In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
thehub.ca
thehub.ca
This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried.
Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff online to complain about various issues. I will get the ability to see all your financial transactions, listen to all your communications, track your location, arrest you when I don't like you recording me, smear you online and pressure companies to ban you from literally any service imaginable, including banking.
Both of us will be bound by the legal framework, but when I don't like it, I will have the ability declare the state of emergency and scrap all the rules. Also, I will have sovereign immunity when I break the rules. Also, many of my actions will be secret because of national security.
Oh, and I will be doing all the things described above using your money.
Sounds fair?
My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest about and see how serious you take the matter.
But after people did notice you, and did listen, and after they've asked you to please stop your civil disobedience now and continue your protest within the laws, if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc. And if you still refuse after the treats, then it's normal for the government to follow through with it after all that, and force you to now obey the civil laws.
This I feel is true of all protests, may I agree or not with the protesters.
You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. We can't have people block the biggest commercial boarder between Canada and US all year long because they're protesting. Once the message has been heard, if people didn't care, it means you don't have support, and you kind of have to accept that. You can keep protesting normally hoping to slowly build more and more support, but you can't keep civil disobedience going on until you get support, because that's starting to get closer to coercion.
> if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc.
More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?
This doesn't really makes sense to me in a liberal democracy like Canada. Every few years, the citizen get to replace the government with another if they're unhappy with the current one. The opposition are able to have a vote to cast out the current prime minister if they want. The governor general, at any point, if it senses the people are no longer favorable to the government can kick off a new election as well. On top of that, the government is using force within the established limits of the laws and Charter of Rights of the country that are already pre-agreed upon, and the force it is using is itself in order to enforce the laws of the country from being broken, which is kind of its job as a government.
> More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem
I'm not really following your point? The government is also allowed to enforce laws, and they can later be trialed. Police does this all the time, they will intervene and perform an arrest, and the trial in front of the court happens after. They are also free to enact the Emergency Act in the case of an Emergency as they did.
The funds from bank accounts are frozen, not taken. What will happen next is they will either be released, or a court case can start and decide what to do with the funds.
I meant that they didn’t have the popular support to shut down the protest (I was not talking about the general popular support to the government as a whole, but just this specific issue). In the previous post, you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.
The specific methods used to shutdown the protest matter a lot. The police are free to arrest them or impound their vehicles. Freezing the bank account is not a standard course of actions, which you seems to think are similar to arresting. Even in the case of arresting, the police can’t even hold you for more than a few days unless they can find a prosecutor to file some charges against you.
They were free to use a plethora of methods to stop the protests, the complaint a lot of people have is they didn’t use other methods, and choose something that a lot of people consider immense overreach.
Seems to be a valid assumption.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...
Exercising traditional forms of enforcement (as seen in almost every other protest in Canada in the past 20 years) would have resulted in the generation of sensationalist content that would have stoked a wildfire in the social media support for these movements. (Look at how much the network nodes of the movement pushed the single instance of violence - a horse that got spooked and trampled a protestor.) This is the reason why force was not used, and non violent/commercial methods were used instead.
The was a poll and it showed that the majority did not support the protest, by a landslide. IIRC, 72% of responses selected "Protestors have made their point, it's time they went home" (paraphrasing), a minority supported continuation.
One of the reasons the right to protest is a fundamental one is because laws are made by people, for people, in the service of the public good and well-being of the citizens.
If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.
This is almost universally true, and you cannot make the argument of 'shutting down the right to protest' on the pretext of breaking a law, because protests are ultimately motivated on laws or policies being changed.Nobody protests forever.
It's not the people's will as a whole though. It's a tiny minority of people that are protesting.
Still, making a statement doesn't require a majority.Usually if 0.5%-1% or more of the population starts protesting, the governing body responds, (or at least it should imo, having potentially more than 2-3% of the population actively involved in a political manner it's not a good sign: politicians don't want people too closely involved). This however vastly depends on the country, the culture, the people.Protests are also not accurate representations of the electorate.
The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa.
By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to actually listen to them: Trudeau's government refused to speak with the protesters, and instead went into hiding until they could figure out how to use force to get these people to leave. If Trudeau had eaten crow and published his plan for lifting mandates, they may well have dispersed. What seemed to occur instead was that the LPC (in conjunction with the NDP and the CBC) used disinformation to circle the wagons and make excuses for a dramatic escalation in force, while refusing to publish a plan for the lifting of mandates. Contrast that with the BLM protests recently, where you saw a lot of dialogue between the government and the protesters and a relatively peaceful dispersal of the protest.
Make no mistake, "account freezes" are not a normal consequence of protest, even of violent riots. The Canadian government is also talking about similar things like revoking licenses, removing insurance, killing peoples' pets, and selling peoples' trucks and keeping the excess beyond what they need to cover fines. For all of these discussions, the Trudeau government is rightly being panned as tyrannical and dictatorial.
The "win condition" of civil disobedience is usually to get some imagery of the police or the government doing something really brutal in response to your protest. Trampling a Native American elder with a horse (and then lying about nobody being hurt and then lying about someone throwing a bike) and freezing normal peoples' bank accounts are pretty solid win conditions for this particular protest. By that standard, the Canadian truckers have been heard loud and clear around the world, and they don't need to keep it up, but they did need to stay until the government responded with violence.
Citation needed.
EDIT: I don't like politifact as a source because it has a lot of bias (despite the name), but here's a citation on the shelter's (Ottawa Humane Society) kill rate: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/22/facebook-p...
Read to the bottom, where they specify that they have rated this as "false" because "The city did not threaten to kill any pets 'as punishment.'" The city merely said that they would give your pets to a shelter that kills 1/5 of the animals it takes in - a shelter that kills pets for "extreme fear" which could include separation anxiety from the pet's owner. They don't explicitly say that they are doing this to punish people because they don't say why they are doing it.
Also, make no mistake, nobody is going to outright say "I will kill your pets if you don't leave," but they are going to make threats like this that provide them with some plausible deniability to say "we didn't actually threaten to kill your pet, the shelter was just overwhelmed and couldn't take it."
EDIT:
Based on that source, the Humane Society had a kill rate of 20.6% in that year. Of those 10% were due to "due to serious behavioral issues such as aggression and/or extreme fear". So, a kill rate of 2.6% excluding health and/or owner request. That's not really a coin toss -- that's the Humane Society making a judgement call on whether a pet can be rehabilitated. I have no insight into the Humane Society's decision making here, but this number is clearly in the minority.
I don't think the government is being unreasonable here or threatening the wholesale slaughter of animals. They're asking people who have brought their pets to a protest to be responsible pet owners and find a safe place for their pets before the police move in, which is the same thing they wanted responsible parents to do with their children.
Let's assume we're talking about dogs here, unless people are bringing their really extraordinary cats to the protest. Anecdotally, in the GTA it can really hard to adopt a dog. One shelter I tried a couple of years ago didn't have a single dog. As a pet owner I would see the greater threat here that my dog would be taken from me and adopted out to a new family. In Ontario, euthanasia wouldn't be my first concern if I were to lose a dog.
None of this is something you have to accept -- and indeed people have been protesting against laws that freeze funds that go to charities that the state argues are connected to e.g. Islamic terrorism for decades now -- but I struggle severely with what I have to assume is feigned ignorance as to why freezing funds is a part of this protest and not others.
the target audience of a protest is the people in power, they build on public opinion and wield it as a show against those in power.
also this can happen in many way, it could be a parent chaining themselves in front of town hall or an orderly march.
also a blockade does not sound like civil disobedience, in the face of these restriction civil disobedience would be not following the restrictions and opening anyway. (in civil disobedience you generally break only the laws you are protesting against)
1. While having formal bounds would be great, in this case, it hasn't been shown yet that they applied force unreasonably and beyond what those bounds should be. Some people want to believe they froze assets of innocent bystanders or small local donors, but that's just conjecture right now.
2. In your example, am I also blocking the biggest commercial boarder crossing between Canada and US? If so, I'm surprised you've not yet thrown tear gas at me, put me in handcuffs and physically forced me to move. And that instead you chose to simply freeze my bank accounts until I move.
I say that, because again, while I do like what the article points out, yes freezing assets is a big deal, and yes having bounds and guards and protections from abuse is important, I'm all for that. But my impression in this case is actually the government is trying to limit the blast radius and choose the lesser of two evils in order to force the convoys to stop blocking the boarder and major roads.
Instead of tear gas and physical force, which often impact a ton of innocent protesters that are legally and peacefully protesting, they went for a more targeted approach, where by blocking bank accounts you can be more specific exactly who you target, and it is also a more civil way to force you to move.
A Canadian MP has claimed that a small-donor constituent had their bank account frozen. In any case it sounds like despite their rhetoric (calling protestors and their supporters white supremacists and lawbreakers), the government wasn't going ham and using these broad powers on all of them. Good for them. Regardless, it's not encouraging -- the powers granted were very broad, weren't needed when granted, and obviously aren't needed now even though the government won't give them up.
And I'm not sure about how targeted the response has been. Aside from the rhetoric, peaceful protestors have been met with violence. Funds donated to support them have been blocked.
The response has been somewhat restrained compared to the antics that US police get up to but I would not call it a "civil way to force you to move".
Going to need some pretty good evidence of that, sounds to me like a great lawsuit waiting to happen.
Not taking anything from it, I’m curious why it bother you so much now, when it has always been that way, in particular for a non negligeable portion of the population (minorities, poors etc.)
And what takes do you see succeeding to improve the situation compared to what these minorities tried up until now (to anchor the conversation, I don’t think “going back” is realistic, the cat is out of the bag)
(your statement isn't true when it comes to virtual + automated surveillance)
Automated surveillance is millions of eyes that track, record, and calculate a billion times faster than the human eye.
It can happen to you too. Even if you think you're a no one.
Additionally, you’re making the fair strong assumption that the state has to expend more than a nominal amount of resources to crush you, when is it becoming easier and easier to do so without significant effort.
The Emergencies Act does not allow the government to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It must also be agreed to by the provinces. It's use has a fixed duration and scope of action. It was designed to prevent executive over-reach while still allowing the government, at the federal level, to respond to unprecedented situations that require it.
Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation. Everyone arrested is getting their day in court.
I've been involved in many peaceful protests and am not afraid that the Canadian government is suddenly going to arresting people without giving them a court hearing and freezing the assets of dissidents. That would be in violation of our laws and I suspect our democracy is strong enough that anyone trying to get away with that... wouldn't be able to.
Sounds like "15 days to flatten the curve".
> Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation.
"occupation" is an interesting word choice. Others might describe it as a protest against an unwarranted violation of their rights and freedoms. The "occupation" was a response to new (rash) government policies, undertaken to make them reverse those rash policies. This is what healthy democracies do.
They can call it what they want. The courts will decide whether they were peacefully demonstrating as you suggest.
Section 2(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is what gives Canadians the right to free and peaceful assembly... within certain limits. It doesn't give the right to riot, hate speech, or blockade lawful activities; nor does it give us the right to impede the authorities from managing a demonstration.
It has only been tried a handful of times. If you push the limits or break the rules you can face arrest. But you'll get your day in court and plead your case. We'll have to wait and see what comes of these trials.
Canadians are happy to have their cities back. Most of them (90%+), and most truckers (90%+), realize we're all in this together and don't try to hold their fellow citizens hostage.
You need to recognize the sources on these are the same who've been saying that requiring someone to not infect other people when going to public places is the same as being a Nazi.
90% of people disagree. The nazis are the ones imposing their views on everyone else.
Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually…
Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defense is crazy overreach. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It was the opposite political party, the Conservative under PM Brian Mulroney, who wrote the Emergencies Act in the first place.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Legislative_hi...
I have family who live in the Ottawa neighbourhood that went through this. They had tractor trailers parked outside their house that honked their horns all day and night for days on end. They literally had to leave and live elsewhere for almost three weeks.
I think we can agree that in a democratic society like Canada, we have civil liberties that allow us to protest, but those same liberties allow us to enjoy our homes in peace, not to mention cross international borders, subject to public health and whatever other restrictions have been put in place by our elected governments.
Similarly, the FLQ had no right to kidnap or murder people, but Pierre Trudeau definitely infringed on civil liberties during the October crisis.
This is because don't support extra judicial asset seizure as a valid policing tool.
You posed your question as an either/or, but I haven't seen any pardon claim that the truckers will never be charged (not that it would Change my position)
Using a legal system to enforce laws is the line that separates legitimate governments from racketeers. I believe that it should not be crossed outside of active warzones.
Separating people from their money is an extremely powerful tool. People capitulate quickly if you threaten to starve their family and children. It should never be used simply because you don't want to go to the effort of charging someone with a crime and arresting them.
It was legislated by the Conservative party to replace the War Measures Act (created in 1914 in response to WW1), which was deemed too easy to abuse if someone wished to suppress civil liberties.
Before the Emergencies Act, there was a broader Act. It was replaced with a stricter Act. It was not used by those replacing it. In combination, these two acts have now been used four times: - WW1 - WW2 - The October Crisis (also known as the FLQ Crisis) - The current convoy protest
Its use was also considered during the early stages of COVID-19, but was unanimously opposed.
Actually it's funny since Mulroney never used it either even when it could have been justified. He was the PM during the Oka crisis [0], which was a full on armed conflict between the army and first nations nations that also lead to closed bridges & deaths. I can't imagine what we would call that nowadays if we call the truckers insurrectionists, terrorists, etc. I guess they understood the monumental consequences of enacting federal emergency measures liberally back then
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis
(It lasted 77 days, involved at least fully 100 armed militants, blocked 3-4 bridges around montreal for sometimes weeks, killed police officers, involved a literal 5km frontline between the 2 sides and yet Mulroney was very worried about involving the federal government and even more so playing with emergency measures. Even better: the government actually talked with the protestors and didn't treat them like untouchable non-citizen foreign agents. The crisis was solved with negotiations)
But that's just it, isn't it? We've stopped caring about improving the fairness and consistency of the process. We only care about the outcome of the most immediate issue today.
It's a lot easier to get people to agree on a fair process for choosing an outcome than to agree on a fair outcome. If you agree to a fair process and it results in an outcome you don't like, well, that's how it goes sometimes and maybe the next time it goes in your favor.
But people are too wound up and partisan right now. Even acknowledging that an unfavorable outcome was generated by correctly applying a process is enough to get you expelled from your tribe.
Fair enough?
What first will be an exception will soon become a rule.
I don't see a problem.
A democracy needs tools to protect itself from elements that wish to destroy it. This is one of those tools. Someone looking to overthrow democracy isn't going to not do it because they don't have this tool. We have plenty of historical examples.
Those that wish to destroy democracy don't get to whine about the tools that prevent them from destroying it. They get to be at the receiving end of these measures. The theoretical possibility of those people ever getting to use those tools for their purpose, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, hopefully never.
Canada will become the largest, longest lived empire of all time, spanning the entire Mediterranean world? That does sound like a dystopia.
In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused.
Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can't give it to them.
I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.
This isn't some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system.
But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don't take the cowardly way out and pretend that you've just flipped a database key and it's not really a big deal.
By the same token, if you tell me there's been a murder on my street I'll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I'll tell you where to shove it. That's what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why.
Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind.
No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision.
Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don't hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it's frozen?
Don't see how any government could reasonably pressure enough nodes in that way, particularly ones that are in other jurisdictions.
You are the enemy.
Govt mandates businesses carry insurance, insurance company releases list of Bitcoin wallets that their patrons are forbidden to have interacted with. Done.
Insurance against what risk? The risk of receiving money that was once owned by a criminal? If the government is going to make that illegal, then you can just list that as your concern, without introducing the extra complexity of insurance companies.
Yeah with no internet at all, Bitcoin along with all modern financial infrastructure breaks down.
In a few short years or decades it will be more convenient to simply plug yourself into the wall. What then?
"We" simply accept that the real world is too inconvenient? Too resource intensive, too difficult, too ugly?
You do you, boo, I ain't down for that.
Of course, this doesn't mean that a technology that provides convenience can't come with hidden costs, and the cashless society indeed comes with risks. That's where the interesting debate is IMO, but the fact that people value convenience is quite reasonable and not new.
Using cash is not actually inconvenient though.
I often find that people use the term "convenient" to mean "more pleasing to me" which is completely different.
