies.
Let it cut deep into the budget. We want to know what the orwellian society costs.
I think, in hindsight, we should have known better, but I was probably too young and naive like everyone else: it's really a form on anarchism that tends to fly in the face of several realities.
One of them is that this kind of anarchism tends to quickly turn into a plutocracy.
If third parties want to regulate you, they will. So we've just added a layer of indirection that may be harder to manipulate by governments, great, but is manipulated by mining cabals and cryptomillionaires.
I don't mean to say it's all bad, there are very valid fringe use cases for cryptocurrencies. But it was never supposed to replace mainstream currency. The government is already a system for consensus, and frankly one that would be deeply unwise, to say the least, to throw away (in particular one in favor of money voting or mining voting). Specifically democracy is the best invention of mankind in my opinion.
(Weirdly enough, I think all big crypto thinkers have been trying to invent, using arcane cryptographic techniques and a lot of algorithms, something slightly (or significantly) worse than what we already have, which is a democracy where every real world individual is given a voting right. In their credit democracy is great, but it's already here, use it!)
Lots of businesses in my city refuse cash transactions. There's minor controversy about how it tends to shut out marginalized people, but AFAIK it has survived legal challenges.
It doesn't matter that cash is "legal tender" if the business can just refuse to enter into the transaction in the first place.
I guess it's going to depend a lot on whether you can just plop down the money (and change) on the counter, and leave after the service has been done / with what you bought... or not (because you have to pay upfront for instance).
Depends on the jurisdiction I guess ? I just checked, and around here cash is the only type of payment that cannot be refused, and if they get caught trying they would be fined 150€.
A debt must be incurred for them to refuse it. If one walks up to a counter to pay for something, there is no debt and a business can refuse to take the cash.
First it was federal and state moral laws (mostly porn, but also race and gender related stuff) with state/local and USPS cops handling enforcement, back when there was no internet and the way you got information out was via newsletters, zines, and such. USPS cops used to literally spend their days steaming open envelopes and rifling through people's packages that seemed like they might contain lots of flyers for unions or newsletters for black panthers, or nudie mags. But religious conservatives lost court cases left and right, eventually giving up on that front.
So they shifted to banking to enforce a moral code in the private sector they couldn't do so via the government. After all - if you can't ban something, just starve it of money...making it impossible, or very expensive and inconvenient, to fund.
For decades, porn stars have been basically shut out of the banking system, blacklisted, finding their bank accounts suddenly closed with little warning, with little or no explanation. I'm not talking prostitutes - I'm talking people who are clearly employed and receiving paychecks for being adult actors in films, all very verifiable. What's wild is that clearly banks are spending labor and resources to have computers and staff go through and find these accounts and close them.
Criminals figured out pretty quick that porn stars had lots of cash hanging around, and they became targets for both organized (and less so) crime...as well as a place for organized crime to dump/launder money.
The credit card industry claims they restrict / charge such high fees for porn because of fraud rates, but...look at the gym industry, which is infamous for fraudulent billing practices, and how they have access to credit card processing and even ACH access. The banking industry also seems more than delighted to handle the finances of boy scout troops and catholic churches.
When ads dominated revenue, that was how censoring happened - major advertisers would contractually ban adult content from sites running their ads. With subscription fees taking over, it's now credit card payment processing. Most of the major crackdowns on adult content on various platforms have come from merchant and processing banks threatening to pull service because they don't like what they see on the site...or from the site trying to get an app onto Google and Apple app stores.
Speaking of which: that's also why Apple is so paranoid about adult content in apps, podcasts, etc. They make a massive amount of cash off their take from app purchases and subscriptions. Even a slight increase in the percentage they pay, due to "risk" or some percentage of the fees going to adult content - means a huge, huge loss in revenue for them. Well, that and I think Tim Cook has internalized a lot of the conservative "gay = child predator" stuff which is why he's so fucking obsessed with Protecting The Children (coughCSAMcough) - but that's another story.
ChatGPT, by the way? They didn't implement prudish (and pretty ineffective) censoring out of some moral code (otherwise they would have better filtered the training set, which clearly contains a LOT of porn), they did it to satisfy their credit card processor. The really big crackdown on naughtiness recently? Notice it happened right when they were submitting their iOS app for approval...
I really couldn't care less about Pornhub and any other digital pimps that made money off revenge porn and CSAM for decades. I'll never feel sorry for them, its executives are rich and without a conscience.
> The small organization that helped bring the porn industry to its knees
A simpler exemple would be independent new commenters, political organizations, or non aligned artists suspended by Crowdfunding platforms, Patreon, Paypal or even VISA directly because the competition or politicians don't want them to exist.
> PayPal shuts accounts of anti-war publications Consortium News and MintPress News
So you want to hurt the people you dislike, and (presumably) help the people you like.
That's fine, but please understand that some of us believe it's worth having principles. We think it's better for society and humanity if people think above the dislike=hurt/like=help dichotomy.
> So you want to hurt the people you dislike, and (presumably) help the people you like.
Yes I dislike those who profit from CSAM and revenge porn, "it's just an app" doesn't change the horror of their actions. It's kind of a lowbar when it comes to principles, don't you think? Do you care about the people they hurt in their very flesh? The people who killed themselves as the result of sex exploitation?
> We think it's better for society and humanity if people think above the dislike=hurt/like=help dichotomy.
Both revenge born and CSAM are illegal, there is no dichotomy here.
> the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors
And the government. In Canada the government suspended the constitution (because that's a thing over there?) because of some peaceful, free-speech protected, protests in the capital and started arbitrary freezing protester's bank accounts. Of course, without any due process (remember, constitutional rights were suspended!).
Yep, and hat tip to the government for a job well done. There's a right and a wrong way to protest, they were given time to choose to do it right. Now that the threat is over and dispersed they're welcome to come back and protest peacefully. For an end to the vaccine mandates, that ended already. Silly sausages.
For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights for a period of time. [1]
You may be thinking of the 'notwithstanding clause' but that's totally different.
Not at all, there have been numerous peaceful protests from these silly sausages since. They still meet up, protesting things that no longer exist, from time to time. You can find occasional news coverage of it. It really was the how. No need to make things up. There's plenty of real things to be upset about.
Do you live in Canada, have family in Ottawa, or are you just consuming right-wing content in the US?
They loaded up the capital area with 3,200L of fuel and started bringing in propane tanks. You think that wouldn't be considered a threat in front of the White House? Especially since the fortified compound around the White House is significantly further from the roadway than the comparatively unguarded Parliament is from Wellington St.
With respect, I suggest you stick to commenting on the US, or at least things you have some specific knowledge of.
Maybe read some contemporaneous news coverage. From Ottawa where it was happening.
> Mayor Jim Watson declared a state of emergency Sunday after a dystopian weekend of carnival-like scenes, heightened lawlessness, growing tensions between protesters and residents, and relentless noise, diesel fumes and fireworks.
The fact you think the situation was limited to 'bouncy castles and hot tubs' is pretty telling of how little you know about what you're discussing.
You know the invocation of the Act was supported by multiple political parties at the Federal level and Provincial Premiers of all parties?
<< For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights for a period of time. [1]
Uhm, I dislike this weird defensiveness of newspeak. Does it suspend some rights available under normal circumstances? If yes, then it effectively suspends the constitution? Why does it feel like Simpsons nailed it so hard when Lisa proposed temporary refund adjustments and people cheered thrice out of sheer misunderstanding of the language used.
And all that before we get to the part whether giving government power to pinky swear give all that power back when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale comparable to Patriot Act.
The Emergencies Act and how it's applied are governed by the Charter. It's a function of government as defined under the Charter. It's not a suspension thereof. It's moving into a different mode of operation, sure, but the it's still all a defined function of that system.
As [1] states:
> Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill of Rights, and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In re:
> And all that before we get to the part whether giving government power to pinky swear give all that power back when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale comparable to Patriot Act.
Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or functions. In fact, once the emergency is over they're required by law to hold an inquiry on whether the action was justified in the first place.
Further, the invocation can be rolled back by the House of Commons, the Senate or the Governor General - or honestly probably the King (albeit risking a constitutional crisis) - at any time, and all the temporary laws expire.
This particular invocation was carried out under minority government meaning the invocation had to have the support of multiple political parties too, and risked calling an election. It also had the support of the Provincial Premiers of all political stripes.
> In fact, once the emergency is over they're required by law to hold an inquiry on whether the action was justified in the first place.
So the government will investigate... the government. Do they at least wait for an administration change? Worked out beautifully for police departments...
> the Senate or the Governor General - or honestly probably the King (albeit risking a constitutional crisis) - at any time, and all the temporary laws expire.
Are any of those actually elected or are these just positions nominated by ... the same government who declared the suspension of rights?
> So the government will investigate... the government. Do they at least wait for an administration change? Worked out beautifully for police departments...
You know the government is currently a minority government, meaning that they require the support of at least one other party to remain in power and an election can be called at any time. Canada's has elections every like 18 months on average under minority government.
Any impropriety in the process would have almost certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate election.
The person who found the government was justified in its use of the Emergencies Act [1] was Paul Rouleau [2] a justice of the Court of Appeals of Ontario.
