Swiss to vote on preventing cashless society, pressure group says
reuters.com
reuters.com
> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...
Yes there needs to be such mandates to limit this but it's difficult to anticipate if/when this would happen.
There was such a limit for the older Maestro cards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) ) (afaik, but I'm not an expert in this domain). I think there the limit was CHF 0.3 per transaction. But you couldn't use them in online shopping or Apple Pay. The new debit cards can be used for that.
(Online shopping is a bit different, instead of Maestro cards we use an NL-specific system called iDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, basically direct bank transfers)
The times when accepting card payments was expensive have been over for years. Everyone whining about "card payments cost so much" should look what the combination of pricing caps and competition have brought up, especially with the pandemic.
[1] https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3...
Customer retention is not a problem if people are used to cash.
Transporting and keeping cash is still a thing if you accept cash. Accepting cash and cards is just doubling costs and logistical issues.
In France at least.
> old good pen&paper seem to work great as well
I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France, if you take cash, you have to get a cashier's machine. Not 100% sure that's true but that's the explanation i got from a bubble tea shop who didn't take cash.
> I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France
Even tiny food businesses have quite a few transactions in a day. Wit weird sums that may make cash painful in other ways. €6.71 is fast by card than counting coins and queue length may matter at peak times. I was talking more about, for example, hairdresser where amount is square and there're very few transactions in a day.
Technically yes, but the cost that Sumup or whatever else processor you use gets charged is based on a percentage amount set by the card networks. Sumup just adds a .5 or whatever onto the rates they get from the card networks and there's the .9/1.9% final charge.
In addition, businesses that handle most transactions in cash, at least here in Canada, are notorious for tax evasion
That being said, I'm not a fan of payment data being sold to ad companies
This isn't just about small mom and pops either, but huge city walmarts and grocery stores who never have a moment of downtime, the amount of productivity gain from having instant easy payment allows those business to service drastically faster and higher significantly less staff, producing what across the world is probably ridiculous profit.
I understand they cost money but how much is the question. I agree some kind of fee system but a dollar + some percent on every transaction? Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor. And they need millions of people doing that just to be able to run a complex aws system? On top of ad revenue as well? Some fees are okay but that sounds like way too much.
> Well if it costs more why are we doing it in the first place?
> Looking back at my credit card history that would be an insane amount of money, thousands and thousands of dollars over the years that I've paid directly to the card processor.
They like it because they make money off of it, businesses sometimes like it because paying extra is worth not handling cash, people like it because it's convenient and you don't need to remember to take money out of the bank.
Not a good reason to eliminate cash though. Everyone should be legally required to accept cash.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... https://www.dianeosis.org/en/2016/06/tax-evasion-in-greece/
Of course it exists but evasion isn’t the first thing I’d think of when considering a cash only business.
Vs
> handing full control over our ability to spend money is handed over to the government
Seems like the second one enables the crime of disenfranchisement, except that no one will be able to label it a crime and no one will ever be punished because it's the government doing it.
See the recent example of the Canadian government cutting off protesters bank access without trial. Whatever you think of the protests, that's a terrible thing for a government to be able to do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
Removing cash at least would have one or two elections between the ban and it taking effect.
My point is also that "revoking all bills" is a bigger step than "disable a card", even though both or possible. Having cash is a bigger buffer against politicians up to no good.
Also you can't target an individual by revoking bills, so the threshold is way higher.
Most Western states are a few bills away of turning full China. They now it, and will surf on any perceived or real crisis to get to that point somedays. In the meantime, they do it step by step.
I'd mention ukraine, but even in peace time, there can be huge power outages in relatively large areas (as in US, more than one in the recent years), where point of sale terminals stop working, there is no internet connection to process the transaction, but exchanging a few bills, for whatever you need always works, even in the dark.
