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Comment by grahar64 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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