The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it | Hacker News Reader

The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it

theguardian.com

42 pointsleejo8 comments

If only we had a decentralized distributed network for peer to peer payments that avoided banks and allowed for verified transactions of value amongst distrusting parties.

Do we have one?

Crypto-currencies.

Cryptocurrencies solve a problem that people don't really have -- namely that trust is in short supply. So even if some cryptocurrency was popular we would wind up right back we are because of the same market forces that brought us here the first time. Cash that you can send over the internet was never something people really needed or wanted.

* People won't want to actually manage their wallet and risk losing all their money and FDIC carries real tangible value so individuals won't have wallets, they'll have an account with a bank. And because nobody -- not you, not your bank wants to pay transaction fees all intra-bank transactions will be done off-chain.

* And there's never been a problem with intra-bank trust so transactions between banks will also naturally be off-chain with some trusted intermediary so all banks would have is an account with that intermediary.

* But how do people with bank accounts actually do day to day transactions? Banks could have a system where users have a local wallet that the bank xfers down and then performs a real crypto transaction with the other party and then back up to their bank -- but 3 rounds of fees just to buy a coffee? Some trendy start-up will emerge to do all these transactions off-chain for pennies.

* And then you run into the same problem with credit cards where you essentially need virtual accounts with unspecified amounts in them and if you actually try to do transactions like this on-chain you spend a lot of money in fees just to move money between the wallets of trusted parties.

So we'll wind up heading toward a cryptoless society for all the same reasons we're headed toward a cashless one now.

I accept crypto on my shed business website. I can take the crypto to my lumber yard and buy materials.

Crypto is catching on.

I don't disagree, crypto functions reasonably well as a direct replacement for cash. But for the same reasons people don't carry cash they won't want to carry crypto either. Crypto can become completely mainstream and not change anything about how banks and payment processors function.

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Moving the actual pieces of paper around is more expensive than moving bits around. This should be obvious. Sometimes you're paying an armored truck to move cash or somebody to count it. Other times you're accepting that tonight's deposit was stolen from you on the way to the bank.

I'm all for physical currency and we should vote and campaign to keep that part of our financial system but this isn't a conspiracy. Cashless will out-compete cash almost every time. The only exceptions are local businesses trying to avoid taxes.

An excellent article, especially given the analysis of the social engineering tools used against the general public.

Sadly, I'm certain it will be read like as a too academical alarmist piece and forgotten soon.

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