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Comment by tarboreus | Hacker News Reader

You know what I find convenient? Cash. You just take it out of your wallet and hand it over in exchange for goods. No tracking, no receipt emails, no machine learning of my behavior to figure out when my partner is pregnant or whatever, no extra apps, no facial recognition, no 2-4% charge for businesses that only doesn't apply if you're an international monopoly.

Oh, my phone is out of batteries. Guess I'll just give up and head home.

Oops, looks like a hurricane/forest fire/proletarian uprising has knocked out local infrastructure. (Luckily, this almost never happens anymore!) Man, it would be great if we had a medium of exchange that would work under these adverse conditions. Guess I'll just barter my Harry's razors and other hipster goods to get some formula for my baby!

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Cash is somewhat ok until you buy something. It's fine to carry around say £100 in a few notes, but then you buy something and you get back £5 and £10 notes and a handful of change and now it's a big jingly mess of shrapnel. I think contactless credit cards are the best right now. You don't need to hand anything over, get anything back, or enter anything, just wave the card.

I personally love $5 and $10 bills. I frequently do exact change when I have a bunch of those. Buying a BLT at the bodega? That's $5.75 with a coke. Here's $6. At the end of the day, I fire my change in a bucket and bring it to a machine once a year to get exchanged.

Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM will let me have and I never regret it.

"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer dead programmers.

If fewer people carry cash around, there's less of an incentive to mug people for their cash.

This is strictly true, but IMO a better argument against iPhones than against cash.

This works less well with other currencies

If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by 50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.

If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.

Who said anything about charity?

Ah, I think I misread the original comment to be something like "drop the coins in the tip jar". Please disregard.

OP is dumping the change at home, then converting it to bills all at once.

That works even when coins have non-trivial value.

Ignoring the coin jar/charity box confusion, I've tended to keep the bigger coins around and just spend them - a few £1-2 coins don't weigh that much, aren't taking up a great deal of room and will buy your lunch entirely. Then they're not your problem any more.

500 yen's over £3, so I'm guessing you don't get many of those in your lunch change? The top result for "how much is lunch in Japan" [1] suggests that your 500 yen coin would just about cover the next day's lunch and is lighter (barely; 7 grams versus 8.75g) than a British one pound coin [2,3].

The coin sorting machines that you might tip a coin jar into take a decent chunk of your money for the privilege of counting it (e.g. CoinStar charge 9.9% [4]).

1: https://www.withhusbandintow.com/costs-to-eat-in-japan/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_(British_coin)

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_yen_coin

4: http://www.coinstar.co.uk/FAQ

I don't know exactly how you'd test this but I'll bet the UK has the heaviest change in the world.

Most of the rest of the world seems to have lighter coins and more smaller note denominations, which is way more convenient.

Australian coinage is probably the heaviest in the world, particularly this monster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_fifty-cent_coin

I like the idea of cash but I barely need it now, I took some out last week but before that it was about six weeks since I went to an ATM. Even my daily croissant at 78p goes through via contactless, with automated checkouts I'm in and out in nigh on 60 seconds.

> No tracking, no receipt emails, no machine learning of my behavior to figure out when my partner is pregnant or whatever, no extra apps, no facial recognition, no 2-4% charge for businesses that only doesn't apply if you're an international monopoly.

Sounds awfully inconvenient. I'm constantly having to travel to the bank to get more cash, it's easy to lose, steal and destroy, the money I get in change might be counterfeit, it takes a lot more effort to track my cash purchases, and it turns out banks charge merchants a fee for handling cash too! (a local example of a fee schedule: https://www.oregonstatecu.com/business#/tab/fees)

Perhaps this all is a cost some feel is worth paying in exchange for privacy, but a cost nonetheless.

How often do you lose cash? I never do. Not sure what your workflow for losing cash would be. If I lose my wallet, the cash in it is the last thing I'm worried about. It's the plastic.

Also, you go to the bank to get cash? This may vary by geographic region, but where I live (NYC) there's I'm rarely near a place that doesn't have an ATM within a hundred feet or so.

Guess money could be counterfeit. But I've never encountered counterfeit bills, at least that I know of or that has inconvenienced me, and I haven't heard of it as a problem among the people I know who run cash-heavy businesses (mostly restaurants). Identity theft, however, is an epidemic, and has happened to literally everyone I know, except for (some) of the kids below the age of 14. Some of these cases can take years to clean up, and they often start with using plastic at a big chain, like Target or Home Depot.

Cards are nice for big purchases, like appliances or a large dinner out, or when shopping online . But cash is the thing.

> it's easy to lose, steal and destroy,

Have any of these ever happened in your adult life? If so, how often?

I like cash but it does necessitate standing in line for stores that are in dense places like cities, which I don't like.

I love cash. By far the most convenient payment method for face to face transactions.

2% back on all purchase with a Fidelity credit card though. I'll take my 98% cost of everything ever over cash any day.

You love to carry cash? So do muggers. After living in SF for over a year I would never carry cash again. Period.

Do you leave your phone at home as well?

So yoy shouldn't minimize a problem just because you can't completely nullify it?

Your phone likely has a value of $600. Your cash at any time might range between $0 and $200 (or more if you're me). Considering that losing your cash has no inconvenience or replacement overhead, I don't really mind losing it in the rare event that I'm mugged. I would mind losing my phone or laptop, which I pretty much carry all over. The way I see it, cash is pretty incidental to muggings.

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