The senators are appointed by various leaders and are, at least in theory, not aligned with any political party and given lifetime appointments. The House of Commons is elected and comprised of various parties. The King is obviously a hereditary role and lives in England, not beholden to any one person in Canada really, but instead to all Canadians. Obviously the King is neither nominated nor elected. And the Governor General is also pretty unaligned as the King's representative to Canada.
So no, you're wrong, oversight comes from all over the political spectrum and all kinds of affiliations.
Are you applying an American lens? The political system in Canada is quite different, and this is starting to feel like a high school Canadian civics class.
> Any impropriety in the process would have almost certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate election.
Didn't they just have an election that resulted in the minority government? Meaning all parties knew their chances of overthrowing the current admin were slim.
> Paul Rouleau
Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration!
> The senators are appointed by various leaders and are, at least in theory, not aligned with any political party and given lifetime appointments.
By who? Who nominates those people?
> And the Governor General is also pretty unaligned.
And nominated by?
> The King is obviously a hereditary role and lives in England
So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
> Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration!
This was a public inquiry that was participated in by members of all major parties. [0]
> By who? Who nominates those people?
The leader of the party in power at the time, which historically alternates between Liberals and Conservatives. In lifetime appointments. Generally, though, the nominations aren't aligned with any federal parties, and the senate has its own political parties. You can learn more about the Senate here. [1]
> Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration!
A Liberal minority that can be dissolved at any time. An important point you keep ignoring. [2]
> And nominated by?
The PM. Not beholden to the PM - and they aren't re-appointed after 4 years. Of course, the PM can't remove them. An exit from this post can only occur through death or incapacitation, resignation, or if removed by the King. [3]
> So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
Charles III is King of Canada - among many other titles - and therefore not a foreigner. [4] Canada has its own independent monarchy. Note that in fact any commonwealth citizen is not considered a foreigner in the UK - a commonwealth citizen with permanent residency in the UK can vote, hold public office and join the UK armed forces.
You wanted someone with oversight who isn't beholden to anyone and suddenly they don't count because you don't like it and it feels 'alien.' Much of their power is ceremonial and as I indicated, if they did reject legislation it would likely trigger a constitutional crisis.
I'm done covering grade 10 civics with someone who has made up their mind on something they have no understanding of. It's playing chess against someone playing hopscotch.
Respectfully you're just asking me to spell out the absolute basics of Canadian government. You can simply ask Google things like 'who appoints Canadian senators.'
There's nothing wrong with having these Governors and Senators nominated by the Prime Minister. To be fair, it sounds a lot like here in the US, where unsurprisingly, Supreme Court Justices nominated by a certain party tend to agree with said party.
<< The Emergencies Act and how it's applied are governed by the Charter.
What you conveniently leave out is that government in its infinite wisdom can simply decide it does not apply under exceptions[1] in section 1 of the charter. Shocking. Government left itself an out. What is more annoying that people defend it as it is not what it actually is.
Now compare it to what the act was intended for ( some sort of senior politician kidnapping ) and what it was used for in peace time ( forcibly dismantling a protest ).
I guess what I am saying is that it can be governed by Charter all it wants, but at the end of the day it is, apparently, governed by what ruling party considers a crisis.
<< Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or functions.
How it is written can be open to interpretation and it functions the way politics does ( expediency of the moment squared ). I am not really writing anything groundbreaking here.
> I guess what I am saying is that it can be governed by Charter all it wants, but at the end of the day it is, apparently, governed by what ruling party considers a crisis.
Minority government, meaning multiple federal parties, in addition to all the provincial premiers. So basically, every elected official - plus the unelected official, the Governor General. It's why we elect them - and have them, respectively.
Literally everyone had to sign off on this. If you think they're malicious then we have much bigger problems because frankly, they could find much easier ways to harm you than this.
And again, it can be ended by basically anyone and immediately rolled back.
> ( some sort of senior politician kidnapping ) and what it was used for in peace time ( forcibly dismantling a protest ).
The state media and government tried to pin mailbox bombings and an instance of kidnapping to this group called the FLQ until an RCMP agent was caught literally red-handed (with severe burns and a torn off finger) planting bombs in a mailbox to pin it on the "FLQ"! [0] The feds then confessed to more than 400 illegal search and seizures, criminal trespass, breaking and entering and arson incidents and the bomb planter admitted he “had done much worse for the feds” (all of these incidents that were used to invoke the constitution's suspension!).
Who was prime minister during that time? You guessed it, Justin Trudeau’s father. What a coincidence.
I have news for you: if your leadership doesn't care about the process they can do literally whatever they want. What's written down is just words on a page. The whole thing is a construct, including the US constitution. The only real defense anyone has is checks, balances, various kinds of oversight and electing good people who care about doing the right thing. Canada has all of the above, generally speaking.
Inevitably, the financial system is rigged to collapse, and it's just a matter of time before critical mass of people realize what otherwise currently at least hundreds of thousands of people across 160 countries realize and continue to. Apes Together Strong released recently on Amazon and Vimeo offers a reasonable perspective that does not intentionally lie by omission, despite that so many details are omitted probably due to time constraints and keeping information introduction simple for everyone not yet aware.
Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially responsible with it.
Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used.
But yeah, nice to have the option to use both!
I also know that credit cards have their advantages, but what are the main benefits of going fully cashless (at the individual and systemic level)? Is it mostly crime related shenanigans?
> what are the main benefits of going fully cashless
One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card. Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office.
At the systemic level, the main benefits of going cashless are:
- Being able to track everyone's purchases (for taxation, law enforcement, and in some countries the blackmail of political opposition or assigning "social credit" ratings)
- Have realtime, near-total visibility into the movement of money, for economic management and personal profit
- Being able to cut off individuals or members of a political movement from the ability to purchase basic necessities, if they fall afoul of the party in power[1]
[edit]: I should have also mentioned freedom of movement and association. You cannot buy a plane ticket or a hotel room anymore for cash - even if your bank's ATM allowed you to access enough of your cash in a single day to do so. Cards enable the granular tracking of everyone's movement, whether or not that person chooses to carry a cellphone.
Personally I'd be far more interested to learn that someone running for office refuses to use a credit card to buy groceries because they fear having that information collected and used against them... than that they once spent $500 in a single month on Twinkies.
If someone wants to use your spending history against you they don't actually need your credit card bills these days, they can just make something up. Look at the insanity that people managed to create out of John Podesta's office pizza orders.
Listen, you got a cell phone, and chances are that's going to give away far, far more than data that your credit card company holds on to.
They're just going to have a line -- "Food Lion, [Date] $88.23" -- not detailed list of your purchases.
Meanwhile if you use a membership card at any sort of grocery store, they absolutely will associate it with you; in many cases you have to register that card with your name and phone in order to use the points. Cash or credit, that's tracking you.
Until modern social media that -- grocery store membership cards -- were one of the best predictors of age, income, gender, etc. available.
I once used that as my number at Garage Center, then didn’t shop there for ~10 years. When I went back, I’d forgotten. The kid at the register tried looking me up by email, my actual cell number, my previous one, and then finally resorted to *gasp* my actual name.
Then, having found me, I asked what number was in there, and he proceeded to read, with exactly zero recognition, <area code> 867-5309, and I just laughed on the outside, and cried a little on the inside.
It’s not the government that concerns me, it’s the corporations. And I don’t think it’s a contest or even matters if cell phones give more data. I’m worried about both.
This line of argument seems to be common to other responders telling me my concerns are "fringy" insofar as they invoke concerns about governments.
My concerns aren't exclusive to governments or corporations. The degree of co-mingingling of personnel and regulatory capture at this point makes the difference moot. Whoever has the data on every purchase you made since 2012 can silence you, threaten you, blackmail you, or force you out of a public or private position, if there's any difference between those things now. It doesn't matter if you're innocent or the law is on your side; all that matters is perception. Someone who wants you in can hide anything you did; someone who wants you out can find the smallest detail that you accidentally allowed to be recorded, and amplify it. It really makes no difference whether it's a government agency, or a corporation. Splitting hairs on that or saying I'm necessarily paranoid because my concern runs more toward government abuse is an argument about nothing more than the superficial, speculative scenario. The data is the data, and anyone who has it has power. Power is power, and it's only realized when you can wield it over people. Handing anyone your full purchasing history is giving them the power to subjugate you.
Not yet [1]. Total symbiosis of corporations and government—to the point of making Mussolini blush—is the ultimate goal. Sure, that sounds paranoid, but look at how far we've come on that spectrum in the last 30 years. Proliferation of technology (due to its enabling of surveillance and weakening of the state) all but guarantees that future.
When you make statements like ‘Total symbiosis of corporations and government … is the ultimate goal’ without attributing that goal to anyone, you come off as sounding a little bit tinfoil hat.
Boston Dynamics is no more (and honestly in many ways far less) enmeshed in the security state than any number of military suppliers. Seems like a poor argument that things are specifically bad now or getting worse on this front.
If you’d pointed at Palantir perhaps you’d have had a point.
Not that you'll view it as valid but I'm using abductive logic. I shared the Boston Dynamics thing in jest, but I'd love to hear valid reasons for the existence of a bipedal robot that can run and scale over objects. Are these things being used to down dissidents a reality today? No, but it's a perfectly logical conclusion for what's down the pike.
FWIW, too, the "tinfoil hat" thing doesn't work on me. I will smugly tighten mine as I look down upon the naive proletariat being manhandled as "Do You Love Me" [1] is played over the crowd control loudspeakers.
