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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I will come out of the woodwork to oppose it :-)

It is not really an innovation. This is basically private money that can only be used at a particular store.

At the dawn of industrial revolution large mills used to pay their workers with "scrip" -- a private type of cash that could only be used in company-owned stores. The company basically double-dipped: first profiting from the labor of the workers, then profiting from the mark-up on the goods and services "sold" to the workers.

Once you put money in Amazon cash, it goes to Amazon and nobody else. It is no longer "cash" or legal tender if you can't use it wherever you want.

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My initial reaction, formed directly after readin "Amazon Cash" was similar to yours. This doesn't seem to be the devil I thought it would be though, since it's more analogous to gift cards than private scrip, IMO. Now, if you can use "Amazon Cash" in lieu of currency by, say, transferring it to other users at will, I'm right there with you - proprietary, private money is very creepy to me.

Yeah, its not the devil. It is more or less a "refillable" gift card. It would certainly be good for handling the occasional piggy-bank windfall (although a coinstar machine is better for that).

I worry, however, about financial products like this that get aimed at people who don't have bank accounts. They're a particularly vulnerable population.

Precieicyly what this target is. Simply a goal to fuck someone.

If you know unbanked people this is just an extension of the normal practice of buying Amazon gift cards at grocery stores and then using them.

Honestly I think that's most of the reason why Ralphs sells Google Play/iTunes/Best Buy/Amazon gift cards. People buy them with cash and then use them for themselves.

1) this isn't money you earn from Amazon...so they're not creating a closed amusement park style ecosystem where you HAVE to spend the money you make with them

2) you don't have to convert ALL of your cash into Amazon credit. You can allocate a portion that is useful to find cheaper/better selection of products on Amazon. They rest you can spend wherever/whenever you want

But isn't that how all gift cards work? If I buy someone a gift card to Target, Target has that money at the time I buy the gift card not when whoever I give the card to spends it.

Is this really any different then buying an Amazon gift card other then you can choose the amount to put on it?

True, but if you're going to use this, it would be easy to put together your purchase, use the barcode to add that much money to Amazon, then complete your purchase. Yes, it would probably be simpler over the long term to get a bank account or a credit card, but this is perfectly usable if someone is already planning not to do that.

This is a misplaced sentiment. If Amazon were trying to trap people into spending money at their store and forcing people to pay exorbitant Amazon prices, then maybe this argument would make sense. But Amazon has a wide selection of products at low prices. And they'd be willing to let people extract their money and go use it elsewhere if it weren't for the pesky problems related to money laundering. There's really no reason to assume amazon is acting in bad faith or against the interests of people using this service.

I agree with you completely, and I am going to put forth a totally unfounded conspiracy theory that popped in my mind, consider it just an exercise in fiction:

What if Amazon, with the fact that they built that huge CIA data center (think AWS for the CIA, plus the other contracts, plus the WAPO purchas...) is now doing an op to determine where grey money may be going and on what...

Think of it as a data op...

the infra to determine where monied intentions are going - it has nothing to to with terrorism, but everything to do with totalitarianism.

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