Cashless society in Switzerland? People to vote on keeping cash forever | Hacker News Reader

Cashless society in Switzerland? People to vote on keeping cash forever

euronews.com

205 pointsstarkd200 comments

Having just come from the cyclone ravaged Gisborne region in New Zealand, where internet and communications have been down now for 5 days. The first thing we did was count all the cash we had, because it is the only way we could buy food and fuel.

Cash works when there is no power or communication.

Also cash isn't easily trackable. This is nice if you are uneasy with all the tracking and surveillance going on today.

It's also really hard to stop people from using their cash. Of course governments see this as a weakness, but everyone concerned about government overreach should appreciate how your cards and bank accounts can be frozen, but your cash is yours (as long as you have physical control over it).

Cops just straight up take people's cash in some parts of the world

They do that in the US. It's called civil asset forfeiture, and the federal government supports it and takes a cut. No due process needed.

https://jalopnik.com/heres-another-reminder-that-the-police-...

This is always brought up as an argument against cashless. I don’t get it. I’m quite passionate about tracking, collection, and use of personal data. But I really couldn’t care less about my day to day purchases. My bank knows that I buy a coffee every morning and lunch from a local vendor, and some groceries or dinner in the evening. My bank won’t use this for any kind of targeted advertising and I trust them to keep it secure. This data seems so unimportant compared to the frustration of cash. The second I step foot in a cash economy I start having issues with large bills (do you have a smaller note etc), losing change, having to keep on visiting ATMs. It’s extremely irritating once you’ve gotten used to cashless. What is everyone buying on a daily basis with cash that is so secret the banks and governments must not know?

All good and convenient untill some governmental agency decides that you cannot use the cashless methods and by that time cash is not available because no one protested since it was so convenient.

No offense intended, but what this is is a failure of imagination. You assume conditions of a liberal democracy where people engaging in commerce without prejudice. That is still the case most of the time. But suppose you speak out publicly and it is taken the wrong way. If you are content self-censoring, you will probably be fine. But society that has a habit of self-censoring feels free?

>My bank won’t use this for any kind of targeted advertising and I trust them to keep it secure.

Well maybe you shouldn't.

Banks Profit From Selling Customers’ Spending Data

https://www.courthousenews.com/banks-profit-from-selling-you...

10 biggest financial data breaches of 2022

https://www.americanbanker.com/list/10-biggest-financial-dat...

I use cards all the time, but I just prefer cash for small everyday purchases. If I'm buying a TV or something, I use the card; if I'm getting lunch, I just use cash. Plus, it's super easy to just give the waiter a $20 for a $12 meal and tell them to keep the change. Also, if you do a person to person sale, most people can't take cards, so eliminating cash eliminates a good chuck of the secondary market without adding a middleman like a pawn shop. I bought about $1000 worth of gym equipment for $150 from someone moving and it was just like new.

This is my core concern really. So far, most outages I experienced here in Germany were mildly annoying, mostly due to the fact that cash is still King here and I had enough around the house to cover a couple days, but everytime it happens I think of what it would be like if we were as cashless as for example China. I'm not against all those modern payment methods, but I seriously think it should be mandatory for stores offering the basic necessities to accept cash.

Yup, this is my stance as well. I switched to a cash-friendly bank, I always carry a few bills on me, and I prefer to shop at stores that do take cash. (This is in a region of the world that's virtually cashless in everyday business.)

When people hear this they assume I must be anti-electronic payment but that's far from true. I love the convenience.

I just think it's really, really important we retain the option of physical cash, and hope that we rarely have to exercise it. It's worth the additional investment to achieve resilience.

There is also something very pleasant about the feeling of cash. It establishes a permanence and a respect for the currency that has to figure into the psychology of money.

You had a power outage that lasted few days?

BTW. For short outage batteries in terminal is enough, and BTSes have UPS that last quite long. Basically when my neighborhood has power outage (once a year maybe) for max 2-4 hours, cell service still works (a bit slower because everyone switched to it).

Long power outages can hit even developed areas if weather gets nasty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_...

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/30/expired-certificate-causes-g...

This took two and a half days iirc and just so happened to affect the two closest supermarkets.

that's not a power outage

I never said there were any

Natural disasters. In the early 90s a blizzard knocked out power on the US eastern seaboard for weeks in some areas. Two years ago Texas's grid was compromised for nearly a week during the ice storm, and even cell service was down.

I'm sure there are other examples. How long was power out in New Orleans after Katrina? Puerto Rico after Maria?

Works great if your country isn't at war.

When superstorm Sandy hit New York in 2012 I lost power for 2 weeks. Local stores/gas stations/restaurants were without power for about a week. This was in a densely populated suburb, not a backwater.

I regularly get power outages of several hours in the pacific northwest [1]. My local cell towers go about 2-4 hours before dropping off. The telco DSL drops immediately, not sure about the cable company. Gotta make sure you've got offline entertainment or you're gonna be real bored.

[1] mostly from trees falling into lines; the same soil conditions that make undergrounding lines very expensive also contribute to trees having shallow roots, saturated soil and high winds strongly implies no power. Also, local regulation requires the power company to pass costs of most undergrounding along to the affected customers and they have to approve the work; most people don't want to spend their money on undergrounding, so it's not typically done.

My major concerns are about surveillance and control.