It's not more convenient for me to buy milk from Amazon than it is for me to get it from my corner shop, it might be more pleasing if I didn't like seeing or talking to people. Those are two different things.
By contrast if I had to wash my clothes in a river it would take me literally hours of manual labour every week and they wouldn't be as clean.
It's a total non issue. You probably have a bank card or phone in your pocket or on your desk.
Some of us even use _note books_. Insane, I know.
Which you, at some point, had to withdraw from an ATM. And which slows down your transaction time at a checkout.
I do have a phone in my pocket. I would have my phone in my pocket anyway. It's great that it now means I don't need to manage bits of paper and metal too.
How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash.
There are bills being worked on at the federal level.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395
It is an important matter! Needs to be worked through, rights established and enforced.
They do where I live.
All of the purpose build self checkout machines at Home Depot are cashless but all the ones that can be operated by an employee do cash when in self checkout mode.
The machines fall back to credit/debit only when they need to restocked with cash or coins, or if the machine needs to be serviced. Some stores don't want to pay for the labor needed to maintain their cash features.
The last time I was in a Walmart was over a year ago, but their machines took cash.
It's lost because they’re mostly legislating that “storefront” businesses must accept cash when both having storefronts and accepting cash are things businesses are less interested in. So, what they have actually done is accelerate the death of storefronts rather than assure that cash is usable.
Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.
However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors.
The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn't work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while "digital due process" is slowly constructed.
Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street. If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (https://usa.kinokuniya.com), it's a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews. The online-offline playing field is now less tilted.
Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators.
The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end.
<there's always a bigger shark.jpg>Cash & digital can be complementary.
One post office trip per quarter: one money order per vendor, one batch of envelopes mailed.
Monthly online bills will have a negative balance to indicate the credit.
Zero data leaked to payment middlemen.
In the United States you can.
Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses. ("Currency exchanges" in Chicago, or whatever your local equivalent is.)
Also, every utility company I've had serving my last five apartments has had a public lobby where people can make cash payments. I suspect even cell phone bills can be paid with cash at a cell phone company's retail store.
So long as you are on a post-paid account you don't even need this. If you are on a post-paid plan of any sort, it's a debt. You have the legal right (via the Coinage Act) to pay that debt via cash regardless of any systems they might not have setup to do so.
It's a fun game to play sometimes to remind institutions of this fact, and usually rouses some bored corporate counsel from their slumber to first argue with you, then apologize.
Probably doesn't really help build a great business relationship, however.
Not directly, though it works with partner companies that accept cash for an extra fee, with limits on per-payment and per-day payments. [0]
> so that cash-based businesses that can't get a bank account can still pay.
It would seem to be impractical for a non-trivial business to work with the cash payments limits.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-with-cash-at-a-retail-partn...
https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash
https://www.irs.gov/payments/what-to-expect-when-you-pay-cas...
In practice that's bullshit and you know it. The .gov, be it state local or fed, has show time and time again that it's not above prosecuting someone for a "failure to X" crime of which the failure was caused by the .gov's own action.
In most countries a tax payment that is due counts as a debt so is covered by legal tender laws, which do require that people accept payment in cash. It may not be an option presented to you, but it is usually legally available to you, if someone is trying to enforce a debt such as payable tax.
Note that legal tender laws don't apply to a service or product that has not yet been provided - only debts - and also note that a business that has to enforce a debt and that you pay in cash may decline to do business with you in future.
Finally, note that not all currency is legal tender - for example Scottish bank notes are not legal tender, so you can't insist on paying your debts with them.
In fact, in Scotland, neither are English bank notes. (Technically there is legal tender in Scotland, but only Royal Mint coins, and Bank of England one pound notes, which are no longer circulated).
FYI I'm in France and here cash can only be used for taxes under 300€ [1]
Maybe if you don't pay and they start suing then some other laws allows you to reimburse the debt with cash for any amount.
With that said, I know we have some laws to allow everyone (most people?) to have a free bank accounts ("right to an account" [2]), and some other laws that prevent even the state to seize what you have on a bank account for debt reimbursement if it's lower than a certain amount (565.34€ - it's called the "unseizable amount" [3]).
I don't know if it's possible to freeze bank account as they did in Canada. I'd guess they would have to have approval from a Judge.
[1] https://www.impots.gouv.fr/particulier/les-autres-moyens-de-...
[2] https://particuliers.banque-france.fr/page-sommaire/droit-au...
[3] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1437
As long as you can pay your taxes somehow with cash, I fail to see the problem? The tax office doesn't need to accept cash directly. I don't really see the problem if they delegate handling cash to banks or other institutions as long as no one can be denied access to those.
Sure, if you're willing to schlep all the way to the nearest IRS office to you that has a human in it that will take your cash. Which might be hundreds of miles away.
There are good reasons why most people prefer not to pay most things in cash.
[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...
I presume this[0] is that story... If i understand correctly, federal law also requires cash to be accepted to repay a debt, which perhaps interesting to some, usually includes restaurants; you eat your meal, and incur a debt doing so. Perhaps with takeout they could refuse to hand over the bag/box until its paid w a credit/debit card, which is their prerogative (except apparently in SF, NYC, ...).
[0] https://www.technocracy.news/cash-is-king-san-francisco-to-b...
Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can't force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient.
So let's figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. "Everyone decides to use cash again" just isn't going to happen.
It is legal in most jurisdictions to give discounts when paying with cash. That is enough motivation to use cash for larger purchases, since it saves costs for both the merchant and the customer. The only loser is the now-redundant payment processor.
These proposals that we need to focus more on cash-ed people are mishearted & distracting from the core topic. Sure, a more cash-ready society is better able to help someone who has to rebuild their life, forced into a cash-carrying state. But it does nothing to prevent or remedy having your assets stripped from you by the whim of some megacorporation trying to improve their PR spin on a hot-topic.
People need assistance before being thrown to rock bottom by the corporation, not just after.
In my circles, I often see people withdrawing out pocket money on a regular basis for small purchases, and using cash for large peer-to-peer purchases that they're unsure of the tax implications of. Cashless is largely reserved for restaurants and grocery stores.
With government reporting regulations hitting paypal and other fake banks, I bet this pattern will become more widespread. Just let somebody have to fill out an extra form on their taxes because of excessive bill-splitting; they'll change their habits instantly.
In the case where they don't accept credit, and I can't be bothered to go make the purchase somewhere else, I'll just tell them to take the dollar bill and keep the change. Not having to deal with loose coins is worth it.
How is carrying, paying with, and managing cash in your wallet more convenient than tapping a credit card or your phone?
The inconvenience of credit cards manifests itself after making the payment: when you're filling taxes, or when whatever information derived from your payments is used against you.
You're trading immediate versus delayed inconvenience.
At least that was the argument. I won't argue that most people will never feel these second order inconveniences.
From the point of view of the consumer, I don't think I've ever done anything differently in regards to tax paperwork with regards to differences in method of payment.
Even from the merchant's point of view, I would imagine credit card payments are easier to keep track of for documenting purposes. Unless, of course, your intention is tax evasion, which I know quite a few merchants (including family) do with cash.
In the generalised case, e.g. I need to pay my friend, or a builder, or a taxi driver, or someone at a market stall - essentially any standalone human, it's a complete mess. You need an account, so you need to decide whether you're an individual or a business, then you have that account, then you need a terminal for cards or an app or bank numbers for them to use an app to transfer or...
With cash: here is $20, done.
Cashless payments impose a bureaucratic structure which simply does not exist with cash. You give me thing I have thing, job done, bish bash bosh.
Unless, as I mentioned in another reply, your intention is to hide such transactions for whatever purpose - i.e. I know quite a few merchants use cash payments to avoid paying taxes.
But that's all from the merchant's perspective. From the consumer's perspective, how does any of what you mentioned above matter? I have an account, a friend has an account. I send him money via Venmo or Paypal or whatever. The middleman might take a trivial fee for the transaction, but it's so trivial I nor the recipient are likely to care, and is outweighed by the convenience factor over using cash.
With cash, we have to meet and exchange the money. Or use snailmail. With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds even if he is physically hundreds of miles away.
If I'm paying a merchant, then I just swipe or tap my card to the reader, wait a few seconds. I get a receipt and I'm on my way. I'm old enough that I made a few online purchases by sending cashier's checks through the mail. It was not a pleasant experience.
There is no consumer, or merchant, or hiding of transactions, or taxes, or Venmo, or Paypal, or any of this stuff.
I'm standing next to you and you have an apple. I give you $1 for apple. I don't care about any of that other shit, it's like this whole invented set of problems that you've got a whole lexicon for.
Yes, if I buy something online I don't send cash in the post. That should be bloody obvious.
Believe it or not, my wife is actually a proponent of cash transactions. She has not been able to convince me of the benefits either. We've agreed to disagree. She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.
…
> She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.
I’m having trouble understanding these sentences written together in such short succession. Are you being serious?
I rarely if ever carry cash. Nearly every transaction I make is via credit card. The only time I'll usually have cash is when traveling overseas (for emergencies, in the foreign currency, not USD). I find cash terribly inconvenient and annoying to use.
Meanwhile my wife loves using cash. I don't understand it. It's not for any privacy or idealogical reason - she says she just likes the old fashioned feel of handling physical money. She doesn't understand my dislike of using cash. As I said, we've agreed to disagree.
Every now and then when we're out together we'll encounter the rare merchant that doesn't accept credit card. Then she'll spot me with her cash. Otherwise we'll typically use our joint credit card. When she is out by herself she's much more likely to use the cash she always carries.
The only real advantage to cash is avoiding government overreach. It is most definitely not convenient in any way
"Accepting" credit card payments or bank transfers is meaningful. Accepting cash is not.
Anyone can by default accept cash. There is no-one who cannot accept cash. You don't even need to have like, hands to count it with, I can put it in your pocket.
In order to "not accept" cash you have to intentionally make the choice to be an arse and decline it.
By contrast digital stuff is this whole web of "need an account, need an app, need a terminal, need this, ...". It's not automatic.
It's like the difference between walking and having a car.
But they very much don't have the money yet. The transaction may have posted (if you happened to have connectivity) but it hasn't settled. It may be blocked in all kinds of ways before they actually get the money. Their account might be suspended. The payment processor may simply decide to never pay it (paypal being infamous for this).
With cash, the moment the object and the bills change hands, the funds transfer has irrecovably settled without any external dependency being possible.
It isn't even remotely true. You might get mugged, you might lose money, you might get counterfeit money.
Cashless systems also have their own pre/post-transaction risks.
The CBDCs are inevitably going to fail for the exact same reasons the central banks want them. The more control the central banks have, the more the CDBCs become merely 21st century company scrip and not currency. The more the central banks can arbitrarily reward and penalize you for political reasons, for social reasons, for economic engineering reasons, the more their "currency" fails to be currency on the most fundamental level of being a reliable store of value. People will realize they don't want them and they are too dangerous to hold.
But ye gods will they damage the world on the way to realizing this is too much control, because the once the elites think they have this, they aren't going to give this power up. They'll do everything they can to "ban" any other attempts at having ways of storing or conveying value until the whole system breaks, and they won't care, because even a failing system that they're still in charge of will be better than a system they aren't in charge of.
In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins.
The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.
We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.
Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.
I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.
there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead.
in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)
Some countries took the opposite approach, and introduced lay-bys just before toll booths, enabling drivers to speed to their heart's content, and then have a rest before going through the next toll booth.
It doesn't matter if lots of people, even most, pay with digital transactions. As long as a substantial minority is using cash, the option will be available for those who need it.
> Very few people will ever hit this. Ever.
And this story has not been #1 on HN for five hours, nor has 500+ comments, and is not being read by journalists in multiple countries, or city-state regulators who care about equality, or engineers who build payment and surveillance systems, whose opinion can't possibly factor into the feasibility of building one of several alternative futures. Not one of those "few" people can change the future of electronic trade, of which payment is only a subset.
Nope, we have a singular cashless trading future and it's not subject to human negotiation beyond surrender. Or is it?
The fallacy of thinking that software engineers as a profession will base what work they are willing to do on any form of ethics rather than getting paid.
And finally the fallacy of thinking that because I predicted what I think will happen that I also think it should happen.
The post I replied to, to remind you, claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned. But most won't be subject to that. Most will rightly or wrongly think that only affects bad people, and given that, most won't change their behaviour. Software engineers in general will do what they're paid to, very few make any sort of principled stand, if they do someone else will be hired.
Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour in the face of a small minority having their rights or liberties infringed? Because if so I'd like some of your happy pills.
As stated in the original article posted to HN, the potential for change is not with those few who break the law, it's with the much larger group who believe in due process and social contracts. When trust is lost in a system, it affects many more people than the few humans who unexpectedly set a precedent in policy and become an exhibit in history books.
> Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour
When trust is lost in a system, it creates an opening for other systems, with different properties.
People don't choose inconvenience, but the failure of one system can motivate action beyond stable equilibria. People can then consider alternatives which may offer more convenience in some dimensions, less convenience (but other benefits) in other dimensions, and new properties which are not comparable between the two systems.
Most importantly, the loss of trust in one system creates an economic opportunity for competing systems, including investments that can change the calculus of convenience.
According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the general public is using more cash, not cashless.
Are cashless advocates in an HN bubble?
Yet. Some fintech/crypto/CBDC proposals on the table are orders of magnitude more intrusive than anything in the history of money. Let's see how current events impact public perception. How many people have seen this clip from the IMF meeting in Oct 2020, where Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
On a topic of interest to children everywhere, a June 2021 comment, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-...
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by an AI to link you to your government-run wallet.
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-fa...
I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie.
The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.
Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.
If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.
I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...)
I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.
I use to think the same but apparently the anti corruption tech is getting every bit as draconian as everything else. Governments will eventually have to go full retard and be openly corrupt or they have to deal with oddities retroactively.
For example, many would love to award contracts directly without holding a proper bidding process but it gets increasingly unlikely to get away with it.
It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.
Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.
All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this.
Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.
I like your election formula. My ideas was to allow people to change their vote whenever they like. Crappy decisions would have to be paid for in votes immediately. Ideally after one truly bad move you are out the next day and the bad move is immediately reverted.
I quite like your proposal for elections too, although its implementation might be difficult when it comes to paper-based electoral systems! It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on the Overton Window, I suspect it would lead to policies becoming more incrementalist and less radical across the board. I would be concerned about it giving more de facto power to the press though.
Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.
It isn't just confirmation bias. We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. It doesn't get much clearer than that. We also had at least two decades where we only ever saw increased surveillance.
And it isn't necessarily cynicism in my opinion, it is realism. It is an fearful older generation that feels it loses control. Sure, government could change course, but I don't see it. To believe otherwise is almost naive at this point. We can be really glad the people that worked on the technology for a global network anticipated such behavior, so I might even want to encourage more cynicism at that point because it provides real safety instead of the fake one that is promised by government.
But it doesn't even matter, because your vote does not count on such topics. Experts in the field do not count on such topics. The older generation is set in their way and we will have to endure it for quite a few years at laest.
Or longer, if life extension research is successful..
One of the big motivators behind the general data protection act is how personal data was historically used for genocide.
We still have plenty of politicians that want to target people categorically and make them second class citizens.
There are a lot of assumptions about the role of government in society in your comment.
There's a heck of a lot of people out there who think society can be improved by refining, restricting or reducing government's role in specific areas or generally.
Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!
It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills.
>We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.
if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments and banks cannot just turn off access to your account, but that is not an answer, you need to explain all of the processes that will need to support this possibility, because obviously banks and governments do need to turn off access to accounts at times.
But if we allow cash as a fallback, then we already have a system that works. All the various rules and processes about cash have been worked out long ago, over generations!
replacing the security that cash provides for people not to starve or freeze because of any number of possible problems would be an incredibly expensive and error prone process.
This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
Like others, I incorrectly assumed US was using less cash.
Cash is winning in the world reserve currency, and the cashless doth protest..
Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined.
Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be!
The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!
N=1.
No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode.
And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.
It’s clearly to have difficult to trace accounting.
It’s a blip, but still, that exists and I don’t see that changing any time soon for those particular places.
That doesn't matter. If laws mandate that services must take cash then a cashless society is impossible, so people who choose not to go cashless can't be forced to give up cash. Hence the war on cash has been won, and cashless lost.