Also privacy... Want to buy a huge buttplug from a "Huge buttplug store ltd.", but your government could collapse in a few years and the new one might not like people (especially guys) using huge buttplugs? With cash, there's nothing to trace... with cards, the government can get a list of names in few seconds.
NFC secure area base locally stored accounts are a pretty good compromise for instance. The account is locally encrypted, anonymous, with a ceiling on the max charge. You’ll pay for bread with no latency, and will only hit the network at charge time and/or if you need to for backup.
I'm from an ex-USSR country. You can't stop an authoritarian government with physical cash in your mattress.
Yes and no. I'm in Canada, so maybe the protests in Ottawa, which were mentioned above, are a good example to use.
It actually is much simpler for the Canadian federal government to just lock your bank account, than it is to raid a person's home and confiscate their cash. Entry to a person's home, or detaining them, invokes the entire set of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure and arrest. (And for complex, mostly stupid IMO reasons, your bank account does not.)
We do still have due process, judicial review, etc. If you were targeted during the protests without reason, and got a lawyer, you'd probably ultimately get the controls on your bank account lifted. But... you'd need to speak to a lawyer. And that requires some travel or an active phone plan. And that's where cash might actually help a lot.
There's also the question of scale. It costs a lot more, takes a lot more effort, to physically search for cash than to simply flip a bit in a database. Bank freezing can be done and applied at scale automatically, in a way that physical detention cannot. I do agree it is basically tending in an authoritarian direction. I'm worried about it and I'm not sure how we can and should fix it.
Nobody can confiscate what they dont know you have. You are making a case not to put all your eggs in your home.
Giving up this power, out of convenience, is a bad deal for citizens. And before anyone argues that this privacy is used by criminal/terrorists/etc., I would need to be convinced that going fully cashless would stop them to even consider it in the balance... but as far as I can tell they happily use the banking system for their criminal dealings, with the support of banks, since each year there are scandals about banks helping money laundering to the tune of hundreds of millions, even billions at the time, I don't think it happens mostly thanks to cash.
Many other are not completely there yet but move in the cashless direction steadily.
Israel is not a cashless society yet but already requires people to specifically declare cash savings exceeding certain (pretty humble) amounts even if they have already declared the income and paid the taxes.
If we’re in to do Orwellian things, I’m not sure what’s technically stoping us from doing it now. All bills are scanned at the banks, we can flag who got which lot from the ATM, major POS systems scan for counterfeit, and retailers will return to the bank any excess from what they need for day to day exchanges (or not bother and return everything to the bank to get new bills in packaged stacks).
We’re already trusting our govs for not abusing the situation. The bridge is already crossed in my mind, going pure cashless is a small step in comparison.
Scare stories about authoritarian governments that still somehow respect rule of law and due process are funny.
Russian government banned withdrawing USD/EUR from ATMs while Mastercard and Visa banned using their cards.
Your balanace ended up being a number in the app.
Cashless - no thanks.
This vote however wont fix this, all it does it force the SNB to continue to make cash available in the constitution when the SNB itself already clearly stated they have no interest in getting rid of cash and it is currently in the law. There was pressure from the EU for Switzerland to get rid of the CHF 1000 note but they didn't.
If no one accepts cash the vote is mute. At least some should be forced such as food and clothing stores. Stores that are not 100% online.
CHF as a banking currency has long been a safe haven. For a while they had negative interest rates in a desperate attempt to keep the value of their currency down to avoid destroying their export industries.
A similar story on a small local mini-market. I had a small number of items and ask the shop assistant to man the till for me. She told me that was not possible and I had to use the automated check-out system. However, because I was buying alcohol, she had to come over and approve the transation manually anyway! I do wonder if people working these jobs realise that automation is doing away with their livelihoods. They should be instead actively encouraging people to come to the manual till for checkout.
"£50 note in a bar" has been a mild horror story for as long as I can remember; bars hate accepting them. It's unlikely they didn't have enough cash to make change, unless you could see inside the till - more likely they wanted a non-confrontational way to refuse to take it, because £50 notes are the most common target for forgery, and they didn't want to give you real notes in change for a possible fake.