The USA is mow requiring banks to report all transactions over $600 to the federal government; the credit card companies are adding category based tracking to transactions at businesses in unfavored industries like gun stores, and banks and credit card companies are denying service to specific individuals due to online speech that had nothing to do with the financial institutions themselves. Canada is “de-banking” protesters. At a macro scale the US government and others are using the SWIFT system to interdict transactions by unfavored individuals, and are electronically “seizing” accounts of such people, usually without a warrant.

We need cash to prevent totalitarianism.

I upvoted this because I agree with most of it. It is not all transactions that need to be reported, however. Only transactions through 'third party' payment systems like Venmo, Cash App, Paypal, etc... Additionally, they have delayed this rule until next year.

The problem with cash is that a lot of commerce occurs over the Internet these days. And cash can be controlled or abused by the government. Even if cash is never technically banned, banks can limit withdrawals to low amounts, any limits can be kept and functionally eroded over time due to inflation, and with enough effort it can be tracked just as well as digital payments.

Personally I see this as the (probably only) actual-use-case for crypto: permissionless payments

I'd settle for something that preserves 3rd party anonymous transactions. Maybe a stable coin could fill the need.

Here is a news video partly about a queue at a cash machine: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I6gVliTmPGA

NZ translations: Spark == ATT, kai == food, munted == fucked, Gisbourne == town of 40000 in the wop-wops (I loved the place when I last visited there!)

Off topic, but I would be interested to know what people from the US think of NZ reporting compared to US reporting.

FWIW one of the bottle shop reopened while storm was ongoing using a generator and was taking payments for some cards offline, tho my card wasn’t enabled for that. I had cash, but that’s NZ for you - first to implement paywave but now there’s surcharge’s everywhere. I was completely cashless/wallet-less in europe.

When I moved to San Francisco, I was told to always keep two weeks cash on hand. If there is an earth quake, the bridges can be down for a while, and cash will become very important.

There's a real world example of this situation from the six-month Irish bank strike of 1970. Cheques, pubs, and trust ultimately replaced the banking system; and everything kept moving; not perfectly, of course, but neither are our current systems.

A couple of links to get you going, but there's a lot of data out there on this:

https://archive.is/20180106184835/https://www.ft.com/content...

https://archive.ph/20120802230107/http://www.independent.ie/...

It's also an object lesson on how money is created out of thin air.

In certain cases Cash takes on almost a freedom of speech importance. Government can just switch off the digital finances of any movement they don't like. Cash makes that harder.

As a topical counterpoint, governments can also just switch off the existing currency in favor of a new currency and create a cash scarcity crisis when theres not enough of the new currency in circulation. This is exactly the situation in Nigeria right now. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/angry-protests...

Another recent example of a hard currency crisis is what's been happening in Lebanon, where the government simply switched off full access:

https://www.ft.com/content/a710fa12-e7fe-4aab-8e4f-962f01add...

I mean they could, but would a country as wealthy as Switzerland just break all business relations like that?

I mean would they do that for digital then?

all vs some.

I can disable your bank account rendering you unable to be personally solvent.

But in order to do so with the cash you have I would have to basically disable everyones account.

The parent I was responding to was not referring specifically to Switzerland, in fact they just said "Government" which is about as general as you can be. Further Nigeria is also wealthy, even if the concentration of wealth is in the hands of very few. Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa and 31st in the World by GDP.[1]

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

They just did that a few years ago. I now have a bunch of old Swiss cash that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank. Annoying.

except bitcoin.

Even if I accept BTC, its pretty hard for me to buy food or gasoline with it.

In case of larger catastrophe cash is as useless as bitcoin. You trade food for other things, eg. tools, liquor, cigarettes, bicycle etc.

There's a reason we moved away from the barter system. Cash would still be useful if it was rare and accepted by the government, though you should expect massive inflation. But something like gold would probably be a good contender as a new money.

Yes, the barter system damages any liquidity. You have to cease thinking in terms of any standard of value. Everything is this-for-that. Very hard to do on a large scale. I think the very concept of money would have to collapse.

You can't eat bitcoin. So you have to exchange it for food. But unlike cash they don't accept it anywhere (and accepting cash everywhere is what this voting tries to keep a reality).

Also you can't access it in places without internet access or electricity (e.g. during wartime or as a refugee on the go).

Cash represents a fundamental freedom to trade autonomously, without having it be approved by any third party. We've seen various attempts on the part of government and private payment processors to stop certain kinds of trade they don't like from happening. If you don't think they should be able to do this, you should support keeping cash, while developing freedom-respecting alternatives such as Monero to give future generations the right to do the same.

While I like several aspects of cash, like little tracking/privacy violations, hard for someone to just cut you off from your money etc., I don't think I've used cash in 5+ years (except vacations). Absolutely every vendor in my country accepts cards or some kind of app payment and have for years, even girl scouts selling cookies.

And cash is expensive. It's easy to scoff about the 1-2 % fees on cards (but in my country "BankAxept" has a flat fee of ~0.024 USD per transaction, so even cheaper). But having a business dealing with a lot of cash is also crazy expensive. You have to have extra security, pay someone to come and get it or yourself go to the bank and deposit. Then also buy rolls of change. I remember my dad spending a lot of hours a week dealing with this. So yeah, I'm all for keeping it, but I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps.

I imagine we'll have digital cash eventually, but the only sound non-blockchain solution I know of requires local quantum computation: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/107

What do you mean by “sound”? Why doesn’t David Chaum’s eCash from 1982 [1] qualify? That’s an on-line system. In 1990 he, Fiat, and Nairobi proposed an off-line system [2].

[1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...

