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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient.

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.

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> Incorrect, the battle is partly won...

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.

We don't need "everyone" to use cash for "everything", just some people to use cash for some transactions.

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.

The problem as stated by the topic is that those who are cashless (which is a vast & growing amount of people) are subject to having their digital assets frozen on a moment notice.

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.

As stated in [1], we need to fight this battle on both fronts: cash-equivalents and cashless-regulation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435574

Unless it actually ends up costing the merchant more money because they need to store and transport large amounts of cash and doing that isn't free.

Some merchants have influence over both revenue and cost. Some merchants understand the economic value of transaction data ("data about money is more valuable than money") and prefer to utilize their transaction data directly, instead of blindly surrendering it to random observers in the payment supply chain. Some customers, when given a choice, prefer those merchants.

This is simply not true. Not only is cashless not at all more convenient than cash for minor purchases, and not only are 10% of the US population unbanked, but in addition the access of third parties to purchase records just alarms people.

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.

I pay with my credit card even for <$1 purchases. It is much more convenient than pulling out a dollar bill and waiting to get change in coins (which I despise carrying).

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?

To paraphrase the message you're replying to:

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.

Not sure I understand. Do you mean from the point of view of the merchant?

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.

The only thing they could mean is tax evasion. Otherwise the built-in transaction history make credit cards far, far more convenient than cash for record keeping.

Modern point of sale systems generate a transaction history for accounting, including cash transactions.

In the asymmetric centralised case of a reasonably established business accepting payments from thousands of people (and barely, if ever, issuing payments in the other direction) it's not. It's about the same, barring this hyperbolic stuff about "despising" coins.

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.

I'm not sure I quite understand, but doesn't the bureacratic structure of cashless payments also provide the benefit of automatically documenting all your transactions for you so that you don't have to keep track of them manually?

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.

Meh. I don't really have a reply for this because we just obviously have really different worldviews so it's not going to really work.

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.

Fair enough. I acknowledge people have different viewpoints on this issue.

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 has not been able to convince me of the benefits either.

…

> 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?

Not sure what you mean, but yes I'm 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.

70 years after plastic was invented, people are seriously been proud and think of themselves as progressive and tech savvy because they use plastic.

The thought has not occurred to me even once. It is purely a matter of convenience.

If the only benefit of cash is dealing with cavemerchants, that's covered by keeping some money around for such cases. It's not something you'd normally do so the thought is perfectly congruent.

The only real advantage to cash is avoiding government overreach. It is most definitely not convenient in any way

You don't seem to see the difference in language that you're subtly slipping in without realising. It's like a form of newspeak.

"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.

> With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds

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.

> 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.

Those are pre/post-transaction risks, not settlement risks.

Cashless systems also have their own pre/post-transaction risks.

You are a very tech savvy, generous and hygienic person.

Part of that "more convenience" is that people think it is all benefit and no cost. If a lot of people come to the conclusion that cashlessness is risky due to the easy with which the powers that be can flip a switch and steal it from them, the cost/benefit analysis changes. That is not to say everyone everywhere will suddenly and uniformly hate it. It just changes. The more people get hit by capricious actions, the more people will find their cost/benefits analysis changing.

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.

> 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.

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.

> convenience always wins

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.

> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch

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.

it kind of depends.

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.)

That pretty much makes no sense as an analogy. People opposed to speed cameras aren't advocating for spending more time and effort to write tickets, they're advocating for not getting tickets.

> 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.

Automated surveillance enforcement tends to bring the discrepancy between the law and the norms of behavior to light. The state prefers to forgo enforcement and keep the law rather than keep the enforcement and alter the law to reflect norms.

Really? You can't imagine a large populist movement rejecting a newly developed technology based on suspicions about some kind of sinister agenda?

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. As a result most are unlikely to care very much. They'll think of those that do care as crackpots.

