According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.
I'm not saying that privacy isn't important but I don't think it is the main problem compared to people being unable to use currency.
Sadly most American politicians on both sides of the aisle would probably vote for cashless right now, but, not all of them... and things do change.
Rising flood raises all ships. The stakes will get higher for all of us.
Edit: Besides, the GP's got a slav sounding username. One would be wise not to assume civilization rates in excess of 75%.
Strong slavs make bad times. Bad times make strong slavs.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Though I don't think that would help. Let's say we go cashless some day, then people get oppressed and manage to put together an uprising. Will the result be the return of cash, or just putting another despot in charge? So many times it's the latter. Perhaps the only real answer is smashing the datacentres, like modern-day luddites..
Privacy isn't the most important thing in the world but it's shortsighted to just throw it out the window. You don't need it 'til you need it.
It's okay to be friends with people who can't keep a secret but you need to have at least one friend who can.
But yet certain people have seemingly perfect privacy, like Satoshi Nakamoto and Jeffrey Epstein's employers. How?
I now realize a lot of people on HN are hard liners when it comes to privacy and think there's only absolute privacy and no privacy.
I think you all forget that not all information is the same. You can keep private channels open "just in case" while using public ones.
You can also enhance your privacy to a degree better than most people with simple, easy-to-do steps.
Anyway, the "all or nothing" mindset is detrimental to your cause and makes the average person feel like it's not worth it.
For you. It very strongly depends on the cultural profile. Other people place it on totally radical grounds.
Don't believe it? Here are some other programs governments have abused: The US put people on the no fly list for refusing to become FBI informants [1]. Canada froze bank accounts of protestors. China abused their COVID tracking app to stop protests. [2]
It's important to remember past government abuses so we don't give them more tools for future abuses.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/supreme-court-case-no-...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/business/china-code-prote...
Imagine a bitcoin standard where the rich own all the Bitcoin and governments force you to use Bitcoin. The rich have no reason to lend you Bitcoin for free, you don't need the Bitcoin, you need the loaf of bread and you are willing to trade your time for that loaf of bread but since the middleman Bitcoin was inserted, you are forced to borrow in the hope that you can pay the money back. Nobody lends out money for free, you are going to have to pay interest. The best part is that you are going to default as the interest payments end up in the wallet of the rich guy you just borrowed money from, due to the magic of compound interest he is going to lend his money out again. This means your debt is unpayable because interest payments must recirculate in the economy and somehow end up with you again but in this case they are just being lent out again. The only thing you can do is outcompete some other guy and take the money he borrowed into the economy to pay your own debt. Since someone is going to lose this competition there are going to be destitute and poor people in your society. The only known way out of this mess that is commonly practiced is to force the economy to grow faster which degrades the environment and results in ever inequality. The obvious solution and actually working solution is to make liquidity have a cost so that withholding money from the economy is impossible over the long term.
Money is power and control for those who have it and their power extends beyond what they can buy with it, it also extends to those who don't have it.
Look, I switched to completely contactless payment through my phone since Covid, and it's so convenient I'm not going back. And it's hard for me to imagine people who don't have access to a bank account or smartphone, but those people do exist, and they may eventually become unable to buy a loaf of bread, and that's a problem.
I find it really sad when people are blaise about something that once gone, can't be put back. A social credit system, & everyone talking about it as an inevitable thing, have already bought into the propaganda.
I find it inevitable that with sentiments like that, that i'll be forced to live in a car & eventually the gutter & arrested regularly because of my nuisance factor. All because of the convenience.
Could you please expand? In this area, the only ones available I found have a surcharge of ~5..10% (you buy a 100€ card through 105€..110€). Note: I am not certain of the amount, it has been a while since I used one.
And in Europe electronic payments cannot by law be anonymous over 150€.
...
Seriously, your argument is that privacy violations will cause people to starve? not the fact that there is a currency monopoly and you can't issue your own currency and start your own regional economy from scratch if the currency is concentrated in the hands of rich people and hence cannot be used and you must constantly borrow new money into the system which eventually gets saved by the rich forcing you to go to the bank and ask them permission over and over again? The dystopia you are imagining is already there. The only thing you're losing is privacy which is solved by GNU Taler.
[0] LETSysteem, or Local Exchange Trading System
What if you get arrested because you sold a train ticket to someone who doesn't have enough "social credit" to buy said train ticket?
It does not. A psychically deficient society expresses its "illness"¹ in many different ways, all with the same root.
(¹Both "evil", original sense, and "malfunction", translated sense. 'Illness' is a good term for this context.)
Since the "two missed meals" that are between today and a revolution are most probable for the poor, skipping them would be bad for the overlords.
In my country, a warrant is required to access both sources of data.
Earlier this year, donors to the truck convey protest in Canada had their bank accounts frozen. This wasn't a targeted list of "these 37 people have broken a law"--rather, it was a broad mandate to freeze accounts assocated with the protests, operationalized a bit differently by each bank.
In a society where most businesses don't take cash anymore, this turnkey coercive capability becomes more airtight.
The frog will boil slowly. A few years ago, all US payment processors blocked donations to Wikileaks, after they reported on war crimes in Iraq. Today, most people still think of digital money in the same way as physical cash; in reality, every transaction is a request for permission, with fraud heuristics and blocklists that might say yes or no.
Soon, a guy gets DUI, loses the ability to buy alcohol for six months--who would oppose that? Over time, the scope and frequency of financial deplatforminig will expand. Twitter does one-week suspensions for violating their terms of service. Why not your credit card?
Cash doesn't prevent this entirely though, unless you have all your cash under a mattress.
Yes, but it's "not being able to buy a car" vs "not being able to buy bread".
Financial transaction records at banks might as well be forever, though.
One of those is far more powerful than the other, and far more dangerous if it gets leaked to malicious actors.