[2] http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf

The latter works fine if you're OK with completely trusting the banks. Local quantum computation gives you provably sound, decentralised, unprintable digital cash. Nice paper though, I wonder if you can make it quantum resistant.

This popular imitative doesn't mandate the acceptance of cash. It mandates that the federal government must ensure that there are enough banknotes and coins and that replacing the swiss franc with another currency must be done via popular vote. So it's not really that radical.

The same organisation is already planning on another popular initiative that seems to go in the direction of mandating the acceptance of cash, but other than the title "Wer mit Bargeld bezahlen will, muss mit Bargeld bezahlen können" (roughly: if you want to pay with cash must be able to pay with cash) I can't find any details about it.

> > And cash is expensive. It's easy to scoff about the 1-2 % fees on cards

The fee could be 100% for the vendor if the card holders uses chargeback. People forget that chargeback exists because they almost never use it but it's a real possibility.

The recent OnlyFans scandal was in fact not an OnlyFans scandal but people charging back their credit card after the acquire the content provided by the creator.

If something has a shot at ever replacing cash won't be cards but instant wire transfers between banks so that payments mde by citizens are both real time and impossible to chargeback. SEPA Instant is the closest effort but even in leader countries there are 40%+ banks which still don't have it.

In the US it will be called FedNow but it's in its infancy

You mean something like Digital Euro? https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

SEPA already exists long time and works in these two cases perfectly? Digital Euro is whole different animal.

For shopping online, I honestly wouldn't use a service where charging back wasn't an ultimate option. Far too many scams, everywhere, and inconsistent support. Something like Amazon, sure, but random niche shopping websites? No way am I wiring money with no way out if it's a scam

But you cant use cash for shopping online anyway, no?

So direct and immutable wires would just substitute cash

> If something has a shot at ever replacing cash won't be cards but instant wire transfers between banks so that payments mde by citizens are both real time and impossible to chargeback.

Chargebacks are enormously popular with the public, however, because they provide a remedy for various scams and avenues for abuse by businesses, which is extremely common. I think it would be more likely that a successful replacement would refine that process rather than remove it.

Are you talking about SEPA Instant? It's already here, across the whole eurozone, and usually free (some legacy banks charge a small fee).

The EU is ahead but it's not as widely availible as you claim. The leaders are Austria and Spain and they hover around 50% banks having it

https://www.cpg.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/sepa-instant-c...

Your source is from 2021, so hardly representative of today.

Oh yes centuries ago indeed

I keep reading about charge back, but in only two cases I tried to do that, because I didn't receive the stuff I paid for, I haven't succeeded. Banks seem to side with the merchants, because merchants pay them, not us.

A fee for using cash would be incredibly regressive because poor people use cash the most.

The poor already pay more for using cash. They pay the same amount as people using credit cards and don’t get any of the rewards/cash back that the more affluent do

Are you trying to justify making the poor pay even more by suggesting they already bear the burden?

I’m not trying to justify anything. I’m saying it’s naive to think that the poor don’t already pay more.

Nobody said they don't already pay more

Maybe but using CCs is even more expensive for the poor given their propensity to not pay their balances in full for multiple reasons; so from that PoV cash is cheaper.

And the poor also use pay day loans and overdraft more and pay overdraft fees. Even paying credit card interest at 20% a year is cheaper than paying a $36 overdraft fee when your account is $5 negative for a couple of days until pay day.

> I also kinda want to be able to not subside other's use of it. So a fee for using cash or something perhaps.

This sounds like... a poor choice of a hill to die on? The people who need cash the most tend to be poorer; asking them to pay more would be just cruel to many of them. There are lots of things (like taxes in general....) where some people benefit more than others from them, but we ignore that and just distribute the burden equally as a matter of principle instead of asking everyone to pay proportionally to what they use.

Good point, I haven't thought of that angle.

Edit: But the homeless on the streets where I live that sell magazines etc accept mobile payment. And I've worked for the main government welfare agency a few years providing help to these people, and an assumption / basis was that they had a phone to be contacted on, which proved to work fine for most of them.

This is really going on a tangent that's beside my point on the fees, but are you genuinely suggesting people can treat payments like phone calls or texts -- things that tolerate long delays? If someone calls you and your phone is unavailable for whatever reason, they can back later, even tomorrow or in a week. Or maybe you borrow someone's phone to call back. You... can't do any of this when you're trying to make a payment on the spot. Especially when you're poor.

If an electronic solution is ever going to work at all, it needs to be something that's not powered. Like debit cards, not phones. But even with those, there are so many giant problems here that I don't have the energy to go on the tangent.

In places where you can get life by with just a phone and a card, even poor people have phones. So perhaps this reality is already changing in favor of the poorer?

I'm sure it's going in that direction but to what extent we'll reach that point remains to be seen. Note that people lose phones and have to go without them for a while (again, probably more for poor people than others), not to mention even remembering and finding the time to charge them constantly, so it's not as simple as giving everyone a phone. Bear in mind there are lots of other reasons to keep cash; I was just addressing the fee idea.

Even in the US! one of the lesser known programs is the Obamaphone program, where subsidized low cost handsets were provided to low income individuals.

Card fees are often 3% and vendors have to increase prices to cover this. People paying cash are already paying these same inflated prices to cover credit card fees.

Luckily not everywhere. In Thailand cash (and bank transfers) are king. Most places do not accept credit, and the place that do usually require a $15 or $30 minimum and/or you're going to pay that extra overhead yourself. Alternatively, like when I bought my monitor recently, folks will just give you a discount for paying via cash/transfer (high value items like that often end up as credit charges or interest loans through the bankers).

