The whole thing reminds me of the Google tracking article posted on here earlier.
I don't want you to know my name, and I don't want anyone other than us to know about this interaction.
Simply - no. No further reason required.
Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen. If all your money and payment ability is digital and controlled by a central authority, your ability to transact can be turned off with the flip of a switch. And in the complex world we live in, that can literally mean that your ability to keep eating can be digitally switched off at almost no cost to your attacker. Is that something that can be continued? Maybe not, but the attacker could drag out the issue in a bureaucratic and legal mess for long enough for you to fall into homelessness and despair if they're motivated enough to destroy you.
Cash has the nice property that it enables permissionless economic transaction. We can exchange cash peer to peer without anyone's explicit or implicit consent. And being private is also nice because it gives the people you transact with some protection from potentially aiding some kind of blacklisted individual. I wonder if people like Harriet Tubman and the people that aided her would have been able to do what they did if their money could have been turned off due to their illegal actions helping slaves escape.
Permissionless and peer to peer cash is a critical feature of a free society that we should be very fearful of losing.
People trying to push an agenda (not you) love to create a sense of inevitability. Don't believe it.
Lots of people have no access to digital payments, and objectively, how are they more convenient than cash? Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?
Yes. I get paid on my account like everybody else in this country and then I can immediately use it at any merchant in the country by using a credit card. No need to run to ATMs (where are they even and if it is not my banks I get charged extra), no need to figure out change etc.
I don't even carry a wallet anymore because I can just pay with my phone, so no need for a physical card.
Good lord yes. Have you not ever been stuck behind someone struggling to count out exact change? Cash is a huge time wasting pain in the ass.
But it's also an important backup to the frailty of digital money.
For a few seconds? I just don't see it. The whole notion is bizarre, a non-problem. Why is it so important to people to exaggerate it?
I personally see cryptocurrency as something akin to second amendment rights. You hold and support it as a citizen's check and balance to make government abuse of people harder to implement.
This is a key point that needs to be emphasized.
For everyone posting about not using cash, consider the thought experiment of how your day/week/month will go if all your non-cash payment mechanisms are shut down.
I'd suggest keeping enough cash to live for however many months gives you peace of mind that you can sort out the problems in the worst case.
Banks can and do freeze your access, sometimes for a reason but often due to glitches but either way you're locked out and it'll take a while.
I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.
In a cashless society, that option is completely off the table, and you will be forced to rely on the goodwill of others to buy things for you, and hope they don't also get turned off by sin of aiding you.
I feel like so many people seem to work within this rigid framework of like, "this is what some people do so it's the only way".
You see it all the time on here. e.g. "cryptocurrencies are easily traceable because exchanges". Ok, so hi, I'm me, I'll sell you a bitcoin.
Trivially disproved.
That's not what the term cashless society is usually used to convey though. If you really wanted, you could've been operating largely cashless ever since credit cards became widely accepted (1970s?). But even today (at least in the USA) you can still withdraw your whole paycheck in cash and pay everything that way, if you wanted to. So we're fortunately not a cashless society at all.
I still keep my money at a bank, no matter if I pay with my card or if I use the ~100$ cash I have in my wallet.
You probably wouldn't say that I have a "massive" amount of clothes because I have enough for a couple of weeks without washing them.
I see having about the same in cash as being fairly normal.
Like you are not really better of in the long term just because you have some cash in your wallet. You would need to keep all your money as cash, to have a systematic advantage.
If you're digitally blacklisted, and can't send or receive money, then the only option you have is hope that someone in your life is willing to risk helping you directly by buying you things with no guarantee you'll ever be able to pay them back.
This means cash cannot be refused for a service/product that has already been provided. Businesses are still free to be picky (eg, no cash, or no coins, or no $100 bills, etc) if they haven't actually provided the service yet.
So for example at a cashless counter serve restaurant that requires me to pay before getting my food, they can indeed refuse to take cash.
But at a place that gives you your food first and then the bill, they have to accept cash. They have no legal recourse if you give them cash and they don't want it.
Yeah, erm. I think you might need to revise your understanding.
Three things for you to contemplate:
1) Credit/debit cards are not "legal tender", a card transaction is not an exchange of "legal tender" and yet it is a perfectly valid means of payment.
2) "legal tender" relates to payments on or to the order of the government (i.e. taxes, fines etc.). The government is the only entity that is required to accept your cash as tender to pay the debt. Private businesses and private individuals can decide of their own free will as to whether or not they wish to accept cash.
3) The *ONLY* time "legal tender" applies to private transactions is if someone sues you for non-payment and you pay *INTO COURT* the value of the debt in cash (the "INTO COURT" bit being the important bit, i.e. it brings us back to (2) you are paying on the order of the court, a public-sector body, which is required to accept "legal tender").The FED good enough for you ? ;-)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
As I said. Its valid for private debts IF you decide to let it get to a point where you are forced to pay it INTO COURT. Otherwise the business is free to do what they like.
> Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all U.S. money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/04/18/what-is-...
A way to think about this is that while the constitution recognizes freedom of speech, signing an NDA results in the exchanges of one's right to disclose certain information in exchange for the privileges and benefits of employment.
The law typically allows you to charge a penalty for accepting cash - everyone recognizes handling large amounts of cash incurs issues.
With all that said, none of what you've stated proves that the law requires all debts to be accepted in cash in every case regardless of circumstances. What you've offered so far is an asserted reading of the text without any arguments backing up the claim.
Yes. I think this is ultimately the crux of the matter, i.e. the moment that reasonable alternative(s) have been offered then the whole "cash is legal tender" thing (basically) goes out the window.