Nobody uses £50 notes regularly, the ATMs largest option is nearly always £20.
I know somebody who set up a cafe having outright rejected cash from the beginning but he was forced to start accepting it because of customer demand.
Also, €50 notes seem to be the default here in Berlin.
What happened in Canada? Their banknotes froze due to the extreme cold?
fighting an illegal thing with another illegal thing is not the way to proceed
if a convoy blocks the way, go disperse the convoy,
they did the illegal account freezing to avoid "looking bad".
Ergo you can still make a living.
And if cash is a valid form a payment you can pay your mortgage with it.
See how simple it all is?
And even there I think lobby (the enemy of actual democracy) has big influence on the decision taking process; it just may not be more than 50%, that in most "so called democracies" it most certainly has.
I'd say it is down to the fact that the Swiss distribute their power better (by it being a collaboration of Cantons), instead of consolidating at the "lobbyable" top.
However on this issue:
There is a lot of push from Visa and Mastercard to get people to go cashless. Push of ads, claims that cash is dirty etc. PostFinance for example no longer is issuing their own debit cards instead are now also part of Mastercard. We have lost all control of our purchasing data.
Additionally there are now several businesses not accepting cash at all when this is forbidden by law.
Interestingly they're presented neutrally ("a pressure group") in the linked Reuters article. It took some googling to find their webpage: fbschweiz.ch.
Personally I think it would be sad purely for cultural reasons to completely move away from physical currency, but I think if there were some verifiably anonymous way to make transactions digitally I'd probably be okay with it.
I'm sure there would still be some state issued physical currency which you could trade or deposit at a bank if people wanted to some for the novelty of it. For me, like most people, the primary concern is the power it gives the state. It seems clear society will continue to move away from using cash, regardless of what the state mandates. In the UK there are already plenty of retailers who won't accept cash payments. So I think whether we like it or not, we probably need to be proactive to ensure the inevitable move towards cashless is done in a way that protects our freedoms.
Yes. Zero knowledge proofs might be some way to get there.
For societies with no trouble, that might seem fine. In societies (which can include a huge chunk of the world) with turmoil, dictatorships or hostile governments, war, and so on, it's impossible to have the anonymity and portability of cash in digital form, while also being able to use it (a) without electricity, (b) without internet access, (c) without a trail
I think if you live somewhere where you're concerned about the government your best bet isn't physical state issued currency, but owning commodities like gold. I'm not sure your concerns are specific to cashless, but digital solutions generally.
Access to means of storing value and exchange, on the other hand, is a necessity.
If you mean that it's used for criminal activities, how is it any different from cash in that manner?
While it doesn't bother me personally, it would be an issue of any digital truly anonymous currency as far as governments are concerned.
That said, I was referring to more mundane things, like how most people aren't used to the responsibility that comes with that kind of currency (eg if you accidentally send to the wrong address, the money is essentially irreversibly lost).
Cash, being a physical item is less prone to some of these issues and because it isn't entirely fungible (with bills having serial numbers), there are various things that can be done with cash that can't with a truly anonymous digital currency, like tracking stolen currency and/or reissuing it.
For digital currency it's just a number. One cent or a trillion dollars are equally easy to transfer. This tips the balance in favor of the "grey" and "black" economies. Long-term, that's likely to be destablizing.
(Grey being roughly "not technically legal but the average citizen doesn't care", such as paying people small amounts of cash so they can avoid tax, and black being "illegal and also agreed to be bad for society")
It failed, and after 10-15 years of steady decline almost all banks have now stopped issuing new cards with this function. Paying to maintain a system people don't care to use is unattractive.
I think it's fair to say that the system failed because it wasn't traceable. People wanted insight into their own card. The design which blocked tracing also blocked insight. That's not the whole story, there were other reasons, but that reason is both relevant and significant.