I still use cash a lot. Many places I go to only accept cash.

These places are not fully licensed which is probably why they don't want to accept digital but there's definitely still a case for it IMO.

What about the people that do use cash regularly?

>And cash is expensive.

Cards are expensive, the price is just currently being subsidized by the industry. Do we as a society really want to have to rely on that? There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future

> There's no guarantee credit card fees will not increase in the future

What kind of guarantee can be made except strong limits enshrined in law, which there already are? (If you don't trust the laws, you can't trust cash either.)

Credit card fees should go down if they remove the overhead of 'rewards'

There are a lot of people who deal only in cash. I knew someone who was a shop mechanic. Completely self-employed and only took cash. When he died, he had stored savings in random places all over his house. He had thousands squirreled away. I can't imagine how much he lost due to inflation over the years, but he had plenty of money to live on.

I'll offer a random anecdote. I lived in Switzerland for a couple of years in the early 2010's, so before contactless payment had become so prevalent as it is now. Most of the transactions I made and saw others made was via cash rather than chip and PIN (the norm in most Europe at the time). One of the memories that stands out from my time there is whilst in the queue getting some groceries in Denner (a lower end supermarket), the person in front of me paid with a 1,000 CHF note and no-one batted an eye! I didn't even know the denominations went that high, which is more a reflection of my ignorance of the place I was living really. I mentioned this to my work colleges the next day and was told it wasn't that unusual, especially with older generations.

To be clear chip and PIN was widely available at this time but most people used cash. Even with a decade gone and a pandemic I still wouldn't be surprised if I were to go back to Switzerland tomorrow and see people paying for groceries with huge documentations

TLDR: The Swiss like cash.

As a person helping my mother from far ahead I understand why.

The hard part is not using the card. It's setting it up: set up the bank application on mobile phone, setting up second factor, looking at notifications when they disappear after a few seconds (older people have slower reflexes).

All the flat UI means that my mother can't tell me the difference between a button and a text.

There's no button to see notifications, she has to use swiping, which is again much harder for older people, as all the timings were optimized for young people with young people reflexes.

Without all this how does she know how much money she has? (with cash she can just count it).

Notifications that disappear after a few seconds are a scourge that I've seen my surprisingly tech-literate mother struggle with too. I wonder if there is any work around accessibility and ui-notification duration or history.

Work should be about just testing everything with old people now that companies practically require them to use smartphones.

Tech advocacy for older people should be a core role for groups like AARP; not just rating which devices they might like best, but having UI/UX staff who specialize in understanding the needs of older people AND lobbying to make sure “accessibility” includes them.

Do not get me started on constant UI “improvements” - just when I have our 85-year-old aunt confident in handling iOS’s last changes to Photo or Camera, they move some common item to the other end of the screen.

Also, not having an option to show passwords as you enter them. After one update that forced a password re-entry, I ended up having to send her to her mobile provider to enter it for her, since we’re on the other side of the country and she didn’t have any younger neighbors she or I trusted with her iCloud password.

Had the same experience getting groceries at Migros. I was about to pay with a credit card, and my friend elbowed me; said that I should just pay cash like everyone else.

Cashless society is utopia, not practical actualy. Imagine homeless people. You wouldn't be able to give them money. Imagine trade in place without data connection. Imagine misery in case of battery failure. Imagine chaos in case of bank system failure.

Of course total surveillance of state is main concern. Unfortunately WEF propose and EU make slow steps to limit cash as possible. Ie by advantages and bonuses in case of paying by card. Banks limiting cash withdraw amount...

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...

Interesting documentary about one digital currency and digital ID, State of control (2022): https://player.vimeo.com/video/769876604

Czech senate recently refused to make cash as constitutional righ.

https://www.epochtimes.cz/2023/02/15/navrh-zahrnout-do-ustav...

>Imagine homeless people. You wouldn't be able to give them money.

I've seen homeless people with QR codes and chip readers.

What a beautiful dystopia we live in

In the modern day, digital continuity of identity is -almost- more important than physical, and being a "cyborg" (constantly in contact with your phone/portal to Internet) is increasingly critical. And we live in an increasingly climate-hostile world. Low tech is underappreciated by many, not just the usual crowd here.

Sure, cash is eco friendly!

I'm not sure I would explicitly call it "eco friendly". A lot goes into making paper bills. But the end result, the paper bill, is "low tech".

> Imagine homeless people. You wouldn't be able to give them money.

This is incorrect on all levels. Electronic payments between bank accounts have existed for decades. Banks in many countries now support instant payments using email/phone numbers. There are QR based payment methods which do the same thing. There has even been a special jacket invented to accept contactless:

https://www.tsip.co.uk/blog/2019/2/19/introducing-helping-he...

> Imagine trade in place without data connection.

What, like an airplane? Where many airlines no longer even accept cash on the plane?

Homeless people are often unbanked, and it's very difficult to open a new account without a credit score and permanent address.

Recent immigrants have difficulty opening accounts for a similar reason - only US credit counts. Political activists are also often denied accounts out of an abundance of caution on the bank's part, e.g. with the Occupy Wall St protests.

The hurdles you mention are nothing compared to lack of ID. Lack of ID is the #1 obstacle to homeless people, especially anyone on the street whose stuff is regularly lost or stolen.

