From August 1: Cash transactions above NIS 6k illegal | Hacker News Reader

From August 1: Cash transactions above NIS 6k illegal

israelnationalnews.com

195 pointswalterbell341 comments

The main reason for this is taxes. It is the same reason why India's government is also trying to ban cash (with very negative results for the economy).

You see rich people have to use banks. Because over certain sums, using cash just becomes way too dangerous. So they use banks which means the banks report to the government and the government gets their taxes. But rich people also often influence the government (or even outright run it). And they hate paying taxes. So they want to shift some of the taxation burden on to the middle class and the poor. But poor people often use cash and sometimes skim on taxes. I am sure this happens with some of the more adventurous middle class too. For smaller sums cash is perfectly manageable.

Thus, the government becomes very concerned and does everything it can to "help" the poor move to more modern electronic payments.

> they hate paying taxes. So they want to shift some of the taxation burden on to the middle class and the poor.

I don't understand how making middle/poor class pay more taxes spares the rich from taxes.

The theory is that broadening the tax base will create a large constituency with a vested interest in responsible government spending.

Or perhaps, more cynically, for lower taxes overall.

The really rich often have too much political influence on elections, they push to get their taxes reduced effectively. This happens in the us where the terrible supreme court ruling said money was speech, basically making it so rich people could give all they want towards political causes. This is very destructive.

The rich then get tax cuts for themselves that aren't applicable to regular people (like most all of us). Example of something we should address - bezos and musk get loans on their vast stock holdings. The loans aren't taxable. If their holdings slowly get higher in value, they never have to sell their stock to get that value (or they have so much they never get a margin call). They can pass on those stocks to their heirs which can reset the price. I wish we all had a billion in stock and we could get a few tens of millions in loans to live off of, never triggering a capital gains tax.

Another example is wealth taxes, which would be something along the line of Steve Ballmer has to pay 1/2 % of his wealth over 100 million or something every year. But what if he doesn't have ready available cash for that, people say, it's hard to value things. Somehow we could do it. And we never think about it, but everyone who owns a house has to pay a wealth tax every year! We normal people pay wealth taxes, the really rich should probably have to do it too. All the same arguments about changing values and not have ready money from an expensive asset applies to every home own in america who pays property tax.

It acts as a "pre-emptive" tax shift. If more people pay taxes there's going to be less pressure on the government to set an ever higher tax rate, because now they receive more money while levying the same amount.

If more taxes is the reason for this rule, then why try to justify it with references to terrorism?

As someone who has lived in socialist countries for a long time... the Government always wants more money until they have it all.

It is as simple as that. "Less pressure" on the Government is a joke. The more it has, the more it wants.

If you give your power away, they take it, and want more. Power 101.

The money will be spent on things like public Media and public education to make propaganda for the Government. And on making the people in power mega rich, just like in China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela or Argentina.

Governments only get bigger, never smaller.

The government needs a certain amount of revenue. If some people get away with cheating on their taxes, then the tax rates for everyone else need to be higher to get that much revenue.

Income tax should be abolished though. Wealthy people can avoid it easily (get 1 USD wage as CEO and remainder in stock, for example).

Only consumption and wealth should be taxed. Wealthy people tend to consume more anyways. For some goods & services (energy consumption for example) a progressive tax rate might be appropriate, with tax exception for people who consume the least (as poor tend to do).

Luxury goods and services (private planes and yachts, luxury car brands, etcetera should also have a higher than normal tax rate, since for wealthy people the barrier to buy would still be low and poor or middleclass people can’t afford such goods and services anyway.

A system without income tax could also result in very simple tax reporting for most people, an additional benefit.

> get 1 USD wage as CEO and remainder in stock, for example

This is usually not possible. In Denmark you are taxed the same whether you receive your payment in stock or money. When you receive stock, you are taxed on the value of the stock at receive time -- obviously this is awful for receiving grants in a startup where the paper value is high, the stock is iliquid and the risk is substantial.

I think where the rich really benefits are the equity line of credit (ELOCs), where they effectively move money around without generating taxable events -- usually for very small interest payments.

Those ELOC schemeshave been clamped down on _hard_ in the last decade to the point of not really being a thing anymore

The real benefit to the rich is capital gains rates are significantly lower than income tax rates in many places, so anyone who is paid via capital gains pays significantly less tax. The income tax over 150,000 in the UK is 45% plus 3% for national insurance, and capital gains is a flat 20% for someone on that income level.

The point is that most taxes except wealth and consumption taxes are very easily avoided by wealthy people. Perhaps even taxes on wealth are hard, since wealthy people can just create some kind of charity and move most of their wealth into the charity.

Make the charity fully controlled by the family and it's a great way to protect ones wealth. Most of the income can be spend on stock purchases and perhaps <1% of the yearly profit can be spend on the actual charity, while another big part of the profits can be used to provide secure income for family members and friend working for the charity. Also, it's a way to avoid inheritance tax and to prevent someone running off with part of the wealth after a divorce.

Taxing income is in my opinion both unethical and rich people can avoid tax on most of their income anyways if they put in a little effort.

> while another big part of the profits can be used to provide secure income for family members and friend working for the charity.

Income which you need to tax. So you just jumped through another hoop before having to pay income tax.

> Wealthy people tend to consume more anyways.

They would pay more consumption tax but pay less percentage wise, because wealthy people save more than poor people.

Raising consumption taxes will be regressive because poor people spend all their money on food, heating and other consumption.

What if we only tax luxury goods?

Then people import them.

There's only so many people who buy a Ferrari or an expensive handbag, and they only buy so many of them before they're done buying.

Taxing property perhaps would work. Or inheritance taxes. Big resistance on those for obvious reasons.

Being paid in stock does not eliminate your income tax; you still owe income tax on the fair market value of the stock.

In practice, consumption taxes are extremely regressive.

Firstly, because people who earn less necessarily have to spend a much higher proportion of their income to stay afloat.

Secondly, because higher earners tend to spend their money on categories that are typically exempted (like healthcare, education, investments, political activism, real estate) -- and things that are out of the easy reach of taxation, like international travel.

Consumption tax is also logistically quite expensive, because it requires every business to continually and constantly maintain records on all sales and returns; the recording for payslips is comparatively trivial. Three compliance burden is magnified by incredibly complex rules which often require teams of experts to evaluate, exactly because of the kinds of "luxury" carve outs you're already identifying seem warranted.

Income tax reporting does not need to be hard for most people. The top 1% of earners cover almost 40% of revenue; the bottom 50% cover only 3%. We don't need to make everyone file and pay income taxes each year; we could do just fine with only 1/10th of Americans filling. The pain of income tax is just a contrivance in the name of "fairness" to make regular people hate the tax process and support policies that would significantly alleviate the well-offs tax burden. Policies like exchanging income tax for sales tax.

Every business needs to continually and constantly maintain records on all sales and returns already, at least in all richer countries.

The system needs some sort of pressure to force the government to work leaner.

Currently there is no reason for them to be conscious about that when every moment of my life incurs a taxable response not to mention their response to me even forgetting to pay amounts as paltry as $1000 is utterly excessive.

Funny the amount of effort they put into that yet how much effort is being put into keeping spending in check.

Best description I read about government needing revenue. Is really the government doesn't need money as much as it needs a way to devote some portion of the economy towards public goods.

Someones got to consume less. Everyone thinks it should be the other guy. Wealthy have power so they are always shifting the burden to the middle class and the poor.

"Is really the government doesn't need money as much as it needs a way to devote some portion of the economy towards public goods."

That much always seemed obvious to me at the federal level. For state/municipal governments there's at least some argument they do actually rely on the revenue, as they can't just go ahead and print/issue more money as needed.

Cash transactions seem to be on the way out in most Indian metros.

However, once you move out of the big cities and into the small towns, cash still rules.

Nowadays you have to have payment terminal if you want the luxury of begging when living under the bridge.

It’s hard not to see financial repression as another likely motive. Make it impossible for someone to operate without a bank account, then use the banking system as a mean to retaliate against your political ideas like Trudeau did already. It’s similar to covid apps being used to prevent protests in China.

There is a worrying return to authoritarianism everywhere. People forget that none of their rights would have been won if there wasn’t any wiggle room in the system, for people to do illegal things before they get accepted as legal, like smoking pot, being gay, being pro-democracy, etc.

getting an abortion, 40 hour work weeks, having health insurance, ...

The freezing and debanking of protestors is a shockingly dangerous precedent.

You are literally removing people's functional access to food, water, and shelter.

Wait till you hear the rest of what Israel does to certain protestors...

Canada used to be a normal country though, even kind of nice, not an apartheid state. Expectations are different.

Canada has a very dark history of violence against natives. The reputation of "being nice" is a recent media myth.

Virtually every country has a dark history of violence. And Canada doesn't even crack the top 10 there. I meant it within a reasonable frame of reference, like say 90s and 00s.

they used counterterrorism laws (which is of course ridiculous), and threatened protesters that they'll lose their corporate license (so they can't work commercially as truckers).

going after financing was surprisingly efficient, but not giving them the convenient out of "sure continue protesting without the trucks" was dumb.

The police, by ignoring the threat and letting the truckers set up, left Trudeau's hands tied here. Towing a semi in a very crowded downtown core is difficult with the drivers help. With a driver that does not want to be towed, the truck would stay there for much longer. And doing that with several hundred trucks, many of whom are the biggest customers of the towing companies, means towing them after they were allowed to set up would take months. The protestors had been told to remove their vehicles - telling them they could protest if they gave up their semis was not gonna happen.

I think we can agree that it left us with 3 things: a dangerous precedent, a reminder to everyone that a centralized, cashless society has downsides, and a protest that ended after a week instead of being dragged on for months.

I don't understand the towing argument. If the driver/owner does not cooperate get a different driver, trucks are not that special, right? (Do they have so so so extra ignition locks?)

Police not doing their job. Yep, and Ottawa did not want to rock that boat too much. (I can imagine they had some initial guess as how quickly they will give up, so it could be that that's why the police was lenient with them. But who knows.)

While from a power and monopoly on violence perspective going after finances is very similar to using other means to get people to do this or that, but it sets a very bad precedent. Even if it's the easier way compared to doing the hard work of separating the truckers from their trucks one by one, and removing the trucks.

Very old school socialist punishment for dissenters. Usually followed by assigning dirty, dangerous jobs to the oppossition.

I don't disagree with your message but why does everyone frame what happened in Canada as a protest? From afar it looked more like a campaign of societal disruption that was paid for by people all around the world with the "protesters" requesting donations.

Is this referring to BLM, or the truckers? Seems to apply to both.

It applies to all "protesters" who take donations for ongoing protests that negatively impact society at large.

Protests and societal disruptions aren't mutually exclusive. And the "foreign funded campaign" argument is such a trope to discredit any protest, and reminds me more of something the Kremlin would say to justify destroying dissent. It was really scary to see canadians suddenly pretend that donations from america are proof that the protestors were foreign agents. Canadians have had no problem sending donations south for hundreds of years, and vice versa.

But hey, that rhetoric came directly from the the only government in the western hemisphere to have suspended constitutional rights (and because of a protest) since probably World War 2... So it's not exactly surprising.

(There was also this obsession to call them terrorists, again textbook dehumanizing/discrediting tactics. And for the record, I'm not a pro truckers and voted for trudeau twice. Yet the way the government dealt with the situation was literally disgusting.)

Under the Soviet Union, the same logic was used against Protestant Christians (my parents experienced this) as many had “ties” to the United States.