What do you mean by insight? You couldn't check the balance on your card?
> How about monthly statements? Purchase history? Stats, analytics, budgeting? In a mobile app? Without you personally or the merchants you buy stuff from having to do anything for that?
Cash has none of these.
Let's not move the goal posts.
The organisations that set up the system surveyed the public to learn why >80% never started using it and the users dropped off. The common answers included things like "can't see my own recent activities", "can't see how much money there is on the card" and "adding money to the card is a hassle", all of which were truish and IMO were side effects of features intended to make use of the card untraceable.
If you can't deliver a realtime feed of the transactions anywhere you can't deliver such a feed to your own smartphone either, see? And if you could deliver one to your smartphone, the system could also deliver a feed to other authorised destinations, and what's authorised, exactly? Can the card be traced to an authorising party? If not, how can you ensure that the destinations receiving a feed a really authorised? That kind of thing.
Not without making a purchase, visiting an ATM, or carrying an additional gadget to be able to read out the balance from the card.
I think the main problem is as follows: By its very nature, digital cash has the problem that you can't look up your current balance without some additional technical doohickeys, so compared to cash it always starts out at a disadvantage in that regard.
If you then add the additional constraint that your digital cash should mirror the privacy properties of physical cash, which means mimicking most of its major properties (both good and bad) into the digital domain, too, it means you haven't got all that many degrees of freedom left in order to positively differentiate yourself from physical cash and overcome the initial disadvantage of digital cash's intangibility.
Some advantages do indeed still exist (e.g. takes up less space in your wallet, avoids "no change given" situations and the like), but even taking those things into account, compared to the annoyance of not being able to simply look up my balance the way I can do with physical cash I personally never found the Geldkarte all that enticing.
(Whereas with a classic credit or debit card at least I get some more tangible benefits in return for giving up the tangibility of cash, like not having to manually re-charge the card all the time, or having a full transaction history available.)
This is one of the biggest selling points of GNU Taler - it's not designed to circumvent the government, it's designed to cooperate with it. It is perhaps one of the few privacy-focused systems that have a chance of getting widely adopted in a legal way.
zcash
monero
grin and other implementations of mimblewimble
also, currency has been digital for thousands of years; plausibly it's what digits were invented for in the first place
Currencies were replaces by points stored on a device called the Key (= modern smartphone). There are red, green, and yellow points.
Red points are the simplest: all people are equal, so everyone gets the same number of red points per month, doesn't matter their skills, employment status, health, etc. That monthly allowance is enough to survive. It's like basic minimum income.
Green points are similar to red points, except they're paid out based on intellectual ability. A smarter person will always get more green points, irrespective of employment status. They were necessary because "all people are equal" is actually false.
Yellow points are most similar to a monthly salary. You can get the only by working. The higher your position in the hierarchy, the more yellow points you get every month.
Not all points are created equal, despite the official 1:1 fixed exchange rate. Quality goods are available only for yellow points, with other colors capable of buying substandard goods. That opened door to a host of black market activities for chameleons (who act as currency exchanges).
A central computing system, called _Syskom_, is used to track citizens' moves. Despite claims of objectivity, it's rules are often manipulated for policy goals.
A simplified example: some working people want to go up the hierarchy by faking their credentials. Criminals, called lifters, who can help them are often found in various bars. Those bars have slot machines allowing you to win hundreds of yellow points (an average salary is ~ 10 yellow pts). There's a non-zero chance that a winner, often drunk, will be approached by a lifter at a bar and hire him.
What does the government to catch more lifters? Increase the likelihood of winning at a slot machine and keep track of where the prize flows. "You pay 300 yellow points and you get a lifter" as they phrase it.
It also makes it easier for other people to monitor wealth being transferred, and switzerland hoards a lot of other people's wealth.
I don't get how this relates to having a cashless society.
This assumes that it is even possible to view the transfers in the first place. CBDCs are not publicly viewable by design.