Especially if someone is from out-of-state, good luck rebuilding that cache of ID again. It requires nominal payments and some sort of starting point of documentation. Sometimes it's chicken-and-egg with the DMV.

The first step usually involves procuring a birth certificate from the correct jurisdiction. Good luck if you're an immigrant from, say, a small village in Latin America.

There are whole services and ministries that help people with obtaining ID. I really appreciated that fact. If you're an addict or mentally ill or raised in poverty or abuse, you're gonna have trouble calmly navigating bureaucracies, for sure. It helps to have a tour guide alongside who can coach you through it.

> This is incorrect on all levels. Electronic payments between bank accounts have existed for decades. Banks in many countries now support instant payments using email/phone numbers. There are QR based payment methods which do the same thing. There has even been a special jacket invented to accept contactless:

Is this in Silicon Valley or something? That's the most tech utopian statement I've seen on HN for a while, where even homeless people obviously have access to electronic banking.

Currently those require a bank, a (smart) phone, and a data service. All of which aren't impossible but they're also not exactly universal. There's still about 5% of the US that doesn't even have a bank account in their household, a number highly correlated with income.

This website seems like really low quality blogspam. Higher quality source: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-may-face-a-future-referen...

Euronews was recently bought apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronews#Alpac_Capital

They've been thrash for as long as I can remember. I visit their site every couple of years and content doesn't match their name at all. "Euro" "news"

In the 90s we had EuronewsTV broadcasted over the air for free in Greece. It was fairly ok-ish. I had the chance to interact with some reporters of Euronews in 2017 and it was fairly ok but keep in mind that it was about a news story amongst hundreds within a day.

Sure. Could you do me a favour and check how many news about Greece they've had over the last few months?

Just the site.

Government debanked the lockdown protestors in Canada. Freezing their bank accounts. So people started giving them cash so they have something for food. But imagine if you couldn't buy bread because government decided you shouldn't oppose their lockdown policy. Without cash, you are a slave to the state, and can't have food unless they say you can.

most people who have never experienced real hunger do not understand this

This, and I cannot agree enough. Generally speaking, governments don't always have your best interests in mind.

> Generally speaking, governments don't always have your best interests in mind

Generally speaking, this a massive stretch for a democratic country such as Switzerland. What is the government there but a representation of it's citizens?

> What is the government ...

Extreme naivety or trolling?

A government's highest priority is keeping itself in power at all cost.

> What is the government there but a representation of it's citizens?

Situations sometimes come up that the people don’t exactly get a chance to vote on. For instance, no one in the US in 2018 ran on a “if there’s a dangerous respiratory virus circulating in the future I vow to lock the country down to the best of my ability and mandate vaccines that have been fast-tracked” platform, and such a candidate likely wouldn’t win. But here we are.

That's a rather poor example. Nobody campaigns on "If an earthquake/hurricane strikes, I vow to respect and implement the advice of the relevant agencies whose entire job is it to deal with this kind of stuff", because it's kind of a given.

Don't get me wrong, but the government asked the fringers to leave nicely, then demanded they leave... other than amassing an army and arresting them all, I don't see what else they could have done to make them listen.

> amassing an army and arresting them all

This is acceptable. Everyone should have an inalienable right to proof of identity and access to an electronic funds account, regardless of their crimes. If the government wants to seize funds, they can go to court and prove the crime.

If I'm not mistaken, freezing their bank accounts did need some sort of court approval... You can't just walk into a bank and say "Hi, I want you to make sure this list of people can't continue business as usual".

Edit: I don't think an army would have been the best solution either... Since the protest, many of those same people are now part of the defund police protests. Imagine the mess that would have happened if the police had showed up in military gear and arrested thousands of people...

Freezing bank accounts is not acceptable, since that is currently the mechanism for electronic money transfer. It is like taking away someone’s right to own or use cash.

If a crime has been committed, and there is a fine with the crime, and there is a conviction of the crime, then the government taking money from the electronic account as payment for the fine is OK.

But the right to engage in transactions should never be able to be taken away.

Tell that to the government then, it's not like they held a referendum to ask us what our opinion was. I'm just saying this method was less violent than the alternative.

That was the point the government was making. They had so much power, they do not even need to be violent, they could strip their livelihood with a few clerical actions. Which means due process and all that is just a formality, that can apparently be ignored when politically convenient.

I'm not sure if you are aware. But the government resorted to the "alternative" violence to end the protest anyway. There's videos on youtube of the mass arrests (crackdown) if you're curious. A grandma gets trampled by a police horse, and some arrested are battered with batons in Ottawa.

In Windsor they used tow trucks from Michigan to clear out the protestors trucks. Which if you think about it, Canada government used foreign aid to end a protest against itself.

You are mistaken. Since Trudeau invoked the Emergency Act he didn’t need a court order to freeze bank accounts. The feds literally went on record stating that freezing bank accounts was used as a deterrent from people protesting. There was no judicial or legislative process involved in unilaterally cutting off people from all of their funds.

Sounds like the banks asked the court anyways. https://globalnews.ca/news/8615490/td-bank-freezes-accounts-...

And there was a review after the fact if the emergency powers were used appropriately, and that review just finished and said that yes, Trudeau was in his right and didn't abuse the emergency powers.

A review which found that Trudeau was justified does not change anything I said. I personally haven’t read the entire report so I wont comment on whether or not I believe the actions were justified.

The reality is that it is legal for the Canadian state to extrajudicially suppress protests, hence why it is important to have cash around because of these laws.

