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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash? The problem I have with articles like this is that I don't trust these coins. What are Grin and Zcash going to be worth in 5 years? Are they going to be stable enough to use as an actual currency and is the marketplace going to be confident enough to use them as currency?

I agree that cash is an important aspect of the economy that should be protected but I don't see how a couple coins that I have not heard of are going to be the panacea they purport to be.

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Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments. It also doesn't work in businesses that get robbed.

The better question is, why do you need a new currency to get privacy? Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this. What remains to be seen is if there's sufficient incentives to build anything around these or for any portion of the economy to move to them. Most purchases aren't sensitive, so for private payments to work, they need to be ubiquitous for non privacy reasons and just give people who need it the option for privacy. Much like cash does. But again, cash doesn't work online or increasingly offline

> Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros? There's no technical reason, indeed several groups are building this.

That's what Monero is, right? It doesn't really matter how stable it is, if I'm just going to convert to USD/EUR immediately after my transaction.

No, Monero is not pegged to any other currency

>>Why couldn't we have a private crypto currency backed by dollars or euros?

Yes, you can utilize dollar backed and dollar pegged stablecoins, like USDC and DAI, respectively, in privacy-shielding protocols like https://zk.money and https://tornado.cash.

The problem at the moment is that Ethereum has very limited scalability, and privacy-shielded transactions are about five to ten times more compute-intensive than vanilla transactions, making them prohibitively expensive to conduct for most applications.

Ethereum layer 2 solutions that preserve the base layer's decentralization hold the promise to make such transactions viable at scale, but they are still quite immature in their feature set. For example, all of the general computation L2s still rely on a centralized coordinator.

> Paying in cash, in addition to being a minor inconvenience that non-the-less outweighs most people's desire for privacy, does not work in online payments

In some countries it's fairly popular and super common with kids to check out, get a barcode/receipt and pay at, for example, a 7-11 with cash for in game purchase top ups.

Ah, that takes me right back to adolesence. Getting a paysafecard in the morning near the school from a tobacco shop to redeem it in the evening at home.

As others are saying, it's an implicit goal by those holding the levers to eliminate cash. China has already effectively done it. US is edging closer, and it won't be stopped unless there is an explicit movement against it.

Right, but the US is still (theoretically) a representative democracy that's beholden to its people. China is an autocracy. Americans have the ability to speak up about this issue in a way that the Chinese don't.

Ok, but is that stopping the slide to a cashless society?

Except those are just market forces and it is more convenient to use electronic payment. I'm not sure what you mean by China, it's China's government that is forcing all merchants to accept cash [1].

> The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is looking to close the widening digital divide and has warned merchants that they must accept cash or face disciplinary action,...

[1] https://www.pymnts.com/cash/2020/china-issues-edict-warning-...

Are we really still beholden to such simplistic and wrong ideas such as everything being explained by "market forces"? Do they exist? Yes. Are they they only factor? No. Are they they main factor? Depends on what you are talking about. Power brokers in the US will do whatever it takes to move things a certain way if it benefits them.

I dare you to find an anonymous visa card that actually works. You won't.

Speaking as a former weed delivery driver in California who got robbed at gun point twice... I honestly cannot wait for cashless to come. You know what's fun about dealing with cash? Nothing! It sucks! At least give me the option to opt out of having to deal with people who transact in cash and give me a badge that says "This guy doesn't carry money!" That seems fair to me since I don't want to be involved with that nonsense or the problems that come with it.

I don’t disagree that there are other forces aside from market forces.

In the case of people paying via WeChat though, it is legitimately market forces. If you don’t use WeChat, people around you will urge you to use it because it is so much easier than cash. No more going to the bank. No more handling change. You just open your phone, scan, and pay. Small businesses you frequent where you get to know the proprietor will tell you they think it’s a little funny you’re paying in cash and even offer to help you set up your WeChat Pay because it is “so easy.”

I honestly don’t know anyone other than me who pays for things in cash. Everybody else is on WeChat. Nobody forced them to; it was just rapid, collective adoption, analogous to what happened when smart phones hit the market. You can still buy dumb phones that work great, but nobody does.

As it so happens, I lived in China for 9 years, swam in the startup tech circles, and built a startup around WeChat. I can tell you with authority that you are wrong that WeChat won through market forces. China operates by allowing many startups to flourish, and when a particular industry becomes dangerous or important to their national interests, they shut down all but one, and put state backing into that one. They play king makers. Tencent, and WeChat, while well run and built, is basically state owned software.