It'll be interesting to see how this battle gets affected by the trucker protests. Historically such bills seem to be largely supported from a social justice point of view[1] (ie. "we need to force businesses to accept cash because cash-only shops are exclusionary to marginalized people"). With the canadian government freezing the bank accounts of freedom convoy protesters, this push could be also associated with the (alt-)right as well. This could translate to a bipartisan push to get accepting cash enshrined into law, or a situation where cash/crypto becomes a right wing dogwhistle, eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/bitcoi...
[1] based on a unscientific analysis of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/nyregion/nyc-cashless-ban...
The relevant sections were:
>because of financial circumstances, unwilling to for philosophical reasons or vulnerable to its darker aspects.
>“We are reining in the excesses of the digital economy.”
>But critics of cashless businesses say they discriminate against people who lack bank accounts and credit cards, while also raising the specter of hackers stealing personal data tied to digital transactions.
>Bronx households, the agency said, were around twice as likely not to have a bank account.
>“I worry about the real-world discriminatory effect that cashless business can have on New Yorkers, especially in communities of color,” Mr. Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said.
>“I think it’s incredibly discriminatory not to accept cash because some people can’t get credit,”
>“It is exclusionary,” she said, “because people without means are less likely to have a credit card.”
2 mentions of privacy/security, 6 mentions of social justice
In SF, despite the laws, many businesses openly had a no-cash policy once the pandemic started. "Sorry, Credit Cards Only. Touching money might transmit Covid" is too easy of an argument, even though it's essentially a non-concern now. And I haven't seen businesses go back to accepting cash as lockdowns have ended. Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually try to enforce this law.
> Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually start trying to enforce this law or not.
Great opportunity for a city journalist to assemble a news story. Collect footage to document their experiences across a diverse range of SF stores which do and don't accept cash.
If "peer" stores accept cash, have good traffic and happy customers, then cashless competitors may reconsider their stance.
Credit card processors charge a processing fee per transaction, but the overhead of physically managing cash and so on isn't free. I expect many stores will decide to stay cashless for that reason, no matter what their peers decide. Being cash-friendly or cash-only is not free, even if people do tend to think of it that way.
As for SF's law, I think it's worth bearing in mind that it was originally written as a shot at the Amazon Go stores.
You foisted a potential risk onto someone without power. Don't do that.
There are companies which empower workers to make decisions.
Any place big enough to afford having retail employees that I've been to in SF was always still taking cash.
If money is speech, does it mean cash is protected by the 1A?
Unfortunately you are probably right. The history of computing clearly shows that convenience beats absolutely everything including privacy, security, and autonomy. The most convenient option almost always wins regardless of any other factors.
That's the nature of rights and it's important to consider rights in this fashion because it shapes our ideas about what is acceptable in terms of obstruction and denial
That's a definition you accept, which is not a useful definition to me.
There are rights that are not inherent and sometimes the legal and moral mix. eg I don't have the right to take an organ from a human who has not yet suffered systemic death, unless they have gone through a process that includes giving consent to that process that may allow the organ to end up under my purview AND I accept it.
There are rights which are fundamental. Saying "definition", as if it is a flexible description does not satisfy the reality. These rights are defined by the fact that they are inherent.
Your example is a perfectly described granted right. You have been granted the right to something which is not yours and you have no other right to take.
The distinction is important. There is no moral hazard nor wrong committed in preventing someone from harvesting organs without permission. There is a wrong perpetrated when someone has been restricted in their speech or movement.
The usefulness, as you say, lies in the treatment of these things as distinctly different in nature
Another counter point is that cash is arguably easier and more convenient in some aspects for some people.
But behave if you want to actually legally drive any of them.
Maybe you could possibly argue this way if upon freezing their accounts they called them up and said "Hey, your account is closed, come pick up your cash", but I'm pretty sure that is not the case here, and it is rather more like a civil-asset-forfeiture situation, where they'll likely need to go to court to regain access.
Now, all that being said, this is Canada, so I don't honest know whether there is an equivalent to the 5th amendment in their charter of rights, or whether there is some legal weasel word (e.g. "reasonable") that somehow provides a loophole for all this.
As far as cashless society winning, I dunno, I'm definitely worried about that outcome, but it's straight up illegal in my state to not to accept cash in a retail establishment and a good number of bars I go to don't accept cards at all. I use cash all the time and I find it way more convenient than a credit or debit card. My wallet doesn't randomly prevent me from opening it at a grocery store I have been to a thousand times and stop me from paying for groceries.
I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me.
Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper.
There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cash and so you don't have cash. Try harder.
I'm not going to argue against cash existing, but "swipe the machine" works 98 times out of 100. For the other 2 times, yeah carry some cash on you. I think it's a very good system of last resort, but especially in places with contactless payments cash is less practical
I guess my note book is less "convenient" than notepad.exe. More moving parts.
We're just not on the same page here, sorry, I don't get it at all. It's like, are we counting the waves of the hands or what? I'm literally here now and I've just pressed about 300 buttons to write this message, are movements rationed?
"That'll be $15.77"
Option 1: I look in my wallet and find a ten and a five, put my hand in my pocket and grab a few coins, hand those over. The cashier takes the cash, taps a number into the till, finds the right change and hands it back. Is it arduous, hard labour and the end of the world? No of course not, but it is what it is.
Option 2: I look at my phone to unlock it and wave it over the thingy. Job done. I don't even have to remember to withdraw cash from the bank before I go.
It's easier and quicker, for you and for the cashier. The shop knows it too, particularly supermarkets - they encourage people to use faster payment methods so they can shave even a few seconds off a transaction and push more transactions through at peak times.
All this compared to touching the card/phone/watch to the terminal, and perhaps putting in your pin/fingerprint/face ID.
Again, not saying cash is hard, we've all used it and you get used to it. But it's objectively harder than contactless by any definition.
Of course, cash has other clear advantages in terms of privacy, censorship resistance etc.
One of my least favorite experiences was telling my banks that I was going to travel so that they don't freeze my accounts for "suspicious activity" when I start spending money at my destination, and then having them freeze my accounts anyway when I got there after trying to pay for dinner. Caused a problem with the hotel and the place I rented a car from, too.
That is long overdue.
However, until we actually do move past this "wild west" digital time, rejecting it is reasonable and prudent behavior.
Also freezing of your funds can benefit you -- if the bank notices suspicious withdrawals they will freeze your account to prevent you from being cleaned out.
It's never okay to take someone's money/property without any court decision (and that should include civil forfeiture). But freezing shouldn't necessarily be lumped into that because it has valid usages. There just needs to be proper regulations and consequences.
So yes have some cash but behind the scenes data sharing does go on, it could be a simple conversation down the pub or a contract to process some data or provide a service.
Signwritten vans & trucks give the game away to neighbours as to whats going on.
Get some crypto where you can draw cash out of a machine, there are plenty of bitcoin machines and online crypto currency exchanges to move money around the world. When the Greek govt debt crisis kicked off, bitcoins spiked as people moved their money out of Greece, some events like this will also trigger a spike in crypto because its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.
The less reliant you become on any one entity the less any one entity can mess you up especially when you dont agree with their politics, methods or employer.
You can also get e-residency in many countries like estonia, lithuania, etc and avail their government services digitally. You will be able to open a bank account and sign stuff.
There are many options available.
People think that e-residency is just a breeze to do, but people who try, discover that its much harder than thought. Still easier than normal residency, thats true.
They are all subject to the same regs, and most credit unions aren't any better than large banks.
I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and make the effort to anonymise your wallet is now.
We must fix and strengthen our governments - there's no way around that.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know what to do in order to use Monero.
As for exchanging for Monero, there's starting to be the option of atomic swaps with Bitcoin. Alternatively, you could also try going through one of the various non-KYC automated swapping services.
Also always keep £500 rolled up in £20 notes somewhere. And make sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
This is good advice, always have some cash around; in these uncertain times, I'd even argue to increase the amount. Make sure to have a record somewhere that you have it (a photo on your phone with e.g. ID and a dated newspaper? I dunno) so that IF you get your home broken into, you can prove it to your insurance.
Of course, there's plenty of places to hide a stack of bills, or distribute it across multiple spots.
If you're concerned about the downfall of the economy, you can get 'slabs' of valuable metals as well, that can be broken off into smaller denominations. The downside of going for those (at least in NL) is that you can't really use them to bet on the price of gold going up or down, because as a consumer you have to pay VAT for them (21%).
Make sure you have a passport, because myself and someone else spent the best part of an hour or two trying to past Google's I'm not a robot when trying to get a passport. The fact Govt uses Googles I'm not a Robot should also show you there is more to Google than meets the eye.
I can see why the rich have dual citizenship and multiple passports, with the richest having diplomatic passports, making them untouchable anywhere in the world!
It might seem like a lot of effort, but when you realise who easy it is to set people up, buy off judges, police, medical experts, etc, you'll realise blackmail can come from everyone and anyone including your family, because there are some messed up beliefs out there.
> its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.
Assuming you completely disregard the computation costs, yes.
Edit: I've always found his ability to track me down in the middle of some woods when I was out walking to be a rather curious use of technology considering he was retired and wouldnt have access to mobile phone triangulation facilities or the gps facilities on my phone. However he outed himself when he went back to get some answers for me!
People get setup without even knowing it but the setup might not occur until years or decades later.
And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.
I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.
Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.
Granted, if you are fluent in local language you can get a mobile number and bank account in less than an hour if you go first thing in the morning to beat the lines, but for tourists who do not speak Chinese it is basically damn near impossible to navigate setting all that up.
That said, international tourism isn't a big revenue generator, they care FAR more about the domestic tourism market, which is many times bigger. Foreign tourists are largely an afterthought.
Even now, domestic tourists can just tap their national ID card to board trains but tourists usually have to stand in line to buy paper tickets, or even if you get your bank account and all set up to buy tickets online, you'll still need to stand in line to print out the ticket because the electronic readers at train boarding gates don't support reading passports or foreign IDs of any sort.
Goes beyond that. The visa process is the most intense of any major country (if you have a high ranking passport). WeChat (the only way to communicate) requires you to be invited by someone else already in country. Street signs aren't in English, neither are any public transport aids. You can't communicate, can pay for things, can't find your way around (once you leave the cities no one speaks English). It was incredibly hard to travel there.
To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.
There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
Does anyone have that as a realistic expectation?
> There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
Except English has a relatively small "native" footprint, not that many speak it as their mother tongue. There are many more secondary speakers of English than primary in the world. If the popularity of English was the result of colonialism, none of the above would apply.
> If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
Are you implying that travelers to China (say with a Latin language as a base) should realistically try and learn basic Chinese for a weeks holiday? Do you have any idea how long that would take?
We need but we can't have. Governments and lobby groups are slowly eroding the rights and freedoms.
And even if we theoretically have those rights, who is to enforce them?
you mean those that are taken away by governments at the blink of an eye?
Whatever your laws will say, the politician will find an emergency to justify bypassing it. We all saw what happened with COVID. The only viable choice is not to have such powerful governments in the first place.
Contrary to the parent poster, I really think we do need the anarcho-libertarian dream - and it doesn't mean we should't have private justice or private protection: it just means this power shouldn't be wielded centrally (eg. by having private competing companies).
I hate these solutions to all of the various problems. These governments and corporations don't care about any of these laws, make up new laws whenever they want, ignore laws whenever they want. You can't just undo millions of people using a system of physical money, but you can undo laws instantly, or not even follow them. All of the solutions to these types of modern societal problems have to be solved in a way that isn't just a few words in a piece of paper, because the people in charge can never be trusted.
Tell that to Justin Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act in Canada and where he immediately started freezing bank accounts of peacefully protesting Cabadians under the falsely built narrative that they are "terrorists" or "funding terrorists" - all without court order.
And those can't ever be breached, right?
We can't be trusted to honour written laws and contracts. We've shown that time and time again. The best way is to remove the possibility or at least the temptation to do it by making it too hard to violate. Physical cash has that property, as does a trustless digital cash based on cryptocurrency (I'm not sure what the best one is in this respect).
This also directly solves the issue of op. Cryptocurrencies are a stop gap solution to this, but known transaction histories and inherently poor fraud prevention make them poor digital cash replacements. Today Ecuador is shilling bitcoin, but imagine if they instead sold tier 2 citizenships, no taxes no welfare type, with new and independent identities. Pay 5000$ and get a new identity and passport, along with an account in one of our many banks, or which can be used to set up an account in an international bank. Sure you wont get to share credit scores with your main identity... Various international laws mean it wont be called exactly this, perhaps its a fee for the creation of a minimum accounting requirement corporation with hidden controller instead (and trying to prevent these is already ongoing but it does not work), but it does not matter in practice. As long as it satisfies the conditions of being able to make transactions easily, has a dispute mechanism with centralized authority with the self serving interest to remain independent, etc.
I'd wager that the majority of identity thefts arent performed in order to steal money from that identity or ever even cause any damage to the original identity. They are performed in order to get around travel and work restrictions. Lets say you are from ukraine or belarus, now getting a work visa equivalent to germany or france is kindof a pain in the ass, in particular doing so quickly, but buying a stolen passport from e.g. rumania isnt hard, and all you are doing is setting up a single french debit account in that name and working under that identity. Odds are that kind of thing gets discovered 30 years latter when the original identity realizes they are getting a small pension from some job in france they never had. But why would they care.
Massively expanded surveillance states could prevent this, but while that will be the case in china, places like the usa are just to discoordinated, and the eu is actively working against it to the point both google and facebook are no longer asking. How can we make our ads better, but rather how can we keep ad quality with much less information per user.
The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.
Implementing Schnorr signatures was a great way to get closer to fungibility improvements, as it paves the path for signature batching, which can make CoinJoin cheaper than a single transaction, and will change the incentives towards making Bitcoin fungible by default for every user.
Monero is fungible.
I agree with your broader point, which is why I prefer monero.
Source?
Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom.
FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.
Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience.
The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.
They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis.
It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.
It’s harder to steal properly secured non-custodial cryptocurrency/asset wallets.
e.x. multisig or Shamir’s Secret Sharing, brainwallets or passphrase encrypted wallets, etc
Socratically, consider what would have happened if Trudeau would have had to send in the army to violently remove property from all of these people.
I'll submit that a different, far more reasonable solution would have been arrived at.
Businesses being forced to accept all the risk and inconvenience of accepting cash to protect people from having their assets is somewhere between a security theater and a straight up pipe dream.
Also, there are a million other regulations that businesses have to deal with from license and insurance to the number of fire extinguishers. Asking businesses to accept cash is not a life-or-death decision from a business cost point of view. If anything, it means more potential customers and better PR.
Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting.
The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics.
One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance.
Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abuses and risks other payment forms bring to the table.
I do not connect payments to my phone for example. Everyone I know who did has a story to tell about how doing that cost them.
I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the personnel and infrastructure to support all or most of their customers paying in person, in cash, the costs of the things I'm actually paying them for would go way up.
Sure, if you're going out for coffee and you'd rather pay with cash, it's a hassle if the coffee shop doesn't accept it. But that just means you go and find another coffee shop that does. That's a very different issue than the issue of cutting off people's access to non-cash methods of payment, which is what the article under discussion is talking about.
Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.
Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts.
And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.
The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication and I frankly tire of that discussion. You're talking about moving small physical things, it's a solved problem, everything around you right now is a small physical thing.
edit: posters are responding about the businesses that exist in their area. by this token it's "inconvenient" for me to use cash because the japanese place down the road doesn't take it. well no, they're just being dicks, there's no _fundamental_ inconvenience.
> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication.
That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.
>That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.
IMHO, both the original statement and the respond are opinions. It may well be the case that cash is universally not “hilariously inconvenient.” Without some empirical evidence, it is just a shouting match.
In my opinion, cash is actually very convenient to use and encourages reflections on spending habits.
He's saying that using cash is inconvenient because no-one uses cash where he is.
I'm saying that it's not because at its' core it's fundamentally just handing over a bit of paper.
It's not a statement about how many people accept cash where I am. I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.
There also seems to be this bonkers strawman thing going on whereby loads of people seem to think I'm saying "don't ever make a non-cash transaction" which is bloody stupid. It's like, _a priori obvious_ that it's stupid. I hate this aspect of online discourse - if the thing you think I'm saying logically makes no sense, then I probably am not actually saying that thing.
