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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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'

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).

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 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.

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.

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