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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth is this considered a good thing? Haven't we learned anything about mass surveillance in the last five years?

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I do not worry about mass surveillance that much. With all the cameras anonymity of cache quickly disappears in any case.

What really bad is when a police or any arbitrary guy representing a state can order to freeze all the cards and bank accounts for an individual. This is already happening in Russia and is used not only against political activists but sometime against arbitrary persons through police bribes by their enemies. If a person does not have savings in cash, he or she may loose access to all his money in a moment and it takes often weeks to fight those illegal freezing orders. One can literally starve while doing that.

And when you have cash, a single robbery can destroy your life savings. Or police can come and seize your money. There was someone in the thread amazed about the trust people put in the complex stack. I'm amazed the trust people put in the ordinary paper-based process. A computer cannot be bribed and leaves a cryptograhic audit trail and does not burn but for some reason a stack of papers under my matress is more trustworthy. There is a lot of irrationality around the topic. I don't know who's right but very clearly it is to an extent about fear of unknown.

That's something to be worried about. But I'm more worried about banks having the power to issue unlimited currency which is a default in a cashless society

Well, cash hasn't exactly stopped them either. I don't know what the figures are elsewhere, but in the UK around 97% of money is created by private banks making loans, not by the central bank printing notes.

Oh please learn some economics. Bank loans are not new money. Some TBTF banks have a problem of under-capitalization and may be bailed out with new money, but banks are government's strawmen on this racket.

Bank loans are new money according to The Bank of England http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte... The reason banks get into trouble is because they cannot meet even their tiniest obligations in actual currency. In a cashless society this will not be a problem, just unlimited digital money creation.

I agree that there are risks with a cashless society (especially from a privacy perspective), but it's not incredibly hard to understand the positive effects of cash-free (as you seem to suggest).

- Vendors not needing to carry cash, significantly decreasing (or even eliminating) security-related risks (e.g. grocery stores/bus drivers getting robbed)

- Removing PoS that affect quality of service for the actual service provided (e.g. someone paying the bus fare and holding up the ride)

- Reducing the possibility for criminals to launder dirty money (the flipside of the privacy aspect).

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