I think "to the point of making Mussolini blush" gives enough background to take the comment seriously without demanding piles of documents.
Few Americans are aware even now of the role of IBM in mechanizing and tabulating the murder of Jews for the Nazis, and basically no Americans were aware of it then[0]. "They" who desire "symbiosis" between corporate power and government power - a better word would be fusion - are the same corporations who promoted fascism in the US and abroad throughout the 20th Century, whose continued efforts we can see daily through virtually all channels in our society.
Name one sphere of society in which corporate power has not merged with or overrun democratic governmental oversight. Name one environmental, social or economic battle that grassroots democratic movements or western governments have won against the corrosive force of corporate profiteering in the last 30 years.
A friend who worked in credit finance many years ago warned me they were “thinking” (wink wink) about doing things like selling your food purchase history to medical insurance companies for the purposes of declining claims on the basis of long-term bad eating habits. I believe it was and still is illegal, but if corporations are allowed to do this, then they will, and it’s worth it to them.
I wouldn’t conflate political shenanigans and things that make the news with systemic forces. Made up things don’t always, or even often, pass muster in court. But true information being lawfully used against you will result in no legal recourse.
...this is already legal for some decades. if you are in a rewards program you agreed to have you anonymized sales history (i mean, they will not list "ate burgers" but "ate at fiveguys" is pretty similar).
after that you need some magic to deanonymize the anonymized data, but in the 90s plenty of people claimed to do that already. the famous case was infact with health insurance and burgers... but i can't recall any names.
If you look at the recent history of scandals that have had zero to negative reputational impact on politicians and public figures in Western democracies - we’re talking Access Hollywood, tax fraud, undeclared gifts, gross nepotism, punching journalists, flouting public health laws, sexual impropriety, lying about your career and life story, mishandling of classified information, and just plain incompetence - what on earth do you think the harm could be of someone getting hold of someone’s old credit card bills?
And literally nobody would care. Regardless of whether the accusations are true or not, the other side is already convinced the politician's in question is a baby-blood-drinking child abuser, while their side will be convinced its just a baseless smear campaign by done by butt-hurt losers.
Life isn't a song, nobody in politics these days actually faces the consequences just because they were a rapist/adulterer/wearing blackface/drag/doing felony fraud/etc.
Given how relentlessly (just to pick a particular example) Epstein's crimes, accomplices, and associated have been publicized, and the negligible impact, why do you think that would be impactful?
Because three letter agencies have a huge incentive to trawl through politicians' private lives through credit card purchase data, and use that against them if they don't want to toe the line of these agencies, whose ex-employees are guests on the main stream media. Just leak enough to derail any politician.
The constraints and incentives for agencies like the FBI have changed a lot since Hoover (in no small part due to the abuses under Hoover.)
“Read about J. Edgar Hoover” is a handwave, rather than an argument, and its made worse when it supposed to support a position on the current state of affairs.
Pointing to a guy who’s been dead 50 years seems like weak evidence for the claim that government agencies are widely incentivized to undermine political candidates by… selectively leaking their grocery shopping habits?
They’ll look for anything they can find, when they need to. There are whole organizations devoted to digging up dirt, and others devoted to countering/deflecting it.
Risk minimization sounds prudent if you’re a target.
If the very first director of the FBI immediately abused his position to blackmail everyone around, what do you think has been going on in the intervening 75 years?
...huh? "Don't use store membership cards that track your specific purchases" is one thing, but in what world does your credit card processor get info about the individual goods on your receipt?
If you apply for a loan, especially a mortgage, the lender could ask to see your outgoing cash flow statements. Which wouldn’t get into receipt-level detail, but could still potentially allow the lender to discriminate against you.
A person with habitual transactions at a casino or liquor store could be perceived as high risk and the lender could jack up the interest rate for that person. I have no clue if lenders _actually_ do this, but they could since they do ask for your outgoing transactions.
They could, but for the vast majority of people they won't. Credit scores exist so that they don't have to.
Credit card company rolls up your behavior into a number, and passes that to a credit agency like Experian, and they pop a number out to anyone who asks.
No one is asking for outgoing transactions unless you're trying to buy a business or are getting a non-standard loan for something
The vast majority of people don't have to pass intensive government background checks or face potential rejection during a political vetting process. (And I'm talking about in the United States, where questions raised about personal peccadillos during this process wouldn't necessarily result in the sort of watchlisting they would in most nonwestern countries).
The fear of having oneself audited is the main reason more people don't run for office.
Yes, some narcissistic maniacs have managed to slip through by portraying themselves as victims of witch hunts, but the average married person will not run for office if it means their spouse will find out they went to a strip club.
Everyone is susceptible to blackmail. The digital trail of expenditures is the key to letting the people with access to that data remain in power.
Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!
And, if I had to guess, the booking of hotel rooms probably has more to do with liability rather than tracking. There are plenty of ways of getting a roof over your head without using a credit card; though IMO they are likely a downgrade.
While your statements resonate with me, it's a bit hyperbolic to say that electronic payments/banking are the only way of exerting the control you're worried about. I think there are a lot of good points in this line of complaint about centralized private financial systems, but the ones you're raising are a bit fringe.
> Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!
Why is that a good thing? You used to be able to walk into the airport, pay cash at the ticket counter for a ticket, and get on the plane. Compared to the fantastic level of nonsense we put up with today?
In the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, one of the characters boards a plane at LAX, and then purchases a ticket from the stewardess. It is the most jarring scene in the entire film.
> things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office.
Granted, I don't see a lot of campaign ads, but has this ever happened? Has anyone ever run an ad like "My opponent's credit card bill shows they bought nothing but Funyuns and Jack Daniels for the entire month of August. How can you vote for this person?"
Well many (not sure if all) strip clubs are basically legal brothels that run on cash specifically because a) they are (usually) in with local organized crime and b) so when the girls get their "tips" they can't be scrutinized about what service they provided to acquire it.
I know a lot of women who work at or have worked at strip clubs (including my partner of many years). While there's sometimes an organized crime element, those are often the safer ones for girls to work at. The blanket statement that they're "legal brothels" is far from the truth. In fact, most will fire girls for any sort of illegal contact, onsite or offsite, with customers. I've heard myriad stories of girls being fired for selling services.
That said, your comment doesn't deserve downvotes, because this very much depends on where you live. It's true that some of them are as crooked as you say. I can usually tell within a minute of walking into one. And if that's been your experience then I can't blame you for holding that perception. But I don't think it's true over all in America.
Its the same case with massage parlors: they either have very well-trained masseuses and take cards, or they are just brothels that may or may not actually give you a massage. I don't think its a bad thing at all...but I can't imagine the working conditions are always great. The thing that makes people uncomfortable about prostitution is the idea that some of the girls might actually be doing it completely willingly (they might even be enjoying it): I don't think the problem, then, is with the existence of these types of establishments, but the complete lack of regulation.
There is a cost to handling cash too. Don't know how it compares to cards but with the latter you don't need to have fleets of armored trucks to move money around and robbers can only steal stock.
In the UK the banks are happy to deal with businesses paying cash, but there are fees, and if your holding cash on premises then you’ll need insurance, which means you’ll need a safe…
The reason supermarkets offered cash back was that this allowed them to massively reduce the amount of cash held on site and thus reduce their insurance costs.
Large chains, large businesses have no problems accepting cash, nor do they have problems depositing cash with banks. Even if a mega bank, say, Chase/Bank of America in the states, doesn't want to deal with cash deposits from a large retailer, the latter can indirectly 'own' a credit union or another small bank that accepts cash deposits, as this bank can still follow AML regulations. Big banks consider cash deposits/withdrawals and money order deposits to be a big headache, and also back office costs for enforcing AML can be reduced by not dealing with cash/money orders (in other words, any untraceable monetary instruments).
> The reason supermarkets offered cash back was that this allowed them to massively reduce the amount of cash held on site and thus reduce their insurance costs.
But wouldn’t this increase the amount of cash you need on hand to ensure you can make change and now give cash back?
Nah. Cash back is all comparatively large notes (£5, £10, £20) and it’s mostly smaller stuff you need for making change. It vastly reduced the amount of cash they needed on site, though it didn’t really help with the need for coins to make change with.
I’m not sure they even offer cash back these days, it has been so long since I asked, and the number of cash transactions has dropped massively over the last few years.
I swear money handling cost will be reduced by one simple thing that some countries like Canada and Ireland have done (and can be improved): ditch the smaller coin denominations (and maybe add higher denomination coins like $2 like EU and UK have)
Anything under 10 cents gets rounded down/up accordingly
It doesn't matter. Minting and transporting it, even in your pocket costs more than you'll ever get in dealing a more "precise" denomination
This is so much cheaper per dollar than people think. Certainly cheaper than credit card fees once you're over a certain volume, unless you are in a very high-crime area. Even then, thieves will often steal off the shelves instead of out of the cash register because that's a much smaller crime. Small businesses get the short end of the stick on cash management, again, because they may not be.
Eh, my experience is that dealing with cash is much more expensive than people think (to be fair, most people think it's "free" since there are no direct fees). At some places I've worked in the past, it's been like almost the only responsibility of a manager working full time. Making sure everything is in order, watch over workers, training them on all procedures, going to the bank to buy change, counting tills all the time, etc etc. Sooo many man hours going into this.
So many people overlook the cost of being able to "make change" an arbitrary amount of time with (nearly) arbitrary denominations.