Also what if the use of the Emergency Act is found to NOT be justified in a report a year later? How are you going to make those who had their bank accounts frozen whole again? A report in one years time in the future is not going to help you buy food or pay for shelter today.

At least if you capture someone you have to feed them. But if you freeze their money? That's hell

Right to assembly and protest are inalienable rights. Do you feel the same way towards the chinese being harsh with hong kong protestors? or should they simply go home when asked?

Doesn't really seem like due process.

Not only a slave to the state, but a slave to private companies. Most electronic payments, including cards and apps are via companies (as opposed to govt). Who wants companies to have more control over their life?

I don't see this as a valorization of physical currency so much as a hedge against the threat of complete loss of financial privacy & autonomy that comes built-in with state-mandated CBDC's.

Forever is a short time in politics.

Nothing stops another voting in 10 years time to swing the other way.

Constitutions have a tendency to be sticky though.

Constitutions are factually much less sticky than formally, as ultimately words require interpretation. When the law can't be rewritten, it will just be reinterpreted.

Here's a reasonably well known monograph about the topic:

John Hasnas, "The Myth of the Rule of Law", Wisconsin Law Review 199 (1995)

https://medusa.teodesian.net/docs/liberty/MythFinalDraft.pdf

That's only true when they are significantly more difficult to amend than the ordinary legislative procedure

That's not necessarily a good thing. Constitutions need to be able to evolve with the times - otherwise many countries would still be disenfranchising vast swathes of their population (women - and funnily, in some Swiss cantons, women couldn't vote until the 1990s!), or a bunch of other problems. It's absolutely a problem when they become synonymous with a deity's work and thus untouchable. One of the worse examples of this is the US, where with the added benefit of the mess that is common law (precedents and reinterpretations being a thing) it's just a messy vague situation. France was able to add abortion protections to their constitution, meanwhile the US relied on an interpretation of a vague statute to constitutionally protect them, and then a change of opinion in the courts changed that.

As someone else already wrote, Constitutions tend to be reinterpreted - see all the controversies in US on several Amendments and the lack of meaning of "not infringe" these days.

Hungary, which used to be a pretty stable and all around OK country showed it takes one single political misstep to cause a landslide victory in the next election cycle - meaning supermajority. Then that party took the advantage to re-write the consitution to gerrymander and keep the power for many years a-coming. I think most political parties would do the same, regardless of country. So next time you curse a politician out at the other end of the political spectrum, also thank them, for actually existing. Nothing destroys a country faster than a (quasi) single-party system.

I always find it funny when people complain about 'Hungarian gerrymandering', as it tells me they know nothing about the place and just repeat what liberal rags screech about Hungary. The election reforms made elections simpler and actually reduced the inequalities between electoral districts.

Its also even more funny considering that the Hungarian election system is objectively better than the one in the USA, in that it is more representative.

Switzerland has a very specific reason for preserving cash, and it's called money laundering

Alternatively the specific reason is to protect people from ever more hairy government paws crawling all over and inside their lives.

Swiss here. This is true. Buy an expensive watch and want to pay with credit card? We'll need to verify name and address, apologies Sir! Have a bag of cash? No questions asked, have a nice day!

Folks in Mountainous, rugged environment knows the value of physical fiat and its essential exchange mechanism.

Yep. Power or internet goes out where I live fairly often and you'd have to drive at least an hour to use anything but cash.

Another commenter already mentioned natural disasters, which happen with surprising frequency (I've been through quite a few myself).

Cash fills in society's all-too-common edge cases.

I kinda thought those environments would be less dependent on emergency cash, because they'll have a week's worth of food, backup energy/power sources (BBQs, propane tanks, jerry cans of gas, woodstoves, etc.).

It's people in the cities that get boned when the grid crashes.

Especially if them city folks put all their livelihood into digital cash.

Who could have predicted, Switzerland, a bastion of financial privacy has voted to keep cash as legal tender?

Cash you can save, cash you can protect, cash you can move, cash you can share.

Digital goolag-coins you can not.

Save in gold.

Some mafia-related millionaire. :)

Per https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-may-face-a-future-referen... Swiss people have $11.8K in cash on average - an extraordinarily high amount. [edited to insert "Swiss"]

Fwiw, consumer prices in Switzerland don’t really compare to those in the rest of Europe or the US. Would be interesting to see a normalized bar chart.

Swiss people are also good at saving money, regardless if it's cash or investments

Gets difficult when you are paying negative interest rates but at least that is over now. [1]

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/switzerland-exits-nega...

I’m very very skeptical of that number… If all the US currency was evenly divided amongst the US’s population, each person would hold about $6600. But almost nobody actually holds that much cash in the US - that cash is mostly held by criminal organizations, individuals that can’t engage with the traditional banking system, and foreign governments. The Swiss Franc has similar utility to the USD in that regard, so I suspect that number is not representative of nearly all households.

Yeah, there's a ton of US$ cash outside of USA. Estimates have been between 40 and 72%

https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/jp-koning/how-much-u-s-cur...

Swiss Francs are far from a reserve currency, beyond the poor recognition of the notes outside of Switzerland and nearby countries, so I'm doubting too many are held outside of Switzerland. Euros or Dollars would be far better.

Whats the median, because average says nothing.

How much lifting is the word "forever" doing in that headline? I thought all laws are forever, until they're changed or repealed, yet reporting doesn't usually include that word. In the future if someone wanted to try to change this, they could just hold another vote, no? How is this different?

If they omitted the word “forever”, it might seem like they are overturning an existing law or voting against an imminent threat to remove cash.