Yes and it's honestly why I'm so vocal about the whole situation, even in real life. It just made me so uncomfortable how the events unfolded and how quickly the narrative switched to justifying (and even cheering!) for people to be stripped of their rights. I don't really care about antivaxxers but as a muslim and an immigrant, it just made me realize just how fast events like these can unfold and how easy it was to normalize batshit insane rhetoric against a minority (in the numerical sense, I'm not saying antivaxxers are a protected class)

We went from calling them conservative grandma killers (at least that was somewhat related to their claims), to nazis, to terrorists and finally foreign backed insurrectionists. In 2 weeks. Let's hope the public opinion doesn't ever turn against Muslims as much too then, because now I have a glimpse of just how irrelevant any of my rights would suddenly be.

> Protests and societal disruptions aren't mutually exclusive.

Agreed. Though the difference with the Canadian Truckers vs all other protests was that it was ongoing 24/7 and they were advertising for donations with the promise of continuing the protest.

Sure the government could have done nothing and let them do their thing but the voter backlash against them would have grown to include not only the people protesting but the people affected by the protests. So the government used all the tools in the toolbox to stop it including propaganda. It's kind of wild though to think that the rest of the country or world can essentially extend their political influence to an issue in a geographical area where they have no "skin in the game".

Personally I think it was stupid of the truckers to block key trade routes. Did they not realise that politicians receive donations both officially and non officially (revolving door) from wealthy people who own businesses? Why not just announce an ongoing strike? My guess would be they didn't have the numbers or they weren't willing to make a financial sacrifice for their cause.

fwiw, NIS 6K (USD$1.7K) single transactions is exceptionally rare for poor people.

Another ‘neat’ aspect is that this makes society shun even more those undesirables that can’t get a bank account.

Australia tried to introduce a similar thing with reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy The proposal died, I'm not sure why. Personally I wouldn't be affected, but apparently 3% of Australia's GDP is in the "black economy".

> reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car.

I wonder if the exception is easily abused. "Here's a 1980's beater and a suitcase which does not contain cocaine, that'll be 30 thousand dollars please!".

there's still a paper trail for buying a car (plus unreasonable prices stick out more than simply reporting to buy art in cash or whatever)

The Israeli version is not new. It was introduced 3 years ago (perhaps more?) with the sums that are legal to transact in cash reducing every year or so. At first, it was sums that only affected people who were (likely) doing things illegally (e.g. drugs, bribes, tax evasion, money laundering, etc). So there was little to no protest -- very few people realized where this was going.

Now, it basically affects everyone - the current threshold is in the between minimum wage and average wage, closer to minimum, with exceptions for effectively 5-year-or-older-common-cars and a couple more things. In a couple of years, the threshold would likely be lower than minimum wage (either by rule change, or by inflation that would bring minimum wage above current threshold), and at that point, the threshold would be "money you can give your kids to buy to stuff for themselves at the store, and not much more".

Slow boil, works great on populations.

Related: The $10,000 reporting threshold in the US has not been updated since the 70s. There have been multiple bipartisan attempts to update it to $20-30k (which is still half of what it should be according to CPI) but for some reason they have not gone anywhere. Most CTRs are basically spam at this point. A lot of people are seeing that the current BSA system incentivizes filling out SARs on everything possible to absolve yourself of liability instead of providing actionable intelligence but no one wants to change anything because they will look "soft" on crime/terrorism/Russia/whatever nonsense. Something like 95%+ of SARs don't result in any sort of criminal referral which is a pretty bad false positive rate in my view.

> It is the same reason why India's government is also trying to ban cash (with very negative results for the economy).

The Indian government is not trying to ban cash. Demonetization replaced old currency notes with new ones and the total cash in circulation increased after demonetization played out.

In India, only the salaried class fully pays their taxes. Businesses which deal in cash don't and anything that makes tax evasion difficult is a Good Thing⟨™⟩.

If they're already doing something illegal (avoiding tax, buying drugs or whatever), surely they'll ignore this law on cash transactions as well?

No, people should pay taxes that they owe. Allowing people to hide income as a form of progressive taxation is inefficient and unjust. This kind of framing of everything as class war is such a terrible way to discuss policy.

I acknowledge that there are valid privacy grounds to oppose the move to cashless/less-cash. I just don't accept the argument that it should be easier for middle-class plumbers to not declare their income.

You understand that "taxes you owe" are defined as an optimization function (Laffer curve), not some kind of moral imperative? By the very definition of the process you cannot possibly "owe" these taxes.

The Laffer curve is a theoretical tool used by economists. The tax you owe is whatever is specified in the tax code.

You don’t think tax evasion is morally wrong? How do you think governments raise funds for your roads, utilities, and military?

I think that the governments encroaching on rights is what really morally wrong. Wake me up when they are personally responsible for the harm they do.

>You don’t think tax evasion is morally wrong?

You can easily make the argument that tax evasion is morally right, since much of our tax money goes to a military that destabilizes "unfriendly" governments around the world and spills as much blood as needed to maintain our globalist economy.

> How do you think governments raise funds for your roads, utilities, and military?

My military? The one that hasn't maintained a defensive posture since 1946? The one that, instead of defending me, goes out of its way to murder civilians in sovereign nations? The one that engages in not-congressionally-declared wars on completely fabricated pretexts? You raise this as a good thing?

Utilities: I don't know where you live, but where I live, private electric utility companies pay for their own infrastructure, or, where there is a public utility, they are paid by bonds secured by future water/sewer fees, not taxes.

Roads, fine, I have no problem with these, but again, they are paid largely by use and gasoline taxes, not income tax.

Furthermore: sales and use taxes are great, and I fully support them. Even luxury taxes are fine - you want to stick it to the rich, go for it, set a 60% sales tax on Maseratis and such. Income tax, however, is an absolute tyranny. Disincentivizing value creation is literally the worst idea in modern governance. In a world of 400+ PPM CO2, disincentivizing consumption is what we need the most.

Israeli here - large cash transactions have already been banned for a few years mostly successfully - this just lowers the limit from ±$5000 to ±$2000

This is totally unaligned with my experience.

Yes, the wealthy can afford to find ways to cheat on everything. But all segments of society are dodging taxes.

As a middle-class salaried employee, your income is taxed down to the last decimal place. But if you work in the trades, or anything else where many transactions are handled in cash, then tax evasion is _rampant_. And you know who is usually party to that? The tradespeople AND the relatively wealthier folks giving them envelopes of cash in exchange for a "discount" because the transaction isn't reported.

Will those stop? Probably not. But at least in larger sums it should make people afraid of dodging their tax burden.

> The main reason for this is taxes

The reason doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's happening.

> there are plans afoot to impose additional restrictions on cash in the future, with the Treasury and Tax Authority pushing for a law prohibiting any citizen from holding more than NIS 200,000 in cash in his home.

One motivation for CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) was succinctly stated by BIS (Bank of International Settlements, the central bank for all central banks, including US and UK) Director Carstens at an IMF meeting in 2020, 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.

Previous CBDC threads on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30634245 (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27805709 (2021).

Meanwhile, the US UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) was modified in July 2022 to recognize CERs (controllable electronic records), a flexible definition which could apply to both decentralized cryptocurrencies and centralized CBDCs. It's now up to individual U.S. states to ratify these changes in state legislation, https://www.clearygottlieb.com//news-and-insights/publicatio...

> Control under Article 12 is designed to be a technology-neutral functional equivalent of “possession.” It generally encompasses circumstances when a party has the “private key” or other mechanism to avail itself of substantially all of the benefits of the record, prevent others from availing themselves of such benefits, and transfer the record and associated benefits.

China will definitely be the leader in CBCDs. This is the kind of control over their population they seek

The European Central Bank decided to discontinue issuing the €500 note back in 2019[0], "due to concerns of widespread use for illegal purposes"[1].

It wouldn't surprise me if other central banks/governments were to take this approach in a future crackdown on cash, step by step getting rid of the largest denomination.

It would get pretty hard to use cash for large payments if there weren't any large banknotes available.

(Full disclosure: the largest cash payment I've ever made was in fact made in those very €500 notes, pre-2019...)

[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/html/index.en.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_euro_note

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) wants to have full control of everyone’s money in the future [0]. This is not possible with cash, but with CBDCs it’s possible to exercise full control.

———

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=9FM4Fu2ujDE

If you want to deposit an EUR 200 banknote at some banks in my country the bank will charge you EUR 5.

Per note.

How is that even legal?

Is that a Euro using country?

Yes, The Netherlands

See this (in Dutch): https://radar.avrotros.nl/nieuws/item/rabobank-5-euro-betale...

I made a significant payment recently with cash and the only bills the bank would give me were 50€ bills. It was very annoying. A few bills in my wallet vs me having constant fear of dropping a ball of money from my pockets.

> I made a significant payment recently with cash and the only bills the bank would give me were 50€ bills

All the ATMs I've used (across Europe) recently have at least offered me a choice of bills (notes) when I make a withdrawal.

I took €300 out of a cash machine in Italy yesterday, didn't specify the bills, and got it all in €20s... left me thinking the machine must have had lots of them and wanted to shift some :)

There are not a lot of normal people using suitcases full of cash as a way to conduct business anymore. Probably the largest transactions relate to things like used cars and similarly large second hand purchases where both parties might prefer to keep the transaction off the books. Otherwise, most people would consider handling large cash transactions as a risky thing to do. And with modern payment solutions, you don't have to. Unless of course you are intent on keeping things off the books.

Unfortunately, I live in Germany where cash is still king. When possible, I use Google Pay. It's just easier. But there are still a lot of cash only places here. All the fun places basically. To get cash, I have to find an ATM affiliated with my bank (Deutsche Bank, one of inept and hopelessly customer hostile local banks) and there are only a few of those in Berlin and none close to where I live. The fees if I go to the wrong bank are pretty substantial. And then they inevitably give me 50 and 100 euro notes. Especially the latter are really a pain in the ass because shops and restaurants hate having to deal with those because it means they lose all their remaining change, which they need for other customers.

Digital currencies get a lot of bad press (and rightly so) but a lot of banks and national banks are starting to adopt blockchains as a way to keep their ledgers. Ledgers are the core thing a bank does and blockchains are basically very good ledgers. So, there's nothing strange about that from a technical point of view. IMHO, we are heading to a cashless future where all transactions go via blockchains. Cash is obsolete basically.

Ever heard of CashGroup?

>> blockchains are basically very good ledgers

"Blockchain" means very different things for different people. Blockchains such as Bit--in blockchain are very bad ledgers. The only thing they are good for is if you want to get rid of trusted intermediaries such as banks.

> Unfortunately, I live in Germany where cash is still king

No, that's actually very fortunate for you, and likely a result of the collective memory among the (previously) eastern German population about the meaning and abuse by government of tracking every little thing you do.

Government abuse of all-knowing and all-controlling abilities is a question of "when, what and who", not a question of "if".

Cash is like a standing army. You don't want to ever have to use one, but if you don't even have one you can use, you'll lose the next war that breaks, which historically has been a question of "when", not "if". So every country - including Switzerland who hasn't been part of a war in centuries - maintains a capable army.

You wouldn't dismantle your army just for convenience. Don't stop using cash.

Exactly this.

Also, i cannot imagine how using CB-issued digital currencies would work especially while being abroad. As already said, the respective government has you by the balls.

Critize someone / something? Voila, account and funds access revoked.

Additional, i get the convenience factor of digital payment methods -paying mostly by credit card myself- but consider this: if your phone breaks, you are oh so bummed.

No maps, no calls, no SMS tokens, no authentication apps (if not having an laptop as a backup,), no ID vault apps (same), no Google / Apple pay, and more...

Had to endure this for 3 months last year.

Physical cards work almost always 100%, can be freely used by people you trust, dont need expensive roaming data, you dont have to rely on a device being a) with you and b) being charged.

Also, good luck swapping the SIM to an older, backup phone if all you got is an eSIM...

Indeed. This is to say nothing of the absolute parasitism inherent in the "cashless" society. The Banks/Visa/MC/Stripe/Square hoovering up 2% interchange and other fees for virtually no work is absolutely ludicrous.

