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Comment by TheFattestNinja | Hacker News Reader

This twitter thread might be a bit extreme, but it raises interesting points ( https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083?lang... ). Basically, if you are not allowed to spend money (transact) then you are really not able to exercise your other rights. And if everything was cashless there is an actual risk of Gov or BigBank having the power to stop you transacting completely. It has happened in 1st world countries like Canada already, and without a trial or anything as per thread. Granted, it was kind of an emergency situation, but while I'd love to go cashless (I really really want to), this kind of thing makes me steer back into supporting the opposite side of the argument.

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> Granted, it was kind of an emergency situation,

No, it wasn't an emergency, it was a bunch of angry truckers, outdoors.

Cutting off banking to some of those who supported them with a donation was a direct political threat to everyone, a highly authoritarian response.

is there any scenario where you would change your mind about the topic?

Why would they need to change their mind?

It's more about finding the logic of the argument

> I'd love to go cashless

then go cashless & don't encroach nor impose your wishes on others

>then go cashless & don't encroach nor impose your wishes on others

Our current society has too high a fraction of pro-jackboot types in it for that to be a tractable solution.

And I thought it may be worth pointing out, since 2014/2015, and all the way to 2018/2019. 95%+ HN comments were against cash. In the year where Apple Pay launched, the overwhelming of Tech and Silicon Valley support a cashless society. Apple made the claim Cash is old fashioned, Quote "cash will be dead for the next generation of kids".

I think most reading on HN should take a moment and reflect on that.

This isn't a problem with cashless, since cryptocurrency solves this exact problem. It's unfortunate that many critics are uninformed and don't understand this.

I would not it put it past governments to shut down some types of payments if there was another lockdown. "Oh sorry it doesn't look like that's an essential business wait just 14 days!"

I'd raise the opposite point: for every reaction there is counterreaction. Going cashless will inevitably become a major boost for crypto and will greatly help detach crypto from fiat, becoming a major facilitator of illicit transactions of all kinds, to the point that people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable, destroying the very notion of law and order.

People should be permitted to do lesser evil (go to the corner and buy a joint for cash) lest they will build a workaround so good there will be no reason to stop in expanding it's use until it consumes the very fabric of society.

> Going cashless will inevitably become a major boost for crypto

These are unlinked. Demographics using crypto loosely correlate with those going cashless. Cashless countries even more loosely correlate with crypto adoption.

> people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable

We have a long tradition of this with our 21-year drinking age. People can differentiate between the laws they can break and the ones they shouldn’t.

In any case, arguing crypto will undermine state power ignores the millennia of commodity money.

> We have a long tradition of this with our 21-year drinking age. People can differentiate between the laws they can break and the ones they shouldn’t.

Well, not really. It was originally 18 to drink.

Thanks to the federal government linking interstate funds to a requirement states support 21 drinking age is how they did that.

In some states, even 16 could drink beer prior to the feds fucking things up.

> In some states, even 16 could drink beer prior to the feds fucking things up.

That's one thing I always found funny when looking at the US as a european. When I had my first legal beer as a sixteen year old I remembered that I would only be allowed to do this in the US in five more years. Of course the actual first beer was drank when I was fifteen.

What I always wondered - In countries where beer is allowed at sixteen, people usually try it when fifteen, because doing forbidden things is obviously cool during this age. But in the US, do kids start illegaly drinking when they're twenty, or do y'all also start experimenting earlier?

EDIT: Also love the fact that 18 year olds in the US can join the military, yet aren't allowed to drink a beer until three years later.

> In countries where beer is allowed at sixteen, people usually try it when fifteen, because doing forbidden things is obviously cool

Pretty similar in the US. I didn’t try drinking at that age, but many high schoolers will.

I see, that does make sense. American kids must feel even more badass then, considering that they're doing something 5-6 years earlier than they'd be allowed to :)

18 year olds in the military can’t buy beer, absolutely nobody cares if they drink it or not. In the whole time I was in not a single person got in trouble for the drinking but for whatever stupid things they did while drinking.

And it’s because they make you follow the local laws, when we were down in Panama the officers all chipped in and bought us a shitton of beer on our last night there. There was another time at Ft Bragg where they were like “anyone not over 21 can’t drink” and then just walked away leaving us with another shitton of beer.

I'm sure that they do drink it, what I meant was the weird logic of a government restricting drinking to 21 but allowing military at 18. Essentially the US government thinks that beer is more dangerous to 18 year olds than the military?

Ha ha ha! You think the government's there to protect us??

I think the answer to this question depends on ones personal ideology. I don't think that this is my governments first goal or reason, but I also don't think that it's not doing that at all.

If you're more of a libertarian kind of person we will probably have different views on this, it also strongly depends on where you're from.

To make an example, the EU at least tries to protect it's citizens in regard to data privacy and ownership, so there's one example.

I'm Australian.

I think our government protects us precisely the bare minimum needed to avoid a general riot, and no more.

100% most definitely they don't protect us in any way wrt data privacy, but that's only because the average person thinks they "have nothing to hide" so they can get away with it due to general apathy/ignorance.

The only place I do feel they protect us is in consumer protections, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were plans underway to change those.

>to the point that people will stop seeing breaking the law as anything objectionable, destroying the very notion of law and order.

This is already the case in the tax brackets that are too far down there for most of HN to have any familiarity with.

People there don't just think "oh it's the law, better blindly lick the boot" when they encounter a legal requirement. They think "what's the fine, what's the enforcement mechanism, is this a serious law or just a suggestion I can skirt as long as I am reasonable?".

If you never leave the "good school district" you bought into you'd never know.

This also happens above the HN tax bracket too. It's only the professional class that seems to follow the rules like this.

In US, maybe. One thing i love about Europe is that people here tend to really follow law to the letter, and actually know it. And consult with lawyers in any case that seems in doubt. When vast majority of people are like that, it's no longer "boot licking", it's for everyone's benefit. It's only stupid when everyone else but you ignores the law.

Haha. Where are you living? :) (I am in Romania, still EU)

That depends on the laws we're talking about. There is such a thing as a conscientious objector which you seem to not be familiar with, see Aaron Schwartz for a prime example.

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