No, I'm not. I'm saying using cash is inconvenient for me for things like paying my monthly bills because it would require me to physically go to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them in person. Whereas with a credit card I can pay all my monthly bills in a few minutes from my desk at home. Even if my utility company, for example, would accept cash in payment (as they probably would since most companies offering basic services like that are required by law to accept cash), I wouldn't do it because of the huge increase it would be in time and effort every month. I have better things to do with my time than schlep around all over the place to pay bills in person.
> I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.
You're shifting your ground. Before you were saying that using cash wasn't inconvenient. Now you're saying it is for some things, like paying your mortgage. Which is exactly my point.
We could solve this problem with an a service where you'd be able to pool all the money you intend to spend on bills, and then the service would handle getting the cash to each individual company. :)
That money could even accrue 0.001% monthly interest, while it's waiting to get spent on bills.
If I don't have coffee in the cupboard is it inconvenient to drink coffee or is it just that I don't have coffee in the cupboard?
If you're arguing that it's inconvenient, then okay, that's your definition of the word.
I'm really not interested in arguing about definitions of words and neither should you be.
Project much?
No, it's handing over bits of paper at the particular physical location of the person or entity you are paying. For some transactions, like paying for your food at a restaurant, that's no problem because you're there anyway. For other transactions, like paying monthly bills, it is a problem.
Literally, if you were standing next to me, you can give me 10 quid and I can send someone else that ten quid. You have paid them ten quid using cash, reasonably anonymously in a way that cannot be easily blocked or censored as long as cash exists.
This becomes far, far less convenient or feasible if we only have barter and now you need to find someone that accepts some arbitrary valuable object of a value that isn't exactly the amount you want to send.
No-one is arguing that electronic transactions are not useful, this is a strawman. It makes no logical sense, so perhaps you should consider that I'm not making that argument.
I was just describing the fact that it's not some sort of crazy idea to pay bills using cash. If HN weren't full of 21 year olds we wouldn't even be having this chat, it's like these guys forgot that not even that long ago we just paid each other with envelopes at the end of the week/month.
Like, they're literally saying that you can't do X, where X is something that most of us did less than 50 years ago, and no we didn't spend half of our days running around.
And as soon as I use a bank for this, I am no longer protected against law enforcement preventing me from paying my bills and supporting myself, which was supposed to be the whole point of using cash in the first place. Law enforcement can block banks from making digital transactions on my behalf just as easily as they can freeze my accounts at those same banks.
I feel like people want this centralized vision of money. Just give someone cash to do a transfer.
Why so bureaucracy? What's the point?
I've never heard of any bank offering that service.
> no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.
Agreed. But it should also be recognized that there are many people who have good reasons to use payment methods other than cash in many situations.
> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication
No one is claiming that cash is always inconvenient. Just that for many people in many situations, it is.
> You're talking about moving small physical things
If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper. And if I pay my bills electronically while I'm sitting at my desk at home, I don't have to move anything at all.
I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.
This has nothing to do with sitting at my desk. Using cash would mean spending my Saturday at one of the least interesting location I can think of.
I never said any of those things. And the idea that schlepping around all over the place to pay monthly bills in person is the best way to get physical exercise is laughable.
> physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite
IMO your posts read a lot more like GPT-3 than mine.
Coming soon for this market, "brain in a jar". Upload your consciousness into an Altered Carbon simulation, Source Code time loop or immortal-gaming-AI Daemon.
After gig economy workers unionize and raise delivery fees, hopefully they won't hire a mercenary army to enforce Code of Customer Conduct.
I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.
No need to interact with any of those pesky humans.
Either the other user was uninformed or my sarcasm detector is broken today.
No, I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.
When there's a new bill for the services you added, it's displayed on a list with checkboxes right beside each one of them. Check the ones you want to pay, click Pay, and you're done. It's linked directly to your bank account. The website was created by a bank consortium.
Is a service like that what you're talking about?
> I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.
Exactly.
I have online banking on my phone, if you wanna give me cash to send it to someone, no problem, why not.
I wasn't talking about cash deposits. I was talking about paying bills. I can't go to my bank and give them the account numbers of all my bills and have the bank pay them for me. If I wanted to pay each bill in cash, I would have to schlep to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them.
For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.
The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.
Telephone banking used this before internet banking.
Banks do offer bill pay services, you just set it up and they mail a check every month. To your point, I don't think there's a way to get your bank to send the recipient cash every month, but I feel like that's a moot point since your cash is already in the banking system at that point.
So don't use it. Non issue right?
Otherwise, dealing with the public comes with some costs. The benefit is being able to do business and turn a profit.
Picking and choosing is an abuse of the public.
And you lose nothing by having more options, including cash. Nobody said you need to pay only with cash.
The shop refusing cash is not accepting legal tender for all debts public and private.
I raised that issue and my local shop does now take cash.
You sure about that? Currently Chicago's mayor is trying to bring it back.
They legally cannot, at least not in the USA, and I doubt in most countries. Thanks to the legal tender laws, businesses cannot legally refuse the legal tender, especially in its cash form. Once a deal is made and cash is offered, service must be rendered or it is considered stolen. A fun way to exploit this (before coin machines) was to go to tow truck lots, offer pennies, and then report grand theft auto to the local sheriff when they refused.
Debt
If they pay prior, not debt.
And yeah, there are times I would not choose your establishment and recommend others avoid it as well.
Being able to use cash is a basic thing I value highly. I realize we disagree, and we get to do that too.
No worries, but just know while you do you, I'm doing me.
Wish it were different.
I do this and all my friends have done this, and I haven’t heard any costing stories. I guess you could be in some kind of high risk group or area for digital theft (Russia?), but I’m curious what specific things have happened to all your friends.
This 2015 post suggests that in 2014, civil forfeiture exceeded burglary.
> Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually... Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, .... According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_...
I'd love to see evidence that the tide is turning, hopefully you have some.
In all seriousness, I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. Obviously there's a whole lot of baggage with the current cryptocurrencies out there today, but there's no reason we have to resort to carrying around pieces of paper or voting for the right people to ensure our assets and livelihood are outside of the reach of the state (at least without going through the proper legal channels).
If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.
People who have bought through sites like these have often found amazon refuses to honour warranties etc on the purchased goods, and when they've dug a little deeper it's been because the real cardholder or account holder has flagged the transaction as fraudulent.
Turns out that governments do not like anonymous cryptocurrency at all.
The reason why surveillance-state-centered interests cannot ban cash is that the public wouldn't stand for it. It's too ingrained in the culture and economy. The same needs to happen with private cryptocurrencies. We need MetaMask to adopt a confidential transaction standard the same way the major websites adopted HTTPS over a decade ago. We still have time as the financial mass-surveillance laws in place were designed for trusted third party financial intermediaries, and not peer-to-peer finance.
If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better.
Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening.
It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.
What a foolish strawman. As if people were to carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.
Not anyone with any substantial wealth, ofc. But I thought it was worth saying out loud.
Nevada Cops Use Civil Forfeiture To Steal a Veteran’s Life Savings.
There are hundreds of news stories like this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-a...
Police departments often get to keep a large share of money taken during civil forfeiture. You bet this creates moral pressure to bring in more cash.
How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!
Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that.
In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end.
I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.
There are a lot of people who are invested via their job, their business or their literal investments, into cashless payments. Big public companies like Apple and Google have made billion dollar investments in cashless payments, and a lot of people hold their stock and/or work for them.
If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?
Also... drug dealers are cashless, they are using Monero! :D Ha!
"Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-...
Mirror: https://archive.fo/T4tgR
Money is fungible, and if you fund some <good cause> with <particular tax/fee/whatever>, all that means is that funding that was previously earmarked for <good cause> would get spent on <some less good cause>.
The solution to highway robbery and grift is not earmarking revenue, the solution is hanging the robbers and grifters off the mile posts.
In US but not in other developed countries! Do not generalize.
Agreed.
Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs.
Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal for a retail business to refuse cash.
Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash. But they lost thousands because a fat guy isn't going to buy cookies there in the future.
I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway.
So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse.
It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.
You also don't need to use an attempt at humor about fat people to add authority to your argument.
Try not to invent imaginary offenses on behalf of strangers.
They go cashless because it eliminates the threat of robbery. Them proudly having signs everywhere saying they were cashless is to announce to the would be theif there is no cash payday here..
Most businesses that do that have a history of robbery.
I'm not sure where you are but in the US the banks will charge a few percent + 10c, its adds up to a lot of money. Plus you dont need to pay people to count/store cash, or get robbed which adds big savings.
Through mistakes and malice money will disappear.
On top of that you have to spend a not insignificant amount of manager time counting and running money to and from the bank. If you deal with large amounts of cash then you get to file CTRs frequently.
In addition to all that you have to deal with the physical infrastructure. Cash drawers, safes, money bags, etc…
Having worked in both retail and in banks I can promise that cash is a major pain point.
Then you should fight the good fight of making cash great again! :P
We can't. Too many transactions are conducted remotely now, and you can't send cash over a phone line or over the Internet. And having those transactions remote is not just a minor convenience; in many cases the transactions would not happen at all if they had to happen in person, and a lot of wealth creation would not take place.
The simple answer is, as the article says, to view freezing people's bank accounts and credit cards as a punishment at least as serious as imprisonment, and to view doing it without first having a trial as at least as serious as imprisoning people indefinitely without trial. Right now most people do not view it that way, and governments reach for freezing assets as a tool of first resort because they do not view it as having serious political consequences. That is what needs to change.
I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering.
The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.
It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.
This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.
If you want to argue for a world where said attack vector isn't possible, then you're implicitly arguing for a world where people literally stash money under their mattress as a standard model of security, but that implies constructs like mortgages can't exist. Point being, how money is represented has a big impact on how society is able to function.
I mean, if that's the only scenario you care about, you can just carry more cash in your wallet.
But when you said "a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button", that sounded like you were worried about more than just not having enough money for groceries for the week.
One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now.
The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same.
Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan.
Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%.
The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around.
How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.
I'm 39; so maybe too young to have experienced that but how does it even practically work? Did your landlord pop round once a month? For utility bills, did you go to the bank and ask them to transfer cash to a utility company; or maybe at a post office? Or did the utility company send someone around to collect cash payments?
Bills - Pay in cash at the Post Office
In Australia I still see people in Post Offices waiting to pay their bills. Some simply haven't got out of the habbit yet..
I have a bank account. You give me £100 and tell me to send £100 to 00273 00338435. Done.
As other posters have said, in many countries this is a Service(tm) but generally, unless you've gimped payments anyone can just do this.
All fiat means is that it is unbacked by physical things, such as gold or silver.
Fight Club is satire.
so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending.
Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.
Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them?
I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money?
Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.
But it is important that these fungible cryptocurrencies are as cash-like as possible. So, no global ledger.
Someone was arguing that we should reject a cashless society, and I was making an argument that it is impossible to do at this point.
The only solution is to have a digital currency as close to cash as possible.
Ethereum (on its own) does not meet this requirement. It is perfectly fungible, but still has a global ledger that can be used to track transactions. It is important that people move to standard L2s that don’t have a record of every transaction.
Bitcoin is actually not fungible in the first place. The Lightning network does provide transaction privacy, though.
By “no global ledger” I should have clarified: there might be a need for a global ledger, but it should be missing all consumer transactions.
Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons.
People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.
Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue.
I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet.
I also agree it is not a binary thing.
Cashless is great as a convenience option, or when there are time sensitive factors.
Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.
Cashless is going to happen. The convenience gain is too large for it not to. Cryptocurrency is the only way to preserve any semblance of genuine sovereignty in a cashless world. It is a technological necessity.
And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not. Governments might even ban cash one day.
This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.
Dont worry, soon everything from your toaster to your car will be internet connected and will be disabled on command
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans...
Despite this, the government has been able to do this.
You really wouldn't says that if you've been locked, it's one of the worst thing in the world, even more so when it's unfair -- this is a progress.
Oh How the tide have turned.
You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash.
Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
But you can't as long as the cashless society is forced upon you. At most you can try to take refuge on currencies which aren't controlled by governments like crypto. But since crypto is very volatile, it isn't a practical thing to do. You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises.
Too bad nobody invented a stable crypto currency meant to only facilitate trade as opposed to speculation.
That’s exactly what gigolo chains were designed for. Police would confiscate your cash, but not your jewelry, so carrying around jewelry allowed you to post bail fairly easily (also why bail bondsmen deal in lots of jewelry). The use of gold jewelry as backup money is also common in India where people are less confident in the local currency.
Very much this. It is disappointing and scary to see tech people, of all groups, who like this idea.
Cash is a perfect currency. It is strictly peer to peer, fully fungible, can't be blocked or censored by any party, anonymous, has no dependency on anything (still works when the electricity and internet are down).
In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.
This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment.
Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.
We got at such stage in history which is impossible even to have an honest debate about freedom without having legal problems and risking our careers to just end. Let's hope internet still a safe place for this for a while.
no
> I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.
your "inconvenience" is the result of modern slavery
you get to not have to work hard because some other poor kid will produce everything you need, he won't get to have your "inconvenience"
[1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...
And it was abused fairly quickly. The problem is that people don't really seems to understand that this is a problem even if they do not support the current cause. I hope this is an educational instead of a neurological issue.
I'm sorry but I don't think that is true, unless people lose this understanding by the time are eligible to vote or obtain higher education that is.
This is why cryptocurrencies were invented in the first place. They were supposed to emancipate us by providing private and anonymous digital cash that's free from government and bank control. Most of them failed at actually protecting us from anything but there are projects out there that are still trying, such as Monero. We should support these technologies instead of trying to turn back the clock.
We need to reject them instead. Just start using cryptocurrency for everything and cut them out.
They'll just pressure all businesses not to accept your crypto.
Just the airlines, banks, any payment processor, any gold bullion dealers, any supermarkets, any restaurants, any car rentals, any car dealers. Probably can be done in less than 10 lines of regulation. Nobody is going to risk jail for your crypto.
What then? You are going to invent some tech that will somehow make totalitarian government impossible?
That pressure is already there in many subtle ways.
As other people here have pointed out, cashless society is just asking for brutal government overreach.
I strongly support Trudeau's actions on this, and I'm sad that the government took so long to crack down on the "truckers". It's deeply damaging to civil society when a few extremists can shut down a city without consequences.
The gilets jaunes were miles ahead in terms of disturbance and there wasnt even a debate about "suspending" everyones rights until they stopped dissenting and being annoying. What a complete shame for canada and the nonchalant reactions like these make me even more impatient to leave this country as soon as I can get a new job. The recent events have been really eye opening.
Protests that shut down cities and piss off residents for days/weeks at a time can be, particularly when the protestors break a ton of laws, urinate on the memorial to the unknown soldier, and the police aren't interested in fixing any of that.
> suspending the charter and using an act that has only been used in wars
The act has never been used before, AFAICT it's a new one, and it's specifically not about wars.
So yes technically it's not the war measures act anymore but if let's say there was a war, they'd enact the same emergency measures law. There is no seperate law for war iirc but at least we get to say that we technically aren't under martial law (because we renamed it)
The truckers were not violent. For real violence, look at the ax-wielding attackers in the recent incident at the gas pipeline site in BC.
It is frightening how you and many other people so easily absorb state propaganda. Try thinking a bit about the circumstances here. Why did Trudeau go out of his way to falsely characterize the truckers as homophobic racist Nazis, while refusing to discuss any of their legitimate concerns? Why did Trudeau invoke the Emergency Act after the the peaceful resolution to the blocking of Ambassador Bridge (which was the most economically damaging part of the protest)?
It seems quite likely that Trudeau was hoping for violence. Hoping that insulting the truckers would provoke them. Hoping that clearing the Ambassador Bridge blockage would involve violence. But when that failed to happen, he invoked the Emergency Act anyway, even though clearing the remaining protesters from Ottawa was then accomplished more-or-less peacefully with ordinary police tactics. Trudeau (or his handlers, he's not particularly smart himself) are clearly delighted to have the opportunity to establish a precedent for increasing state power, and for making everyone think twice before offering any support for any dissent group, lest their life be destroyed. Of course, "dissident" groups that are actually in line with the government's agenda are safe...
Almost nothing was shut down as a result of this protest. You could travel over 99.5% of the city and forget a protest was taking place. Almost anything that was shut down, was shut down voluntarily.