A 2% interchange fee made sense in 1982, when it was expensive to move bits and clear transactions. In 2022, it's pure, gluttonous parasitism.

Surprised to find this on the front page of HN.

Note that the current law already forbids cash transactions higher than 11,000 NIS and that an exception is carved out for automobile purchases. This law is tightening screws that already exist, not implementing new screws.

I hadn't heard of this before today, and I think the same is probably true for many other people, so I found it interesting and notable.

Maybe it is beneficial for the knowledge of those who didn't know about the original screws in the first place.

Why is an insidious erosion of rights and liberties better than a sudden one, and why does that (if that's why, it's unclear) make it surprising to find on the front page?

Culturally, Israelis only value privacy in very narrow contexts that are carved out and afforded protection in law (reputational and medical privacy). This is a country where there are security guards who open your bags before you can enter public places like government offices, malls, and public transit terminals, and airport security at Ben Gurion is world-famous for its invasiveness.

Israelis accept this because Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and security falls on deaf ears here. To Israelis, security is a pre-requisite for liberty, not the other way around, and there is wide public support for measures that would be completely DOA in the US, like government identity registries (that now include facial scans and fingerprint databases, with fingerprinting admittedly optional but fingerprinting extends the validity period of issued identification) and extremely strict gun control.

Financial security is pretty much the same, for example, most of the Israeli drug trade links back to terrorist organizations and as such a "war on cash" is seen by many as fighting against terrorists as well.

Franklin’s quote was about liberty (of the legislature) to tax so it is even more apposite here

> Ben Franklin's quote about liberty and security

Although the rest of your point stands, this part is a common misconception. The exact context of the quote was about a taxation dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the Penn family, and didn't actually have much to do with modern day liberty or security[0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

Right. These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism. The biggest gains of the police state in the US have all been in the wake of wars or terror attacks (or in the name of pseudo-"wars" like the war on drugs), And this is perfectly predictable. But even given the long history of Israel's status as a besieged military state on the constant defensive, is this really the direction you want to see it go in the future? Because it seems to me that this is a path toward Chinese-style totalitarianism, where once someone flips a switch and democracy fails there would be no going back. Are you that certain that these kinds of measures should be scaled up and up?

> These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism.

Federal law requires a person to report cash transactions of more than $10,000 by filing IRS Form 8300PDF, Report of Cash Payments Over $10,000 Received in a Trade or Business. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/cash-payment-report-helps-gover...

See also https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/CTRPamphle... Federal law requires financial institutions to report currency (cash or coin) transactions over $10,000 conducted by, or on behalf of, one person, as well as multiple currency transactions that aggregate to be over $10,000 in a single day

And finally remember civil forfeiture implies carrying "large" amounts of cash risks police seizing the cash with very limited recourse.

So no, not DOA in the US, rather already existing in the US but in a more sly format

I'd argue there's a big difference between a law which requires reporting a transaction and one which criminalizes it.

I have no problem reporting large cash transactions. I do have a problem keeping all my money in electronic accounts that can be vaporized by government fiat, hacking, bank insolvency, clerical error, EMP, etc.

> These would be DOA in America because our distrust of centralized power largely outweighs our fear of invasion or terrorism

What about organized crime? You have one of the, if not the worst crime rates in the developed world.

Most of the crime that affects Americans is not really organized though.

Where do you get your data?

According to [1] Israel's crime rate is 105/135 (higher is worse). It's better than Norway and worse than China. USA, by comparison, is 56, which is worse than Ghana, Egypt and Lebanon (but better than Sweden and Iraq).

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rat...

This looks like a random SEO spamblog-equivalent site. It sources another site, numbeo, that also is more or less unidentified and says it polls random site visitors?

I'm sure that I am missing something obvious here, but why are car purchases exempt from the threshold reduction? Dealers/dealerships must come under an awful lot of regulatory scrutiny - or pressure from elements keen to keep transactions private. Or maybe the exception applies to only person-to-person sales, and not buinesses.

Basically a political carve-out for the only reason "most" people would need to handle such a large amount of cash.

In other news, they also plan to raise minimum wage to NIS 6000 by 2025.

This effectively mandates electronic banking for all full time salaried workers by 2025.

For context, under the table transactions are very common in Israel. Tax avoidance is everywhere.

Are you surprised that a country built by illegally stealing other peoples land and property would have citizens who don’t respect its laws?

If the citizens of a democracy don't respect its laws, then it is not a democracy.

> a country built by illegally stealing other peoples land

That would be all of them? Even if you ignore illegally I’m not aware of a sovereign state that was settled by people who were there first settlers and has continuity of government.

s/Israel/every country/

Those pesky citizens! Meanwhile, https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/09/3-count-felon-jpmorga...

> ... secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury. The documents “show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.”

Trailer for Netflix series, The Laundromat, https://youtube.com/watch?v=wuBRcfe4bSo

Great whataboutism.

Perhaps, if hundreds of billions of dollars of money laundering were comparable to consumer spending taxes.

You can stay within Israel for that pivot. We have our fair share of rich people not paying. https://www.reuters.com/article/natgas-israel-leviathan-idIN...

"Tax avoidance" is what rich people do by exploiting loopholes and aggressively taking deductions. "Tax evasion" is what you're talking about here.

The same loopholes that they lobbied for. Soooo much better.

well uhh fuck that. its only like $1740 and the reasons they list for getting rid of cash is exactly why we need cash.

And why bitcoin is here to stay regardless of price and of course xmr.

Bitcoin specifically is inadequate to act as anything more than a very infrequently traded store of value. Not a currency that is exchanged for goods and services in small amounts by many people.

Someone needs to build a better cryptocurrency, but it everyone is preoccupied with building ponzi schemes and pump and dump scams instead.

There is eth and btc cash. Lightning payment is also a thing even eith btc. It is really a question of merchants willing to spend time supporting it give lack of significanr consumer demand.

Ah yes, the notoriously computer-illiterate Israeli government will never think to monitor Bitcoin transactions.

7 transactions a second won't cut it unfortunately[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Bitcoin's layer 2 can do 7000 transactions per second easily.

It is very easy to track crypto spending. All the information is there on the blockchain for anybody to peruse. The blockchain may not have personal identifications, but you only need to catch a person spending bitcoin once in order to match them to a blockchain wallet.

So if the Israeli government's goal is to track citizen's spending, they will love crypto.

I’ve been considering “laundering” my own crypto through a handful of bespoke smart contracts that I write myself since I doubt anyone on IRS salary would actually read my source code.

At which point you are probably guilty of "structuring". Which is a crime all on its own.

Also, that only holds up until someone actually looks at you.

But XMR is private?

Not with single use wallets. If you have multiple transactions yes but if you create a new wallet put btc in it and spend it all and each time you spend you create a new wallet it is much like cash.

But you will have to move BTC from the old wallet to the new one. And that will be visible on the blockchain.

No, that's what I am saying you will spend the entire wallet no transfers. If HN was charging me something I will create a new wallet at say paxful, populate it with btc by paying much more than exchange rate in exchange for giftcards or wire (or cash if they are local) and then pay HN, never use that wallet again. Of course the threat to this has been thay american/western services have all become KYC (mandatory ID check) still possible with chinese and other services.

Another alternative is to store it all in XMR and populate single use btc wallets with one time XMR transfers all while VPN+Tor'd.

But the initial loading is traceable. wires are completely traceable. Gift cards above $100 or so in many jurisdictions require tracing (and while they are more easily exchanged / tumbled / whatever than credit cards, that's still a hard problem).

Not if you buy in cash. I have done so for more.

All the replies so far seem to focus on Bitcoin and not XMR (Monero). Monero does a better job at solving the problems that have been mentioned about Bitcoin:

A blocksize that scales which also leads to reduced fees, transactions and address balances are private.

(Disclaimer: I own some XMR, but not much.)

Props for the disclaimer.

However, it seems doubtful that Monero is 'better' than cash either.

The idea is less about chasing after cash money, and more that if e.g. you suggest me to deal in cash I must consider that I will be on the hook forever in case this leaks -- doesn't matter if this is due to your negligence, your disgruntled employee or partner whistleblowing, advances in spying tech, another customer reporting you, etc.

It's the same with Monero, possibly worse. With cash, taking all precautions once is enough (ensure there are no cameras around, leave my phone at home, wear gloves, etc.), while the only way to have all the evidence gone from blockchain is only by having Monero itself gone, right?

lol imagine still buying this.

You have even less privacy with BTC than you do with fiat.

Yeah, the average laypersons idea of crypto seems to be that it's totally anonymous. When I explain that most are pseudonymous not anonymous and that every single transaction being publicly visible forever is a feature, not a bug they seem pretty shocked.

This seems extreme, but it's actually already common in some European countries (e.g. Italy where the limit is 999€).

I don't want people monitoring or controlling what I spend stuff on. I love cash. I hate the idea of a restriction on that.

At the same time, if governments fail to efficiently tax their populations they end up having to go to war to plunder the resources they need to maintain their countries instead.

Probably another solution tho.

yeah, I'm going with there's probably something in between plundering your own population and plundering your neighbor's.

> At the same time, if governments fail to efficiently tax their populations they end up having to go to war to plunder the resources they need to maintain their countries instead.

This is a pretty bold assertion. Do you have an example of this happening? If a country has all the resources it needs then it's not going to have to plunder resources. If it doesn't have to the resources it needs it either has to trade for them, borrow, or plunder as a worst case scenario. It has absolutely nothing to do with taxes.

Also, with your logic, how do you afford an army to plunder resources if the reason for plundering is because they didn't "efficiently tax"? To go to war to plunder some resources, you need the resources. You can tax all you want but if you don't have the real resources you can't build an army.

Taxes can put resources you already have to work but it can't create them out of thin air.

Take a read of [this book], it has plenty of examples throughout history (from ancient times to today).

From memory, most recent example is I think Japan in WWII, and maybe Germany in both wars tho I can't recall clearly right now.

The thesis is: expansionist tendencies arise because states fail to efficiently tax their populations so they seek wealth through plunder.

Good question about where the money comes from first, I can't remember what the book said now but I'm sure there's possible solutions. Maybe: seize from the rich people in your own country first (likely by demonizing them ~ I think China did this to elites during the cultural revolution from memory from [another book]); the leaders are savvy enough to go to war before all the funds are gone; bootstrap by using emotive demonization of enemy and fear (I guess the Nazis did this to Jews before and during WWII) so you can be scrappy at first until you plunder some wealth and use it to upgrade and purchase more soliders.

[that book]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rul...

[that other book]: https://www.bookdepository.com/Mao-The-Unknown-Story-Jon-Hal...?

> expansionist tendencies arise because states fail to efficiently tax their populations so they seek wealth through plunder.

That sounds pretty much wrong, even if there are probably countries that did end up doing that.

> From memory, most recent example is I think Japan in WWII, and maybe Germany in both wars tho I can't recall clearly right now.

Yeah, no. The reasons for WWI are extremely complex, but Germany and Austria-Hungary not having enough tax revenue aren't in there.

Slightly before WWII, Nazi Germany's economy was basically a Ponzi scheme with massive investments (in rearmament) that needed to financed somehow, and plundering neighbors and Jews was a good way of achieving that. Maybe a more optimised tax structure could have alleviated that, maybe. However putting that as the main, or anywhere near the top reasons, is foolish.

Japan before WWII had a resources problem, and expansionist tendencies to correct that problem. However they were cut off from the global markets due to the invasion of China, and thus could no longer import the resources they needed and hadn't yet conquered, thus war. Again, nothing to do with taxes - Japan had money, it needed raw materials.

So those books sound pretty bad. I'll see if i can find a free copy to skim because I'm interested in just how bad they are.

Why does HN have to be about braggadocio? Thought it's about curiosity. If you make a point with certainty people trust it more than if you make it modally. But that's not about the facts or history.