Ah yes, the fallacy of quantitative supremacy and human fungibility, that illusory phase of statistics kindergarten. Imagine a fictional universe where Steve Jobs was cancelled in his early career. "But it was only one person". How many human lives would have been impacted if Steve Jobs had been deleted from technology history? 2021 smartphone adoption is north of 3 billion humans.

> 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?

Ah yes, the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.

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.

> claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned.

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.

> the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.

According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the general public is using more cash, not cashless.

Are cashless advocates in an HN bubble?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

I don't know, but Americans almost certainly are, US payment systems and attitudes to them are generally far behind other countries.

A bit awkward for cashless narratives that "behind" Americans are leading the world reserve currency, where cash use is increasing. Is there public data on the decline of cash outside America?

But that's exactly the point people are making in this thread: people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

> people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

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 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...

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...

It's all fun and games until you get a new hat and glasses and cease to exist.

Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo? It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.

We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

You mean contactless payment which has been available outside the USA for over a decade, including Android wallet from 2011? Yes the future is unevenly distributed, but when it comes to banking and other payment infrastructure the "developed" country where it is least present is the USA

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking.

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.

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter.

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 to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state

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.

This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic.

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.

Firstly, imho the UK reduced it self from a global empire to just the one island though this political funny business. You'd think someone in the right spot would eventually have enough of it.

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.

The decline of the British Empire is definitely an interesting subject, especially as its territorial peak came relatively close to its precipitous decline. While I don't think the notion of being a former superpower really defines contemporary British politics in the way many outside commentators assume it does, the speed which that decline happened definitely had a marked effect on how our political history played out in the 20th century.

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.

Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance.

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.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.

Anything involving authorization introduces the possibility of denial.

> Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.

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.

> endure it for quite a few years at least

Or longer, if life extension research is successful..

Governments can do the right thing most of the time but things should be designed for the worse case.

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.

>Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it,

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.

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking.

Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!

> But convenience always wins.

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.

You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?

> You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it.

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

interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.

Would be good to quantify the cash decline, if any, outside the US.

Like others, I incorrectly assumed US was using less cash.

Cash is winning in the world reserve currency, and the cashless doth protest..

What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments.

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!

An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones.

N=1.

> 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.

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.

Fun fact : a least one city in the country has a large percentage of bar being cash only. ( New Orleans )

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.

Yeah. Plus 2 states in one country is definitely not 'partly won"

There are a dozen EU countries whose population is smaller than the cash-mandatory population of New York City (not state).

The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future.

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 can be more dominant. I pay most of my stuff cashless, but really, really love cash. I would always recommend to keep some on you for emergencies and as we have seen that government is quick to freeze accounts, it seems like a very good idea.

> the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash

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.

Whole Foods created a dedicated checkout lane for cash during the pandemic, in some stores surrounded by a 6-foot plexiglass walls. It was usually the fastest line. Now they are back to all registers accepting cash.

> 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.

For a lot of businesses, the overhead that comes with handling cash isn't worth it. Especially smaller businesses that would really rather not deal with the risk of being robbed or having a staffer mugged for the nightly drop.

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.

Businesses whose existence is contingent on cost management may find themselves replaced by those that can manage both top line (demand, revenue, culture, brand) and bottom line. Especially IF the economy continues to fragment into online escapism for the poor and 3D experiences for those with discretionary spending, aka "inequality".

Yeah. I only saw that sign a couple times during the early COVID days and just payed with cash to see what happened and they took it without questions.

That's because you were being an asshole to a retail worker, who doesn't want to get into it with you and maybe get assaulted about company policy.

You foisted a potential risk onto someone without power. Don't do that.

No one here knows either of the parties in that transaction, perhaps avoid projecting?

There are companies which empower workers to make decisions.

My experience with this no-cash signs was only on owner operated shops. Maybe I was being an asshole, and they were being assholes to illegal immigrants that can't have bank accounts, and maybe we are all assholes but I really don't care. What I do care is about being able to buy stuff anonymously and without banks or the government getting in-between me or my friends and our food.

Any place big enough to afford having retail employees that I've been to in SF was always still taking cash.