Only the 3-4 blocks immediately adjacent to the Parliament buildings (where else do you go to protest your federal government's policies?) were partially blocked with parked vehicles (Mainly trucks, again very relevant to protesting a policy involving trucking.) This area is 90% + unoccupied government office space ( they work from home ). Almost all roads had at least one lane open for local traffic, and a route was cleared for members of parliament to be able to drive into work without obstruction.
A few residential side streets and a few high priced condo buildings were on the edge of this area. Those people did hear a lot of honking :( and perhaps had to see what people look like outside of their shiny city. I personally think that the important people in the high priced condos were a big reason why our local politicians were foaming at the mouth to wipe this group off the face of the planet.
The honking was mostly resolved by a court order to stop honking and after 2 weeks, the mayor actually talking to them to ask them to move; which they then did (pretty much).
While I had not been paying much attention, on Friday, my wife (muslim) who reads the news, was completely beside herself at the invasion of horrible violent people into the city and how minorities would have to go into hiding etc.. really total fear..
On Saturday, I took my wife and our kids to the protest to see this for ourselves (hard sell.) I was able to find parking without any issue or traffic about 10 minutes walk from parliament (there was space closer but blocked by police.) Once we got into the area near the parliament it was very loud and chaotic with the truck horns blasting (my kids enjoyed) and the smell of diesel fuel in the air (my wife did not enjoy.) But what we found were not angry people, but happy people. People made way for our stroller, help carry it up snowy stairs and thanked us for coming.
While I don't think my wife became a supporter, she certainly didn't have any further (irrational) fear of this group over the next 3 weeks, which we lived completely normally.
I'm not sure why it is so easy to hate people you have never met or care to meet, but it certainly not making this world a better place.
The injunction worked for 2 days, but the lack of enforcement meant that it was blaring horns again in no time. I'm glad your children enjoyed the brief trip. I think a lot of people there were actually just curious spectators there for a few hours to party. I live about a kilometre from the parliament and I could still hear the honking. A friend of a friend had to arrange for their kid to relocate because it was impossible to sleep.
Looks like someone else's fundamental rights were impacted.
There are a lot of people who do nothing but read headlines or watch mainstream news who don't have any understanding of what was going on there.
There is a heavy attempt by political opposition to cast the whole thing as a US-Style January 6th when it was nothing of the kind.
Nobody hates anyone. Well, that's not true, some people do hate and we've seen some of that. But hate or not hate is orthogonal.
Protest is fine when you don't break the law.
And happy not angry people, seriously? You gotta be at least a little bit angry to park your truck on the street for 3 weeks? You'd think anyways. The things people do when they're happy.
Protests mostly happen when the law sucks. My country also only allows permitted protest, but it also is a shitty country regarding civil rights. Trump would call it a shithole country and some would be offended by that. He is technically correct though.
People implying that Canada doesn't have civil rights seem to mostly not be from here and they've no idea what they're talking about. Rights are balanced with responsibilities. I too would prefer not to have police, not to have laws, and just have everyone behave themselves. Unfortunately people have a tendency not to do that. That's why we can't have good things.
But streets like Kent, Metcalfe, and O'Connor (and the cross streets between them) where the noise and diesel exhaust were messing up people's lives. I'm sorry, but honking your air horn for 10 minutes in a residential neighbourhood is a criminal offense. And it's not like you're sticking it to the elite, here. Somerset Ward is one of the lowest-income wards in the city. Only Vanier is lower, and not by much.
Your dismissal of this as only affecting a few high-priced condos and side streets is shocking. The affected area was nowhere near 90% government buildings. For example, this section of Kent was full of protest vehicles making noise at all hours:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4168826,-75.7005369,3a,75y,11...
Do those look like high-priced condos to you? Ditto for this section of Metcalfe:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4180527,-75.6932468,3a,75y,56...
I know it's easy to dismiss the people living downtown when you live out in Barrhaven or Kanata, but I'm saddened by your callous disregard for your fellow citizens living in a low-income part of the city. Just because you don't notice them, it doesn't mean they aren't there.
I don't mean for any of this to be pejorative; it just sounds like you're someone living in a suburban part of the city who went to the protest, walked around the party zone, and assumed that stretch of Metcalfe/Rideau represented the entire thing.
Have you sought out the information on whether it is or not, or just decided it wasn't?
Re: violence:
The scariest to me personally was someone attempting to start a fire in a building nearby to the convoy while duct taping the doors shut.[1]
Depending on your threshold for violence, the numbers could vary greatly, from a handful to several hundred.[2][3]
Regarding polling, there were a number of polls showing they didn't have broad support, especially as time went on.[4]
[1]: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-police-investigating-attemp...
[2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/hate-crime-hotline-ott...
[3]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...
[4]: https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine...
Separately, at what point does a protest cease to be peaceful?
What percentage of bad apples would satisfy you that this wasn't a peaceful protest? 1%? 10%? 50%? I'm curious because you can make that argument about pretty much any protest/disruption.
A crowd of people intent on harming others would be violent. I haven't seen any evidence that either protest included such crowds, police excepted.
I mean the only thing connecting your first link to the protest was it happened in the same part of the city. That's it. No other evidence. If a guy beats his wife at home do you blame that on the convoy too?
Seems like a smear campaign.
This is a pretty useless and disrespectful response for a few reasons. Firstly, it's pretty obvious from the links and the locations things happened that these were directly related to the convoy or at least convoy adjacent.
Secondly, I don't doubt that there were nonviolent people involved, I saw many of them via livestreams. I've posted elsewhere that I think if the Convoy wanted to still be protesting today their goal should have been to avoid picking a fight with residents and instead focus on the government itself. The saying goes, one bad apple spoils the bunch. I think it's highly applicable to what happened here.
The word on the street regarding the building arson attempt was that people in the building were blaring music and shouting stuff at the convoy protesters who were parked in the streets below their apartment building.
That was just the first such incidence during the convoy. During a separate day some people were attempting to handcuff a door shut[1] but fled the scene once they were confronted. There have been no other recorded incidents of this behaviour in Ottawa that I can find anywhere, ever. It would be a leap to assume this is just coincidental.
But let's assume it's just some anarchist being opportunistic, what about the literal mountain of other information provided?
[1]: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/mcleod-street-condo-residents...
All I see relevant to the convoy is the quote "when a group of men they believed to be convoy demonstrators". Ok, so they believed they were a part of the convoy. That's it?
If there is no other evidence in the arson case, then like I said it's nothing more than a smear campaign.
I was referring to the other documentation of violent and otherwise criminal behaviour by protestors, not the arson case.
You'll also note I was careful in my wording ("nearby to the convoy") because that part is unclear. It's coincidental timing if it wasn't people participating convoy people. I already addressed this part though. I also provided a plethora of other examples.
I also didn't suggest that alone was "proof of violence committed by the convoy" -- Why have you avoided comment on the other links I provided?
Has that changed?
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/politics/fact-check-canadian-...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8600592/truc...
I have no doubt many Canadians are not happy about the protests. Maybe even most. But I don't believe these polls for one second. It looks like propaganda saying "see, everyone believes XX thing thing the government in power would like you to believe".
I agree with your other point, that Canadians largely oppose the protests.
What I don't understand is why the Emergency Act was invoked. I've heard no reasonsble explanation for why police couldn't disperse protestors blocking roads or arrest them and impound their vehicles if they refused to leave without the act.
On the footage, he described seeing two individuals lighting a fire in the lobby shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday. After the suspects leave, another individual is seen coming into view and quickly extinguishing the fire near the elevators, Munoz said.
...
Police have not confirmed any link between their investigation into this incident and the ongoing convoy protest.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-police-arson-in...
I invariably see some version of this post every single time somebody posts about the attempted arson.
Are you of the opinion that in order for something to be true that it has to be publicly confirmed by police? Do you consider the statement that you posted to be positive proof that the arsonists are _definitely not_ involved with the silly trucker tantrum?
Looking at the photos of the arsonists, I see one is ear-wearing a mask. Having a mask at all seems out of character for the trucker-protestors given other photojournalism. Maybe it was a disguise?
Why would anyone think it is rational to tie the arson attempt to protestors? Have other incidents of arson been coincidental to the protests as in Minneapolis and elsewhere?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-police-arson-in...
The news reported that someone in the building had a confrontation with some of the protesters that day, and then there is video of someone trying to burn the building down. I wonder if it could be related. The facts of the matter are that there is no linkage to the truckers because the cops don't know who it is. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why don't we say instead that the occupation instead created an environment of lawlessness where the police had no control.
My anger isn't really placed at you, but I'm really sick of people from all over the internet telling the people who actually live in Ottawa that the protests have been peaceful. I wrote about this on my blog earlier this week: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/makeottawaboringagain. Everyone is keen to talk about what the truckers want, or what the government wants, but no one wants to talk about how the only people directly affected by the occupation are the people of Ottawa, who are faced with things like:
- Harrassing elementary school children: https://pressprogress.ca/elementary-school-students-and-teac...
- Flooding 911 system: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-police-say-...
- Forcing businesses to close: https://twitter.com/CreesonCTV/status/1492620852764020743
- Millions in lost revenue: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/truck-convoy-costs-ottawa-s-busies...
These things are obviously not okay and not signs of a peaceful protest. They should be beyond the pale for everyone. I'm working on a new article about the Emergency's Act and freezing bank accounts, and I think the government went too far, but that doesn't mean that any of the things that came before are acceptable.
Your sickness is regrettable. It’s such a shame not everyone is on board with your pity-train of first world problems. Are you so out of touch that you even know what not-peace is?
An epistemologically closed assertion without evidence deserves pushback. I think you might agree with that given your lengthy response that barely addresses the claim at hand.
The fact that Canadians are largely against this has absolutely zero bearing on anything.
You need a lot of faith if you think that can ever be a representative sample.
In Canada, popular support for the convoy was around 30%, but it's a little more nuanced than that. Most are sick and tired of the health measures (duh) but very few actually approve of the way in which the protesting was carried out.
EDIT: The downvotes kind of drive my point home. Thanks!
I doubt many truckers were violent, but the truckers weren't the only one there. Their presence created a center of gravity that attracted many hangers-on, and from what I have seen, they've been the source of most of the problems.
Also, it's not really about violence. It's about needlessly harming innocent citizens. Although this is happening right near Parliament, it's one of the poorest wards in the city. This isn't a neighbourhood full of the liberal elite sipping lattes while they work from home. It's students, and shift works, and retail workers just trying to live their lives.
Consider things like this: https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1488905393199890432
Turn your sound on/up to get a sense of what that was like. Do you want to live in a society where that is ever okay in the name or protest? I sure don't.
And that was filmed from a building a couple of hundred meters away from the trucks that were parked up Kent St. How do you think it felt for people living in these apartments right on Kent:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4168826,-75.7005369,3a,75y,10...
For what it's worth (and I realize it's a small sample of a small portion of the population, so maybe it's not worth much), my friends in neighbours in my small Ontario town were initially generally supportive of what they saw as the truckers' core message, because "it's time to end vaccine mandates for truckers re-entering Canada" is a completely reasonable topic of protests. It's a good time to have that conversation.
But the protest quickly evolved into something larger and messier than that core message, and sentiment in my small town quickly soured against the protest. What I've heard is recent conversations is that people feel the protest had lost the plot, the actions of some of the attendees in harming local citizens were beyond the pale, and it was time for the protest to end.
There have been some objections to the way police ended the protest, but it looked relatively tame in comparison to other protest breakups here in recent memory like the Toronto homeless camps last summer, or the Montreal student protests, or the G20 protests. That's not to say it was done perfectly.
I used to live a few blocks from Parliament Hill, and everybody living there is used to protests. We think protests are good and healthy and even necessary, even if we disagree with the protestors. This one quickly evolved into something beyond mere protest and turned residents against the protest who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its message.
For some of the grievances local residents have, see lists like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/sh7qok/a_su...
Lists like that are, of course, one-sided. It's up to you how much of that information you choose to see as credible. Just realize that as someone from outside Canada, you're probably seeing a filtered version of events. That list above is also a filtered version of events, but it's a very different filter. Look at it through enough filters and you'll probably end up with a more complete understanding.
Personally, I watched some of the live streams to learn more about the protests and hear from some of the actual truckers. Danny and Czaba and the couple from Saskatchewan with the puppies seemed like good people with legitimate grievances to protest about. At the same time, no amount of goodness makes the harm caused to local residents okay. I know it's easy to come down strongly on one side or the other of this, but I see the whole thing as a crappy tragedy for everyone involved.
As for the government's response to all of this - we'll have plenty of opportunities to voice our opinion at the ballot box. Municipal and Provincial governments should have been able to manage this protest from the start without needing the feds to step in, and we have municipal and provincial elections this year. And with a minority government federally, we could have an election there at any time as well. Realistically it's unlikely we'll see one before next year - but we'll still get to express ourselves soon enough.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408611
Proponents like to imagine that people using it to evade the law will mostly be using it to evade unpopular laws such as laws that restrict civil rights, but I thinking they are being way too optimistic. There are far more people who are simply criminals and fraudsters who need to evade popular laws in order to blackmail or steal from or scam ordinary people than people who need to evade unpopular unjust laws.
This will lead to public support for laws that extend things like KYC down to even small ordinary transactions and the government knowing how much you have and how much you spend and where it all came from and where it all goes. To make that work the government will need a lot more surveillance but the public will be fine with that.
Just recently we've had scandals with Credit Suisse and HSBC banking criminals and laundering drug money, add in all the tax heavens which are fully in UK/US jurisdiction and I think total volume of bitcoin transactions willvpale in comparison
Bless your heart. I hope you can preserve that innocence for many years to come — nobody in Venezuela or Argentina has the luxury of such ignorance†. So, even though I hope you can, I hope you choose not to.
One correction, though: the people who were donating to the truckers' protest weren't evading any laws. Rather, the government is evading laws in its illegal crackdown, and Bitcoin is providing a means to limit its unlawful powers.
______
† Of course, not all of them think Bitcoin is a good idea! And they might be right.
[1] https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/14962234722087403...
From Dan of The Line Goes Up on The Financial Diet - https://youtu.be/8St36RjHd2E?t=757
(please pardon the wall of text transcription)
> But the why are crypto and NFTs bad? It's like they're socially destructive and they represent crypto. I really want to stress that NFTs are an extension of crypto and crypto is a socially destructive experiment that goes to great lengths to concentrate even more wealth and even more power into the hands of the few. They're deflationary by design, which traps -- so the long-term outcome of these would be that late comers, which -- you have to consider that, oh, well, what does a late adopter look like in crypto? And it's like well, if we're talking on a timeline, its people who are kids right now. So let's imagine this hypothetical future where where crypto becomes like mainstream. Let's say it wins and it takes over. Well, it's like, oh, well, you should have bought in early. It's like, well I couldn't buy in early. I was five. I now have to buy in late because the passage of time dictates it. And it's like, Ok, how is it going to behave when those people have to buy in? And it's like, oh, not good, not well. It's going to be terrible. And deflationary economies trap ordinary people into irrecoverable cycles of debt that just leads towards serfdom.
It just doesn't make sense and I don't see why I should carry that burden.
It just doesn't make sense and I don't see why I should carry that burden.
There are many reasons your allegory doesn't apply - 'people who want to pay cash' are not a protected class. Serving people with disabilities doesn't put me at risk of theft either, nor does it increase my banking costs.
You're going to have to show some pretty good evidence of a positive social outcome to make this persuasive, because it is adding a big burden to business. (And unbanked figures in the US are not that - US society is very backward in its attitudes to banking and payments, and in giving access to banking to everyone)
ironic
The argument that is being made is that people who want to pay cash should be a protected class, with their ability to transact protected in law, so that every participant in society may benefit from those rights should they ever be needed.
I'm not seeing it here.
Hey, bit of a late reply, but yes.
You need to keep a float to provide change, you need security measures around your float and your takings. You have to count and reconcile the cash at the beginning and end of the day. Someone has to take it to the bank. Banks charge businesses for handling cash deposits. You need a cash register too! Which implies space as well as expense. There are many costs around a business taking cash.
Clearly, taking cards isn't free either, but it's often missed when people moan about card fees that sure, if someone gives you the cash for your goods, you have the cash now. But you don't just stuff it in your pocket forever, and credit card fees often come in cheaper than the cash handling costs mentioned above. People like to say that hiding card fees is evil, and cash customers are subsidizing credit card prices, but often it's the reverse that's true. While there may not be a per-transaction charge you can point to, overall costs to a business for cash are non-negligible.