You haven't convinced me of your thesis, but I get you don't believe mine. That's OK. The world is a big place with lots of different opinions, especially on history, right?

I think my view was similar to yours, and vaguer, before I read these books. They helped me understand a lot.

Don't you think you should read the book (or books) before you dismiss it? Maybe you're smarter than me and all those other people and the guy that wrote the book? Maybe you're not? But how are you going to know until you read it?

Maybe I am an idiot and I was duped by a really bad book (or books)? But maybe you are for dismissing it out of hand before it had a chance to work on you and you had a chance to look at the argument presented really well?

I don't care what you believe. But I get that history matters, and it's an important topic.

For me, that countries go to war because they didn't tax effectively is what the book convinced me of, and it fits my world view that there are basically simply forces underlying human behavior. Conflict is about resource competition. If you have enough (or more than enough), you're unlikely to risk or want conflict. Taxes are the main way states fund themselves (so it is OK to say it as the main or anywhere near the top reason, it's not foolish at all. But I think it is foolish to pretend there's complexity when there's not. That's how you get sucked into propaganda and narrative, and get manipulated by it. Don't you think?). Anyway, it makes a lot of sense. And all the racial/national/group hate is then manufactured in service to an economic motive. But I get your (or others') logic may clash with this, but maybe your logic is not expanded (or experienced with enough of the world / history) to know that? Maybe I haven't read enough books and so got duped by the ones that pretended to offer new insights and a simplistic perspective? But the book lays it out really clearly, and I loved that book. The arguments are also quite subtle, and complex, and backed by a lot of data I think, even if they're maybe contrarian in some cases. I think it has new insights. That's how I took it anyway, and I'm still very comfortable with that, and I think the book is a great resource, despite what you say and how confidently you (and others') say it. Because what do you really know? I'm going to trust this book, that lays it all out for me, more than you. Who are you anyway? What do you know about history? I don't know you or what you know.

I get you don't want to take my word for it, and I respect that. I don't want to take your word for it either. I think you need to read the books to rebut the points made in the books. They can make it better than me right now and they have all the data and examples.

A side note, it may have been Japan before invasion of China. But same point.

Anyway, I hope you learn something!

> Conflict is about resource competition

So i understand how you got into believing that thesis. Your fundamental departing point is, sorry to say it so bluntly, wrong. Not "different opinions on subjective stuff", but objectively wrong. Wars aren't only about resources. In fact it's probably rarer that they're for resources and not something else. You're prescribing a simplistic logical rational basis on something that is complex and simply doesn't have it and is more often than not irrational.

For instance - do you think that Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia was about resources? Or about more complex goals like preserving their sphere of influence on the Balkans, dominating Serbia, vengeance, etc.

The Franco-Prussian war - was it for resources? Or was it von Bismarck needing a common cause to push through German unification? Same goes for the Prussian-Austrian Brothers war and the Italian wars of independence btw.

We can go even further back - Thirty Years war was fought over religion and political power, not resources.

Or further forward, the Saudi and Emirates intervention in Yemen.

Some others, like the Silesian wars, were mostly for resources. Some others, like Germany invading the Soviet Union, are for complex reasons, including resources, but also ideological (to destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism").

So you start from a simplistic and wrong position, and go backwards from there - war is inherently for resources, and taxes are resources, so optimised taxes mean no war. No amount of tax optimisation would have made von Bismarck not need and want a war with France, or Austria before that.

As i mentioned, I'm interested in reading that book because, on face value, the thesis is wrong. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, or misunderstanding your interpretation of the book's thesis, hence my desire to read it.

Edit: i keep coming up with examples, the vast majority of wars during the French Revolutionary / Napoleonic era (the Haitian expedition is a nice counterexample), the Iran-Iraq war, etc.

> So i understand how you got into believing that thesis. Your fundamental departing point is, sorry to say it so bluntly, wrong. Not "different opinions on subjective stuff", but objectively wrong. Wars aren't only about resources

But you don't know how I got into that because you don't know me, and you also don't know that is "objectively wrong" or not. You can't know that, because you don't get to decide if that's an objectively wrong statement. You just have your own belief about it. That's it.

But does sound kind of dumb to say that "war is about resource competition" is "objectively wrong". Because it makes sense, and it is a major basis for conflict. You even seem to accept this ("there are probably some countries that ended up doing that"). How can it be "objectively wrong" if it's true?

Mostly you're arguing against what you imagined I said, not what I actually said (are you doing deliberately to define yourself against something, or just took what I said wrong?) Anyway, I never said all wars caused by states going toward bankruptcy. And I never said, "good taxes means no war". Both those are your inventions. It's a common "reverse the venn diagram" type situation that happens a lot online, but not what I said.

One region our beliefs do differ I think is you seem to think that "ideology" is a "real causative factor" for war. But I think that's mostly made up. Every age gets the ideas it needs (also from the Book), I'll extend that here now, with, "Every war gets the propaganda that justifies it, and unifies, and compels its combatants (or funders/taxpayers) to take part". I see it as: People (the mass population who will be the soldiers) need to be manipulated to go to war, and there will always be those required to craft the narratives that manufacture that motivation, pretext and consent for war. Recent tragic and sad examples: media drumbeat before Iraq war, fake narratives used by Islamic State, media hyperdrive demonization of certain countries over the last 12 months, one of which now has a war going on :(

> You're prescribing a simplistic logical rational basis ... > So you start from a simplistic and wrong position, and go backwards from there - war is inherently for resources, and taxes are resources, so optimised taxes mean no war.

Actually, son, you're the one doing the logical gymnastics here: inventing a logical chain that doesn't exist in my words (good tax -> no war), simplifying the argument to fight against it (therefore all war caused by bad tax), being duped that ideology is a causative factor for war, rather than a necessary psyop for combatants.

I'm not sure why you want to believe that wars are not about (and primarily about) resources? It makes it seem like you want to believed in a "justified" war. A war that is about something more. I don't mean to attack your personal history and I understand you may have a deep vein of that in your background. My life doesn't have experience of that stuff. But even if my thesis is true, that war is caused by economics, it doesn't take away from the meaning that people derived through the narratives they adopted to fight it, does it? What did the war mean for you? Ultimately that's a personal thing, right, because ultimately everybody fights for their own reason, under their own choice. Whether the narratives were manipulated, people chose to make it mean something to them.

And even if the big picture causative factors were economic, as I'm saying, or a symptom of government mismanagement and insufficient taxation, it doesn't negate the significance of historical grievances or prides, and it doesn't (and it can't, I think) take away from the meaning that people make for themselves about what a war means for them. Just because some country's government fuffed things up, then had to go to war, that does not have to denigrate the pride of that country's people I think. The people can still be proud of who they are.

So for me, the personal and big picture are a separate thing, and I'm not trying to get in your way about that. I understand if what I said could be hurtful to your background, for me, I wasn't speaking to that (which to me is a separate side of it). I'm trying to understand the big picture, geopolitical stuff behind conflict. That's it, I think for me.

I'm actually not that interested in talking about it more. I hope you can respect that, too! :) ;p xx ;p

Let's not make a war out of this between us XD :) xx ;p

I think the main thing about this for me was the guy was making a lot of examples with a very brief analysis, or synopsis of the situation. But that doesn't prove, or convince me, about the thesis that it's not about states trying to recover wealth through war. You can't go up against a book of well thought out arguments, and in-depth analyses with a couple of lightly summarized examples. That for me is the main point.

Taler (https://taler.net/) claims to be a taxable but anonymous payment system.

That's interesting.

> The theory is that this will stifle black market activity

Black market activity is already illegal. As usual, this kind of government overreach will only punish law abiding citizens for being law abiding citizens.

The idea is that you make holding a lot of cash much harder to work with on day to day life. That means the incentives for that are far lower.

It also complicate illegal activities in general.

The idea isn't that your typical criminal will say: "I'm okay with dealing drugs, but the law about 6K NIS is where I draw the line".

The idea is that once they get the money in cash, they have a problem actually using that. So they have to go into addition hurdles.

Basically, it makes illegal activities more expensive.

Criminals already have means of laundering their illicit cash. They can't just deposit it in their bank account anyway without accounting for how they got it. They have a front business that accepts small cash transactions (which would be under this limit anyway) so they can report it as legitimate income.

So when there was a black market for banned goods, there now is a black market for banned goods AND banned money. No?

New Zealand is making it illegal to buy Gold with cash.

This is not about paying taxes its a global move to make sure the banking systems are well funded, and runs on the bank are pointless during periods of high inflation.

Cash is problematic, how is the banking system meant to increase money supply if everyone holds physical cash.

> Around NIS 5 billion have already been collected in fines since the restrictions were voted into law. In 2022 alone, around 6,000 audits have been conducted so far, with 2,189 law-breakers identified, representing a sum of NIS 35 million in illicit transactions.

That figure of NIS 5 billion, or US $1.45 billion[1], must be error because it suggests they are fining people $95K when caught doing a $5K cash transaction[2]. It seems very extreme, enough to bankrupt many people and businesses; it can't be right.

[1] The exchange rate for the NIS (New Israeli Shekel) to US dollars is about NIS 3.44 = US $1.00.

[2] Extrapolating backwards, if 2,189 law-breakers did NIS 35 million in illicit transactions so far this year, then in the last 3.5 years since the law came into effect, 15,323 law-breakers did NIS 245 million in illicit transactions, for an average transaction size of NIS 15,989 or US $4,647. So each law-breaker received an average fine of NIS 326,306 (NIS 5 billion divided by 15,323), or US $94,856, which is 20 times greater that the illicit transaction itself.

I'm surprised that this applies to cheques. Can someone from the region explain this?

In Canada cash transactions over $10k are possible but require a large amount of extra paperwork for anti-money-laundering reasons, but there's no such restriction on cheques since the government can see all those clearing through the banking system already.

In Israel, checks are basically legally-enforced IOUs and are thus nearly the same as cash. Once a check is written in a particular amount, that check can be transferred to another party. If the check bounces, that party can take the person who wrote the check to court and begin legal proceedings to enforce a recovery of the funds in the amount listed on the check. Israel has a state institution, Hotza'ah LePo'al, which enforces the collection and payment of debt through means like garnishing wages and cancelling passports.

To evade taxes, one merely needs to trade in such IOUs without actually cashing them out.

> To evade taxes, one merely needs to trade in such IOUs without actually cashing them out.

So because the law about bounced checks is so strict, checks are essentially as good as cash? That's an amazing unintended effect.

Aha, interesting! In Canada it's possible to "countersign" a cheque, allowing it to be cashed by a third party, but in practice it's extremely rare and many banks refuse to cash such cheques.

It never occurred to me that this mechanism could be used for money laundering!

It's almost like we would need a global rise from the consumers (99,9%) against the bank moguls & wef. If we only knew who these ~1000 people were..

Been seeing WEF pop up all over the place in contrarian, mainly right circles lately - what's the deal with that? It was traditionally a bogeyman of the more left-leaning global conspiracies in the 90s and 2000s

Conspiracies are like fads, they come and go.

Their promotional materials with sinister messages like "you'll own nothing and be happy", "great reset" discussed in Klaus Schwab's book which puts the world under technocrat control, their young leaders tending to support their authoritarian policies, etc. make them a disturbingly powerful antagonistic organisation to be aware of.

Klaus Schwab lol, Charles Schwab is the banking CEO. Very cool guy.

> Klaus

Oops, corrected. Thanks!

Can you link some of these promotional materials with sinister messaging, or their young leaders supporting authoritarian policies?

I think the reason I'm seeing this all over the place in conspiracy circles this week is some grift podcast brought it up - in a week or two we'll be on to something else.

Mildly related. A lot of countries have limits on physical cash transactions. Germany doesn’t. You can buy a mansion and pay for it in physical cash.