There was an interesting ruling in Europe[1] in relation to Euro cash where it was even ruled that European government bodies are not obliged to accept cash. The ruling basically said exactly what @Dracopheonix pointed out:
"Limitations on payments in notes and coins, established by Member States for public reasons, are not incompatible with the status of legal tender of euro banknotes and coins, provided that other lawful means for the settlement of monetary debts are available"
[1] https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/european-court-justice-deli...
So I offer up the money and they say hey we only take cards here and I say well I only give cash. Your theory is what - I would be arrested, it would go to court and the court would say pay the debt at which point I can pay in cash and the restaurant can't do anything about it because at that point it is a debt and not before?
Also, cops don't have to arrest you on the restaurant's say so, the cops I know would be all take the damn cash and don't bother me.
So to reiterate the parent poster's point:
If you eat at a restaurant and then they bring you the check, they have to accept the money because that is a private debt and money is legal tender for all private debts.
If they take your order and say pay with a credit card please then they are free to do so, if you do not have a card you don't eat.
There is of course the edge case where the business makes quite clear you need to pay with a card to eat there (probably by having prominent signs saying so) and then they ask you to pay after eating and you say I only pay with cash, in which case yes I think the cops might agree to arrest you and in which case it will have to go all the way to court to get to where you can pay with cash.
And then there is the even edgier case where you say oh, damn, somebody stole my credit card but I have cash here. You think the restaurant is really going to call the police and the police are really going to arrest the person?
In short if a restaurant gives you food and you eat it they better have a way to accept cash or to accept returns of an unsanitary nature.
Its simple.
You chose to enter that restaurant, nobody forced you to go there.
That restaurant is perfectly entitled to set its own conditions that apply to its service to you (within reason, of course).
Hence that restaurant is perfectly entitled to say on its menu or signage or website or orally "sure we'll feed you, but we don't take cash, only cards".
If you don't like that condition, you are free to get up and leave before ordering. Just like you are free to get up before ordering if you don't like the menu, the prices or that noisy kid on the next-door table.
If you proceed to order and eat, then you have entered into a 'contract'.
The restaurant has offered you an alternative means of payment which you have accepted by proceeding to eat. Card payment was made a condition of contract.
Wow. I think a lot of the people commenting in this thread don't have any familiarity with cops or service workers, like at all, if they honestly think cops will be called or that said cops will start making arrests. Nobody will call cops over this and if they did, the cops would laugh or be annoyed or just tell the clerk to just take the cash so the cops can move on to a more pressing service call. Just put yourself in their shoes and this will be obvious.
From experience here on planet earth they will be mildly annoyed and sigh and move on.
Despite that this displeases the networks, businesses are allowed to elect to only accept a subset of card categories (i.e. they may decide they accept Debit Mastercard only, not Mastercard Credit or business cards). That said, honor all card rules _within_ a given category have been found enforcible (including that e.g. a merchant can't decide they accept Visa Debit, Debit Mastercard and Mastercard Credit but not Visa Credit - Visa are allowed to say "If you accept Visa Debit and Mastercard Credit, you must also accept Visa Credit")
Processors/Terminal providers will add their own margin on top of these, of course (interchange fees are entirely remitted to the card isssuer)
Then they are quite possibly operating with a false economy somewhere, due to the costs associated with cash handling.
Of course it helps to be in a country where card fees are capped.
> tracking
Though I wonder: The serial numbers on US cash look quite machine-readable. It seems like banks could trace the bills you take from the cash machine and the bills the restaurant deposits, and connect dots - not perfectly, but form a pretty good idea, especially using patterns over time.
Do you have any idea of the security measures that go into creating cash?! It's anything but easy to create cash that's hard to counterfeit.
Leave all your cards at home. Make it their problem. This is what I do.
I used to be the same way as you, but cards became more convenient so I slowly moved away.. I now have a cash supply.
So terrible. I don't see that as suppression of speech though.
(As I said elsewhere - take note that there is no evidence that any donors had their accounts frozen. One person was reported by a local politician to have had her accounts frozen, but when a list of donors was leaked later, no matching name was found, and no other information about that case has been shown. AFAICT, and I've looked, there is no decent evidence that any donors had their accounts frozen. It's just a right wing talking point.
The donated funds were frozen, temporarily, while the border blockage and other illegal protest activities were cleared up. But donors? Nope. )
No - the government does (should) not have the authority in any normal democracy to arbitrarily freeze the finances of those who have not committed any crimes, especially those that have not been proven in court or whereupon there isn't any threat of impending violence.
The situation is obviously politicized, as there are perennially 'protest' activities in every nation which may technically 'criminal'.
The are innumerable protests and related activities in Canada related such things as block Oil pipelines from being built, Aboriginal blockades etc..
In Portland, Oregon, several city blocks were taken over by violent force - with a militia of self-appointed 'soldiers' brandishing weapons, prevent police and emergency services in.
Were their finances blocked? Were the supporting charities blocked? Did those donating to the charities have their assets frozen - no in all cases.
The justice system of most governments have ample power to enforce basic laws, as exemplified by the police response at the border in Alberta and Ontario, and should not be partial to the 'types of protesters' they chose to pursue let alone pursue extra constitutional measures.
That extra judicial measures were taken in Canada is a stain on Democracy and definitely an indication that the government can't be trusted with basic civil liberties specifically with respect to the issue of the transfer of money.
The last thing we need is more oversight over basic finances. If the police, acting independently of any politicians impetus, get a warrant from a judge to intervene in something or the other - they can do that, and it's why those mechanisms exist in the first place.
I find that with Parliamentary oversight, I have no issue with this at all, and calling it a stain on democracy is entirely disproportionate, especially considering the actions we see in other countries.
Handling cash is disgusting and so inconvenient.