A cashless society is incompatible with a free society.
Of course in practice it probably is, but I appreciate the theory.
You can use enough cryptography to make blockchain transactions anonymous. But I think you can use the same cryptography to make non-blockchain electronic money anonymous, too.
Once you have access to Bitcoin on-chain and have other people willing to transact directly through Bitcoin, with no fiat intermediaries like exchanges... yeah, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the transaction from going through (eventually).
The end goal with Bitcoin is to bypass all the permissioned fiat rails eventually.
What's the volume of Bitcoin traded outside of exchanges? 0.0001%?
How could you ever know? A group of people could trade paper wallets with 1000s of Bitcoin trillions of times and no record of it would show up on chain.
(It requires trust, because how do you prevent double spending attacks? Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.
You need to move the funds to an address you control to be sure.)
It's always Bitcoin in any scenario we can think of since value never ever leaves the chain, only the person with control of the on-chain value changes.
>Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.
I used "paper wallet" as a simple place holder, many tamper resistant one time use solutions exist, like Opendime.
...from KYC exchanges. There's already tons of non-KYC darknet exchanges that will happily take your btc and give you xmr, at which point you're off to the races. Any attempt to extend requirements at KYC exchanges would spur further developments in non-KYC/decentralized swappers, as we've seen so far.
The world your proposing isn’t just about upending financial plumbing. It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation. That would send us back to the dark ages of finance. That’s not something I support.
> It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation.
Imo this is a positive, but that's a little besides the point - it is inevitable in the same way that encrypted communications are inevitable and don't care whether Australia decides its laws trump the laws of math. If you care about the ability to maintain taxation, etc, then riding the wave is vastly preferable to being crushed by it.
In another situation, most on here will be familiar with FIFO and LIFO for buffers, and whilst most cash registers take a serialised bank note and hand it back out in a LIFO manner, sometimes the register operator will take bank notes and put them at the bottom of the pile.
This creates a new state, LILO as its gone to the bottom of the pile of bank notes. In addition why did the shop or business engage in that activity with some people and not others?
Is there something shady taking place or are they displaying knowledge to others?
How does that mess around with the banking systems ability to build payment networks what central banks would call the velocity of money?
A cashless society would make some crimes less possible like muggings, but could it also escalate the extremity of muggings? For example if fingerprints are required with a card or smartphone, would muggings evolve becoming more extreme with events like cutting off peoples fingers?
It also highlights the fact that's society is not configured/setup properly because such events like muggings are taking place.
I think coinage should be dropped (ie non serialised money) and banks should start displaying the serial numbers of bank notes much like the blockchain, so that people can track and trace where all the money is going.
For example, celebrities helping out less fortunate people with autographed products including things like NFT's could evolve, because a celebrity could hand out cash to someone which has its immediate utilitarian value as currency, but just like collectors demonstrate, that bank note could actually be worth more to a collector willing to pay x times more for that celebrity bank note which the less fortunate currently has in their possession.
Ergo could poverty be reduced with this method or would human behaviour change and less celebrity worshipping occur?
And would less celebrity worshipping be a bad thing or not?
I am comfortable with it, since by the time those bank notes come into the bank, they do not know how many times, and between whom, they have changed hands.
There is also plausible deniability: the suspect guy bringing cash into the bank with numbers I had might have gotten them from me spending them at the supermarket, or from me getting change at the restaurant, and the restaurant owner doing business with him.
There are many gaps in this argument.
On the point of they do not know, humans are creatures of habit, it is possible to know where money is being laundered and its not a single step process.
But a simpler example would be looking at the reCaptcha I'm not a robot process. So google dont know what these random images are when they present them to people in recaptcha. The user does not know who these images have been presented to previously if at all. Users treating it as a hurdle will click the right images, the malicious user trying to mess up the image recognition will deliberately tick the wrong image. Over time, google gets to find out what images are a bike or plane or traffic lights, helping to train their visual recognition AI models, or at least clean their streetview dataset, they also get to know who are the deliberate malicious users.