Think about the last time you bought some for $1.27 and paid with a $20 and they took it without blinking.
I live in a developing country where there are still a ton of small mom & pop shops that aren't willing to eat the cost of that externality. So it isn't uncommon to go to one of them and they'll go "sorry, I can't make change for that bill size". Then you suddenly have the hassle of needing to drive to another store or getting change somewhere else or whatever.
In practice you adapt: the ATM only spits out big bills so you make a purchase somewhere to start breaking them up. Go buy a soda at an international chain instead of the local corner store. That kind of thing.
But it is still a cost we all pay, since "making change" isn't free.
I don't need fleets in my small business so I'm maybe not your target market but for us it's significantly cheaper to deal with cash than cc fees. We spend about 2-3 hours of person time handling cash per week. Compared to the cost of our cc fees I would prefer to be all cash.
True. But there is no way in hell you can stop people paying with their smartphone or plastic card so those costs are fixed.
An anecdote: during COVID people had to use shopping carts in the supermarket (social distancin).
Those trolleys needed a 1 euro coin inserted in them to unlock.
Chaos ensued because many customers were not carrying cash- let alone coins.
Are these really inconveniences? Most of the times I've had trouble paying for stuff were usually at supermarkets or gas stations where the credit card reader would refuse to acknowledge my card. Swiping/inserting/touching, not even cursing worked so without cash on hand I'd have had to surrender my ID to the clerk, take a cab to the closest ATM and return with cash.
I've been using cards nearly exclusively my entire adult life, and I can only think of one time that my card had an issue, and it turned out my whole bank was down for ~1 hour. Inconvenient, but I can think of more times I've forgotten to have enough cash with me, and I barely use cash at all now.
In the UK and Australia where I normally am, card infrastructure is just so entirely universal and reliable that it's not even worth considering.
Yeah when I first moved to London after uni I used to carry ~£20, but about 6 years ago I naturally stopped using or replenishing it and ended up never having cash in my wallet. Now I rarely even have a wallet on me, even when abroad.
Im in the us and have had at least 3 times in the last year that I needed cash due to credit card systems "being down" be it from internet outage or actual issues. Twice while trying to get gas for the vehicle.
I was an early adopter of (debit) card only, using it for everything in 1999. Your experience has never happened to me, as far as I recall. I don’t think I’ve ever had to go to an atm because the reader didn’t work.
The main reason I carry multiple cards, and Cash was because my debit card was used for fraud once, which shut down my card, and it took several days to get a new one.
Now days they can print you a new card in real time at the branch, but still I will never not have cash, and not have a backup card
I also NEVER use by debit card for anything other than ATM now, credit cards and pay it off every month... I dont even carry my debit card anymore, it is locked in the safe, and a bring it out when I need to get more cash.
Well, it happened to me just the other day - said it cannot read the card or something like that (even though I had used it less than 15 minutes earlier in another shop). There was already a queue behind me so I forked $40 for gas and went on my way.
Yes. I cannot stand cash, I hate carrying it, I hate coins, I don’t want to keep up with it. I leave my house with nothing but my phone and I’m good.
I don’t have a wallet, and I don’t want one. I want efficient and secure digital currency, with easy interfaces between digital wallets. I pay for my lawn care via Cash App, most of the other small businesses have Square or something similar.
If I need anonymous currency, I will convert to crypto and then convert once or twice more across different coins. It’s good enough for my use.
Curious, do you use a tumbler or distributed exchange (not sure if this is the right term)? I always treated crypto as not-at-all-anonymous, so I'm curious how to achieve cash level of privacy with crypto. Any tips?
And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home? Or it's blocked for some random reason? Nevermind the services that just don't take cash, or the fact that their card reader might be down, etc.
Doesn't seem tenable to leave the house without at least some cash in a back pocket somewhere.
I barely ever use my card, so dropping it is less likely. It’s just a backup in case the payment terminal doesn’t support NFC. If their card reader is down, I just go somewhere else. If it’s a restaurant, well, that’s their problem if they didn’t warn me before hand (but it’s never happened before).
A lot of people (esp under 30) these days are running around without any cash at all. Pickpockets and muggers, or even just panhandlers, have been suffering as a result.
I do have some cash in my car I think. I put it there a few years ago for emergencies. I haven’t touched it since then.
If I really need cash for something that I can’t get somewhere else, like a visa from the Japanese consulate, I go to the bank and withdraw cash. It’s a weird request for tellers, but I only do it once every two years or so. I’ve forgotten the pin to my ATM card.
> And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home?
How is this different to cash? I also have Apple pay on my phone and watch.
> Or it's blocked for some random reason
I have a couple cards. Also, I've been cashless for 10 years across three countries and this has never happened.
> Nevermind the services that just don't take cash
Assume you mean card. Not a problem in many countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. I travel a lot, remote, even random middle-of-nowhere merchants accept card. From a business point of view, cash-only makes zero sense. Why would a business turn away people who want to give them money?
> or the fact that their card reader might be down
Never had it happen. A couple of times the payment network has been down, and these terminals seem capable of making the transaction offline and syncing later.
If you're from a country where any of these are legitimate concerns for you, it doesn't mean cashless is bad - it means the systems are bad. And they can be fixed, again, AU, NZ, and UK (and more, I'm sure) are proof. Haven't carried cash for 10 years and it doesn't occupy a single thought.
Of course there's no difference in regard to the risk of getting physically lost.
I was referring risk of carrying a single value store (independent of type).
I also have Apple pay on my phone and watch.
Not sure how that's less cognitive overhead than a physical wallet, but as you like.
From a business point of view, cash-only makes zero sense. Why would a business turn away people who want to give them money?
Margins are thin. Apparently the overhead is significant for some merchants. Such that in my part of the planet, it's not uncommon for street merchants (and small shops) to only take card payments above a certain minimum amount. Oh, and some work under the table. Cash lets them do that.
Meanwhile, the card-only places turn away customers all the time.
If you're from a country where any of these are legitimate concerns for you, it doesn't mean cashless is bad - it means the systems are bad.
Mmm - from first principles, and given that one system is orders of magnitude more complex (and subject to far many more points of failure) than the other - is may very well be an intrinsic liability of that system.
> People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out.
My favorite question that many of the people on this site love to ignore, what about natural disasters? Do you believe CC terminals still work when the rest of the infrastructure has failed?
Cash is far from on the way out, you’re being naive.
Sure, natural disaster occurs, then...maybe I have more things to worry about then having cash? If the POS is down at the store, the cell phone networks are surely down (since many POS these days are just cellphones attached to Stripe or similar), and I'm guessing your saying FEMA help won't come very soon, it will be everyone for themselves in the city? At least I won't be the only one suffering in such a DOOM scenario.
I also don't live in a place where natural disasters (like hurricanes) are very common. I imagine people in Florida or coastal Texas would have a very different view on things.
> If the POS is down at the store, the cell phone networks are surely down (since many POS these days are just cellphones attached to Stripe or similar)
People have calculators that tend to work and be accurate outside a POS. Many people can do basic math and add tax, and you hand them cash. Is this hard to believe? It comes from an era where a POS didn’t exist.
> I'm guessing your saying FEMA help won't come very soon
FEMA, National Guard, etc, stand up critical infrastructure first. This means hospitals, not storefronts. They also only bring in limited food. They feed some, no where near all.
> come very soon, it will be everyone for themselves in the city
hardly, for one National Guard is patrolling. You’re purposely being reductive here.
> I also don't live in a place where natural disasters (like hurricanes) are very common. I imagine people in Florida or coastal Texas would have a very different view on things.
So you, knowing you lack experience, blatantly state cash is on the way out when you now state there are some uses? What is your point exactly? Because a few people don’t need cash in the US clearly nobody needs it?
Whether cash is on it's way "out" (as opposed to contracting a bit and settling to a certain niche level) is -- as the article indicates -- far from an obvious, final matter. And in my view quite doubtful in fact.
Not sure on the fees part of that - cash handling itself is expensive, both for direct reasons, and anti-theft reasons. Anywhere from time spent counting drawers to full-on armored car service. All of that is expensive, and not present when credit cards are used (and conversely, a network fee doesn't exist on cash). I think all payment methods end up with some costs to them.
Processing fees aren't inherently expensively. They're low in Europe, and high in the US only because they go to rewards programs. You're paying 2% more but getting 2% back. Legislation could easily regulate them to eliminate rewards programs and bring them back down low.
Chargebacks are supposed to be expensive because they're a deterrent to businesses acting in ways that will lead customers to attempt chargebacks. And then they usually have an element of manual review which costs $ as well. Chargebacks being expensive is a feature not a bug. And they're an easy consumer protection option that isn't even a possibility with cash.
Chargebacks exist because the element of agency in payment is broken in the electronic money systems we've created. When using a card, you don't give merchants your money, you provide them with enough information to take your money away from you.
The UX of those two things is similar enough that nobody really cares, until it bites them in the ass, that is.
If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.
For more information I suggest getting some books on Terrorist Financing for the new meta. There is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service lady out there that wrote a whole book on it recently.
I have to apologize, but you don't understand what the concept of "laundering money" means. It has nothing to do with tracking cash bills through serial numbers and it has never had anything to do with that.
"Laundering money" means that criminals make transactions in order to use cash they have from their illicit gains within the general economy, ie get it into a bank account and being able to declare where they got the money from.