In 2017 Russia launched the biggest cyberattack ever against Ukraine. It affected a big part of the county’s digital infrastructure including banking. People were unable to transact electronically and unable to withdraw cash from the ATM machines.

If a major conflict against 2 advanced nations ever happen I expect scenarios like this to play out. Cashless is great in times of prosperity but when shit hits the fan you need to have a backup plan.

I sometimes think that something similar might happen with ICE vehicles in the EU.

How does the voting work? Is it a good reference for other nations?

Some info here: https://www.ch.ch/en/votes-and-elections

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking but it may be helpful to know that Switzerland is a direct democracy.

https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge....

It would require some modifications I guess. Switzerland has a relatively long history of direct democracy and citizen participation in politics, and for this reason people do not fall prey so easily to misinformation like they would in other countries where referendums are held that do not have people prepared for it (see Colombia, the UK, Chile, or even California).

The key to direct democracy is citizen engagement and in Switzerland the government actually does a lot to support informing citizens about what they're about to vote.

I think for other nations it might be better to look into citizens assemblies as a next step in empowering democracies because citizens assemblies are very good at achieving public policy that aligns with the general population but in an environment where it's much easier to control for misinformation. In Ireland these were used in conjunction with direct democracy (referendums) as part of the process, in that, the assembly explored the question that would be asked in the referendum and gave a sort of "official opinion" on it. This was then widely distributed as part of the information campaign that the government did for the referendum. Polling suggests that a large part of the population that voted on the referendum was aware of the resolution made by the assembly, which is a good sign. And yeah, ultimately, the results of the referendum aligned with the assembly. The issue was abortion and it was voted in favor, consider that Ireland is a very religious country so it was quite a contentious issue.

The Swiss are not smarter than others. We just have a system that keeps the misinformation by all parties in a relative equilibrium.

I didn't say smarter, I don't think they're smarter. They're better informed and have a more responsible culture regarding politics which takes the form of informed participation.

In fact, I believe this is precisely because people are given a much more direct way of influencing decisions in the country which starts at the very local and scales up. What you say, that you have a system that keeps misinformation in check, yeah, that's part of it.

It's not about individuals being better or worse, groups of people everywhere in the world I would say are pretty much just as smart. It's about the system, but you can't just take a system and drop it on a society that's not used to that; it needs to be phased in and adapted.

I guess, in fewer words, it's not that the swiss (individual person) are smarter but socially (swiss group of people) are. Because there's a culture and systems in place that allow for better group-making decision. It's the difference between having a disorganized group of people just shouting and a group where people take turns to speak; the individuals in the first are not less smart than the second but the second has a system that allows for better decisions to be made.

I generally agree with you. I believe it is all about the culture and by extension the systems which have evolved over time to govern the political process.

I took objection however with "people do not fall prey so easily to misinformation like they would in other countries [...]". People as individuals are as prone to believe anything they read or hear as they are in any reasonably developed and educated country.

The key difference to me seems to be that the political system offers fewer incentives for political actors to act destructively. Proportional representation and multi-member districts mean nobody can assume they will win a majority alone, and a strong pull towards consensus (multi-party governments) means no party will ever govern alone. Everywhere, including in Switzerland, any political party will use information for a certain benefit or advantage, and "misinformation" is just the derogative term for that process, usually from the vantage point of the political opponent. However, there is less to gain from it when you need other parties to find an acceptable compromise and bring forward your objectives.

I think Switzerland has one of the best governments in the world. His model basically after the United States but implemented on a smaller scale where it works even better. It has a weaker federal system and most of the funding is concentrated in the states/cantons. There's also a long tradition of putting questions to the people in terms of a general vote. I think they voted on whether cow herders could remove the horns or not.

It's really not all that similar. The emphasis is very much on the local government, more so than really anywhere else in the world (that I know of). There are some states where local governments matter. There are more where power is concentrated at the level of the county or state government.

A (bad) way to think of it would be something along the lines of a New England townhall system on steroids, with several layers of federal/confederated associations above the local township (geminde).

Again, not a great comparison, but it's something that at least a portion of the US-centric users on here would know a little about.

Im not too interested in debating the topic as I am not Swiss. However, this was explained to me by those who are, and there is a lot of literature on the subject.

https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2021/01/switzerland-and-th...

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

Switzerland spitting out all the right moves of late.

Disclaimer: resident in CH

Time for Stallman to step in and give a speech in Europe!

To add some context: the group that promoted this initiative is a fringe ultraconservative one. Among other things, in 2020 they were denying the existence of Covid and in 2021 they did an anti 5G campaign.

Far-right extremism is surprisingly common in the German-speaking world if you look beyond Western Germany and Berlin.

Eastern Germany (excluding Berlin) is one big racist hellscape where refugee homes get firebombed and Putin is worshipped as the second coming of Jesus.

Switzerland and Austria are not that bad yet but judging by social media trends they both have a significant far-right problem.

Hmm, this is a fun game.

"To add some context, the group that promoted this initiative is a fringe ultraprogressive one. Among other things, in 2020 they were first calling border closures racist, then denying the harmful effects of lockdown, then promoting riots and arson in the streets. In 2021 they did an antiwhite campaign and in 2022 they are openly collecting money for war."

I don’t think I understand what you mean. There are certainly fringe leftist groups in the world and in Switzerland, but this [1] is not one of them.