So with money going into a supermarket, periodically money is taken from tills and sent off outback for the bank. This is a snapshot of the serial bank notes during a period of time in the supermarket. The checkouts also know what amount of money was handed over. If money is being laundered as cash in a supermarket, or pub, its possible to identify who these people are from cctv, over repeat visits. You see not everyone will be making a monthly food shop, some are just buying lunch so might only hand over £10, someone laundering money will do a monthly shop handing over £200 or £300 pounds.
As these places tend to receive cash and hand out coinage, its possible for the banks to work out the cash trail of money from spending habits. Same goes when money laundering is taking place around an area, like weekend holidays paid with cash. What these money launderers dont know is how many other people from their base area are also on holiday in the same place like a weekend away a few hundred miles away?
There are so many ways to track cash but I dont think most people think about it. The fact people are using cash is a deliberate red flag for a start. Sure some jobs are best done using cash like taxi firms, fast food outlets and pubs, but these are also red flags for scrutiny as well. Arguably its just another form of intellectual surveillance.
The original concern was
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
You moved the goalposts to money-launderers, but let's assume only money-launderers, which I am not, because it is fun thinking about these things.
Your hypothesis only holds if at least some pubs, supermarkets, record serial numbers, or if we assume that "money launderers" always pay in 200 or 300 pounds and there is an active investigation of cctv cameras.
Now, going back to the original question:
> Are you comfortable with your bank knowing who you hand cash to?
This is not a concern at all, because the bank does not know who I hand my cash to. Cash that the bank recorded as given to me can travel many many times before the bank gets to see it again, thus proving nothing about who I handed to it.
Most people keep their money in banks, instead of cash. So if the government wants to target you they can already do it, no matter if you have a few 1000 in cash or not.
If your government freezes your bank account - you're fucked.
The state already has this, it's called prison.
WTF? You do realize that it's not an arbitrary status in an app that mattered, but whether you're at risk of infecting hundreds, right?
I'm not going to have any sympathy to people who intentionally and knowingly bring that upon others.
Sometimes things happen that cause society to need to be rearranged. In the case of COVID it really didn't require that much rearrangement - prefer outdoor activities, wear masks, stick HEPA filters in enclosed spaces, keep windows open. Contact tracing apps, maybe. We had those in Taiwan in a way that protected privacy.
Predictably, people with reactionary tendencies, well, reacted, to which I say good luck in your next hurricane I guess? "Bah to this flooded city, I'm not about to let a half meter of water change how I live my life!"
And guess what... they're over. Because they were temporary healthcare measures and reasonable people understood that.
People didn't "eventually decide" anything.
People accepted that Covid was a pandemic of a new virus and some temporary measures would have to be put in place to avoid a potential repeat of the Black Plague. Reasonable thing to do with a completely new human virus.
So governments put those measures in place <<temporarily>>.
Just like when a storm is coming and you close all the windows, all the doors, make sure that everything important is inside, etc.
Again, reasonable people always knew that strict measures were temporary.
Unreasonable people just assumed we'd be boarded up with wooden planks like in China, for the rest of our lives.
This isn't new or rearranging whatsoever. The only new thing is people suddenly refusing to adhere to reasonable measures to protect each other.
I'm not allowed to go through downtown spreading teargas or anthrax, why should you be allowed to do the same with a different dangerous aerosol?
You may also analyse the currently available arbitrary data. Then you may realize that the status was indeed arbitrary. There is not even correlation, let alone causation on infection outcome when comparing arbitrary countries and states whose arbitrary politicians arbitrarily decided to listen to a different set of arbitrary scientists.
A tokken represents the value of what a society can do for you. When that shrinks and all those billionaires, become just paper factory owners. Thats were the hurt is. What does it matter who and how you hold that weimar paper money fort.