> the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.
It should be tracked to some degree. If the motorcycle is designed for street use (compared to track or dirt only) then there are several interested parties that need to know about some sort of transaction (insurance companies, DMV, state sales tax). There's some difference between "my insurance company knows I bought a GSXR" and "Visa knows I bought a GSXR", but less than you'd think. Even if the insurance company doesn't sell the data, you're likely to buy a new helmet with the Visa, increase browsing of motorcycle related webpages, or have some new speeding tickets.
You launder money to obscure the source of the cash. If you sell, for example, $200k worth of cocaine and you try to deposit it all through one of your fronts you will be caught.
> each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it
This isn't quite what you meant, but 20-ish years ago there was some crowd-tracking of Euro-bills.
The Euro was pretty new and people were excited about their banknotes showing up in other countries. Some people created a website where you could enter the serial number of your bills. Each serial number would have a tracking page in which places it showed up. It felt kinda cool to find a bill in your wallet that had visited a few other countries.
This reminded me https://www.wheresgeorge.com/ in the USA has been doing it a while as well. Had no idea it was still going strong all these years later.
> if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.
Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000 on a used car from another guy who then used that same money to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not in the bank's hands.
It obviously could have gone through an intermediary, but it usually doesn't for honest transactions. If one of the two people is already a person of interest to law enforcement, a warrant can be called up to figure out exactly what happened. Added to other sources of information, like the new registry of the car or motorcycle, a pretty reliable history can be constructed.
Don't think in binary. Think in continuums of likelihood. Also, this isn't a new concept. It was covered by HBO's The Wire many years ago.
> Money Counter Machine with CIS Technology: Equipped with one pair 200DPI Contact Image Sensors, scan and detect each counted bill like human eyes.. counts the quantity, reads the denomination and currency type, calculate the total amount at one time pass. Turn on serial number reading function to record serial number and all the counting details can be printed directly or exported to PC , very helpful for money tracking and management.
Modern ATM bill acceptors have sensors that can read serial numbers off of bills. I don't know whether it's been publicly stated that this occurs (and don't have any relevant personal knowledge, either), but the capability exists in the field.
I'm not sure if I'd be surprised either way. Either they don't track bills because it costs too much money, or they do track bills because they've found a way to monetize the data.
I scarcely use ATMs at this point because they won't hand out "large" bills. Inflation will be the real driver of cashless adoption, as the absurd number of $20 bills (and eventually, $100 bills) you need to pay for anything these days makes using cash too difficult for the average person.
I admit this is a bit of tin hattery. But that said at my bank the cash is distributed from machines that the teller uses. You go up, make a withdrawal, they type the amount into the machine and bills are counted out.
I am sure this offers several advantages to the bank. That said, however, maybe I can see it being straightforward for these machines, along with ATMs, to log bill serial numbers as they’re distributed.
I have no idea if this is being done, simply, at least at my bank there’s an avenue for it to happen. I would also freely admit that it would be an imperfect system. But still food for thought.
If the bank teller counts out the cash from a drawer and hands it to you, no. If he runs it through a counting machine, or you get the cash from an ATM, maybe?
It looks to me like there's two different notions of cash tracking being discussed. One is tracking individual bills and the other is tracking transactions that involve exchanging goods or services for cash.
Cash pretty much has to be fungibile, it would just be too much work keeping track of the history of each dollar in your wallet.
Maybe that's nice because you can pay your taxes with money you made selling drugs.
Maybe it's bad because you don't know what kind of activity you're supporting when you accept a stranger's money. It could be that refusing to accept their money makes them unable to set up the mining operation that would poison your drinking water.
Dealing with cash is mainly just super-expensive because it's a massive volume of paper and metal that you have to count and move around every day, and deal with replacing it over time. It's not a big deal for a single individual, but it's a huge deal for businesses. And for banks and for the government.
And there's just so much nonsense involved, like a cashier discovering they're $25 short at the end of their shift, and how do you deal with that. Unlike digital transactions, people are constantly making mistakes with cash, which one side or the other is losing out on.
And then obviously theft as well -- if there's no cash in a cash register, there's less incentive to hold up convenience store clerks at gunpoint. (You can still steal merchandise, but it's a lot bulkier and harder to handle.)
Cash has a lot of costs as well. For example it’s easier to steal, it slows down transactions, and it requires a larger payment device and overhead of transferring it to a central location. It’s not at all clear that cashless even with fees is more costly to a business.
As for can't be tracked, does anyone else remember that website you used to see stamped on dollar bills, WheresGeorge.com? Early internet goofiness, crowd-sourced tracking of cash.
At the individual level, the cost of using cash is that you are subsidizing the other consumers who are paying with a credit cards that offers cash-back or other rewards
I've been using cash more due to the proliferation of sluggish, badly engineered, or dark-pattern point of sale systems.
There are two eateries across the street from each other near me. At both, you go to the counter and order, and they later bring food out. The first has a good system, from Stripe. Big, clear, uncluttered screen facing the customer, with the amount the biggest thing on the screen. When the system is ready to read the contactless card, the contactless card logo lights up, above the screen. The reader always reads the card once it's within about 1cm of the reader. The display immediately changes, by a smooth horizontal scroll, to a tip screen, which needs only one touch on a screen that senses the touch without difficulty. One more smooth horizontal scroll, with receipt options and a big "you are customer #5" display. One more touch and you're done. If I select "Paper receipt", the receipt prints within 2 seconds, and I tear it off and take it. Done.
I'll use a credit card there.
Across the street, another place has a Veriphone systems. This one is much more sluggish. There's no unambiguous indication of when the system is ready to accept a card. The contactless card reader is separate from the customer display screen. Sometimes, when the display indicates it's ready, it isn't. Or it may take several tries before it accepts the card. This is probably "hosted POS", where the POS terminal is a dumb web client and has to wait for an overloaded server for each step in the transaction.
Then the display wants a signature. There's no pen, and a finger touch won't work. Writing with a fingernail is necessary. Then the clerk has to ask if you want a receipt, and they have to do some data entry to get one printed.
I pay cash there.
Walgreens and CVS are even worse. Half the small screen is full of ads. There are asks for phone number, stuff about "reward points", readers that seem to be out of sync with the screen, and printed receipts two feet long, full of ads.
It's easier to order on Amazon rather than go there.
Whether or not you agreed with the trucker protest in Canada, I hope we all agree it’s pretty terrifying that the method the state decided to use to silence protesters was freezing their bank accounts without due process, any trial, anything. Cash is the best weapon against this.
It seems like being able to do this sort of thing. And being able to make government payments to people that must be spent (use it or lose it) and only on approved things are the big motives. Control.
The scariest part of that was people who weren’t necessarily in that group but agreed that the vaccine requirements were going too far so they donated to people who were willing to stand out, in a time when even questioning the office owners five got you called an anti-vaxxer, and got their accounts frozen.
I feel like that was the moment the government of Canada let their true colours show and it scared me.
Most stores aren't going to be able to sell you anything with no power, regardless of taking card or cash, because sales need to go into a database via a register, update inventory, etc. Sure a few small family run businesses, maybe restaurants, might be able to take cash, but almost no chains will be able to run and that's most stores in most places.
In Canada, the Rogers network went down in July 2022 for several hours which caused debit card transactions to fail (after the outage, Interac said it was going to add a SECOND network provider - *facepalm*). Many businesses which relied on the Rogers network for credit card transactions were also affected.
"Small business owners were among those hardest hit by the outage, which left them unable to process debit card payments.
Sharif Ahmed, the owner of Plantforsoul plant shop in Toronto's west end, said the outage left him feeling helpless, as he turned away customers who didn't have cash."
Home Depot has a backup generator or battery in order to still allow transactions to go through in the event of a power outage. It even ran the air conditioning. They stored the payments offline until they were able to connect online again.
What I've seen happen more often is that there is a network error and digital payments can't be processed for hours. Digital money relies on a lot more complex infrastructure than just electricity.
In my country it's required for cash registers to have a backup power enough for 48h of outage. We don't get outages that often (probably once a year or so) but the requirement is there.
The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability to be lazy. You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to count out cash. That's the major benefit. All things being equal, sure, it's more convenient. But all things are not equal; in my opinion the potential negatives that others in the thread have listed overwhelmingly outweigh the ability to be more lazy. That so many people have the desire to ditch freedom in exchange for the ability to be slightly more lazy is such a disappointing state of affairs and says a lot about society.
> The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability to be lazy.
By this logic, the primary benefit of just about every technological development in human history is the ability to be lazy. The wheel is just a crutch for those too lazy to drag their loads on sleds.
The downsides of a cashless marketplace are indisputable, but “laziness” is a reductive view of the upsides.
Using your example, the wheel allows us to perform more work per unit of time. I think it would be good for discourse to identify that within society there is the general consumer public and then there is education, government, research, etc. Could you argue that the wheel allows an individual to be lazy? Definitely. Is it correct to argue that a wheel is a crutch and makes every individual that uses it lazy? Definitely not.
Surely the same happens with cashless payments? A teller in a store can process way more transactions via contactless than with cash in the same amount of time.
I agree that contact-less transactions are able to be performed faster. In the situation of a grocery-store checkout there are other factors at play. Have you paid and everything is still being bagged up? Is there anyone waiting on you? Probably others I'm not considering here.
