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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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> I've never heard of any bank offering that service.

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.

Can't you make deposits directly on the ATM? Where I live, the ATM takes your bills, counts them, and directly deposits them in the account you choose.

No need to interact with any of those pesky humans.

Well, yes, but the GP comment was specifically saying that they had "never heard of any bank" offering the service of taking cash and depositing it into a provided account, which is weird because that is very much a standard service that brick-and-mortar banks provide.

Either the other user was uninformed or my sarcasm detector is broken today.

> he GP comment was specifically saying that they had "never heard of any bank" offering the service of taking cash and depositing it into a provided account

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.

You can do so online (which I do for many monthly bills). But that doesn't really solve any perceived problems about maintaining anonymity associated with making cash payments buth neither does anything going through a bank.

In Argentina there's a service named "Pago Mis Cuentas" (Pay My Bills). You can add all your services (gas, electricity, cable, internet, taxes, etc).

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?

It's not, because this conversation is specifically about how much worse it would be to pay all your bills in cash, while you seem to be talking about a digital payment.

Yes, because of this statement in the parent:

> 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.

It sounds like you're talking about taking cash to your bank and depositing it into your own bank account, which of course you can do. The original commenter was talking about taking cash to your bank and somehow very quickly distributing it to everyone you owe money to this month.

> The original commenter was talking about taking cash to your bank and somehow very quickly distributing it to everyone you owe money to this month.

Exactly.

Use auto bill pay?

The original commenter is talking about a solution which would be vulnerable to the exact sort of "digital jail" being referenced in the article. They've added a central authority to their decentralized solution, in the form of the absolute classic way banks are used against people - by freezing accounts and deposits etc.

Nah, because you can just go to any money transmitter. Which is actually just anyone, if we didn't scare people off it by making payments this like, scary bureaucratic taxy AML'y thing.

I have online banking on my phone, if you wanna give me cash to send it to someone, no problem, why not.

I use autopay for all of my monthly bills.

> this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US)

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.

There’s nothing that makes it inherently impossible to put bills this way in cash, though.

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.

I'm in the US and have had checking accounts in three credit unions and five banks and they all offered this service. They don't send cash if that's what you have in mind, but they do send checks. They'll send a check to anyone given a name and address, and if I provide an account number, for many businesses they'll also receive a billing amount and pay it each month automatically.

Every bank has been doing this since for at least 30 years. Companies register. It is simple and easy.

Telephone banking used this before internet banking.

Ooooh, I understand now, and I do apologize for misreading your comment.

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.

>No one is claiming that cash is always inconvenient. Just that for many people in many situations, it is.

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.

Sure, if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox, this is an unsolvable problem. Got me.

I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.

We don't have high streets here. All my adjacent banks are in the middle of a parking lot not near anything else I'd want to interact with during my precious Saturday except maybe the grocery store. Sure that's a bad design and I'd prefer to live near UK high streets but that's beyond my control here.

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.

> if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox

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.

> If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper.

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.

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