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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Some countries (eg. Thailand) have a centralised government system for managing this.

On every receipt, by law, is a unique barcode encoding the shop and purchase value. That barcode, when scanned, leads to a government webpage (and doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything deductible, so many of the receipts get scanned).

On that webpage, occasionally they ask for a photo of the best before label of the goods. The best before date usually includes the lot number.

Now, the government has a list of lots of serial numbers and associated retailers. They can now easily punish those who regularly sell stolen goods.

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We don't really have receipts anymore here in the USA. I mean, we're supposed to, but it's on thermal paper, but everyone's printer is broken, and they'll try to send it in email, but oh the images are broken too, and the link expired after 29.25 days anyway. Proof of purchase is necessary for refunds. No refunds.

We don’t have national business registration either.

Is cash still the dominant means of exchange in Thailand? If the discounted price of the good covered the potential deductible amount then no receipt would be needed.

Lots of people still want the receipt.

I suspect there are both undercover sellers and buyers to find buyers willing to buy without a receipt, or sellers willing to sell without a receipt.

> doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything

So a dystopian police surveillance-state?

Thanks but no thanks. The socially optimal amount of theft is not zero.

I think you already live in that... Credit card networks already know everything you buy, and will happily hand that info over to government.

At least this way you get the benefits of it.

Not quite, card networks only know transaction level information if the merchant processing the card transaction passes back level 3 data. Merchants only pass level 3 data to secure a processing % discount on network fees. This data can be used to mine user behavior by the card companies, and unless you opt-out of Visa/Mastercard's data mining program at the card level, they do this.

I was under the impression that the vast majority of merchants do this though...

And any that don't still need to keep records for tax purposes, and the authorities could still request that anytime and without your knowledge.

It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Most merchants do _not_ send level 3 data. For the most part it’s only sent on travel related transactions or for government vendors.

>It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.

Not really, because the search could have happened in the opposite direction (eg. they ask the store for a list of transactions that were made with the suspect's card). I doubt they're asking visa/mastercard to give them a list of all hammers sold in the past month.

> Credit card networks already know everything you buy

I didn’t know this.

Let’s say I buy advil, condoms, and dish soap with my capital one Visa card at Walgreens. What information does Walgreens share with visa and/or capital one? I just assumed the name of merchant and the total amount charged was all they needed?

I remember back when I was younger, I’d often see adults requesting the cashier to charge this much on one card, this much on another, bringing out four or five cards. Do all these banks/ card processors get a full list of items sold?

Somehow I doubt it - I would honestly consider it a feature if I could look on my credit card statement and have an explanation around why I spent $22 at 7/11 on the 12th.

There are 3 levels of data shared from the merchant to the card networks. Level 3 is the highest which does contain item level detail.

That tends to only be sent on hotel or airline transactions or when working with government accounts.

Generally speaking the merchants and card networks have very antagonistic relationships. The big merchants know that their sales data is valuable and won’t share it without incentives. The credit card networks do offer lower interchange rates for sending level 3 data but it still hasn’t seen a lot of uptake.

If the retailer keeps a record of the receipts, the government can ask for them since they have the payment reference from the credit card company.

Until its your store that goes under because of theft. And you can't pay for your kids' education or medical bills or food or rent. And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government where everybody gets free everything and we all eventually become government-subsidized vegetables on life-support, useful only as fertile incubation vessels to pop out the next round of vegetables.

> “And then you turn around and you beg for a dystopian UBI government”

You seem to have mixed dystopian and utopian.

It is only utopian if everything you happen to be into is what the current power is into.

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