Essentially I think this gets into a estimation of magnitude problem (outside of ethical, security, and other concerns). Where if the payment isn't ever the action being waited on, a contact-less payment while convenient doesn't save you any time to get out of the store. If you have just a snack and no lines then the payment will be the action causing the bottleneck.
That question of "does this allow for more work per unit of time" is honestly a pretty interesting way to stratefy whether an innovation is actually innovative imo. For example, the first iPhone? Sure, you can email and video chat on the go and conceivably do more work over time. But the 14th compared to the 13th? No, all that effort spent didn't really unlock more work per unit of time. If anything you are doing the same work, at the cost of more resources because the hardware is more overpowered, the screen has more pixels, and the bulk of the resource load on the hardware is from rendering stuff like sexy window dressing instead of the actual functional process, like checking your email.
Pretty interesting parallels to biology too, like in some birds there's the race towards sexually selecting ever fancier tail feathers that might cause more female birds to ooh and aah perhaps, but hurt your chances of flying away from a hawk, and lead to an overall reduction in fitness in the species as the hawks start finding more success and expanding their population size at the expense of yours.
They're obviously not clear enough to elaborate upon, although there's room for a discussion about wheels. A cashless society saves almost no effort.
The reason I support government fiat crypto is because banks get a free ride, holding customer deposits and playing with them, but giving nothing in return. But I also think that if you have a physical store that sells to the general public, you should be required to accept cash. Government crypto is still an account (or any number of accounts.) The physical token is cash.
Even though I would not like to ditch freedom with a cashless system, I would not like a cash only system either, and it is not about being lazy.
An advantage of a system where cards or checks are widely used is that it decreases significantly the risk of getting robbed.
In some country with cash only, the citizens would travel by bus with big amounts of cash while bringing back money to their family. Sometimes the bus was stopped by armed robbers. Everybody would have to give their money, or to take the risk to hide it, or to take the risk to fight back. When a minimal system of money transfer was introduced in the country, those kind of robbery disappeared: there was no point anymore for the robbers to stop busses since the citizens didn't have huge amounts of cash on them anymore.
first month with central bank digital currency, instant kidnaps were thru the roof.
the "solution" lower limits of how much you can transfer. what a joke.
now only 100usd per day can leave your pocket. wish i was kidding. even lower at night when traveling i have to wake up at 3am to make payments thanks to timezones.
people can raise limits, but if you pay for something expensive once you're probably marked forever as having lots of money in your pocket. with cash, that would be a one time opportunity to be robbed. with cashless, you signaled that forever you're a good target.
Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by the state. I've been actively against bitcoin and monero exactly because they facilitate kidnapping and other forms of effectively irreversible digital theft.
The best part about living in a society with institutions based on trust instead of non-trust, is that it's trivially easy to eject bad actors from the system.
> Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by the state
instant, cashless, transactions are not reversible, and can be withdrawal instantly on the other end. sum that with the usual practice of employing disposables young criminals to quickly withdrawal the funds and you have even less risk than btc or cash based crime.
sheltered engineers in silicon valley or theoretical economist in boston... will never get how easy it is for criminals to sidestep rules.
> Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a dead drop.
Where the perpetrator needs to:
1. Be in the general area.
2. Only ask for enough currency that's easy to physically move (an actual real limitation in many countries)
3. Be sure the bills aren't marked (practically impossible). Because of this:
3(1). Be sure to not deposit the currency, ever.
3(2). Be sure not to use the currency with anyone who knows you who will every deposit the currency ever.
3(3). Allow the victim only enough time to procure a large amount of currency (likely days), but not enough time to procure a large amount of marked currency (this is an inherent conflict).
Obviously kidnapping is possibly via use of physical currency, but the practical limitations of cash over anonymous digital currency with regards to kidnapping are massive.
Your concerns with hyperinflation are alleviated by investing in any commodity, and trading on a black market. The fact that the commodity is a blockchain asset is effectively moot. The days of states not forcing individuals to be up front with capital gains on blockchain assets are over.
It might, sure, but it might also have to do with the fact that people carry almost nothing in cash compared to 40+ years ago.
In 1985, when I was a child, my father would care around $300 on him effectively at all times. Credit cards were still new, and checks were a limited option, most places you still needed cash. That's the equivalent of $850 today. I rarely carry more than $200 on my person today (less than the cost of a fancy dinner for two in San Francisco). The only reason I'm able to do that is because the vast majority of my transactions settle on a bank card.
You can argue that the change is surveillance, but the stark decrease in untraceable value I carry on my person is clearly an incentive for robbery that has been lost. It's also likely a major reason for the near-elimination of pick-pocketing in western society.
I was responding to your argument that there are no economic incentives to mug people. The mugger isn't out to impose a cost on the victim, but to get some free money. Purchasing power on a credit card is just as good, although it's not as flexible/reliable as a wad of cash.
Everyone you see on the street has a slab of metal in their pocket that you can take apart and sell for parts online, or sell as a bricked device to some sucker. This cashless society is dealing with a robbery problem in places like Beverly Hills, because for some segments of our society its common to wear $30,000 on your wrist. A couple hundred cash perhaps in a wallet is honestly the low end of the potential take for a mugger these days, if they know where to mug.
It's dishonest to portray it as if it is only about being "lazy".
If all digital payment did was that I didn't have to present the correct amount of bills from my wallet, you might have had a point. But that's like almost on the bottom of the list of benefits being cashless provides.
> You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to count out cash. That's the major benefit.
It's not just the counting out part that's inconvenient, and it's not just cash. There's also receiving some arbitrary amount of cash and coins that you then have to dump into your pocket/wallet/purse and deal with until your next shopping trip. Coins dangling in your pocket and having to fish them out every time while making sure you don't lose them beforehand is not exactly fun.
I've just gone several months without access to any electronic money (e.g. debit cards, credit cards, phone etc) and it has been complicated. I've been thrown out of several stores at the checkout because they couldn't or wouldn't take cash.
You also lose the ability to take advantage of many special offers that are available only through retailers apps, e.g. McDonald's. You can get the discounts, free items, nor can you accrue any credit (e.g. Walgreen's Cash) or points towards future discounts.
I also couldn't ride any of the scooters or bicycles in my city that are available everywhere, because it is incredibly difficult or impossible to use cash to access these forms of transport. You can't even use your cash to buy a prepaid debit card as they won't accept prepaid debit cards to rent the items.
Going to jail for a long time. When you get out you have no ID, you're a nonperson. It can be very difficult to get things like ID, then Internet connection to try and get bank accounts etc.
You have to just spend the weeks and months necessary to reboot your entire life from the ground up to be able to use electronic money.
>I've just gone several months without access to any electronic money (e.g. debit cards, credit cards, phone etc) and it has been complicated. I've been thrown out of several stores at the checkout because they couldn't or wouldn't take cash.
What stores? How do they serve kids and old people?
All sorts of stores. These are all regular stores who for some reason suddenly are unable to process cash, including Chipotle, McDonald's, Dollar General and more. They will say "CARDS ONLY".
Big brother wants to surveil on everyone, that's the goal of any cashless society. How the big brother can force shutdown a business, say, X, which doesn't comply requests without warrants? Just have visa/master/paypal (third party) to not do business with X, because X violates some TOS.
Even though inflation has increased three folds since the bank secrecy act, they have kept the limits so low to track any cash entry/exits out of the financial system. Big brother doesn't want the powerless people to unite--thats the end goal.
Something often not spoken about (as the discussion often focuses on privacy and "power") is the price.
As someone who uses card for most payments (maybe paying in cash a couple of times a year), cash is expensive to use. It requires time out of my routine to take the cash out, unless I can take out an exact amount there I'm then left with change, and then because I don't want the change I normally spend it on things I don't need. If cash in another currency that's very expensive as I have to pay to convert the small amount. On the other hand cards are effectively free to me, even paying in other currencies. I travel a lot and never use local cash.
However, for many people, the reverse is true. If your cash flow is primary in actual cash, then paying into an account can be annoying or even cost money, current accounts without sufficient funds in them often charge a fee (in the UK current accounts, checking accounts?, are typically "free"), some users can't even hold a real bank account and are forced to use pseudo-bank-accounts based on prepaid cards with exorbitant fees, and cash could be argued to subsidise card fees (which are rare in the UK).
I hope that for the foreseeable future both options are accepted at the majority of places. I'm never going to take cash out for a truly discretionary purchase so only accepting cash limits the market, and some people are rarely going to have a card they can use at card-only merchants.
> On the other hand cards are effectively free to me
The average card merchant fee in the US is 1.5-3.5%. You're paying that much more for everything you're buying. That applies even if you use cash. So it's effectively a private sales tax.
You absolutely pay for the convenience. It's just not on any receipt.
In the EU/UK it's capped at 0.4% for debit cards I believe, and not much more for credit cards. I agree it is a private sales tax, but cash handling isn't free so it's not a perfect comparison.
In Australia it's actually very common for the card fee to be applied on top of the charge, especially in restaurants and small businesses. And I actually don't mind. It's about 1-1.5%, which on a $50 bill is small enough that I'd rather have the convenience, and the annoyance (or risk) of cash is enough to not bother.
In Canada, we saw the main use case for cashlessness last winter during popular protests. It was used to track donors to a popular non-violent movement and freeze their bank accounts. That's all anyone needs to know about it, really. Consider that most people aren't smart enough to apprehend how deeply malicious the architects of cashless policies are. They don't care if you disagree, they just need for you to do nothing.