I saw this whole ordeal play out with Twitter clones. There were maybe ten with traction. Then the gov stepped in and there were none. And then Weibo rose from the flames as the winner.

Not just market forces. Moving away from cash is encouraged by govts as it’s a really effective step against tax evasion.

Although for the local shops who are cashless around here the main motivation is reducing theft/risk of robbery.

You cannot buy a macbook pro in all cash in India. It is illegal to use cash above certain limit. There are restrictions on what a business can claim as an expense if they are paying in cash. There are onerous compliance and tax hits which come with accepting cash.

Businesses are reluctant to accept cash when government punishes them with compliance and additional paperwork + tax + tds.

The US is trending this way with inflation. 10k is the numerical limit at which everyone treats you like a criminal in the US, which was roughly equivalent to 60k (in 2022 dollars) when the law went into effect. Now it's not even enough to buy a middle of the road 10 year old used car.

One of my bank accounts has been blocked for the last 6 months over this, despite hours on the phone beforehand and countless assurances that this wouldn't happen. It reminds me of traveling to Canada with a credit card in the mid 00s.

Cash works for in person transactions. It can work for certain delayed transactions (e.g., prepaid or post-paid remote orders, will-call, layaway), though in almost all cases those are actually transacted by some other mechanism --- vouchers, credit cards, cheques, postal mail orders, or personal / direct credit.

There is an arguable need for an anonymous remote-transaction payment mechanism.

That itself introduces numerous further concerns (none of which TFA addresses):

- Black market, criminal, ransom, or blackmail transactions.

- Refund or chargebacks initiated by the payee for nonfulfillment / fraudulent transaction / substandard product or service.

- Money laundering and tax avoidance.

(That's just off the top of my head. Financial crimes isn't my strong suit. FBI list: https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes)

If you're going to legislate monetary privacy, why not use an update-to-date form of electronic privacy and outlaw all the ways of breaking it?

A nation-state enforced "black box" is probably the only way to stop nation-states breaking open any privacy features in the marketplace. It's probably easier to conceive of a black box/black blockchain that can't be opened if you aren't trying to fight off the whole world and every conceivable adversary to keep the contents unknown.

I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were.

How do you trust the government enough to keep its hands out of a digital ledger system that's supposedly private when we all know how valuable that information is? The whole point of crypto to begin with was to pry control away from the government.

I get the rebuttal and agree with your sentiment. The government acts as if it's above the law and outside of trust, why bother trying to engage with them?

Well I've seen the completely-hidden privacy pattern tried. People tried to cut out the government and at the end of the day, they will lie, cheat and steal because they know their rule is backed up with guns and in legal grey areas, the average tech bro is remarkably vulnerable to the system they live inside. Just look at what happened to Ladar Levison for just being an unknowing facilitator of Snowden, his stuff got nuked.

If you want something to be private, there has to be a mechanism to roll back government control and the only way to do that peacefully, is legally inside the system. The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades?

This could be a whole new gov department that has a zero trust policy of it's employees like the intelligence agencies have and aimed at keeping pandora's box closed, rather than revealing everything.

Training people to keep the lid shut and keeping the unknown, unknown is very different to the CIA/NSA method of harvesting everything it can in the world. Then pretending the same employees that can harvest everything on the planet, won't leak the NSA's database too for their own profit or moral reasons.

I don't know, the easy answer is just to roll custom stuff and go private individually and blend in with the herd. For real privacy, there's big big problems that avoiding the gov won't help.

> The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades?

Because unlike those secret R&D projects, they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario. There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government, one of the largest acquirers of zero-day vulns, would build such a system and not have some sort of backdoor. They've been caught so many times playing this game, thinking to the clipper chip and beyond.

It would be so much simpler and more private to just require everyone to accept cash. The more I think about it, the idea of a private government blockchain that they're not looking at is fundamentally antithetical to the existence of that institution.

There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government

You're right, you couldn't trust it with absolute certainty.

they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario

The government makes transactions it wishes was private all the time. A politician that could route money through a black box could perform many many patterns. Ollie North supplied guns to the 'good guys'/politically favourable team in the Iran-Contra affair with money from outside the sanctions. It's not required for the government to increase the privacy of money flow, but they could see benefit in it, for better or worse.

You're right it is simpler to accept cash in a lot of ways. In a world of mass surveillance, showing up to meet your local drug dealer in a parking lot at 2am, is no longer private and nor is cash.