[1] fbschweiz.ch

The point is that adding "context" to an initiative by associating it with fringe politics with negative connotations does not illuminate much at all... and in particular, after the last 3 years, people should be very careful to throw stones.

Revolut has already of few million users in Switzerland. It looks like swiss citizens and foreign immigrants being taken for a ride in fees by the swiss banks are now fed up and have alternatives...

No, Revolut has ~250,000 customers in Switzerland.

Additionally people have had some serious issues with how Revolut operates including their complete lack of support system. There are several stories of people loosing large sums.

People used Revolut because it made thing easy and quick but now there are Swiss alternatives available like Neon[1] or Zak[2] with the backing of a Swiss bank license providing deposit guarantees.

[1] https://www.neon-free.ch/en/

[2] https://www.cler.ch/de/info/zak

cashless society is a requirement to ascend to the next civilization

If the next civilization is my government having the ability to take my money away from me, I want to part of it

you'll be busy counting your cash on this burning planet while china will be a multiplanetary society

Yes society is definitely going to develop in such a simplistic manner. Also, do I really want to be a member of a society like China in its current form? The answer is no. I have no interest in being a slave to my government, even more so atleast.

If those in power have absolute control of your currency, have fun opposing them without large numbers of deaths.

Why haven't we replaced the dying ISS? why China did?

Why can't we offer universal health care? why China did?

There is a lot of debatable things China did, but when it comes to its citizens, they are properly taken care off to move forward

From a poor emerging country to a developed one in record time, you have to be a strong collective and have the support of your own people to achieve this feat

Our model of society stagnated, we must reinvent ourselves to move forward, otherwise we are headed towards dark times

Chinese workers in rural areas make less per day than any one of my laying hens produces in income at the current price of eggs.

That's apoignant comparison, reminds me of when i had the realization that parking meters downtown Chicago make more than minimum wage.

Why would that surprise you? Parking is expensive, and should be.

> but when it comes to its citizens, they are properly taken care [of] to move forward

Except for Uyghur citizens apparently, unless of course they have drastically mangled the meaning of 'taken care of' beyond all recognition. The same if you're a Falun Gong member, or a dissident, or said anything bad about Dear Leader, or complained about the wrong corrupt business entity, or have a low social credit score for whatever reason, etc. If this nightmare is 'moving forward', then I prefer 'dark times' thank you very much.

Not my impression of China at all. Sounds like you reject western propaganda, yet you bought the communist propaganda wholesale.

Chinese don't have pension, health care, or anything similar. What misinformation are you partaking in?

I am guessing it will be a two-class society: one being able to cut off other's access to money when needed.

That's a risk indeed, but that shouldn't prevent us from doing the work in order to ascend, so we must debate and plan today, Switzerland's political system is unique with their direct democracy, so they are better prepared than the rest of the western world

Not a risk; a real fact that happens.

Good, we know it's a thing, therefore we can work towards avoiding it ;)

If that's the future, I'm glad I'm history.

Even Star Trek had gold pressed latinum

not necessarily the better one though

This can only be realized in a post-scarcity society, and even in a post-scarcity cashless scenario, energy and matter are fundamentally limiting, so people will have allocations of those units.

Does this mean that the digital equivalent of cash in the form of an appropriate cryptocurrency is officially also mandated by law?

I don’t think so, unless it is the only official currency.

No, the vote is about banknotes and coins (as the headline states)

What if i print private keys in qr codes and call them banknotes

The word "banknotes" has a specific legal meaning. You can print anything and call it anything you want, but that doesn't mean anyone will take you seriously or you'll get legal recognition. You're venturing into sovcit territory.

In the United States, at least, they wouldn't be "legal tender", which means that every entity (person, government, whatever) is required to accept them in payment for a debt. I believe most other countries have similar rules for their official currencies, likely including Switzerland.

Note that the "debt" part is important. You can refuse to take cash for a new transaction, but not one where the other party already owes you money.

I believe there have even been court cases that held that the type of restaurant that requires you to pay before getting your food can refuse to take cash, while the type of restaurant that lets you pay after you've eaten cannot (because that makes it a debt you owe). Don't quote me on that, though.

Properies of hard cash: - almost untraceable - works offline - easy to understand

Doesn't matter how you turn it, cryptocurrency is never replacing cash. Digital currency, maybe, but I would always take cash for any inperson transaction.

I think few people are seriously suggesting replacement.

The better way to consider: There are arguably favorable properties that ARE in cash, that are NOT in mainstream bank-led digital payments, and that ARE in cryptocurrency. Some people have already discovered this and use it for these purposes. Now, it is also true that the cryptocurrency space is a breeding ground for scammy behavior.

The only question is -- to what extent might cryptocurrency get more popular for "legit" purposes.

To a greater extend than any other cashless payment system since it isn't controlled by a single entity and has by now proven it is censorship resistent. People are getting more and more educated on censorship issues and the UX continues to get better and better.

Like for many things before, gaming is likely to lead the path for more adoption, the tokenomy has been a thing for many years there now and crypto nicely provides the infrastructure for building a token system on that already. networks with low fees are there and smart contracts can even be written in JavaScript, with companies providing transaction gateways etc etc etc.

At this point anyone doubting crypto has continuously be gaining legit adoption must be blind or in denial.

Developer tooling and ecosystem getting better and better, the whole crypto crashes aren't putting a dent to that.

All it takes is more absurdity from a government for a spike in adoption. See Argentina and Nigeria.

It is already popular for legit purposes, except that the news rarely report it, it makes better title to say some group is laundering crime money using Bitcoin.

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