I can't believe how willingly people submitted to going cashless. I was at a trendy rivertown restaurant, went to pay with cash, and the shock on people's faces was unbelievable, like I was some ancient alien. It honestly feels pretty forced, like there's a hyper-fashionable status attached to paying digitally. It's not the first time people lapped up a status marker hawked to them by some globocorp, just like iphones, luxury cars, etc.
I'm cashless for none of the reasons you mentioned. It's simply more convenient. I don't have to constantly visit ATMs to withdraw money or carry my wallet, deal with coins etc. And my spending is tracked automatically. People can have opinions - just because you prefer cash it doesn't mean people who prefer cashless are brainwashed by globocorps.
They weren't talking about people who prefer cashless as being brainwashed by the globocorps.
But rather merchants who insist that you go cashless - and not only refuse to serve you, but look at you as if you just emerged from a swap and learned to walk on land if you don't go along.
I encounter more businesses that only take cash than I do those that refuse it. A couple of local restaurants, and my barber. Though one of the restaurants recently also started accepting Zelle. I can't think of anyplace local that refuses cash but there are several others that offer a discount for cash.
Small businesses pay a lot in cc fees. I am happy when they give me the fee back as discount. One restaurant I frequent its 4%. Imagine losing 4% on all revenue just to be a participant, what a sham, its like being taxed by the mafia.
It's also interesting how you see more knowledge on making it work with cash in communities where its common to have small businesses, like working class immigrant communities. A greasy spoon burger joint in socal might be open for decades, no marketing budget, cash payments, interior is what it is when it opened, word of mouth and line of sight customer base, no website.
Meanwhile you have these "modern" hip restaurants that might have no paper menus nor tableservice let alone not take cash, have impressive marketing and social media operations, big grand openings, an entire merch line, brewery partnership, all this fanfare, complexity and overhead, just because that's what all these sort of restaurants tend to do. Then they tend to fail in like 2 years because its hard to sustain this costly model even if they are ostensibly bringing in customers and good reviews. As they say, the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Yep, exactly the places I am thinking of. Chinese place in an unimpressive storefront, dining room looks like it's furnished from an institutional cafeteria surplus auction, menu is handwritten on posterboard and pinned up on the wall. No website, no online orders, no delivery. The food is really good though.
Opposite in my part of the world. Lots of businesses aren’t taking a cash anymore. The only ones I know that deal with cash only are marijuana dispensaries, which are popular targets for thugs as a result.
They aren’t allowed to carry guns at marijuana dispensaries, for federal law reasons similar to why they can’t take cash. It’s a weird business to be in, you pretty much have to drop all your cash into a safe as soon as you get it.
> This is relatively new; previously Visa/MC prevented their merchants from doing this but it changed recently.
Not in all states (and maybe not recently in some of the states where it changed); a class action lawsuit in 2013 changed it for several states, and over time more states have allowed it by (IIRC) a mix of legislation and court cases; it is now at 48 states that allow it (plus D.C.) and two, Connecticut and Massachusetts that don’t.
The OP article is about the UK and in fact many place in the UK do not accept cash. My understanding is that trend accelerated, if not started, during COVID.
It took off in London towards the end of COVID really, some pubs & cafes and most cinemas for some reason (with a few honourable exceptions like the ICA and the Picturehouse chain).
On a recent trip to Europe I didn't take out cash once over 3 weeks across 3 countries. I brought 50 euros with me and that was all I needed! Everything else was just a quick tap of the phone, including every metro system outside of Paris.
My only hesitation to getting rid of cash entirely - how will I buy drugs? I don't gamble illegally or pay for sex, but I imagine those services would also struggle in an increasingly cashless world.
The absence of cash should terrify anyone. So ridiculously easy to quash any dissidents if you can cut off their ability to buy anything with a single click of a button.
I don't use much cash at all but if my government was planning on ending all cash, I'd go out and buy a bunch of precious metals. Can't trust my basic freedom with Visa and Paypal.
Yeah I completely understand a business not wanting to handle cash. It's bulky, dirty, easy to steal, must be secured in a heavy expensive safe, it takes time to count, it has to be physically transported to the bank or picked up by an armored car service, it's error-prone.
But in terms of personal freedom, I don't want cash to go away.
Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has the ability to employ much more brutal and effective methods of quashing dissidence.
Not really. Elaborate black markets exist and thrive all over the world. Maybe in the most brutally restrictive regimes they can truly ban something people want. But the rule across most societies is: ban something people want, then an unregulated black market will fill the void, regardless of laws, and will probably bring otherwise avoidable violence.
If black markets are your backup strategy then all countries would have to abolish their paper currency at the same time because nothing prevents you from paying with dollars, yen or euros in a foreign country.
If you travel around the central Asian "stans", especially Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - you'll notice that a surprisingly large number of people, especially older people, have gold teeth.
They didn't do this as a fashion statement - being able to escape with whatever gold you could carry was a means of survival against a brutal communist regime.
My own great grandparents escaped during the partition of my country by bartering my great grandmother's gold bangles and earrings for safe passage.
The government can and will try to quash dissidence. That doesn't mean you have to make it completely easy for them and hand over complete control on a silver platter.
Some countries have constitutions, armed citizens, some police who believe in the rule of law, and would like to maintain at least an appearance of due process.
What's more scalable - querying a database and hitting "delete" on the payment channels of 100,000 people at a political rally, or hunting them down one-by-one across an entire country?
You're applying this to individuals. Which is never the real threat to any regime. It's always large groups of people.
I think you're living in techno-fantasy land. "Deleting" people on a database achieves nothing. Look at how authoritarian governments actually work in the real world. An authoritarian government would simply arrest the leader of the opposition on made up charges, and then they would throw them in the jail. They don't have to go after everybody who disagrees with the government. They just go after a few of them, and this is more than enough to discourage the rest.
A decade ago my friends were already paying for drugs with Venmo. The dealers aren’t very careful because they’re rarely caught on the financial side. If the recent revelations are anything to go by, they’re probably using Cash app now.
Ironically it’s the legal dispensaries that have problems accepting digital payments - they usually require cash with an ATM on-site.
Drugs/gambling/prostitution may be considered contraband now (in some jurisdictions) but the decision over which goods/services fit that distinction is a political question so the answer will change with the political winds. Eliminating cash is inherently centralized: You can't pay someone directly for something. The transaction has to go through a walled-garden intermediary. This is a chokepoint where political policy can be enforced. It is a very useful and obvious tool for those with an authoritarian mindset-- or a utopian mindset but who knows if their idea of utopia will match yours.
Digital money is an ideal slip noose that keeps you under total control and surveillance. People who fought the government in my country have found it out the hard way.
What, the government in your country is benevolent and would never do something like that? Oh, my sweet summer child...
You don't have to do anything that seems illegal to participate in the illegal cashless society. A person selling ice cream out of a cooler at the beach is an example of a business that probably would not exist if they couldn't take under the table cash payments, considering the business model is a simple arbitrage opportunity on wholesale ice cream that probably wouldn't pencil out with the overhead of credit card fees or taxation.
Many people see laws against victmimless activities to be a direct curtailment of basic human rights. Even in our own lifetime we've seen completely arbitrary changes to which substances and banned or not banned, so we should be extremely wary of future, similarly arbitrary changes (that we can easily get around using cash).
The problem is that the government often creates crimes that citizens don't agree with. Or the majority uses the law to try to force their preferences on the minority.
It doesn't "end" whatsoever. Your notion of it ending means total governmental control or total anarchy. Life is in the middle of the two, the resting point is a continuous balance of two extremes. It's not simple to disregard laws, it's risky and makes you vulnerable.
I think the depends entirely on if the "crime" has a victim or otherwise causes severe problems to society. Though those problems should probably be more severe than then the problems caused by trying and failing to ban a victimless crime, which always creates a black market (and associated violence, which does have victims).
At least in America, there's not a lot of alternatives. The system is setup in a way that favors minoritarian rule (particularly, but not exclusively by the rural) and lobbyists. Unfortunately, that means that diregarding laws that they disagree with is often the only way to represent the will of the people.
Unfortunately it seems that digitalisation often removes a former middle ground and forces a choice between two extremes – like in this case either total privacy, or total surveillance, and there's no choice in-between.
On one hand, it clearly creates a power problem where too few have too much power.
On the other hand, you don't run a company without a dashboard of statistics and information to inform the decisions you make and theoretically the higher fidelity of the information you use to make decisions, the better decisions you can make. It's also very convenient.
Since people can exercise power without consequences it seems like anything that centralizes power is bad and therefore preserving cash is fundamentally good, but if people could provide consequences to those who abuse power, then things like digital currency could be used for great good.
I have to admit, relatedly, I am incredibly skeezed out by square e-mailing me itemized digital receipts for purchases made against a square terminal. What are they doing with that data? Are the regulated? Are they selling it? Are they using it to collude against customers (like the people who suggest rental prices creating a de facto cartel)?
> In 1978, Massachusetts became the first to enact such a law, requiring retailers to accept cash and credit. In passing its ban in January 2020, NYC joined New Jersey, Philadelphia and San Francisco, which all approved such bans in 2019.. Two rationales motivated NYC’s ban. First was the large number of NYC residents – more than 10% – who lack bank accounts, and thus access to credit cards.. Second is general skepticism over the security of cashless transactions, with the NYT noting they raise “the specter of hackers stealing personal data tied to digital transactions.”
