With the death of cash, privacy faces a deeply uncertain future
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
Taking away cash puts me at the mercy of these systems, which is uncomfortable.
I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash, and there are never any 'pending' transactions.
It's the opposite for me. It is much more difficult for me to keep track of cash expenses while budgeting and it is easy to forget individual transactions. So much that at this point if I ever take out cash, I consider that money spent as far as my budget is concerned.
Now imagine when you are too poor to have a bank account, your credit history prevents you from getting a credit card in the first place, or you don't have a permanent address to associate with a digital payment card.
A cashless society is one that will only further exclude those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cashless-society-poor-exclusi...
It is not something to strive for.
And how will you get them to people sleeping rough?
How will you deal with their being stolen?
How will you deal with reissuing them?
And that's just the first obvious questions that spring to mind.
There's obviously problems with this, mostly revolving around identity, but that's true for all forms of banking. But getting someone a phone and an account and being able to trivially send them money is pretty safe and realistic to set up.
There is reason in general to be concerned about the lack of good, private digital payment systems, but there are still plenty of cities where a pro-cash sentiment is strong, or at least a pro-"cash should be an option" sentiment. And I suspect (but can't confirm) that rural areas might also bias towards more cash transactions as well.
The general trend away from cash is something to pay attention to, but depending on where you live, it may not be an emergency right now.
Not exactly. A single transaction might be untraceable but over repeated transactions it's possible to deanonymize people with a high degree of confidence. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o the good part starts at 10 minutes.
Full original paper here: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/arti...
I skimmed the response and the linked paper. It looks like the paper and the article was mostly talking about deficiency in the decoy selection algorithm, whereas the video I linked was talking about the wider problem of taint trees on repeated transactions. That aspect doesn't seem to be addressed in the response.
It's all control. But instead of seeing it as right vs. left, its better framed as authoritarians (historic and modern left [1], Silicon Valley, FBI) vs. people who value their freedom and privacy either because its innate to their being, or because their particular group is kept under a watchful eye (gays in the 80s, muslims 20 years ago, christians people today).
Avoid getting ensnared in the identity trap the way you just did. Once you do, you've accepted the basic premise of identity politics and, therefore, things like CRT; which is just 's/class/identity/g' for Marxism.
[1] that is all of the left's history from the Jacobins until today minus twenty or thirty years centered around the early 90s.
So I'm an identitarian for criticizing Silicon Valley for constantly engaging in that kind of discourse? Are you identitarian for assuming I am one?
I criticize Silicon Valley because they are worthy of criticism. You say they aren't?
Buying groceries.
Many if not all small businesses like hotdog vendors, flea markets etc have completely dropped cash because it's expensive and inconvenient.
Once the costs of cash management is higher than that of cards or digital transactions, there is no incentive.
It's easy to say "we need cash for privacy" but if people are doing better business without cash, it's hard to convince them.
That sounds like a restatement of 'who needs privacy if you have nothing to hide'. I use cash because I don't feel like making my purchase history available to anyone with deep pockets. If someone wants to figure out what I buy, I'd rather they just go ahead and hire someone to follow me around.
And as a general principle I don't like having all of my transactions logged and tracked. That's the same fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide, then submit yourself to complete tracking"
EDIT: here's a quote from when this was discussed in HN last time:
> A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
what? You're saying I can go to a bank, withdraw 90 one hundred dollar bills, and sell it to someone for more than $9000?
I’ve gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have no cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.
>The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that’s being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
Or, you know, because the government says that it’s worth 100$ and lets you pay 100$ in taxes with it.
This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty than to argue for keeping cash around. Last time I traveled Chilean Patagonia, I was impressed that even the most isolated communities now have 4G and the village general store has a card terminal. In Finnish Lapland, too, where there are almost no people, you almost never lose a mobile phone connection in the national parks, and the shops take cards like anywhere else in the country.
Is there a timeline for when America will get perfect, reliable connectivity in rural/isolated areas? Is it OK if we keep cash around in the meantime until that problem is solved?
Just let us know when that 4G rollout is completely done, and then we can revisit this conversation.
I cannot state how strongly I. disagree. Part of the appeal of these places is that you are completely cut off. Destroying that for something as banal as credit card payments is abhorrent to me.
I’d also much rather that the organizations that run these areas spend their money on things other than paying for and maintaining PoS systems. I’ve yet to see one that’s as reliable as a steel post that you jam cash into.
A lot of the alternatives involve unnecessary infrastructure (e.g. PayPal etc have various controls to block money laundering, which isn't the purpose of your once-a-decade garage sale) or are siloed, making it hard to quickly do business with someone who has a different brand of phone or doesn't have the right app installed.
And asynchronous transactions are hard (I used to buy a newspaper by leaving a quarter on a board and grabbing a paper...and this setup was next to a busy subway station!). And farm stands are often simply goods left out on the honor system.
It doesn't help that we've all seen other / real (depending on whether GP is being sarcastic) authoritarians making exactly that argument I guess.
Thankfully some brilliant souls pointed out you can buy things with cash. The comments about donating to political parties are especially ironic. Hacker News is great for technological information but way off base when it comes to finance and economics.
Literally backed by the government. Cash is a government-backed store of value.
What kind of hoops do you have to jump through to say "my federally standardized central currency that only the government is allowed to print is a tool of the anarchist anti-state fanatics?"
Cash tips to underpaid workers of various stripes.
An “Oh, Shit” emergency envelope in the home.
An “oh crap got a flat” $50 in my bike jersey.
Lots of reasons!
The Chinese government might be trying to build a state-backed digital currency, but as the article states it is already almost cashless. And in Europe, as far as I know, each country already has one or a few de facto standard app-based solutions for digital payments between private persons. My country has instant bank transfers between banks and one mobile payment app. And at some point, the (American) smartphone solutions are likely to allow person-to-person transfer. This is all based on existing, privatized banking infrastructure which, while obviously not completely outside government control, is certainly not a public resource like the cash-based infrastructure was.