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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent news. I hope other municipalities and states follow. Only accepting corporate or institutional payments is racism against non-corporate persons (humans). Racism in this retail context is already illegal.

Cash must be accepted. It is the only form of payment (besides cryptocurrencies) where the individual does the payment. Other forms are merely large corporations/institutions using their financial clout to signal that they will pay for something in the future. Those corporations always have perverse incentives to both sell your purchasing history to anyone that wants it as well and to enact financial embargoes against arbitrary people/companies whenever even slight political or social pressure is applied.

Additionally, work-arounds for the law of having to accept cash for all debts should be addressed. Many retail or food service companies will only take your business initially if you present a credit card.

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Racism?

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya,

Since dang/etc have manually slid this off the frontpage and it's just us who've already posted now I'll respond to individual comments.

Yes, it is racism. There's far more difference between a corporate person and a human person than between any of the human persons. Corporate persons are of a very different race and receive a lot of preferential treatment from retail businesses.

Only natural humans have "race", and thus only discrimination or bias between natural humans can be considered racism. "Persons" (in the legal sense) do not have "race".

What?

Cash is the bane of society. We would live better without it on every single aspect imaginable. (including but not limited to health, environment, crime)

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

"Cashless" does not mean "moneyless".

Cashless means that it doesn't accept physical money, paper bills and metal coins. It only accepts credit or debit cards. Or any other kind of electronic medium.

If I give 5$ to a homeless person and he then tries to go buy a coffee at a cashless coffee shop, what do you think will happen?

After all he has money, right?

I try to use cash as much as I possibly can. It is no ones business to track what I buy, when I buy it, how often I buy it, etc. In the event of an emergency (environmental, energy, etc), how do you propose using a credit card to purchase anything?

The biggest problem I face is tellers that can no longer do simple math and have problems counting.

OK. Let's say this is true. How would financial nonpersons be serviced in a cashless society? (i.e. homeless or home insecure persons, bad credit, and other judges of financial risk on humans established by non-governmental authority)

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

> We would live better without [cash]

While I love the ease of use of electronic payments of all stripes, your assertion runs counter to my general knowledge and judgement. Can you support the assertion somehow?

In my understanding the ease and safety of use of either cash or electronic payments is pretty much ensured by the easy and safety of the other alternative. Competition FTW.

When you mention you can't imagine a single negative aspect, I presume that you are not a low income minority without a credit/debit card? Cash is more convenient for many (especially nearly the entire demographic of Hacker News), but the point of the article as you may have noticed is about how a large percentage of low income people and minorities do not have bank accounts and thus are not able to shop at these establishments. Hopefully someday states can help solve these underlying issues and then we can live in a world where payments are more convenient for all.

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