.. NYC went after the upscale Van Leeuwen ice cream shop for repeated violations of the cashless ban.. In October, the city charged the ice cream shop with 17 violations of the cashless ban and penalized the company with $12,750 in fines.
In a dense urban area, competition for many businesses is a short walk away. Once the playing field has been leveled by a municipal law, there is little to be gained by antagonizing customers who can walk to the nearest competitor.
Most US credit cards return 1%, some return 2%. Another advantage of credit cards is that the bank acts as a mediator in case of disputes regarding the charged amount. Also, rental cars and hotel rooms are only available if you charge them to a credit card.
The government should be increasing the size of bills to keep up with inflation.
In 1934 gold was $35 per ounce, and a $100 bill could buy 2.86 ounces of gold.
In 2023 you'd need about $5000 for 2.86 ounces of gold. There "should" be a $5000 bill to match the status quo of 1934 but the government has never created bills larger than $100.
Switzerland has cash written into law[1] (You must accept all denominations of notes (that includes the CHF 1,000 note) and at minimum up to CHF 100 in coins) but sadly it is missing any penalties if you don't do it so there are now some that just ignoring it.
The law needs to be updated to add penalties and exceptions for businesses that have no physical presence.
There is an initiative to prevent cash from going away[2] but it's too little to prevent the above. Also organized by the people that are against vaccines, 5G and don't believe in climate change so the support is probably quite limited.
The SNB is also under pressure from the rest of the world regarding the CHF 1,000 notes but decided against getting rid of it. I also don't understand why a CHF 1,000 note today is such an issue when it existed already in 1907 and back then CHF 1,000 was a lot more than in today's money.
Indeed. Recently I grudgingly went to a ticketmaster concert. Shit you not, it was like boarding an international flight. It’s not possible to buy a top performer ticket anonymously any longer, and you are required to present ID and have a smartphone.
Who the hell asked for this? I didn’t. It will be my last tm concert, that’s for sure.
Went to a familiar small venue which has been trying to make a bit of a comeback after covid, but still not weekly live music. Monthly at least for about 6 months now but this month was the first time with a newer "competitive" online ticketing service.
I pay cash at the door anyway, often for years which was almost the same price as advance with fees online.
Nope this month it suprised me, door man said card only now.
So they let me in free, knowing I'm there to support the band and bartenders with good tips anyway.
Depending on how big of a whale you are, something like runescape gp or some commodity in game is probably a more stable store of value than most crypto.
Is not taking cash common in the USA? I'm in a small city in the midwest so I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't reached here yet but aside from a couple of rare stories I haven't heard much about it happening here.
I recently made a $1300 transaction in cash, and while the business was able to accommodate me, it took them five minutes, two drawers, and creative accounting to generate $74 in change. They were surprised to see a cash transaction. $1300 probably puts me in the top 20% of their transactions.
I once lost my keys to my car, and called a locksmith, he drove a van out to the neighborhood and provided two new locks for a cost of $700. When I started putting cash out to pay he said "holy shit" and his mannerisms changed. He then insisted he is good for repeat business. Considering the interaction happened between 11pm-1am on a Wednesday, and he took no record of my identity, I wonder what type of repeat business he was expecting from me.
I often see trendy places with staff running around with a tile or square or whatever, often operating by a teenager. I'm unsure if they have cash, and if they know how to keep a drawer that would count correctly with receipts. I imagine some of them will straight up refuse cash.
There aren't all horror stories. Anyone working a cash register in a gas station, convenience store, smoke shop, or grocery store will actually be prepared to take your physical concurrency.
In the context of the WSJ, cash doesn't mean physical currency. It just means dollars, i.e. not treasuries or any other type of asset. Most people would interpret that headline differently -- to the point of it being inaccurate.
I would. People in the tech bubble don't understand their privilege. If everybody you interact with daily makes less than you then you are rich. Or how does you total compensation compare to that of the Walmart worker, the guy behind the McD counter, you hair dresser, the lady cleaning your office toilets or the waiter at your lunch restaurant or staffer at the bouldering gym? You think they get stocks?
I seriously doubt that. I might bot be able to afford the exact house you most desire in the exact location that you desire. But if you restrict the definition of "rich" to only include people that can, then it's a very odd set that's left. I'm sure Elon desires a house on Mars, and he can't afford that either.
You don’t know me or my situation. Houses in Seattle are upwards of 750k for something that isn’t a fixer-upper. And if a house meeds work that’s even more money. Being able to “afford” something is more than having the cash to buy it or credit to finance it.
There’s a huge difference between being rich (or wealthy, not the same) and simply having more than someone else.
True, I don't know you, but you've now given some information to work with. With a 300k income, you should be able to put away 50k a year without problem. That's a 20% downpayment after 3 years for a 750k house. (If you can't save 50k a year then that's because of lifestyle choices like what car you drive, when and how much you eat out and where you go on vacation. That's fine, but your choice, so don't complain.)
> There’s a huge difference between being rich (or wealthy, not the same) and simply having more than someone else.
No. That's basically the definitions of those concepts. They are relative to how well off everybody else is.
Yes, I could penny pinch to buy a house for an exorbitant sum. That also contributes to increasing housing prices. Or I can keep renting and saving for retirement. The fact is tech salaries are actually modest and everyone else is getting really screwed. The idea that tech workers are villains only plays into the hands of the truly wealthy.
"cash" in your pocket is central bank money. Current president keeps the dead presidents good (in theory). In the bank it is merely a promise of money.
Cash can (arguably) mean paper money but there is often a distinction made in capital markets - physical cash is for retail banks.
An applied example of a cash position in finance is repo: You need some short term cash - a simple hack financial markets use to do this in an administrative/credit efficient way is to simply sell (say) a bond (the collateral), receive some money (your cash), then agree to buy the bond back tomorrow for slightly more than you sold it for (the interest rate).
In the US it is catching on, particularly outside of the population dense centers of cities. You see signs now charging surcharges on card payments to cover the processing fees, thus disincentivizing card payments.
Personally I do everything in my day to day life with cash. I don't want to use a card, ever, if I can avoid it.
Typically, if a business accepts cards, part of their agreement with the card-processing company is that they cannot charge a surcharge. Card transactions have to be the same price (presented to the customer) as cash transactions. (I forget how gas stations get around this.)
I do tend to see "card transactions under $X will have a Y¢ surcharge" handwritten signs in smaller businesses. I don't know if that's permitted or if MegaGloboCorp simply hasn't cared that the dive bar or taqueria isn't holding to their contract.
Car dealers now prefer financing (if you have good credit). They can make more money that way since the banks will give them a kickback for originating the loan.
We don't even need to abolish cash, imo it would be a huge improvement to cull 1 and 2 cent coins and make digital and card payments available everwhere. I'm from Germany and there are a lot pf places where you can't even pay with a regular bank card.
I understand and agree with the arguments for cash as an option.
On the other hand, I think it's completely irrelevant if nobody is using it. I'm in my 30s and literally nobody uses cash among my friends. Is this debate even relevant?
I tend to agree, a related concern that I share is with CBDC, programmable money would truly be a dystopian thing. I don’t this some tangible things should go away, cash is a firm contract and it should remain that way.
We already have a cashless society, effectively. Let's say 1% of transactions worldwide are done with cash. Is that 1% really holding back all of these bad things that pro-cash folks imagine?
trying to remove physical cash is trying to micromanage what people are allowed to use their cash for
its obviously a terrible idea, removing it would cause tons of friction that leads to an economic downturn, or people finding new, societally worse, ways of getting around it
I'm torn between the the logical argument that the loss of being to pay in cash would be a huge detriment to society, and the 1-10% discount (if you include points gymnastics to maximize value) that I get by using my card.
People who want to go 100% cashless at the current state of tech progress / society are the enemies of humanity. They are advocates of totalitarian regimes and whatever comes with them, no matter what they glaze their poison with - convenience, crypto, futurism etc.
Honestly I don't really care about the freedom argument anymore. If the government wants they can just black bag you anyway. And we all know how many time leftists have had someone "deplatformed" from money for thinking wrong. It just doesn't make a difference.
What it would make a difference with is crime. All the drug dealing, child prostitution and money laundering from those businesses would be fucked overnight. Sure they can still do it, but it's a hell of a lot harder when everything is recorded. All it takes is one break in the case and suddenly you've got every single financial record and you've wiped out 10b in criminal profit. That would hugely benefit the world.
> secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury .. “show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.”
>What it would make a difference with is crime. All the drug dealing, child prostitution and money laundering from those businesses would be fucked overnight. Sure they can still do it, but it's a hell of a lot harder when everything is recorded.
"Criminals will stop using cash immediately when we make it illegal" - it doesn't work like that. Criminals would just adopt another method of payment. Even China, the country with the most authoritarian, all-pervasive internet firewall, hasn't managed to stop people using crypto to pay for sex and drugs online. There's pretty much zero chance of the west tightly controlling the internet anywhere near as much as China any time soon, so there's basically no way it could effectively ban crypto either. Even if it did manage to completely ban crypto, however, it still could not stop criminals just resorting to traditional forms of cash, backed by gold/silver/gems/precious metals. Or do you think every country in the world is going to ban all their citizens from owning any precious metals?