But it's really hard to get PAID any serious amount of money in cash, and it's increasingly hard to withdraw or travel with cash. Just because you can still buy groceries for awhile doesn't mean you can function for any length of time if the government and the cashless system is united in unbanking you.

> Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.

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...

Only if the restaurant takes payment after the meal. If they require payment before (like at McDonald’s), it isn’t considered a debt.

I’ve been in DMVs (dept. of motor vehicles - a government office) that don’t accept cash. Check or charge only.

>Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.

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

Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.

Also as noted in the article, things like electricity, internet and other utility cannot be paid in cash either here.

US Postal Service money orders can be purchased with cash and used the same way as a certified check. This works for utility payments. Mobile phone companies take cash as payments, in both their dedicated retail stores and a large network of affiliated airtime merchants. In some countries, there's a mini-economy for the trade of airtime minutes within cellphone networks, based on physical stores that can convert cash->minutes. M-Pesa was one of the earlier success stories, unifying payments and digital identity, but it was anchored in real-world ingress points for cash.

Cash & digital can be complementary.

On the topic of convenience: utility companies love prepayments.

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.

Also as noted in the article, things like electricity, internet and other utility cannot be paid in cash either here.

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.

> Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses.

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.

Sending a check in the mail is not the same as having a digital currency. You can add cash to the bank account and write the check.

You still need to have a bank account to do that, and bank accounts are one of the first things law enforcement freezes when they want to take away people's assets. Objecting that the deposits you made into the bank account were cash won't help much at that point.

You don't need a bank account to send a money order. You just need to visit a post office with cash.

The post I responded to said "check", not "money order".

The next step will be somebody who is in "digital jail" and can't pay taxes so ends up guilty of tax evasion too.

Inability to pay taxes is not tax evasion, of either of the recognized types in the US (evasion of assessment, i.e., concealment of facts that would indicate tax is due, or evasion of payment, i.e., concealment of or movement out of reach of taxing authorities of funds with which taxes that are due could be paid.)

Presumably, the US government still accepts payment of taxes in cash, so that cash-based businesses that can't get a bank account can still pay. Perhaps the situation could arise in other countries though.

> Presumably, the US government still accepts payment of taxes in cash,

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...

Your link only pertains to one way the IRS takes cash payments. They also take cash payments at Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs). You don't have to pay cash at a private corporation, you can go into an IRS office and pay cash.

https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

https://www.irs.gov/payments/what-to-expect-when-you-pay-cas...

In theory, sure.

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.

> Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.

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.

> Scottish bank notes are not legal tender

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).

http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow10.htm

Thank you and everyone else for the answers, it's quite interesting.

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

Paying taxes in cash is almost the most important core thing. It's utter violation of basic concepts of fiat currency for that not to be possible. The whole point of cash is that it is legal tender, and it has to be acceptable for taxes. Any country that violates this is really denying the basic concept of cash.

Exactly, as we see from the history of fiat currency, where acceptance for taxes was initially a monopoly given only to the fiat currency.

rather, denying the basic concept of fiat currency

Cash is just the physical representation of a fiat currency. Fiat currencies exist independently of cash.

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.

My cash says, "Legal Tender For All Debts Public and Private."

> Can you pay taxes in cash?

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.

In the US, public agencies are typically required to accept cash in any denomination. This occasionally makes the national media when a disgruntled citizen decides to pay their substantial tax or fee in bucketloads of pennies ($0.01). Private organizations, however, are not required to do so.[0]

[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

I’ve been in a DMV that didn’t accept cash.

The IRS will accept cash.[1] For small payments, they have an outsourced setup with Dollar General, Family Dollar, CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Pilot Travel Centers, 7-Eleven, Speedway, Kum & Go, Royal Farms, Go Mart, and Kwik Trip to accept payments up to US$500. There's a US$1.50 fee. So people who have no bank account and not to pay can pay easily. For bigger payments, cash payments are accepted at an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center, after making an appointment 30 to 60 days in advance.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

well.

If money is speech, does it mean cash is protected by the 1A?

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