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Comment by vertis | Hacker News Reader

> Around 10 million people, or one in five adults, would struggle to manage in a society without cash, a report from the Royal Society of Arts commissioned by cash machine network Link found.

At least they didn't bury who was paying for the study.

Going completely cashless is troubling for many reasons. I almost never have cash that I can give to beggers and buskers now (the later sometimes have little tap to pay machines).

Given that there are plenty of people that are unbanked, it's going to be problematic to be 100%.

These are not insurmountable problems, but you have to bake in solutions. Rights to have accounts even if you don't have a fixed address (etc).

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I'm not sure how/if Brexit has changed that in UK, but in EU there is indeed a legal right to have a basic bank account for everyone - a bank can't refuse opening a basic bank account just because they're e.g. homeless or a convict or whatever - and there has been a push for quite some time to reduce the number of "unbanked" people. From what I see locally, the very very poor people such as permanently unemployed rural alcoholics "living off the land" all do have bank accounts as that's the way they're getting state support payments.

The same thing still exists in the UK, the banks have to offer a basic account to anybody.

It's actually the opposite in the UK.

Banks are required to deny bank accounts to people who are disqualified from banking, and also deny them from being added as signatories on shared accounts.

This is why cashless in the UK would be more harmful than in countries where everyone is allowed banking as a right. In the UK, access to banking is a government-controlled privilege, even though most people take it for granted and think that everyone can have it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/home-office-...

Similar checks are already normal in the EU; national identity card systems, a population registry etc already prevent non-residents from opening bank accounts.

Just search "open bank account Germany" or similar, and you'll see you need proof of residence.

The checks tend to be done once by the government, rather than 10 times by 10 private businesses.

A penniless local citizen who is homeless (thus no residence address) has the right to a basic bank account and no issues with that - all the searches for "open bank account Germany" are obviously intended (just because it's in English and not German) for the special case of immigrants who don't necessarily have a right to live, work and bank there. The above discussion was about unbanked Britons - that's an entirely different discussion, the conditions, arguments and legal issues of poor/marginalized/homeless/addicted/etc people are completely different than the same aspects for immigrants without proper immigration documents, mixing both these groups together makes for a muddied conversation that can't come to any conclusion since what applies to one may be entirely opposite for the other.

The home office's checks there were quietly discontinued a short while after they were rolled out - a short while after the Windrush scandal broke. Regardless, identifying bank accounts possessed by illegal immigrants is probably a use case about as legitimate as anything about controlling immigration is.

(I tend to think the home office is terrible and inhumane and that in general immigration policies are terrible and inhumane, but the above is in the context of those)

Regardless, there is no such thing as people "disqualified from banking". The CMA9 banks (who are required to offer basic bank accounts) have fairly limited leeway to decline accounts to someone (though having defrauded that particular bank is one valid reason why)

If you go into London now, so many homeless people have those card readers as people are just using their cards or mobile pay. Definitely see the change after the pandemic where they advertised cash in supermarkets to be the spreader of the virus.

In Brazil, with a huge informal economy, you can now find all sorts of small street vendors with a card reader. Also the government has successfully rolled out Pix less than 2yrs ago, with now 50% of the population as registered users. Pix is the smartphone payment protocol which has basically nuked cash transactions countrywide, or at least where mobile networks work.

So, at least in Brazil, card readers are already on the way out for informal workers, and even some SMBs, and Pix with its QR codes and phone numbers are in.

This process has started in Puerto Rico, too. People still mostly use cash, but almost every vendor these days has ATH-Movil, a phone-based payment system through your bank.

I've heard the same with China and WeChat Pay even pre pandemic. This is just from second hand anecdotes though so take it with a grain of salt.

Can confirm. Beggars and small street paddlers in China all just have their WeChat Pay QR code printed and laminated or you can scan their phone. Hell, summer of 2018 when I was in Hong Kong there was an American tourist(? granted, he did look like one) that was begging with his QR code printed so he could "fly back home".

> the later sometimes have little tap to pay machines

Its interesting how these have started to crop up more and more recently as cash has declined, for instance my local Gurdwara (Sikh temple) which traditionally takes donations in cash has a little card machine you tap on as you go in.

I wonder if when we get to a point where homeless people get them too, if people will trust them enough to do carded donations.

In Sweden they sometimes do it with a phone, as you can Swish to pay directly to phone numbers. I'm not sure how they register with a bank and their ID though, maybe it's not theirs or they share it.

Nevertheless, they really shouldn't exist. There should be enough housing and emergency provision to help people in emergencies, and they need to crack down hard on the foreigners that come and use it as a way of sending money back - e.g. https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/20/gang-of-beggars-pictured-gett...

I really wish more would have a scannable QR code for Venmo/Paypal. More outreach needs to be done in this regard to educate. Both issue debit cards.

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