Apart from the tax implications, it is an effective way to launder money. Apparently organized crime really likes this and buys real estate en masse.

I still don't understand how those supposed money laundering plots work. E.g. if you buy a house with dirty money, wouldn't the tax agency still ask you why you suddenly own a house and how you could afford to buy it?

My tax agency already asks questions if my living costs seem too low...

Well, table stakes are to obfuscate you. A nesting doll of shell companies buys the house on your behalf that you live in.

In a lot of cases tax agencies also lack the means or authority to verify the cleanliness of money obtained abroad.

They pay taxes on it. This is why the state “doesn’t care”.

As far as I recall, when you buy a house, the notary is supposed to check where the money is coming from, but this can be more of a handwavey thing.

This is a slightly older article, I am on the go and didn’t find anything more in depth in English: https://m.dw.com/en/german-real-estate-market-a-hotbed-of-mo...

In NZ or Aus the house would be taken under civil forfeiture, with you having to show a legit paper trail for the money to get your asset back. I think they're making it so you don't even have to be associated with any crime, and nothing has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt because it's civil.

This took me a while to understand, this is targeting physical cash transactions - online transfers/payments were the norm for me growing up in NZ. The absurd difficulty of transferring money online in the US was incredibly frustrating when I first moved here, though not as absurd as when I discovered that in the US having someone's bank account# meant you can take money from their account.

>in the US having someone's bank account# meant you can take money from their account.

The account number is written on every check. This is simply not the case.

Yes it is.

The way you do online payments in the US if not by credit card is by providing the recipient with your account number - they conveniently point to the parts of the cheque to copy - and then they withdraw money from that account.

Better yet when I was first trying to set up my online banking so that I could send money to my partner E*trade had me enter their account#, and then confirm the amount that they sent to it. Once I confirmed it they let me pull money out of her account at will. Because they were enforcing the can/cannot withdraw money for my partners account with another bank.

A lot of the reason for things like Venmo, etc existing in the US is because you can’t simply send money to a bank account. Everything assumes that having an account# means having something to withdraw money from.

Another entry in the list of "What is Bitcoin good for, anyway?"

Bitcoin is actually worse than this. Bitcoin is easily traceable and doesn’t solve the “anonymous money” problem that cold hard cash solves. Not only is Bitcoin easily traceable the record exists forever and is impossible to erase. There are other crypto products that attempt to solve this issue but Bitcoin is definitely not one of them.

Bitcoin is much better in that it's pseudonymous (instead of 100% associated to your real identity) and cannot be censored (instead of your government being able to freeze your funds, only allow transferring from/to X, up to Y amount, etc).

Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant.

Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable.

Bitcoin is censorable, and it has been censored in the past by miners refusing to include transactions that they viewed as spam. Because Bitcoin transactions are public, they can be discriminated against.

It takes a "51% attack" majority of miners to refuse to include a transaction, and then only if they're willing to reject blocks mined by others that include it, at the risk of their own blocks being rejected by full nodes (like Coinbase's and Binance's) if their 51% majority turns out not to be as solid as they thought it was.

As far as I know this has never happened; the only transactions I've seen excluded from the blockchain are unanimous things like the spam transactions you're talking about.

Yeah, Bitcoin doesn’t typically make sense for avoidance purposes while you are still interfacing with centralized entities. It was always supposed to be p2p but has largely failed at that because there’s no real need for most people’s use case (speculation.)

> Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant.

How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous.

And before you say "yeah but nobody does that", I do that and a lot of people in my country do that.

> Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable.

I don't see the point here? If it's no longer bitcoin then of course it's properties don't apply anymore.

By the way I don't consider Bitcoin specifically a good replacement because it's not scalable, but my point applies to other potentially similar but scalable cryptocurrencies (maybe ETH in the future if they figure out scalability)

> If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous.

It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

This is fairly rudimentary forensics work, and an unmaskable, centralized store of all transactions makes it trivial.

> I don't see the point here?

"Anti-censorship" properties that are worthless in real-world usage seem to be a fairly important flaw if we're talking about a technologies anti-censorship properties.

> It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

How is that? Let's say I go to PornHub and purchase premium (which is only purchasable with crypto). Assume tor usage to not have to worry about any kind of side channel identity leak. How could PornHub know who I am? At most, if the person who sold me the crypto face to face messed up and the address he used to send me the coins becomes identified, PornHub could assume

A) This is another address of his

B) This is the address of someone he conducted business with

Either way you would need to personally inquire him to leak my identity, in case he even knows it.

And this is assuming a trivial case without the use of mixers and so on.

Ideally you would want your wallet software to automatically handle all this stuff, and automatically clean your coins for you, generate new addresses, etc without you even knowing.

As with any thing OpSec, all it takes is one mistake to make your digital footprint clear.

I do not have the time or expertise to explain all the ways in which blockchain forensics is able to trace identities and ownership, but behold, it's an entire industry now. And isn't that much different from other forms of forensic accounting, which has been tracing money through labyrinths of shell companies and offshore accounts for decades.

If you believe, "Well, I used a new address! And a mixer! I'm safe!", that entire industry would like to have words with you.

This is a Bitcoin transaction that was made recently: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/2ade2fbc7260f7000696953d4f...

How much can you tell us about the sender and recipient, please?

I'm not a forensic accountant.

This like someone pointing out that there are doctors who can cure a mild infection and then demanding that person heal your infection immediately.

You said that you could in your comment:

> It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

Regardless, obviously you can't. And no forensic accountant can either. I think you're just misinformed. You can draw some unreliable statistical relationships between adresses but that's it. And schemes like CoinJoin makes that sort of analysis even more irrelevant.

There's an entire industry of people and court filings that disagree with you.

So we've gone from "you", to a "forensic accountant" and now to "law enforcement".

If by industry, you mean blockchain analysis software vendors, I'm well aware of them. It is snake oil meant to tick an AML checkbox and appear as though you are doing something to fight money laundering. It's pure security theater.

Regarding law enforcement, they can't simply link Bitcoin addresses to real identities. It's just not possible. What happens is that some criminals are dumb enough to volunteer their real identity to exchanges and get caught that way.

> How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face [blah blah]

You just described the benefits of a cash transaction. If the government is your adversary in this scenario, what's stopping them from cutting network access and rendering your Bitcoin immobile? Starlink and solar panel? For everyone?

I'm really getting sick of this libertarian drivel.

> You just described the benefits of a cash transaction.

Nobody is denying cash is good. But cash relies on the government issuing it, can't be sent through the internet, can't be transported across borders easily, or in large quantities, can be physically seized, etc.

> If the government is your adversary in this scenario what's stopping them...

Yeah and what's stopping them from throwing you in jail? Or just killing you?

I'm assuming an intermediate point here, in which the government isn't either fully libertarian/anarchist, neither fully authoritarian. Which is what most "free" countries are like nowadays.

If the government is fully authoritarian and you're an "adversary" you're fucked.

Bitcoin hasn't seen large scale, transactional adoption anywhere, but especially not in any "free" country, where Bitcoin's advantages aren't outweighed by its disadvantages outside of illicit usage.

Crypto now means Coinbase the same way that email now means Gmail. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Protocols > Platforms.

Nobody here in Argentina uses Coinbase; they all use Binance.

Interesting. Yeah it's a few different exchanges + banks. The dependency on platforms is the problem here.

I agree that it's a problem, but an oligopoly like that is much less of a problem than a Gmail-style near-monopoly would be.

In reality it isn't pseudonymous though, because 99% of users are on centralized KYC exchanges for convenience.

Maybe 99% of the users you know. When LocalBitcoins imposed KYC everyone in Argentina switched to Binance.

"breaking the law" is the only entry in the "what is bitcoin good for" discussion that everyone already agrees on. I thought the point was getting away from that image though.

If the law is nonsense then breaking the law is a very good use case.

lex iniusta non est lex. We've philosophically explored that idea for millenia. It's time to act on it.

An unjust in that context is one that was passed without rightful authority or does not apply equally to all. It's not a shorthand for "I don't like the law".

Throughout the millenia I can assure you the idea of an unjust law has very little to do with the bitcoin mentality of "I like cash and I don't like high taxes, therefore I will evade state authority".

It sounds like your reading hasn't actually ranged through the "millenia". Sure, you can find people arguing what you're arguing (though mostly since the Renaissance) but you can also find plenty of people arguing the opposite.

In The West (and certainly much more so in many Eastern traditions) the guiding principle has always roughly centered around what Tertuillian summed up as "render the image of Caesar, which is on the coin, to Caesar, and the image of God, which is on man, to God; so as to render to Caesar indeed money, to God yourself."

This idea to arbitrarily opt-out of the earthly authorities is a figment of internet anarchism. I'd honestly like to hear which historical thinker or regime suggests otherwise.

Plato relates that everyone expected Socrates to evade state authority because he wouldn't like being sentenced to death; his Socrates is a daring rebel against conventional thinking by accepting his death sentence, not merely an expositor of that conventional thinking.

None of the characters of the Iliad would have recognized your idea that a law must apply equally to all to be legitimate; when Odysseus goes and smacks down the mutinous soldiers, he isn't appealing to some kind of abstract notion of equality before the law, but to inequality: namely, the superiority of kings like Agamemnon and himself over commoners, which rests on their martial virtue. Similar value systems can be found in Scandinavian sagas.

You don't find the idea of legal egalitarianism that is your sine qua non of legal legitimacy until after the Renaissance; until then it was taken for granted that some people naturally had more rights than others. Slaves, women, foreigners, veterans, nobles, and royalty were categories to which the law generally did not apply equally. Though, in some times and places, some of them were exempted from the special treatment that applied generally, that was the exception rather than the rule. Today usually only so-called "illegals", children, and felons find themselves outside the boundaries of legal egalitarianism. (Though any black person in the US who's visited white suburbs can tell you that sometimes equality before the law is only theoretical.) Switzerland, more egalitarian in most ways than the rest of Europe, didn't grant women the vote until 01959–71.

Tertullian and the whole Christian worldview to which he belonged were, like Socrates, rebels, against what they saw as the corrupt selfishness of the society around them—he wasn't just restating the conventional wisdom either. At the same time, though, Christianity was founded in lawlessness (Jesus casting the moneychangers out of the Temple was definitely not authorized by the authorities, and whether it happened or not it was evidently the sort of thing the early Christians approved of) and existed in open defiance of Roman law for over a century before Tertullian and another century after him, regardless of the fact that the laws they were breaking (against deprecating the Roman state religion) applied equally to all. Modern Christian sects have commonly preached disobedience to laws, including but not limited to laws requiring loyalty oaths, laws forbidding polygamy, conscription laws, laws establishing slavery, and, obviously, laws establishing state religions.

So, while many Christian sects do preach obedience, I think it makes more sense to read Tertullian as preaching poverty.

History is replete with tales of people rebelling against authority because they suffered under it, and just as replete with poets and philosophers glorifying and justifying their deeds. William Tell is the national hero of Switzerland, and Robin Hood was the national hero of England, for just such acts of rebellion. Today we have narcocorridos and gangsta rap. Sometimes philosophers argue against the legitimacy of particular forms of government or government in general (Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Goldman, Rorty's student Sartwell) and sometimes they argue for it.

Sartwell's Against the State is, I think, the most convincing modern argument I've read on the anarchist side of the aisle.

Usually the ones who argued for the legitimacy of the current form of government were the ones who got a position at court instead of living out their years in poverty and toil to survive, so we hear from them more.

In the modern context, Thoreau's and Gandhi's concept of civil disobedience, rooted profoundly in self-denial, is that your obligation to the law only extends so far as accepting the punishment the law metes out, as Socrates did; while they are not advocating "arbitrarily opting out of earthly authorities", they also definitely are not limiting their advocacy of civil disobedience to laws that are "passed without rightful authority or do[] not apply equally to all".