Apparently this was a major driver behind the "Cashback" model in the UK in the 1990s when supermarkets started to be able to perform a cash withdrawal as part of your food purchasing transaction - it saved you a trip to the ATM, but more importantly for them it cut their handling costs and security requirements.
I've interacted with a few IRL businesses that don't do cash at all. Many food vans in London when I worked there were operating with a phone and a square reader only. This morning I bought a doughnut from a new doughnut shop here in Western Australia, and they run the business from an iPad on a stand and a similar reader. Any lost business from not taking cash is clearly not important enough for them to take on the added costs and problems.
As a practical matter, how do I begin to move towards unseizable assets? Crypto is popular but several crypto wallets were frozen as well, including a Monero wallet. All crypto exchanges in Canada require KYC. Literal cash or precious metal is maybe an option but getting through an airport with a bag of $50K in cash wouldn’t be easy or safe, especially when you land in another country which might have open corruption and you’re not a citizen.
The emergency was Ottawa police doing nothing, Windsor police doing nothing, OPP doing nothing, RCMP doing nothing, Ontario provincial govt doing nothing, Alberta provincial govt doing nothing -- for almost a month. We came really close to a crisis of faith in our system of governance. The federal govt (in my opinion) didn't have much of a choice but to bring out the big guns.
It just demonstrates to me how broken politics are in this country, that individual politicians are so focused on their own advancement that they could not see they were endangering the very system they're parasites of.
You have to understand that this is not one group of protestors. The border blockades were cleared without the emergency act. The emergency act was used specifically against the protestors by parliament in ottawa. The government used using a CBC article talking about threat of border blockades to justify using this emergency act against the protestors in ottawa who had nothing to do with the border blockades.
It's like using actions of a third party in new york to justify quashing protestors in washington DC. and the NDP helped the Liberals pass it. The Liberals should be required to change their party name to something else, because they aren't.
I am not a believer in crypto but the current government here is convincing me quickly.
Laws can't fix this.
I seem to remember some articles, on this very venue, recounting horror stories of being deplatformed by Google.
In addition to the power it would give governments and mobs as the article points out, there's already a growing group that's increasingly locked out of society as we transition to a more digital world: people in poverty and the undocumented (often one and the same). You can imagine how a cashless society can create increasing feedback loops of poverty as more and more goods and services are unobtainable to people on the bottom rungs of society.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
A great point I overheard recently was that this precedent is likely to be used in Canada against indigenous peoples protesting resource extraction and other incursions onto their land. Now a blockade can be a "terrorist act," etc., and their finances can be frozen among other things. This power is not just going to be used against some wacky antivax truckers this one time and then forgotten about.
I dislike the term "financial deplatforming" quite a bit as it minimizes the severity of freezing someone's assets. This isn't like being kicked off a media platform. Having your assets frozen doesn't just deprive you of your livelihood but also prevents you from defending yourself since lawyers cost money. It's one step short of imprisonment.
It's also being done by the government. Get kicked off a private platform by the owners and you can just go elsewhere. That's not the case if the government is seizing your assets and also says its illegal for anyone else to do business with you.
It depends on the politics of the people involved. The Obama DOJ executed Operation Choke Point nearly a decade back.[1]
> Critics of the operation accuse it of bypassing due process; the government is pressuring the financial industry to cut off the companies' access to banking services including access to capital, without first having shown that the targeted companies are violating the law. Critics also say that "it's a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn't like, such as gun sellers and coal producers."
Actually the emergency powers declaration specifically excludes indigenous people - that is, they can protest, but others can’t.
It is, however, very likely that these new powers will be applied selectively, not according to how disruptive protesters are, but according to whether their message is congenial to those in power.
Cash is pretty great. I am a fan, and have all the usual, ordinary reasons most people do.
Cashless seems like a goal others want, but most people probably don't.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
Studies have shown that among bank notes, microorganisms can survive for a significant time only on bank notes made of polymer. Most bank notes in the world, including US dollar bills, are made of cotton, linen or a blend of the two whereon microorganisms tend to dry out more quickly.
Copper is antimicrobial, and that includes "gold" coins, of copper alloy. Most "silver" coins, including those in circulation in the US and most of the EU are of copper alloys too. Steel coins are not so good though.
Bank of England has summarised several studies (starts 1/3 down the page) :<https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2020/2020...>
First, the police in Ottawa chose not to enforce even basic laws in the area of the protest for several weeks. The result was lawlessness and a total lack of respect for the police. They were being jeered at for putting threatening flyers under windshield wipers one day, and the next they brought in armoured vehicles and riot squads. If the police had consistently written tickets and made arrests from the start of the protest it likely would not have grown as large as it did.
Presently, Trudeau is keeping the Emergencies Act in effect, not because there is an ongoing emergency, but because there might be. He's argued that some of the protesters have not left Ottawa and might return to the protest site if given the chance to do so, but there is nothing in the Emergency act that is required for the police to maintain peace and order. Trudeau wants the act to remain in effect for other reasons apparently.
The opposition is introducing a motion in parliament to end the Act, but that will likely fail unless Trudeau loses the NDP's support. However, the senate could also end the Act at any time. Given that the emergency is over they should do just that. It is entirely unclear what Trudeau hopes to accomplish by holding onto these powers.
It’s really quite clear
I see the same pattern here. I would be surprised if there is going to be another PM ever in Canada. If it sounds ridiculous, think about the fact that current government is a Minority one. The way they gather support is by showing carrot and stick to the rest of the parties. And these emergency powers are a big stick just waiting to be used at the right time.
Do you know what "minority government" means? It means that if he loses support of the other parties he's toast.
Come back to us and tell us about "no more PMs in Canada" when he's had his mob stage a January the 6th style event and he refuses to step aside in the face of an election.
What a surprise. I guess Canada isn't a broken state after all.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-event-feb23-1.63618...
CPC according to him are Nazi supporters after all.
Freezing their bank accounts when they have not been proven guilty of any crime is an abuse of power.
Interfering with the social funding drives of a political resistance movement sets a precedent that might affect all political protest in the future.
I don't know what to think of the staged media campaign smearing people for bringing their kids to a protest. Should the state be able prevent you from exposing your kids to your deepest convictions? Maybe they should have smeared my parents for taking me to church, women's centers, and union picnics.
If the police and government had taken the appropriate steps at the outset of this protest (parking tickets, towing vehicles, laying charges for blocking streets), none of this would be even close to necessary now. But as the article points out, that would be very visible, and would require a bit of political courage.
There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders. Kids come to protests all the time, it is not a big deal, but when the cops hand out flyers telling you that you have to leave and you don't, keeping your kids there with you, you are going to get some extra attention - it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable.. if the cops had handed you a flyer saying they were going to forcibly remove your picket line soon.
I agree that early enforcement may have made a difference - but it is clear from the reporting that towing vehicles at the outset was never an option - the towing firm that moved a shack /at the request of the protestors/ received a huge amount of harassment. In other cities pre-emptive measures were successful - sometimes by the police and sometimes by citizens. In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.
Okay, sure. So your argument boils down to that's the way it is and it's practical.
>There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders.
At the point when the reporting on kids began on every network, there were no emergency orders.
>it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable..
Fair. Point taken.
>In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.
I remember the police presence at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, and the WTO in Montreal. It seems like these protesters got a lot more leeway.
> Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power.
However:
> The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the Emergencies Act to help authorities deal with convoy protests do not affect donors to the protests, despite unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP that a constituent had her bank account frozen over a $50 contribution.
> “At no time, did we provide a list of donors to Financial Institutions,” the RCMP said in a statement Monday. [1]
Facts are important!
1: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-rcmp-banks-an...
There's also plenty of wiggle room in their statement - they said they froze the accounts of "influencers" and people they "suspect" committed illegal acts. If it turns out they did in fact freeze someone who just donated, they didn't technically lie if they can fit them into one of those vague groups.
Want examples to show governments tend toward corruption? Easy. Want examples showing governments working well? Sure! Examples showing citizens exercising power? Yep. Examples showing citizens being crushed under the heel of their government? We have that too! Black people being killed by police? Sure! White people being killed by police? That happens too! How about police getting attacked by civilians? Google has you covered.
> How many more examples do we need
If you go looking for examples to support your narrative, you'll always find them. We need data and analysis. And no, the plural of anecdote isn't data.
Shouldn't we be talking about what actually happened, though, instead of buying into a false narrative that is being intentionally pushed by people with an agenda? I agree that freezing the bank account of a student in Halifax because they made a small donation to the convoy protest would be an abuse of power. But since that's not what happened, despite the fact that various people with a beef with Canada/Trudeau/liberals/etc. are claiming it did, what exactly are we debating here?
We know that, after a period of weeks and after economic losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the government has gone after the principal people organizing and financing the blockades and occupations. They have used force and arrested some of them. They have frozen the accounts of others. We can argue about whether or not those actions constitute "egregious human rights violations", because then we're arguing about actual facts and actual decisions, not strawmen.
The Canadian government isn't known to have lied over and over a thousand times over as far as I know.
Yes the government has had scandals, here's a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_i...
So I won't say they can't, but I also like OP think arguing in these hypothetical is a waste of energy.
We could argue that the process needs to be transparent, make the list public for example. In fact, maybe it is, might be one of these: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...
I also feel logically, I don't see a motivate, small donors would only be cause for political complications. Logically it would make sense for them to restrict it to the people actually blocking roads with their trucks and to big donors financing large sums of money.
If a crucial part of your argument is the epistemological claim that we obviously can't trust anyone who presents evidence or arguments that we don't like because they could be lying, then there's clearly no way of having a reasoned discussion.
Let's be clear -- there is no silencing component to this act. If someone has unfairly seen their accounts frozen, do a tell-all sad tale to every media outlet you can find. Rant on twitter. Share those Facebook pages. There are plenty of outlets that would love it. There are political parties who would make this their battle cry, using it to seal their own ascension.
But there isn't a single case. Not one. No sad tales. Now accounts have been frozen -- we know that for sure -- but the people whose accounts have been frozen have been organizers and direct participants. People who knew what was coming and had literally weeks of warning to stop or face consequences. There isn't a lot of sympathy there. But the poor waitress in some small town who gave $20...boy, that story will give this country a new government.
Yet...where is it?
As a contrasting case, if a police department arrested some people during a protest and released a statement about why, a journalist could verify that against the public records and even follow along the criminal proceedings. How can we verify claims made by the RCMP about their extrajudicial actions?
I think there might be, the banks aren't in individually being contacted, I'm pretty sure they would have been added to one of the public sanction lists here: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...
Why assume she lied until there is proof?
> It's hard to hide who has been jailed
None of the “influencers” we talk about are jailed. Nor does having your money frozen mean “jail”. It sure can be really bad and not without consequences, but even fully IRL we wouldn’t describe someone having all his possessions taken as jailed.
Then govs have been freezing account under many pretenses for decades, except we now have a chance to get the affected people to come forward and explain they’re getting shafted. That wouldn’t happen a few decades ago, there was no way the local news would touch a story about some random peeps getting frozen under a terrorist charge for instance. Do you really think it’s worse now for activists than decades ago ?
1. The person made a donation to the Freedom Convoy.
2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse.
3. The person's bank account got locked due to an unrelated reason (false positive on the fraud check system).
4. The person either didn't contact the bank, or the bank was ambiguous, so they contacted their MP.
5. The MP, that is generally arguing against the right to freeze accounts [0], used it as an example to illustrate his point.
So, key takeaways:
1. The recently passed legislation makes it possible to freeze the supporters' bank accounts.
2. It has not been done so far.
3. People are on edge, expecting it to be done.
4. Making the power less broad, or putting some provisions about basic life expenses could be a good idea.
> 2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse
The Emergencies Act is not retroactive. If this was the order of operations then their account was not locked because of the EA.
https://orders-in-council.canada.ca/attachment.php?attach=41...
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-ottawa-can-do-n...
> However, Jacques said some bank account holders may still be subject to other court orders freezing their assets.
> The province of Ontario won an order on Feb. 10 that froze the distribution of funds raised through the American online funding platform, GiveSendGo. And on Feb. 17 a group of Ottawa citizens, businesses, and employees who are suing key organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy 2022 won a sweeping order to preserve their ability to recover damages.
[…]
> The emergency financial orders took effect on Feb. 15, and Jacques made clear it has no retroactive effect, so that anyone who donated to crowdfunding platforms prior to Feb. 15 should not be captured by the order, she said.
* https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ts/politics/federal/2022...
No individual protestors accounts have been frozen. If you donated to this cause you literally have no idea where your money went. If you participated in the protest and feel entitled to these funds, how would you get them? Freezing the accounts, at this time, is neither pro-protest or anti-protest. The government isn't seizing this money -- it's keeping it from being moved until somebody can figure out who even owns it.
https://financialpost.com/fp-finance/banking/trudeau-gives-b...
This is the first time I've seen someone make this completely true point about the banking system.
It's not right or just, but money in the bank is not your money. It is your bank's money, and they may or may not allow you to transact it at any given time. Your recourse's are few and extremely expensive.
If anything positive comes out of this, I hope it's more folks realize this.
It is a highly regulated sector, there is frequent reporting and quick reviews. In the specific case of the GoFundMe money TD Bank was immediately at the courts begging for someone to tell them what to do.
Those are very different statements, and they can both note have provided a list specifically of donors, while including donors on a list of "suspected criminals whom accounts need to be frozen"
Facts do matter, and I do not trust the RCMP, nor the Canadian government to provide those facts
1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.
2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.
The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and the current governing party -- the ones who take all of the heat for every abuse -- are a minority government. They can fall at a moment's notice. Prime Minister in Canada isn't King, and instead is far less powerful than, for instance, the US president.
Yet *not a single case has been brought forward*. A couple of Conservative MPs have vaguely alluded to cases -- ones with almost no details, yet the few details that are brought up don't match any known donor lists (e.g. "Briane from Chilliwack") -- yet despite this being such an incredible hammer to take down this government, crickets.
So yes, I'll take the government's position on this.
"seal-clapping"
Ah, yes, "seal-clapping". That surely conveys the sincerity of your comment. Or we saw mass financing of public mayhem and realized that yes, this is a very real problem. It's a real problem that needs considerable solutions.
"purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years"
A "minority"? This is perverse. By this measure, every deplorable subset is a protected minority that you will pearl clutch about. Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?
Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope.
Can you quantify this? Because I've seen zero quantification of this. Do you know the numbers? I have yet to hear anyone with your point of view point to a single specific number. Just hand-waving about FOREIGN MONEY that MIGHT BE FROM RUSSIA and TRUMPERS! Never is a single percentage mentioned in this regard. If it was remotely significant, mentioning the quantity would bolster the government's claim, and they would do so. They don't, which almost certainly indicates it's an insignificant amount.
"Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope" Here in the US in the summer of 2020, we had entire city blocks burned to the ground, multiple police stations burned, a Federal courthouse besieged by suburban white kid radicals in Portland, a church set on fire across the street from the White House, had armed radicals occupy a neighborhood and police station in Seattle (mostly peaceful, but there were a few dozen incidents of minor violence and then a couple of murders towards the end) for months. The bad actors setting fires and perpetrating violence were a minority of the protesters. Most were simply exercising their first amendment rights. At no point did anyone freeze bank accounts, despite massive outpourings of donations from individuals for things like food, and more nefarious things like bailing out jailed rioters. It was a GOOD thing that nobody had their accounts frozen. It was immoral and wrong to allow a small number of bad actors to be used to delegitimize the entire movement. Therefore, the US government didn't do anything to rob these protesters of their rights to protest. And at no point, not for a single second, was the news media rooting for the police over the protesters. Certainly not the mainstream news in the US that has the vast majority of the mindshare. Not NPR, not CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC/NYT/etc.
By contrast, the truckers have been entirely peaceful. In a world where every human has a video camera in their pocket, there are no viral videos of violence perpetrated by the protesters. No viral videos of protesters hurling racist epithets. Instead, 2 videos showing lone actors carrying hateful flags (Confederate flag in Canada???? Really?) A few statues got vandalized in minor ways, but they got far more coverage than statues of Lincoln in the US did when they were vandalized and toppled by rioters.
"Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?": So the truckers are Nazis? One person was photographed with a Swastika flag, and they are all Nazis? Do you apply the same judgement when you see protests in line with your laptop-class fashions carrying hammer/sickle flags? Or left-flavored anti-semitic flags, which always pop up in the fringes of fashionable left-wing protests?
It's blatantly obvious you have dehumanized all of these people based on propaganda and political bias. We all know why this is:
The truckers are part of a highly unfashionable political movement. And amongst the laptop class, fashion is king. If you dissent from the government in a manner that is fashionable to the elite class, you are a hero. Fringe elements who perpetrate violence are depicted as not representative of the movement. Maximum sympathy is provided. But unfashionable? Suddenly, a single incident of violence doesn't deserve the label "mostly peaceful", you get zero sympathy, and the media is aggressively cheering on the removal of your rights. You get labelled "deplorable" (that's the word you just used above) which is subjective and revealing of dehumanization.
I'm a lifelong liberal, I've never even voted Republican. I always hated the censorious, rabidly illiberal echo chamber of the GOP that was created by them allowing themselves to be taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The constant judgement, the constant othering and dehumanization of political opponents. Today, the center left parties in Europe/Canada/US are all on this train. I'm reminded of the old Black Panther Party quote: "Scratch a liberal, and you'll find a fascist."
I will not be voting Democrat in November, and look forward to ending all support for the party until they stop championing aggressive violations of civil liberties and government/corporate allied censorship. I say this as a person who has spent cumulative weeks volunteering for campaigns, including writing software for the Obama 2012 campaign as well as the 2014 midterms in Florida, where I did 5 figures worth of free labor for targeting applications for minority registration drives. I'm done, and people with your illiberal belief system inhabiting the center left is why. I'd rather vote for dumb rednecks who treat me like an adult than folks like Trudeau who think that an NPR-like soothing voice can cloak the authoritarian, paternalistic inclinations of their actual words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you have a long history of breaking the rules here and we've had to warn you many times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390797 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052599 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052375 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348969 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513080 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512934 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207243 (May 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18250891 (Oct 2018)
If you keep this up we're going to end up having to ban you, especially because you appear to be using HN primarily for this. That's a clear abuse of the site, so please stop.
I get the sense that whenever I'm in any thread where many others are making similar, political comments, somebody gets upset and flags mine and I'm the one punished. The parent comments are all political. So what is the line between flame bait and commenting on politics?
The most recent occurrence listed was me stating to someone they were suffering from cognitive dissonance in June. If you actually look at that comment, it's not exactly a brutal insult.
I think you do a great job moderating and I don't envy the task. I just feel like there are certain kinds of users who flag everyone that disagrees with them and gives me the impression that political comments that do not go against certain dominant ideologies never get flagged but mine do.
My recommendation is that if HN does not want political discussion on the site, they shouldn't allow political links to be posted. My comments were directly related to the digital jail article's contents. I don't really see how any conversation around a government freezing people's bank accounts as a form of digital punishment cannot be political.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679
If you take a look at those and still have questions that haven't been answered, let me know and I'll be happy to try filling in the gaps.
This is a fundamental mistake. Just as you can't take your experiences from (let's say) IBM and assume that Google (or a startup, or a family business) operates in the same way, you can't take your experiences from the US government and assume that every other government works in the same way. As the only (mostly) democratic superpower, the US is a category of its own. It has global ambitions, and its government serves many purposes apart from the interests of its citizens. Other governments exist for other reasons and serve other purposes.
I'm not familiar with Canada. I don't know how its government operates or whether you should trust its word. However, I know that in another country, it's never "the government" that speaks but a specific agency or a specific official. Those all have known reputations and known biases. An informed person can often say with reasonable certainty whether you can take the government's word at face value.
What things you feel make people lunatics in this case?
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
He speaks in this syrupy, soothing voice that makes me think I'm listening to NPR (it's the public news radio here in the states, infamous for its sleep inducing qualities). But that NPR voice is saying incredibly misleading, demagogue-like statements that are the hallmark of authoritarian leanings. It's almost preferable if someone who sounds like Trump says he's going to implement a program to freeze bank accounts with no court review, because at least you expect it from a guy who speaks like a dictator. With Trudeau, it's like the optics of his appearance and demeanor blind a large subset of the population to what he's actually doing.
>If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.
Can you understand now why people may be concerned about the scope of who is being targeted, regardless of what the RCMP claims they're doing? A high ranking official made it clear that donators are under the microscope based on their political affiliations.
0. https://twitter.com/RebelNewsOnline/status/14941153331368673...
Subsequent statements and clarifications have made it clear that these donors were not subject to any action, this freaking government.. they just can't quite figure out how to make a clear statement about anything, despite seeming like they are constantly reading talking points - it drives me up the wall.
Canadians donate to US protests all the time and vice versa.
Plus, the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Canada's financial intel agency (FINTRAC) said there is no evidence of suspicious transactions around the freedom convoy:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans...
So what exactly is his point?
As stated elsewhere, this is a minority government. If there is a single actual case of someone donating some small amount and having their account frozen, with the corresponding life mayhem, may the Conservatives use it to bludgeon the Liberals.
But there hasn't been one. Not a single case. A couple of opposing politicians and twitter personalities have invented vague claims of cases, but these are clearly a fiction (or have been clarified as "but it could happen" scenarios).
They don't need to. The list is public. Banks have been given the power already.
Also, trusting anything the RCMP says is like trusting what the CIA/NSA/FBI says.
"The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts will be frozen."
https://twitter.com/ATabarrok/status/1494381498555781122
And this story was run in Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/police-be...
So I think it's not fair to dismiss this as fake news coming from "unsubstantiated claims by a Conservative MP" as your comment seems to do. The story came from the government's own deputy PM!
In the video, the deputy PM sounded like she was being vague, either obfuscating or because she was out of depth on the specifics. So if this statement wasn't true as-quoted (maybe she mis-spoke or wasn't precise), then that's great news.
So, maybe it is actually true that they did not share names with the banks. But I think it would be quite naive to take the latest claim at face value, after all they did make a contradictory claim previously. This is the sort of thing governments lie about and try to spin their way out of all the time. It's entirely plausible that they did share the info, did not expect the blowback they got, and are now in damage control mode trying to walk this back and pretend it didn't happen.
The article makes the point that it's is dangerous to not have some limitations on over reach in this case.
For example, in a protest, you might get physically tear gased or jailed, but it's temporary, and eventually you get due process and can be released, and your tears from tear gas will dissipate. Yet the nature of it is that police punishes you before you've been convinced in a court, so there's collateral damage, people who did nothing wrong are hit and tear gased and arrested by the police, and it's a big deal each time it happens.
Here too, there could very well be this sort of collateral, but the article worries that since it's less visible in nature, that people might not see it as a big deal, the same way that they would if they'd see police throwing tear gas, hitting people and arresting people left and right.
So it's saying, there's a possibility of overreach and collateral, but it might create less of a concern from citizens towards the government, since they won't notice the blast radius, as it is harder to notice it.
It's a good argument to some extent, even if in this case there would have been zero overreach and collateral, it is still a good argument for next time where there could be some.
It probably is true, but it still is not a fact until it was verified, which is not trivial.
Not endorsing any details of the what or how of it on the basis that I don't understand it. But if criticisms of it start with "Having some fallback for digital monetary transfer seems like a good idea." Then what can you actually do if you're signal. Criticise what could really in a practical, pragmatic way work better to that end seems more worthwhile than most of what I've read about it.
This is exactly what they did in Russia. If you consistently punish 100% of dissidents, you will end up with a large number of people that have nothing to lose, that will unite against you.
If you instead make it clear that anyone demonstrating dissent would face a low (but non-negligible) chance of disproportionally severe consequences, most people will shut up and comply.
Ironically, this is what terrorists do. They don't try to physically kill every citizen in the affected area, instead they demoralize the public by making them accept the fact that the next random bombing could be near their house.
Things like due process, burden of proof and separation of branches of power were not invented our of nowhere.
Have a version of the writ of habeas corpus (habeas numus?) to quickly undo unlawful freezing. Maybe allow small amounts of money to be released to the accused, large enough to live on but too small to be of much use to criminals. Have an exception for paying for a lawyer. And if they're cleared, require banks not to keep records of the freezing to prevent discrimination.
(Discussions of this topic should also all include a mention of civil forfeiture, which is effectively when police officers are legally allowed to rob you. This is a thing that already exists and happens regularly.)
Digital Jail? Seriously? Show me the concern when the feds seize the assets of someone they accuse of being a terrorist or a drug kingpin.
HN suddenly cares about this because of some generalized hatred of Trudeau, but I can't remember a thread generating thousands of comments about companies trying to force employees to accept pay on fee heavy debit cards.
The way that discussing a Canadian protest about vaccine mandates has come to take over HN feels bizarre, agenda pushy, and like a bunch of crocodile tears.
You don't need to add due process, it was already there. They decided this was worth declaring a war level emergency to clear out some protestors in ottawa. The border blockades had already been cleared by then.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-franciscos-cashless-ban-now-in...
Nominally it was because during early pandemic people were worried about handling cash with virons on it, or otherwise bringing infected peoples' bodies nearer to cashiers' bodies than strictly necessary.
Then many realized that their profits didn't take a hit since card payments are common now and nearly everyone has a card.
Now it seems simply to be a convenience thing. Probably businesses are happy with prompting every customer with a tip request, rather than expecting them to remember to drop some money in the jar before they leave with their goods.
Is it more likely that you frequent places which are cash-centric? Coffee shops, independent retailers and the like?
Once you get into the trades and workshops, cash is king for obvious tax avoidance reasons. It's rare someone in such regions doesn't at least imply you can pay a portion of an invoice/bill with cash for a moderate discount.
Small shops in those areas might be more apt to only accept cash, and you'll notice at chain stores like Dollar Tree the cashiers actually have cash handling skills vs. the affluent areas of the cities.
For most places within the airline network, you can easily avoid paying cash these days. I still recommend anyone who travels keep enough cash on them to get back home in a pinch, if at all practical.
This is personal anecdote, but I make it a point to pay cash whenever at all possible (to the point of being "that guy" in my friend group) so I likely pay attention to it more than most.
- The US mint slowed production to protect workers
- The shutdowns slowed circulation of existing coins
Given that a large percentage of coins are irredeemably damaged or lost each year (I once knew a particularly spoiled college student who would simply throw change away rather than deal with keeping them) it doesnt seem like much explanation is owed beyond that.
Or you stay off the toll roads, I guess.
IDK what NY's policy is, but it is rather hard to cross the southern Hudson without toll.
If you're renting a car, and you don't have an EZ Pass, some rental agencies will also charge some pretty ridiculous fees (we were once charged ~$25 for a single toll!), which pretty much forces you down the EZ Pass route, or onto some really odd paths to avoid incurring that charge. (In our case, we didn't even realize we'd driven on a toll road, and actually requested proof of such when the bill came. Sure enough, we had.)
Something like EZ pass seems potentially gray area; can they just say "well don't use these roads if you don't like the payment terms" ?
I suspect you are right that with a state agency they probably have to provide some way for you to settle a debt (plus possible penalties) in cash, but they don't have to make it convenient.
If they put up a sign that said "don't use these roads if you don't like the payment terms" and then you drove on the road anyway, that would technically form a contract between EZ Pass and the driver. However, contracts are made to be broken and any damages would be payable in cash so we're back to the start.
The legal tender thing has nothing to do with the agency being part of the state. Private debtors must also accept cash.
Right, debtors do but merchants don't. And merchants can put terms on it, which was the point I wanted to make.
If the sign says, "you can use this toll road if you either use EZ pass or accept our pay-by-mail system", then there seems to be no reason you have to include "cash" as one of the options.
Of course if you fail to pay, then you do owe them a debt (fee + penalties + whatever) and I think you are right they have to somehow accept cash, but that doesn't have to be made easy for you. Agree its not a state vs. private issue, I should have been clearer.
"Cash or Credit/Debit cards are accepted at any of our Customer Service Centers."
And… you have to sign up, get a transponder, keep said transponder in your car and allow them to track your movements with it. (Which, admittedly, they can probably already do by reading license plates. Might as well just broadcast it on radio?)
You likely do.
If you are worried about people tracking your movements, don't carry a phone or have a hands free link in the car.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2020/9541234/
https://tti.tamu.edu/researcher/now-taking-it-to-the-streets...
It's becoming more and more common here in Sweden. Especially smaller shops and restaurants don't take cash anymore since it's so expensive and annoying (and potentially dangerous) to deal with.
I'm not really sure where class comes into accepted forms of payment? But I'm also not sure what class you're talking about.
In fact, a local ski resort ($99 season pass - cheap type of place) only allows ordering via the Toast App. No credit. No cash. App only.
So this has been a long time in the making, really.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...
I strongly disagree with the antivax protestors currently the subject of these measures; I think they're all plague-enthusiast morons and should go home already. I also recognize that using such measures against these protestors makes it that much easier to use the same measures against protestors with whom I do agree (like, say, First Nations folks trying to reassert their right to the lands stolen from them), and that it's absolutely prudent to prepare for that eventuality should my government on this side of the US/Canada border opt for a similar strategy (as police here in the US already do rather routinely via civil asset forfeiture).
Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it. And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated). Your bitcoins become frozen and/or worthless to 3rd parties.
Yes, you can try and operate outside that system by only transacting with wallets that are also frozen (or that are happy being frozen, transitively). Good luck with that.
Bitcoin's key functionality (all transactions are infinitely traceable) is the main reason it is so easy to regulate in the real world.
(The simplest approach for regulators implementing this system is to declare ALL wallets frozen, and to require public registration of wallets to unfreeze them, e.g. by being on an exchange with existing KYC laws. This makes all new private wallets useless prior to registration, and makes it a felony to transact with unregistered wallets. Exchanges would then literally prevent people from transacting with unregistered bitcoin wallets. Existing KYC laws are sufficient for governments to regulate bitcoins in this way.)
Governments already make it a felony to possess various illicit substances above a certain quantity. That hasn't done much to curtail the drug trade.
More to the point: if a government attempted this, it would open up every other Bitcoin user to a DoS attack; I would just need to send some money around to well-known addresses to "freeze" those wallets, too.
> And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated).
They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation. Tokens are the property of whomever actually controls the wallet; the feds can "freeze" however much they like, but there ain't really much they can do outside of a very targeted attack (i.e. one such that the costs of performing that attack vastly outweigh the benefit unless I'm some Bitcoin millionaire and I'm careless enough to keep everything in a single wallet).
> (The simplest approach for regulators implementing this system is to declare ALL wallets frozen, and to require public registration of wallets to unfreeze them, e.g. by being on an exchange with existing KYC laws. This makes all new private wallets useless prior to registration, and makes it a felony to transact with unregistered wallets. Exchanges would then literally prevent people from transacting with unregistered bitcoin wallets. Existing KYC laws are sufficient for governments to regulate bitcoins in this way.)
All that would accomplish would be to shift traffic to exchanges that operate outside KYC (which was always possible, given that there's nothing stopping two people from exchanging cryptocurrency for other things in meatspace, including fiat currency or actual goods/services). It would also, again, open up the KYC wallets to a DoS; if even so much as a single transaction from an unregistered wallet is enough to feloniously taint a registered wallet, then a malicious actor with even a tiny amount of money to burn could do so pretty easily and turn all sorts of innocent people into felons overnight - rendering such a regulation useless.
Easily solved by sending illicitly obtained bitcoins to the government—which they can trivially ask you to do, or automate on the exchange that you're on.
Note: people can already deposit illicit funds into your regular bank account without your permission, and it causes no difficulties.
> They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation.
They're not confiscating them except from private citizens complying with the law, they're freezing those wallets and the bitcoins they contain out of the legal bitcoin system entirely. The government has no need to confiscate bitcoins when it can prevent their legal use without confiscation.
Which means I can easily launder my own money by claiming that "someone" sent frozen cryptocurrency to me "maliciously".
> The government has no need to confiscate bitcoins when it can prevent their legal use without confiscation.
The government has no more ability to prevent use of Bitcoins than it does to prevent use of cash or gold. Again, making something illegal doesn't prevent it from happening anyway.
BTC >> Monero >> BTC.
