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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

That's how services work though, you can't really be self sufficient unless you're a hunter gatherer. And even then you still need to be strong enough to kill the other tribes who are contesting with you for land. Imagine going to Mars and the very air you breathe is owned by your government. For me that's not an argument against going to mars, that's an argument for working harder to build a stronger, more trustworthy society.

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This is a false comparison. Physical cash, in your possession, cannot be frozen or revoked unless those entities stop accepting government fiat currency. It has nothing to do with being self-sufficient.

But it can be stolen. Much more so than money in your bank account

And that's why the ideal is a choice between cash and electronic currency.

Sweden made cash (practically) illegal so now everyone has one less choice.

At this point in time I'm at much higher risk of my electronic money being stolen than my cash, and if someone steals my cash I know about it instantly.

They can't skim my cash, can't MITM my cash transactions, they can't accept payment and then not deliver (more fraud than theft, but still) because the cash and the object being purchased are both right there.

So I think you are wrong.

I think the point is even with cash in your wallet it is already a society where you have to obtain permission from unknown people to "obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation" because all of these things are delivered to you after many rounds of market exchanges which require clearing houses, escrows, the Fed, SWIFT, etc. Society has been essentially cashless for ages.

Whats the bar for declaring foo illegal vs keeping foo from effectively keeping people from doing foo by making it impossible to pay for foo.

This would be abused in the US in very short order. How it works for the swedes should be interesting.

Then a cashless society requires permission from multiple entities- the government, the financial providers, and the entity you want to transact with.

Not at all like cash, which just requires the entity to accept it as legal tender.

Unless the entity you're transacting with is also interested in operating in a completely cash-based economy, they will need to deposit your cash with a private bank and enter into the electronic money market. They will then worry about the source of your money by profiling you in case the risk accrues to them. Stores already do this if you pay for something with a large amount of cash and stand out as a target. That's my point that society is already essentially cashless. You're only talking about the margins of exchanges on the last hop that may be conducted in cash. Within one hop of conventional transactions it's almost certainly electronic. So I'm not sure that's a real distinction.

You are talking about an edge case which just isn't true.

It is entirely possible to live your entire life, paying with only cash, in the United States. The hardest part would likely be paying rent, but even that isn't unheard up to pay with using cash.

Society is not cashless. The edge cases you are talking about rarely ever come up. If it is possible to only pay with cash, then the last hop is all that matters for you as an individual.

> Physical cash, in your possession, cannot be frozen or revoked unless those entities stop accepting government fiat currency.

Which is exactly what happened in Sweden, according to the article.

The difference is there are thousands of places to go for food or shelter. But only a few to get a credit card.

No. Self sufficiency is a continuum, not a boolean. Cash decentralizes permission for economic transactions.

I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction? The only reason I can think of would be false positive on fraud detection or system error or the such, all problems with the medium, not with centralization/permissions.

Ever dealt with an unaccountable bureaucrat?

How about to please a regulator who is also an indirect competitor, or to avoid bad tweets?

Who decides what is a legitimate transaction?

If a politically undesirable group wants to accept donations, is this legitimate?

> "what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction?"

Paypal cite the following reasons that they may freeze or suspend an account (at their sole discretion):

    - You’ve received an abnormally large amount of money in your account that is way above your average
    - Someone has filed a complaint to Paypal about your business
    - A series of chargebacks have been placed against your account
    - Your website has questionable content
    - You are in violation of Paypal’s use policy. For example if you sell drugs or anything illegal, you may get banned
    - Your account information is not up to date or your account is not fully verified
    - Someone has logged into your Paypal account from a strange location.
    - Your credit score is low or something with your background history makes you a higher risk customer
    - They have detected fraudulent activity on your account.

Some of these are reasonable. Some of them are highly questionable. Some of them are outrageously open to abuse.

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/wikileaks-blames-us-lawm... - "WikiLeaks Blames U.S. Lawmakers for Visa/MasterCard Blockade"

> WikiLeaks' founder accused two members of Congress of pressuring MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) to block payments to his group after it published thousands of confidential messages about U.S. diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

> Julian Assange charged Tuesday that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Peter King from New York influenced the moves by both companies in December 2010 to halt the payments.

> Assange, speaking to reporters from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he claimed asylum in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault, said the blockade had eliminated 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue and cost the group roughly $50 million in donations.

Of course, it could be argued that we don't have a competitive payments market. But then your proposition wouldn't reflect the real world.

You maybe just don't like them.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...

The payment processor makes pennies from your business. If doing business with you ever costs them more than pennies - if it costs them dollars, or hundreds of dollars, or thousands of dollars, or more - they're going to drop you.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...

Sorry, legitimate transactions! We reject you!

> I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction?

This happens all of the time to lots of people.

The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies.

If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.

And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.

It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.

> It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.

It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.

The problem is when the payment companys are so big and so few, that 1 or 2 companies can basically shutdown an entire business themself (by removing their ability to be paid).

The solution is to use anti monopoly laws to break them up.

I don't think that companies should be forced to do something. What I instead want is for there to be enough competition in the market, such that no matter how terrible your views, there exists at least 1 one who will work with you.

And if there isn't enough competition in a market, then that's a problem.

There doesn't need to be a rationale or incentive. It's electronics combined with software. At some point it will shut off or break down, probably at a time most inopportune.

That's not an argument against going to Mars for you?

Regimes that absolutist and authoritarian usually aren't the nicest of places to live.

> Imagine going to Mars and the very air you breathe is owned by your government

Don't worry, it'll be owned by Elon Musk.

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