Outside of philosophy, though, you'll find that most people break the law without a second thought when they're sure they won't get caught. They don't worry about whether the speed limit was constituted by rightful authority or whether the US's Schedule I classification of marijuana applies equally to everyone; they worry about whether they'll get punished, and if so, how badly. And this has evidently been the case as long as there have been laws.

Of course most people don't go around robbing and cheating just because they can get away with it, but that's not because it's illegal; it's because they think it's bad, somewhat independently of what the law says. They think the law should punish actions that are bad; they don't think that actions become bad because someone has passed a law against them.

At least for the time being the law does not prohibit Bitcoin transactions above NIS 6k, does it? So it's more like "getting the benefits of breaking the law, without breaking the law".

It seems like governments around the world want to push people to keep their money in the bank. But this is an awful idea: first, in this case the government can track all your spending (even if the law doesn't allow that, they can ask the bank informally). Second, the government can always limit how much you can spend or withdraw.

For example, if there is a financial crisis, the government can limit how much you can withdraw from your account. Those with cash might be able to buy currency or precious metals, but those who trust the bank will be screwed.

But to be honest cash is not much better. For example, the government can introduce a cash reform, and also set limits for exchanging old currency to new one.

That's exactly why Bit--in was invented. Electronic money, kept outside of gov control.

A government with little enough concern for its citizens, and enough tech savviness, can effectively ban cryptocurrency too. Case in point: China.

This is such a dark future (and present for some apparently).

In Italy the current limit for cash transactions is €2k, but it will be lowered to €1k starting from 2023. [0]

(Just for reference, NIS 6k is roughly equal to €1.7k)

[0] (Italian) https://bancadiasti.it/senza-categoria/utilizzo-dei-contanti...

No, no more buying used cars from private citizens. Got you.

Sure, you could do this by the bank, wait for a few days, then constantly wonder if it arrived, and/or if the car seller is scamming you, while the (honest) car seller wonders the same thing, facing a third potential buyer who brings cash. Or you can just, you know, become a criminal and decide to ignore that particular law.

I actually prefer to buy and sell used cars with wire transfer. Within EU, they're usually instantaneous within a country and overnight internationally. I don't have to worry about carrying larger amount of money - when I was purchasing my first motorcycle, it was literally almost everything I had at the time. If something goes wrong and I got scammed, the money can be tracked a little bit better than with cash.

EDIT: And in this case, there seems to be an exception specifically for cars.

Or you could implement a system like in our country where national wire transfers arrive in seconds without any fees.

I recently sent a US national wire transfer (known as ACH) from my bank account to my account in another bank. Took two weeks.

> No, no more buying used cars from private citizens. Got you.

There is no change when it comes to buying cars. The limit before this change was NIS 50000 for payments between private individuals. That limit is dropping to NIS 15000, but there is an exception keeping it at NIS 50000 for car purchases.

Same in many countries where it’s just too inconvenient even if it’s legal. For example in Sweden some Ukrainian refugees who fled without their documents can’t open bank accounts so now can’t be paid despite having worked since may. It’s just not possible for an employer to pay employees any other way than directly trough a bank account. Which is good in most cases (less tax evasion and money laundering) but it gets silly in some edge cases. This (not being able to pass out a check or a few $100 bills every month) must sound absolutely insane to Americans.

There was an exiting legislation for 11K, so this new legislation only reduced the sum to 6K. Not sure how this law is going to be enforced (as many of the laws in Israel are not strictly enforced).

Please, HN, tell me again how cryptocurrencies are useless.

Because the malware they have backdoored into your phone can track what money you have sent/received?

You're right -- the traceable transaction ledger that most cryptocurrencies generate is exactly what this law is intended to force people towards, to ease the burden on law enforcement. Combined with basic know-your-customer laws, they're quite useful for tracking down illegal transactions.

"Hmm this person is receiving high value products but we have no record of money being exchanged. Maybe we should send the police to 'interrogate'"

How would crypto currencies solve this issue? Crypto transactions above that value are also illegal and traceable. If you wanted to break the law it would be easier to just keep using regular cash.

OR just use your bank account / card to send money, which is kinda like crypto but easier and legal.

Mind elaborating how cryptocurrencies are at all helpful here? How's government saying 2k cash transactions are illegal different from it saying 2k Bitcoin or Monero transactions are illegal?

The point is not that cops will now chase after conspicuous stacks of colorful paper, but that law-abiding citizens and businesses will refuse dealing with you and/or report you to police if you suggest to commit an offence.

as an Israeli, I really think this is a good thing. I hate the use of cash. I understand digital privacy and liberal concerns, but apart from the theoretical liberty taken, most non-criminals dont use cash and prefer digital payments.

> I really think this is a good thing. I hate the use of cash

Noone forces you to use cash, isn't it?

> apart from the theoretical liberty taken

why theoretical? It's a liberty taken.

> most non-criminals dont use cash and prefer digital payments

Do you have evidence supporting this? I am not a criminal, but I have no intentions to share how my money are spent with actual criminals, who constitute government bodies.

another + is that they can track much better what and when people buy stuff.

Cash is at least kind of anonymous

Arutz Sheva/Israel National News is an extremist right-wing rag. A more extreme version of Daily Mail or Fox News. While the claims it makes may be true, they may as well be completely false or severely distorted. If the story hasn't been reported in reliable Israeli press (Haaretz, Times of Israel, ynetnews) INN may be misrepresenting it.

It's almost like we need some kind of cryptography currency

What does a "cryptography currency" bring to the table in regards to this problem that cash hasn't? The fact that it hasn't been banned... yet?

Cash is way less traceable than most cryptocurrencies.

Of course cash is better, but with cash the government is in charge of issuance.

What are you going to do if governments decide against issuing any more cash? Bills will eventually break, or the currency itself will lose too much value due to inflation that the bills won't enough.

With crypto you don't rely on your government issuing cash.

If governments ban cash, it's back to barter. Drugs/alcohol/cigarettes, weapons, food, gas, gold and silver...

Nop because the authorities will consider the value of your barter (equivalent in cash of your good, gold, silver, gas, ...)

How will they track it? They can only know what people report, which is why they have hardons for digital currency.

Anyone can issue (paper) cash.

Cash is just a paper IOU for some other thing. With 100 dollar bill, that thing is 100 USD. You could also issue paper for gold backed IOU, or gold itself, or bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

Counterfeiting paper is a problem, so you need force against this, and this is why the government is generally involved. But what kind of paper counterfeiting is enforced against, is just a legality. Currently the wost thing to counterfeit is 100 dollar bills. Law could be changed to make it equally bad to counterfeit gold bills, or bitcoin bills.

Saying bitcoin is less private than cash is a category error.

It would be extremely hard to issue cash as non government assuming the government doesn't want cash to exist, it would basically require a centralized entity that could be trivially shut down by the government.

I agree, and this is a reason I am glad bitcoin exists.

My point is that there is nothing stopping bitcoin from being used in a paper cash like way, any more than any other value carrying token.

Bitcoin without government support? Possible, but inconvenient and dangerous. Bitcoin with government support? More nice things.

Currently we are in the "with government support" world, more or less. I hope this continues.

I'm more of an Ethereum/PoS guy but what is for sure a fact, now that we're talking of decentralized issuance, is that you need PoW, at least for bootstrapping a cryptocurrency that has an even remotely fair distribution of tokens (instead of almost all being in the hands of the people that were there from the beginning).

Even then, almost all PoW are tuned in a way to pump the value and enrich the early people, not fairly distribute tokens or make the crypto functional as a currency.

see my reply to redox99 below.

probably would have been better as reply to you.

> Counterfeiting paper is a problem

Again:

It's almost like we need some kind of cryptography currency

death sentence punishment for using money

It's crazy how they openly admit they're targeting the exception available to PA Arabs yet are fine with the one available to haredi Jews.

I realize it's completely in line with Israel's laws, but imagine if there was a change in US law with a loophole that kept Christian churches tax exempt but closed that loophole for Jewish synagogues. The outrage would be immense. Yet in this story the line is a non-issue, seemingly thrown in to show an added "bonus" of making things worse for PA Arabs.

This law applies to the Israeli trading with the PA Arab, not to the PA Arab.

> The stated purpose of the law is to force the general public to use digital means of payment rather than cash, so that transactions can be easily monitored.

You mean you don’t want the government monitoring you at all times?

I mean, the end goal is also to decide what you spend it on…

> Digital dollars, on the other hand, would be traceable and programmable. The Federal Reserve (or some other designated entity) would have the ability to create more digital dollars whenever it sees fit, and, depending on how the legislation is written setting up the currency, the dollars could be formulated to have various rules and restrictions built into their design.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/599768-biden-is-planning...

(This is the US, but UK, EU, and I’m assuming elsewhere all have the same legislation at the moment. China already has this to a degree with the social credit system)

Imagine, I go to get groceries:

checkout machine: “sorry, you used all your carbon credits this month”

You: “but I need food!”

Checkout machine: “if you need food, remember cricket powder is carbon net neutral”

You: “guess I’ll eat that this week.. grumble”

Yeah, that’s literally and explicitly what is being discussed. Maybe this scenario is exaggerated, but carbon tax credit and restricting purchases inbound.

This is heavy, heavy speculation.

The same way that people claimed 20 years ago that cash would be made illegal was "heavy, heavy speculation"?

Still is, yup. I have some cash in my pocket right now. I might even buy a sandwich with it later.

Just wait. It will happen sooner in some countries, later in others, but unfortunately it's almost inevitable.

So the 20 year old prediction didn't come true, but just wait, you're sure it'll happen?

Lots of predictions don't come true. The dystopian "A Nice Morning Drive" from 1973 turns into the Rush song "Red Barchetta" in 1980, and 40 years later, it hasn't happened.

> So the 20 year old prediction didn't come true

The 20 year old prediction wasn't that in 20 years cash would be banned. It was that eventually it would be banned.

And yes, you can look no further than this thread to see that it is being either banned or severely limited around the world already.

Public commentary in forums that serve as forges of opinion such as HN are much more than passive statements. It's similar to the quantum effect of observation affecting the state of a system. These speculative comments actively shape opinion. Any friction against the slide towards a cashless society is welcome. Speculation serves to stoke the imagination of a populace that would be subject to these changes if there was no friction for policy makers. An example is the Murderbots video which speculates on a future where small commercial drones are used as domestic political and literal weapons.

Actually “Hacker” “News” has been a point of ridicule for quite a while now outside of the bubble here, so arguing that it’s an opinion forge plays right into its notoriety.

This is just another bot-riddled echo chamber, with disagreements over trivialities instead of what actually matters in the world

It's a bot riddled echo chamber because there is influence generated here.

Who exactly is being influenced?

Everyone.

Utter nonsense. People are laughing their asses off at the amount of idiocy on this web site.

Where is HN being ridiculed?

You've heard of this thing called "Twitter"?

One thing can be both a point of ridicule and an opinion forge. Pitchfork music reviews come to mind.

It always is, until it is proven a fact. In my country, people were being alarmist about the Corona travel restrictions, the vaccine, and the negative externalities of closing the healthcare system to pretty much everything. The alarmists were given a derogatory name, their concerns were labeled "speculation" and generally after 6 months, turned out to be true.

Gov: "There will be no app to restrict your movements if you aren't vaccinated."

Six months later: there's an app.

Gov: "The vaccine is fully tested and is completely safe"

Six months later: vaccine turns out to not have been completely tested, and the corporations behind it can't be sued.

Consider me heavily, heavily sceptical about CBDC's and the government's/central bank's desires to build a social credit system. I've seen too many quotes by August Karsten not to be.

Yes, if you throw enough theories at the wall, a few will stick.

Remember Citizen, meat is for Party members only.

