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Comment by Lucadg | Hacker News Reader

True. This is exactly the problem with non cash transactions. Every single transaction, no matter how small, is recorded forever and shared with several governments and secret services. I never signed up for this. This is why we need cash and why they are fighting it.

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Another question on my mind (again, just my random thoughts, not representing others) is: How could this be used to undermine countries economies who are possibly earmarked for regime change by a company with strong ties to the US State Department affect the current geopolitical landscape...especially when some "developing nations" populations literally see Facebook as the Internet?

Same as Trump's (and his predecessors) financial blacklists. Huawei CFO is prosecuted and currently in home arrest in Canada awaiting extradition to the US for allegedly bypassing sanctions on Iran.

In simpler words: another US-domiciled lever that can be switched to the off position.

> Huawei CFO is prosecuted and currently in home arrest in Canada awaiting extradition to the US for allegedly bypassing sanctions on Iran.

Huawei's CFO is currently on "house arrest" in a $10 million dollar estate in one of Vancouver's best neighborhoods, but free to move about the city so long as she's accompanied by a minder. As contrasted with the Canadians that China has kidnapped in retaliation and remain in secret prisons 8 months later with limited consular services. [1]

She's under arrest for wire fraud because to be extradited from Canada you have to have committed what would be a crime in Canada, and violating US sanctions is not a crime in Canada. She is not awaiting extradition, the trial hasn't happened yet, and she may well not be extradited if this is in fact primarily case of US extraterritoriality. One of her best arguments, per usual, is Trump's comments on the whole situation.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-08/huawei-cf...

So, you basically agree with me.

The problem with cash is that it prohibits sensible monetary policy in certain situations (i.e. negative interest rates). So instead of cash we would need anonymous physical (and digital) tokens whose value is not fixed, but is adjusted according to the interest rates.

I guess main problem is that to a very good approximation nobody wants these. Generally, the ones understanding monetary policy don't understand the need for privacy and the ones understanding need for privacy don't understand the need for negative rates and the rest don't care.

> So instead of cash we would need anonymous physical (and digital) tokens whose value is not fixed, but is adjusted according to the interest rates.

So what you want is... cash. But cash from a separate currency. This is identical to what we had here in Brazil in the 90s during the Plano Real transition: the cash everyone had was in the Cruzeiro Real currency, but all the prices were denominate in URV (a "virtual" currency, which months later became a real currency called Real). The Cruzeiro Real was suffering from inflation at the time, but the URV was stable, so to buy something with a price of 1 URV you might pay CR$ 864,14 one week and CR$ 1004,68 the next week (source for these values: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor).

Yep, that is one way to do it to have an exchange rate between cash and account currency.

It astonishes me that you refer to Negative Interest Rates as "sensible monetary policy."

> The problem with cash is that it prohibits sensible monetary policy in certain situations

This is a feature not a bug.

The reason they are fighting it is because cash transactions are mostly transactions which will not be reported for taxes. When Greece implemented capital controls in 2015 the country's tax income skyrocketed because everyone started using debit cards.

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