Your number plate was recorded the whole way, your face hit facial recognition cameras and IR scanners at toll gates and the phone booth/mcdonalds wifi picked up your phone's IMEI as you drove past, which is linked to your passport photo you submitted to buy your phone, the cash you got from a bank or business has captured your face. A satellite captured your car moving every 5minutes(?) or so.

The cash might not be 'on the books' but nearly everything else you did was, which you need to defeat with perfect opsec to be free from a government audit that can ping the FBI/CIA/NSA/private organizations officially or unofficially, legally or not for information about you.

Absolutely Certain™ privacy isn't possible with cash either.

> why can't we just pass a law that requires all businesses to accept cash?

Why shouldn't business owners be able to choose which forms of payments to accept?

Because it is a profoundly discriminatory practice. At the extreme, it amounts to "your money's no good here", in the bad sense of that phrase.

But isn't discrimination only bad when it's based on membership of protected classes? And preferred method of payment definitely isn't a protected class.

It's well established that lower income cohorts have less access to digital finance and credit. Cashless systems instantly become a proxy to exclude those cohorts.

But income isn't a protected class either (and it can't be made one, or nothing would be allowed to be expensive).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32091797

1. If the net effect is to discriminate against a protected class, legal liability may still exist.

2. Discrimination as a general concept is not identicial to discrimination against a protected class. It may be legal in a strict sense, and still morally, socially, and politically reprehensible and/or disruptive.

Discriminations harms extend well beyond those which are recognised legally. The law itself is very often a tool for further oppression, and should be considered on that basis.

There are two elements to that question: the legal and the moral.

Legally the premise is shaky as it's a short walk from "use a specific payment method" (a financial instrument, a device, a service, a company) to what are protected classes: age, race, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy, and veteran status in the United States.[1] As such, strictly as a business decision there's a considerable risk involved that such practices would be found to be de facto discimination against one or more protected classes.

(Keep in mind that there are religions which consider interest on money to be against their beliefs, which would then transfer to use of revolving credit instruments. I've no idea whether this has been tested in US courts.)

On a moral basis, even that which is not strictly illegal may be against principles of greater justice, and gatekeeping access to goods or services can easily work against those with limited means (unable to buy the latest mobile smartphone or desktop/laptop computer), unabile to maintain broadband comms access, owning a working but end-of-lifed device (for Android as little as 2--3 years, somewhat better for Apple), living in regions without high-speed broadband (most of the US), excluded from access to credit by low credit scores, or forced by circumstances to accept massive invasions of privacy or exposure to manipulation (propaganda, advertising, targeted manipulation) simply to participate minimally in the everyday business of life.

Note that remote-commerce can be a force for inclusion and against oppression. The Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the subject of recent commentary on that point, see for example:

"How Sears Catalog Fought White Supremacists" https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_all-about-america_how-sears-ca...

The major operative factor to me seems to be whether a technology constrains or expands opportunities. Reducing payment options quite clearly constrains them.

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/protected-cla...

> owning a working but end-of-lifed device

Aren't such devices major security risks, and isn't accepting them connecting to anything of your own a major liability?

It really shouldn't require much reading-between-the-lines or interpretation to see that for someone who cannot afford to replace such a device, a multi-hundred-dollar expense every few years is a significant hurdle. The choice isn't between "old unsupported device" and "new, supported device", but between "old" and "none".

Most especially when the underlying hardware itself may well function for a decade or more.

Your volume and line of questioning are suggesting a lack of consideration and awareness of circumstances. You might want to think a bit more and ask a bit less.

It would be great if we could make it law, but it will be difficult. It is in government's and other's interests to eliminate cash. It is not law here in California. I recently went to a bar that would not take cash. I somewhat loudly explained to the bartendenr that my bar tab is one of the last things I want public and that my friends and I would not be returning.

We could pass laws to protect cash, but in reality the opposite is happening. Harvard economists like Ken Rogoff are actively lobbying to kill cash exactly in order to remove anonymous transaction possibilities (to fight crime, purportedly), and they are playing into the hands of all the companies who profit off cashless transactions.

There is some law about being required to accept any form of legal tender. I think there are some specifics to it though.

I've seen more and more fast casual restaurants in the US starting to go cashless, so there's definitely a way for businesses to get around it. But I don't know the law at all.

The key word is "debts". If you owe a debt to someone, e.g., in a restaurant where you eat first and then pay, they have to accept cash. But in situations where there's no debt, e.g., restaurants where you pay before they give you your food, they can refuse cash.

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