Your language is referencing communism, but this is mostly happening under capitalism not communism.

There is a meme in leftist spheres of pro-capitalist people posting photos of slums saying "this is the world under communism", except it's literally a photo of a part of the world under capitalism. Anyway, thought you should know you did the meme.

How does this kind of reactionary doomerism stuff have any traction on HN of all places?

There's a relevant table on page 7 of this 2020 UK document, https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/29941...

Note the goal of zero consumer travel by 2050.

Are private jets and yachts subject to Net Zero carbon restrictions?

That document appears to be an academic exercise into how the UK could reach absolute zero emissions, not net zero but actually completely zero, and doing it using current tech.

This is not anyone's policy nor realistic.

(edit: putting further comments here as I am rate limited and unable to reply -

The paper itself says on page 4 that it is going over and above the climate commitments in law in the UK, and is about absolute zero emissions. It even says the paper is an appeal for public discussion and then goes on to set out what it means by Absolute Zero and how that differs from the current law.

This is not a policy document.

Heathrow's decision to cut flights is due to ongoing covid-related staffing problems, not environmental concerns.)

From the 2nd page of the document:

> UK FIRES is a research programme sponsored by the UK Government, aiming to support a 20% cut in the UK’s true emissions by 2050 by placing Resource Efficiency at the heart of the UK’s Future Industrial Strategy.

UK Heathrow recently tried to impose a 50% cut in daily passenger air traffic, from 200,000 to 100,000, https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-statement-on-...

It's very explicitly an academic exercise. From the same page:

> In response, this report starts from today’s technologies: if we really want to reach zero emissions in thirty years time, what does that involve?

The UK has not made it an official policy to reach zero emissions in 30 years. The might have a policy to reach "net zero" emissions by 2050, which is completely different.

> UK Heathrow recently tried to impose a 50% cut in daily passenger air traffic, from 200,000 to 100,000

Not sure why you bring it up, yes they did, but in a completely unrelated manner to emissions.

LHR wasn't prepared to handle the influx of passengers once travel picked up because of lack of staffing/readiness and they're trying to force the problem on airlines to handle.

Of course airlines would reject this. Take the PR brunt of LHR's problem?

> UK Heathrow recently tried to impose a 50% cut in daily passenger air traffic

Yes, because they don't have enough trained staff to handle the current volume[1]. Absolutely nothing to do with climate change, just trying to stop bad PR from delays to people going on holiday.

[1] https://www.heathrow.com/latest-news/heathrow-implements-sum...

I would call it idiotic. They call for no shipping by 2050. Like a country in the modern world can survive without getting goods shipped in or out.

It's not idiotic, it's a theoretical scenario on how CO2 emissions could be reduced to zero (not net zero, actual zero) by 2050. And they don't "call for" it, they say that if the goal were to reach zero emissions by 2050, all ships that still burn CO2-producing fuels would have to stop doing that by that date.

It doesn't say zero consumer travel, it specifically talks about trains being the preferred mode of travel and becoming faster.

It does say that all airports would close by 2050. However, that doesn't address military flights or flights used for other than transportation purposes (ex. aerial imagery, etc.) So it would seem that small airstrips would likely remain open for those purposes.

They don't seem to suggest a solution for intercontinental travel at all. Presumably, everyone would have to land in the European mainland and take a train over. But it would seem strange to rely totally on the EU for that.

> It does say that all airports would close by 2050.

But that's only because they can't see getting net-zero planes etc. in sufficient time that everyone can switch over before 2050.

"Although there are lots of new ideas about electric planes, they won’t be operating at commercial scales within 30 years, so zero emissions means that for some period, we’ll all stop using aeroplanes."

Other than the fossil fuels already being used, there doesn't seem to be anything energy dense enough for commercial air travel coming any time soon.

Maybe some kind of in-air carbon capture on the engines?

Carbon capture doesn’t create energy, it uses a lot of energy to generate fuel. This makes it excellent where you have lots of renewable energy that may be irregular (like wind), since hydrocarbons are an incredibly dense energy storage mechanism. You can then create fuel from that renewable energy and use it to power everything (like planes). Not the best to create on a plane tho

I actually think carbon capture is a great solution to global warming and general oil depletion, since hydrocarbons are such a great energy source for everything except their pollution characteristics. If we can build out carbon capture / hydrocarbon production facilities that use renewable energy, and we can do it cheaper than current oil extraction, I think we’re set to just use hydrocarbons forever!

We really just need a breakthrough that makes the whole process more economical, which (fingers crossed) is actually possible within our lifetimes

That would be literally engines operating on thin air, so no, I don't see that happening...

It would generally be better to do the syngas generation on the ground in major hubs, since it’s probably like most industrial processes where scale improves economics.

If only there were hubs that planes congregated at on the ground.

> Note the goal of zero consumer travel by 2050.

I'm not seeing where it says that? It explicitly says, for 2050, "Road use at 60% of 2020 levels" and "Electric trains the preferred mode of travel for people and freight over all significant distances". If you mean "flying and shipping are at zero" then yes but that's only because they don't envisage having net-zero planes and ships by 2050. If electric planes and ships arrive before then, they'll be usable under this plan (as it says under "Beyond 2050").

> If you mean "flying and shipping are at zero" then yes

Yes. Current electric plane prototypes have limited range (e.g. 150 miles) and weight capacity.

> but that's only because they don't envisage having net-zero planes and ships by 2050.

Don't be disingenuous.

You replied to the wrong person, or cited the wrong text?

>Are private jets and yachts subject to Net Zero carbon restrictions?

This isn't an answer, but the European Commission have proposed an aviation fuel tax that exempts cargo aircraft and private jets.

Thanks, looks like yachts would also be exempted by the EU, https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022...

> In July 2021, the European Commission published a set of proposals to decarbonise the maritime sector. However, the proposed carbon pricing scheme (ETS) and the low GHG fuel standard (FuelEU Maritime) will only apply to ships above 5,000 GT and exclude a number of ship types such as offshore vessels, fishing vessels and yachts.

Private jets wanted to be exempt from jet fuel carbon tax in the EU:

https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2231434-eu-draft-exempts-...

I hope this is an academic exercise because if absolute zero entails no air travel, no shipping, no lamb or beef, amongst other prohibitions, it also entails violence.

Most of the point of carbon credits is that you can buy more if you want.

I'm not sure why this is meant to make me feel better.

The elite would bid up the price of the credits so they can fully enjoy their yachts and private jets.

It would still be crickets for proles.

If the elite have all the money so nobody can do anything fun, the problem isn't this hypothetical carbon credit system that's bolted onto the side.

You're giving them yet another lever with which to control your life while maintaining maximum freedom for themselves.

Since I don't consider the overthrow of capitalism to be a realistic near-term goal, I am quite worried about near-term power grabs such as these.

Eventually ... if you drive a mate to the airport, and it is a benefit in kind worth $100 say, then they have to report it and pay tax on it.

> Maybe this scenario is exaggerated, but carbon tax credit and restricting purchases inbound.

It's funny, in context, because Israel is the largest per-capita consumer of single-use plastics in the world, driven by a religious public that uses single-use plastic to help comply with religious dietary law. Attempts have been made to implement taxation of single-use plastic, but have failed because of entrenched religious party members in the government. And crickets don't comply with Jewish dietary law.

The truth is more mundane. When finding plumbers, movers, painters, etc. it is quite common to be quoted a price "without VAT", which is code for "pay in cash, don't request a receipt, and we won't charge you the additional 17%, thus also permitting them to underreport income.

india does the same thing.... there is an entire world of unregulated cash economy which does not care about indirect taxes.

>plumbers, movers, painters, etc

unless you are quite big, you are not required to get registered with the tax department and as such, you dont collect taxes on your sales from customers.

In Israel, the threshold is low : 100000 NIS, about $29k, and that's revenue, not profit.

As a reference point, the minimum wage in Israel is 60,000 NIS, so adding expenses and buying parts/consumables/fittings etc on behalf of your customers onto that, most contractors would reach that threshold quickly.

I can see why the contractors are keen to stay below the threshold, and why the government is keen to restrict cash usage (they are gaining 17% sales tax as well as income tax.)

alright. in india, for a "service provider", the threshold is inr 20 lacs or $25000. daily wages is at best inr 7-900 or $10-12.

the threshold is calculated on the "bank deposits" so people simply collect cash and don't route it through the banks. that way, people can avoid reaching the limit for quite some time...

> driven by a religious public that uses single-use plastic to help comply with religious dietary law

Say what now? As someone who knows this religious dietary law quite well, I have never heard of this ever.

In addition you have to pay for each bag in the supermarket in Israel, those disposable bags are not free, so I really doubt they are wasting them that way. https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/decrease_of_74_percen...

Source: https://m.calcalistech.com/Article.aspx?guid=3741791

Did you read your own source? There is zero connection to anything religious. Only convenience.

And this article is from 2018, in 2019 they passed laws that dramatically reduced plastic waste.

Quote:

> Much of the consumption of disposable tableware in Israel can be linked to the country’s ultra-orthodox population. Netanel Leifer, an editor for online magazine Kikar Hashabat, which caters to ultra-orthodox readers, told Calcalist that ultra-orthodox neighborhoods have hundreds of disposables stores. “For every convenient store, there is a store selling disposable tableware. It is very common,” he said.

Sure, the article gets into the convenience aspect of it, but for religious consumers, single-use plastics help tremendously with simply avoiding issues of cross-contamination of dairy and meat. Synagogues hosting light refreshments and meals do not need to maintain kitchens with strict supervision when there are no dishes to be washed, and neighbors who bring food over do not need to worry about whether their dishes were mistakenly used or washed incorrectly (i.e. households that keep separate meat/dairy sinks) if there are no dishes to return.

If you want a more recent source, feel free: https://www.ynet.co.il/environment-science/article/sjzqqpxco (Hebrew). Two years after that initial attempt in 2019, there's still 1.3 billion NIS spent per year on nearly 70,000 tons of single-use plastic, with more than 1/3 the population using single-use plastic on a daily basis and more than half using single-use plastic cups for drinking water from home/office cold water dispensers.

> And crickets don't comply with Jewish dietary law.

If you mean specifically the religious law, then locusts/grasshoppers are the only kind of insect permitted to eat (see Leviticus 11:20-23). Ancient prophets consumed them too.

Most modern rabbinical authorities forbid them. Source: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4624319/jewis...

I've read the same article. The fact remains that it's not a blanket ban. If you could figure out which species are kosher and limit production to just these for kosher products, they would be perfectly fine as far as the religious law is concerned.

> If you could figure out which species are kosher

Therein lies the crux. How do you figure out which modern-day species were the ones that are referred to in the biblical source? Many religious followers would prefer to act out of an abundance of caution and simply not partake.

> [...]it is quite common to be quoted a price "without VAT", which is code for "pay in cash, don't request a receipt, and we won't charge you the additional 17%[...]

It's also annoyingly used to quote one price and then "oh but you also need to add VAT", sidestepping the law that requires prices always be specified with VAT. (A store is not allowed to advertise a VAT-less price and then charge VAT afterwards, the price you see is the price you pay, they must deduct VAT)

Or alternately it's about combatting large-scale money laundering, terrorist arms sale, and the stuff that they actually say it's for.

Hmmm.

> I mean, the end goal is also to decide what you spend it on…

Or that might just be ludicrous hyperbole, and the article you linked could be 95% speculation, as it appears to be. The environmental concerns could be more to do with the investigations on BTC and ETH and the wastefulness of PoW.

But no, I'm sure you're right, the US government that is helpless in the face of citizens slaughtering each other with firearms is going to regulate how much beef you can cram down your gullet.

Carbon accounting is simply a way to build in a price signal to activity that produces an unwanted externality.

Imagine if it were free and legal to dump garbage in your local park. That is how air pollution is currently treated in the US.