I take take <10 minutes for small amount and a few hours if you need to wait for multiple confirmations.
There is plenty of reliable exchange platform that do not require IDs or even creating an account because they do not deal with fiat.
Bitcoin is NOT anonymous by default if you don't know/care how to use it, but it is extremely easy to get full anonymity if you need it. It would also be very hard to prove that you own a BTC wallet in a court of law.
Regulation regimes will work on a whitelist system: only wallets that are "approved" are allowed. All other wallets ("anonymous") are preemptively frozen/tainted until they are approved. Result? No more private/anonymous wallets in the "legal" bitcoin system.
> There is plenty of reliable exchange platform that do not require IDs or even creating an account because they do not deal with fiat.
Sure, and regulators would make them illegal under pre-existing KYC laws.
There is no such thing as KYC for exchanges that don't deal with fiat. In some cases, you don't even need to create an account at all.
But even without that, they can still freeze your accounts. Just look at GoFundMe handled the donations intended for the Canadian truckers. This is the infrastructure for turn key totalitarianism.
My PayPal got permanently banned because I owed them money. The reason I owed them money was because I lost my job and became permanently disabled due to COVID, and I took advantage of the fact that they floated money for a little bit before the ACH posted to my checking account in order to still be able to eat.
Anyway, I just started the first job I’ve been able to work in two years with enough salary to pay the debt off with my first paycheck, but because I couldn’t for so long they have permanently closed my account and banned me from their service.
...
* The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done. When we can’t see the consequences of government conduct, the risks of government misconduct increases. A government that sends in riot troops to dispel a crowd will rightly pay a price if the police commit abuses. But the diffuse and anonymous nature of financial enforcement mean that sweeping repression can easily go undetected. It is the political equivalent of using drone strikes instead of boots on the ground.*
...
The fact that weaponizing the financial system against nonviolent protestors and their distant supporters was the government’s tool of first resort should worry anyone who understands the role of civil disobedience in democracy
Canada's democracy was seriously wounded by the people currently controlling its government. What's going to heal it?
Policing at every corner benefits a few and seriously treaten equal opportunities.
So I've came to some beginning of a conclusion. The idea would be to have a constitutional right to a grey area. The phylosophical rational would be that it's useful to human life, democracy and equal opportunities. Some extreme policing practice (like KYC, banking and digital policing, even adn in some cases) couldn't be used against you unless you're commiting a very (very) serious crime (5-10+ years of imprisonment for example). That would work with what ive seen lately, that would work against terrorism and money laudering and it would work for those canadian protesters as well. If police would want to catch a 2 year crime, they got to roll up their sleeves or wait for it to be become more severe. Im starting to like the idea a bit more (though its certainly quite a rough diamond if it works at all).
> There’s a lot of talk that the U.S. is moving toward a cashless economy…at least in the sense that people are using more and more “plastic” (credit and debit cards) for transactions and that cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular. One test of this theory is to look at currency in circulation. If this measure stops growing while the economy is growing, it would be an indication that other forms of money have become more important and are serving as substitutes for currency. The graph above tells a different story: Currency in circulation is consistently growing more than the economy is.
What's most peoples primary source of money? Jobs. How are these jobs paid? Usually as a wire transfer to some bank account. Custodial Money.
Sure, someone could go to the ATM every payday and then actually hide the money. But this comes with lots of serious drawbacks: physical cash can be damaged, stolen, even forgotten. The Blorkchain is only the digital form of the mattress; drives can get damaged, hacks can happen, keys can be forgotten. Plus, with its volatility, even if no catastrophe strikes, it may well be that the money lost a lot of its worth at the point when it's needed.
Then my money will be safe. Unless I piss off the United States Federal Government that is. But I don't plan on doing anything that would put me on OFAC list, so I should be fine.
The US is actually a tax haven for non-residents. They have made every country in the world (that matters, anyway) to comply with FATCA and OECD CRS, yet they themselves don't do OECD CRS.
You are also required to disclose any such US accounts to your european financial institutions that you work with.
This was some years ago though, but assuming not much has changed, I don't think it'd be too difficult.
So inflation and FX isn't really a concern for me, it's just a fact of life. If you're keeping a decent investment portfolio in Europe, it's almost certainly mostly in USD.
From the author's bio near the bottom of the article:
> Howard Anglin is a post-graduate researcher at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
I don't think this invalidates the argument in any way. I do think that it should raise a red flag however. Comparing the October crisis to the freezing of trucker funds partially raised by Nazis still seems a bit far-fetched to me after reading the article.
Any evidence for this claim?
I could confirm however that the movement including its leaders had ties with neo-Nazi groups and that Nazi flags were flown in the convoy.
Here's the Wikipedia article with more than enough sources to support those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest?wprov=sf...
Call me when he starts going after long-standing issues like civil forfeiture: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-administr...
as if cash can't be seized.
"For most of history, we have thought about deprivation of liberty in quite literal terms. Short of execution, which Canada hasn’t done in 60 years, locking someone up has been the ultimate state sanction."
To open with such a statement is, frankly, ridiculous coming from anyone in Canada in this day and age. No mention of the genocidal tendencies towards the indigenous populations? No? Jail is clearly the worst thing that can happen to anyone.
It is an open season on anyone who is member or supported People’s party. Totalitarians having tasted the pandemic power do not seem to want to relinquish it(surprise! lol)
In my area there are shops that do not accept cash. How is that even legal?!
Also, supermarkets have automated tills that only take cards. They also have ones that take cash - they all used to take cash - but the ratio is definitely swinging to card.
Not to mention all the ATMs that are disappearing.
So, this is a form of coercion.
If you put all that together with a govcoin, the scene is set for tracking of everything.
It's beginning to research how that cost should be minimised, and how it should be recouped, because if vendors start charging cash-handling fees, it's likely to be unfairly distributed.
You need to explain that to my hardware store.
When should their access to money be blocked?
"what-aboutism" is what we used to call equal protection under the law.
Every use of the financial stick to silence dissent and protest makes all the more cogent an argument for cryptocurrency, especially untraceable forms such as Monero. traditional Kissinger style flexes of soft power, while effective in the past as KYC turned the fiat world into a tool of state, only serve to galvanize actors in the crypto sphere.
the astute would argue that KYC ingress and egress control take some steps to extend the stately stick of monetary policy to where it could act similarly. freeze a protestors exchange account and youve accomplished nearly the same thing. However this merely stokes an arms race at the expense of a well funded industry of exchanges that are neither keen on enforcing arbitrary rules of a countries law, nor are they comfortable with the inevitable outcome of such enforcement: exodus and loss of trust. overzealous enforcement, or even the perception of such in this case could result in the collapse of the inroads to crypto altogether at a certain point, with industries simply dealing in crypto entirely as new means to earn $coin emerge at the state and local level, for example, companies that pay in $coin.
A google search shows the Netspend cards (cards for people without bank accounts).
Eyeroll.
So, yeah it roughly began in 2001 with the attack on civil liberties (Patriot-Act) and it will continue as there is no real opposition to it, the vast majority simply don't care, and after 30-40 years, one or two generations it will end.
[0]The prospect of arrest and trial weighed heavy even on the highest-ranking Party member. Following their arrest, aware of the fate that awaited them, many immediately asked to sign their ‘confession’. Others, unable to comprehend what was happening, remained loyal to the Party, believing that it would eventually realise its mistake and reinstate them. ‘They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.’ Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, 1945, (quoted by: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 1990).
[0]https://archive.org/details/danzig-baldaev-drawings-from-the...
I think people implying that this now gives the government the ability to put down protests by freezing everyone's accounts is misinformed. The Emergencies Act still requires any government action to be bound by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada -- everyone arrested is getting their day in court, those who are not directly involved in the occupation will eventually get access to their funds again, I'm sure. It also require co-operation from different levels of government. It gives the government extra powers to deal with unprecedented circumstances which is exactly what has been happening in Canada.
It was a very targeted response and the most infuriatingly peaceful ones I've seen. Everyone involved in this occupation was given more opportunities to leave than I've seen given to actual, legal protestors in similar demonstrations. The key story seems to be that there was no intention to ever disperse and leave. And the folks organizing this occupation were encouraging more people to stay and were accepting funding to help ensure they could stay.
Is getting your account frozen devastating? Absolutely. No question. Was it the right response for the government to freeze the accounts of people supporting this occupation? Absolutely. Violence wasn't going to solve this and would incite more violence. Most people who donated a few bucks to their fundraising drives will get a shock and life will go back to normal. It's the people who funded this occupation that the authorities are after and it will come to light soon I'm sure.
Cash hasn't gone anywhere yet either. Merchants in Canada are still legally required to accept it and ought to -- I can agree with that.
But hey no one wants to let the complexities of reality get in the way of good story of assholes playing the victim card.
Of course it was an executive overreach. I have seen no evidence of violence and non-disruptive protests do not get results.
I grew up in the 80s, in Europe. The only thing the government knew of me was that I existed and which school I attended, and absolutely nothing else. There were no recording devices anywhere. My actions, my communication, my spending, all private. I was still a kid though. My dad worked and got cash in hand. It was also common to obscure parts of your income that way, but only "party money", as you don't want to overdo this.
Society worked just fine, just to make the point that this supposed chaos of having pretty much no surveillance or data at all, did not lead to an abundance of crime, terrorism, or other issues conveniently folded under "national security". Which just shows that justifications for surveillance really are razor thin. Same for their effectiveness in actual stopping all that bad stuff.
We all know what happened next, the rise of computing in business and government, and 9/11 as a perfect excuse to do the largest data grab ever, and to never ever dial that back.
Then social networks and smartphones happened and anything ever is recorded, in the hands of private businesses, with back doors to the government. From knowing zero to knowing everything, it didn't take long.
Same for finance. Where everybody freely transacted in a cash-based society, now it raises suspicion. You can't just withdraw a lot of cash, send an amount to a friend, cross a border or even pay with big bills. There's KYC and capital controls, you don't transact with privacy, are you nuts? The world would fall apart.
We've all silently went along with it, because we're all good people and only criminals are affected by this. Furthermore, we live in stable democracies under the rule of law.
Canada broke this expectation severely. Under the disguise of an "emergency law" they seized assets, redistributed them, forced private businesses to give up personal data, freeze bank accounts and block credit cards. Supposedly, even for second-hand interactions with protesters, such as donating to them. And shockingly, they do all of this with a straight face.
I don't care how you feel about the protest itself. If it is indeed an illegal protest, you arrest the protestor, tell them which law they broke, and put them through the legal process. Which includes rights like the right to a defense, clear claims, a process by jury (or judge), and then a fine or prison time, based on earlier precedents and the book of law.
You don't go and digitally "cancel" citizens without any form of process. If you believe this is warranted, flip the script and apply this arbitrary power to a protest that you do agree with. Say a right-wing government is in power, and there's new BLM protests. Would you be OK with the government tracking every protesters, arbitrarily requesting private data from private businesses you interacted with, and then financially wipe you out without any process at all?
After this historical fly-by, we've learned that surveillance is additive. It never gets dialed back. We also learned that your private data is in no way private, also not when interacting with private businesses or your peers. We've learned that if technology allows for more surveillance it will be used and it will be abused.
Digital level abuse is a sight to behold. A cop doesn't need to find you and carry you to jail and go through this annoying delicate process. No, a politician pushes a button and thousands of you will be dysfunctional. This thought is supposed to scare you, a lot.
All this while, your personal freedom and privacy is shrinking. Rapidly.
And we're not done yet. We're now entering the territory of what formerly would be considered conspiracy theories. I used to laugh at the following, but not anymore.
There's crypto, which can be considered private, unregulated money. Digital money is inevitable so the government is waking up to the idea of digital (crypto) money issued by central banks.
This version would not be anonymous, hence this marks the death of cash and transaction privacy. Everything you will ever transact from here on out is known. And can be blocked from a single point, or subject to approval.
It also marks the death of private commercial banks. The central bank issues the currency as well as holds your "wallet".
With this, some serious monetary policy can begin. Because crypto is programmable and monetary policy is running out of instruments, such is the health of our financial system.
Are you hoarding too much money? Let me turn that dial of interest rate to negative 20%. Low consumer demand? Here's 100 new money for every citizen. Major environmental problems? Let me block the buying of oversized televisions directly from your wallet.
Far-fetched? I don't think so. Think back of the 80s, the starting point. Think it won't happen? Think Canada.
Let me remind you of the Panama papers. Did this huge group of people have their assets seized? Do any jail time? No. The big fish are cleared. All of this is for idiots like you and me.
Like this: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us... ?
You can agree or disagree as much as you want with the current situation, but at some point, there has to be ways for a society to enforce its laws.
Ideally you want to be in a society that define laws collaboratively, where you have a say in them, with a vote for example, and where the laws are applied fairly to everyone, without preferential treatment or specific targeting. And you'd want a process for people to asses and review if the law needs to be enforce in a particular case or not and what that looks like.
But you still need a way to enforce them somehow.
Ok, so let's say a group of people is indeed doing something that isn't right by the laws, and let's accept for arguments sake that you agree with that.
Now how do you enforce the laws on that case?
You could tear gas them, hit them with batons, point guns at them, handcuff them, and physically force them to comply, and lock them up if needed.
Or you can use softer methods, like temporarily freeze their accounts and funds, starving them of resource until they comply.
Yes, both methods are serious, they're meant to force you to follow the laws. So I agree that both are a big deal, but between the two, I think the latter is much better overall, and a lot more civil in my opinion.
Reminds me of this exchange in Office Space:
Bob 1: We can’t actually find a record of [Milton] being a current employee here.
Bob 2: I looked into it more deeply, and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago, and no one ever told him about it. But, through some kind of glitch in the payroll department he still gets a paycheck.
Bob 1: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Boss: So, Milton has been let go?
Bob 1: Well, just a second there professor, we fixed the glitch. So he won’t be receiving a pay check anymore, so it’ll just work itself out naturally.
Bob 2: We always like to avoid confrontation whenever possible. The problem is solved from your end.
The current threat of Trump-inspired fascism worldwide. Of which the "protests" in Canada are but one facet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsbank#Nazi_period
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Finance_(Soviet_Un...
[3] http://www.commartrecovery.org/docs/EnglishAnselmiReport.pdf
Cash is important not only because (as others have said) it is a mature, near perfect technology that provides fluidity, anonymity etc. It's important because it's a distributable store of highly resilient wealth.
Physical cash is one of the greatest defences a society has against total civil disintegration - the kind of "worst fears" we are all terrified of when the pandemic or Capitol riots were looming. People in the streets with guns killing each other over a loaf of bread. It's the sort of thing we worry EMP attacks, nuclear war, overnight hyper-inflation would bring. When chaos comes it can come very quick.
One of the surest and fastest routes to a totally precarious civilisation is to create a "cashless society" than runs on these highly unstable and very new-fangled things we call computers (we've had them "properly" for about 20 or 30 years).
Imagine that there is no physical cash at all. Cash acts as a buffer, like power-supply smoothing capacitors. One day the systems all switch off (a very likely scenario (some time - we don't know when) by all cyber-threat accounts). Modern people, within one or two generations, are losing the ability to value or barter things, or do simple mental arithmetic in many cases. That level of dependency is catastrophic. Fortunately we still teach how to add up money and caculate change at schools.
When no-one can buy food, and no-one can fuel vehicles because the "system is down", watch it all descend into madness within 24 hours. And no, the police/national-guard won't help. They'll all be shitting themselves too and worrying about their families, getting paid.
Ayn Rand (not someone I am very fond of) made at least a few rather intelligent philosophical observations, one of which is that (I paraphrase) "money is a peace-keeping instrument". Cash gives a society it's own form of distributed "power" which allows a momentum of local exchange and flexibility. There only needs to be a few tens of millions in circulation. Right now most folk have a few hundred bucks at home or on their person. Without it your fallback is, within days, only people who have stores of gold, medicines and weapons being fucntional. That might be great for "preppy" survivalist types, but it's not a world I'd like to live in.
Any government that eliminates physical cash entirely would be clinically insane and playing a very, very dangerous game. Given all the cyber-threats movement toward a "cashless society" is utterly premature from a safety perspective, regardless any social politics.
The author could have chosen to stand in solidarity with those actually suffering, but instead clutches pearls over a theoretical wrong done to a group who never needed nor deserved that concern in the first place.