In jurisdictions with sensible climate policy, you pay to dump waste into the atmosphere and those dollars are used to reduce GHG emissions elsewhere.

> Imagine, I go to get groceries:

> checkout machine: “sorry, you used all your carbon credits this month”

> You: “but I need food!”

> Checkout machine: “if you need food, remember cricket powder is carbon net neutral”

> You: “guess I’ll eat that this week.. grumble”

> Yeah, that’s literally and explicitly what is being discussed. Maybe this scenario is exaggerated, but carbon tax credit and restricting purchases inbound.

This is trad "RETVRN" conspiracy BS verbatim. Nobody is going to force you to eat bugs or live in the pod. Let's try and do better, folks.

And this is where technologists totally fail to understand the implications of the technology they push forward.

Okay, get a drivers license, OK submit to speed limits, OK submit to random searches for a failed bulb, OK submit to automated license plate scanners, OK submit to marketing companies tracking your car in the parking lot.

Most technologies do not exist in a vacuum, when one becomes entrenched in society, it is impossible to operate as a human without one. Even the Amish have telephones now.

This, for those who aren't aware, is a somewhat more eloquent rephrasing of the "Great Reset" neoreactionary conspiracy theory[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset#Conspiracy_theorie...

Label a dog a conspiracy theory and hang him.

Where's the dog and who's hanging him?

"You will eat bugs" is bog-standard reactionary lingo at this point. You can't credibly expect people to not notice it.

You would be more convincing with reasoned arguments instead of this "guilt by association" tribalism. You do everyone here a disservice by resorting to ad hominem.

This is a pretty run-of-the-mill globe-spanning conspiracy theory. They are all more or less scapegoating mechanisms for a given demographic.

Uh oh, sounds like a “conspiracy theory”, must not have any validity at all.

Is there a “sounds like a conspiracy theory” fallacy someone can point me to?

I'm not interested in disputing the veracity of the claim; it's not worth my time. I'm merely pointing out that this is indisputably a popular neoreactionary conspiracy theory. It's a pointless insult to this forum's intelligence to pretend otherwise.

You’ve supplied the labels, I’ve supplied the critique. I don’t agree with your labels, am I pretending?

Like all things in life, "insult to intelligence" is meant to invoke the average, not the individual. You aren't accused of pretending.

Ah, so he’s a conspiracy theorist and I’m of average intelligence. Have a label for everything don’t we.

I think you misread the last comment.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What "conspiracy theory"? Several government officials clubs and "policy proposal" bodies have openly stated plans to that effect, and even used those very terms. They have even published public policy wishlist books about it, it's not like they've been shy about it.

That's a conspiracy alright, in the sense of coordinated action to specific goals, but hardly a "conspiracy theory".

But of course, if you tag it a "conspiracy theory" knee-jerk idiots will consider it to be the same category as alien abductions, the illuminati, and Elvis being alive...

As noted in the link: there's "the Great Reset," which is a broad collection of economic and social policies that generally prioritize environmental and social action, and then there's "the Great Reset," a neoreactionary conspiracy theory that says that the former is really about getting people to live in the pod and eat the bugs.

The former is a "conspiracy" in the sense that there's a bunch of policy being written and applied by various important people, the legitimacy of which you're welcome to contest. But it's not remotely consistent in content with the conspiracy theory, which is a redressing of the iconic "The Other (Jews, Muslims, Last Night's Meatloaf) is going to take away Everything You Value" conspiracy template.

The WEF conspiracy doesn’t seem that radical to me.

You have some of the wealthiest people in the world flying into Davos on private jets to discuss how society needs to change to save the environment. Pro tip: When they’re talking about society they don’t mean themselves, they mean you. These folks aren’t going to be dining on synthetic meat or cricket protein, and they aren’t going to take public transit or give up a few of their 15 houses to reduce their CO2 footprint.

The reality is they are entirely self serving and it sure would be convenient for them if a few less plebs were crowding up the beaches in Fiji or jamming up the roads in NYC or London when their driver needs to take them to the airport.

I didn’t say radical. I said neoreactiory, as in: co-opting traditional reactionary pathologies and reusing them in a contemporary setting. The taboo disgust reaction of eating bugs is just a cherry on top.

It would be a grave error to read these comments as “I endorse whatever our planet’s ultrawealthy think is best for you and me.” I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I’ll hop onto every cheap retelling of the same basic reactionary conspiracy that’s been around for the last 600 years.

>I didn’t say radical. I said neoreactiory, as in: co-opting traditional reactionary pathologies and reusing them in a contemporary setting.

Is the above anything else than a word salad to say "thought crime" just with more words?

Label them "reactionary", yeah, because as if being reacted against is "revolutionary". It's convenient how such weasel words can justify anything ("You don't like the gig economy? You're reactionary") - as if there's a monopoly on the definition of societal progress.

>The taboo disgust reaction of eating bugs is just a cherry on top.

Yes. We should rejoice for every such corporate money-making scheme pushed through advertising, subsidies, and policy. And even if eating bugs is not taboo for many, there are still a lot with this taboo about shit eating. They should learn to eat shit with a grin too.

>As noted in the link: there's "the Great Reset," which is a broad collection of economic and social policies that generally prioritize environmental and social action, and then there's "the Great Reset," a neoreactionary conspiracy theory that says that the former is really about getting people to live in the pod and eat the bugs.

I've read the "broad collection of economic and social policies that generally prioritize environmental and social action" and they're mostly about "getting people to live in the pod and eat the bugs" (and buy into this or that new sector that will serve as an upcoming profit center).

They're not even covert about it, e.g. promoting bug protein as the "solution" to meat production, designing (and legislating) e-cash with full government control and even recommending its use to enforce policy (e.g. driving consumption to specific paths, etc), not to mention the "own nothing" concept (yes, we'll still own some things, just increasingly less, and with more rentiers coming to get a chunk of our income).

>But it's not remotely consistent in content with the conspiracy theory, which is a redressing of the iconic "The Other (Jews, Muslims, Last Night's Meatloaf) is going to take away Everything You Value" conspiracy template.

Nice strawman, but it doesn't have to be Jews, Muslims, or (to further the strawman) Last Night's Meatloaf.

It's enough to be global corporate interests and their lobbies, and government bureaucracies (who historically only know to add to their responsibilities, areas, information they collect and so on, never to take away, and which have been on a huge race on those fronts ever since the 1950s, that got "nuclear" with the advent of the digital era).

In other words, it can just be good old neoliberalism, empowered by the ongoing crises and "exceptional conditions".

I don't know whether this is unintentional or acquired ignorance on your part, but: there's two different things here. There's a bunch of obnoxious neoliberalism, which I am more than happy to criticize, and then there's a neoreactionary conspiracy theory that's basically a rehashed "FEMA death camps" but with COVID and the WEF as the objects of focus.

Nobody is going to make you eat bugs or live in a pod. If someone tries to, you can do what humans have always done when they're placed in an unlivable situation. It's embarrassing that this even has to be said.

>Nobody is going to make you eat bugs or live in a pod.

No. They're just going to jack up prices, subsidy bugs and promote them (including with taxpayer paid advertising campaigns) because "environment", and make them the main viable option. Eventually you can also tax meat more (no need for anybody who doesn't make 100K/year to be able to afford much of it).

Similarly, they're also just going to ensure wages are kept down, good public housing and affordable morgages are a no-no, and rent is made increasingly untennable.

Pods then wont have to be enforced - they'll just be the affordable option.

Ah, the naivety in believing that "somebody will make you" can just mean a gun-to-the-head or legal requirement.

Has anyone properly debunked it? I just looked up the WEF promotion video about the Great Reset and it is just straight out of Orwell's 1984 including slogans like "OBEY": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPYx12xJFUQ

I can understand why people are skeptical. Youtube dislike extension shows 10% likes to 90% dislikes ratio on 1.8M views. Youtube's clarification banner doesn't help the impression. Why is Youtube putting warning banners like they did for Covid, but for Great Reset?

What's there to debunk? It's the name that a bunch of rich goobers gave to their rich goober conference. The content of the video itself is incredibly bland: it is, in effect, "more of the same but also some environmental justice, so that they don't hang us for burning the world."

The worst thing about all of this is whichever poor soul had to put this video together.

Why is it a conspiracy theory then?

It seems like the facts are not disputed. Just that people disagree with the policy.

Because we're now conflating two things. See the other threads in this discussion.

When politicians argue in favor of this kind of CO2 reduction measures, targeted at individual citizens, know that they are (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps because of dependence) following the framing put forward by fossil fuel companies:

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

BP spent a lot of advertising budget so that we worry about our individual CO2 footprint instead of focussing on appropriate and social policy change which would enable us and make it easy to live climate-positively.

> I mean, the end goal is also to decide what you spend it on…

Governments in the US already exercise this power, making certain drugs illegal, restricting purchases of certain products, regulating quality and other requirements for food, vehicles, construction, etc.

The federal government already exercises both of these powers. The federal reserve changes the money supply. And WIC/“food stamps” (originally specially printed currency, now a cash card) can only be spent on certain purchases.

>Governments in the US already exercise this power

Yes. And now they will have it at 100x the reach, 100x the efficiency, and with automatic monitoring, install rule-change enforcement, and so on.

I never understood the tendency to say "It's already a thing" when the new development is so quantitatively and qualitatively different from what existed, as to be a whole new thing...

It's like "We're at war, the towns are bombed, and people are getting killed? Big deal, people were already getting killed in murder cases and gang shootings".

> Another exception applies to PA Arabs, although according to attorney Uri Goldman, this situation will be rectified by the end of 2022.

To be absolutely clear here, “PA Arabs” refers to those governed by the Palestinian Authority… as agreed to by Israel, so excluding the Gaza Strip… and “rectified” refers to subjecting anyone under that agreed authority to Israeli law rather than any agreement with any party. “Rectified” here means effectively acknowledging that PA governance is effectively squat. Which it has been for some time, but the other consequence is that there’s no denying Israel is a colonial occupier of Palestinian territories.

The law applies to the Israeli not the PA Arab.

> no denying Israel is a colonial occupier of Palestinian territories.

You are seriously messed up. How can a native to the land also be a colonizer?

> the area of ancient Israel was predominantly Jewish until the Jewish–Roman wars of 66–136 CE. During the wars, the Roman Empire expelled most of the Jews from the area and formed the Roman province of Syria Palaestina

> 1948, when the Jewish State of Israel was proclaimed in part of the ancient land of Israel. This was made possible by the Zionist movement and its promotion of mass Jewish immigration.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais...)

> Colonization, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gaining substantial privileges over other inhabitants of the territory.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization)

The history of Isreal is poorly summarized by these three quotes - but your "a native to the land" is a worse summary. A wrongful expulsion, or thousands of years away, doesn't give you a right to displace and oppress on your return.

> The law applies to the Israeli not the PA Arab.

“Rectified” is the exact wording I quoted, they plan to apply the law to Palestinians under the PA authority.

> How can a native to the land also be a colonizer?

By doing the actions colonizers do to other people native to the land. Imposing their national law on those explicitly not subject to it is pretty clear cut, without even considering the other Palestinians they exempt from clear cut designation under their law.

> they plan to apply the law to Palestinians under the PA authority.

Only in your twisted imagination. First that's not what the article says, and second they can't even do that if they wanted to.

Greater than 95% of Palestinians live in areas A and B where Israel has no presence. So how do you imagine they would even do it?

Are C which is under Israel control is less than 5% of the population.

> Only in your twisted imagination.

Or, you know, according to the quote from the article, that I included in my initial comment.

Eliminate non-fungible revenue and many many forms of corruption are abruptly rendered extinct. It might even repurpose why people enter politics.

Oh, cash is not how you bribe politicians in (relatively) civilized countries. Inside information, bearer shares in offshore projects, and board seats will have to do.

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