Hacker News Reader

Until the day your phone breaks for some reason, or one of those payment monopolists decides you shouldn't be able to spend your money because you modified your phone without their permission, and you find yourself unable to pay for the bill. Eliminating cash also eliminates the possibility of having transactions that are difficult to trace for whatever reason, at least in small amounts. What if something you take for granted today becomes illegal (weed, abortion, anything you may think of) and the government will now have near total ability to see what you bought. It's a bleak future without privacy.

> Until the day your phone breaks for some reason

I happen to have a second Apple device on me at all times: my watch. Risk of this happening is low. Still a risk though.

The "phone breaks" argument is weak as plenty of wallets are lost and sometimes even attached to phone and then both are lost. The strong argument is that things don't even have to be illegal to become impossible to pay for using digital currency. Look at the adult industry, where it is nearing impossibility to find a merchant to support payments for legal adult services. Better laws & privacy protections will help but won't ever fully solve the problem. (And before anyone else jumps in, neither do cryptocurrencies in their current state.)

Cryptocurrencies, especially the stronger privacy protecting ones like Monero mitigates tracking to a great extent and is permissionless, requiring no authorization from a third party to use your money. Though by doing so it also attracts criminal and law enforcement attention and is likely to be banned upon widespread adoption.

No cryptocurrency in its current or foreseeable future state are useful as daily methods of payment, for many reasons. Cryptocurrencies are volatile speculation instruments, not a practical currency as they lack the necessary combination of stable value, widespread adoption and either usefulness outside of limited markets or privacy friendly method to convert. Monero might not be as routinely traceable as other cryptocurrencies but any conversion to or from fiat is likely to be traceable or dodgy enough to get a bad rate of return. To be a truly useful currency someone has to be able to earn it one day and spend it freely in the overwhelming majority of commerce situations a week or month later for the equivalent value. That is not going to happen with cryptocurrency in the foreseeable future. The majority of people who claim it will be or should be are typically those most interested in cryptocurrency being a volatile speculation instrument, which defeats their stated goal.

> one of those payment monopolists decides you shouldn't be able to spend your money

I assume you keep all of your money at home?

Oh, you keep it at the bank. And withdraw it using a plastic card? Well then.

He was specifically talking about physical money (cash) vs digital money only.

I agree, though I suspect HN is going to be a tough crowd :)

It is not just breakage. My phone was low on battery when I realized my bus pass was just in digital form. I had to find a place to charge.

All of these concerns have analog equivalents. Plenty of people get to public transit and realize they need to recharge their pass before it's useful again.

I’m 40 and I’m in the same boat as your daughter. I no longer carry a real wallet. This isn’t just due to Apple/Google pay but also because basically everything related to your identification is now available as an App here in Denmark, so you can get your social security card, your drivers license and your national 2factor login on your phone along the digital wallet.

I do still keep around $100-200 worth of Danish Kroner in cash in my bag, however, and I almost never need it, but it’s nice to always have enough for a night in a hotel, a really long cab-ride or groceries for those times where the systems break down.

She would have a hard time visiting Germany, where "No cards accepted" is still a thing in 2023.

When I arrived to Germany two decades ago, living on digital payments (debit cards) was already common practice in Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and France, so it was kind of shock the money only culture around here, that is still quite prevalent.

> She would have a hard time visiting Germany, where "No cards accepted" is still a thing in 2023.

Have you been in germany this year?

I live in Germany, and can point you to several restaurants on the city center where I live, that have "No cards accepted" quite visible on the window, or the typical blackboard menus.

I sure have, I live here! Tried to pay for my croissant and juice in Penny Markt just this morning, i trid to test paying with my credit card and got the usual "Keine ausländische Karte!" :-)

And dont even try using a card in a restaurant or a bar, the terminal always, and i mean always just happens to be "broken" at this particular time.

That wasn’t my experience in Munich recently, although I could see it being the case outside of larger cities.

Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange). People use debit cards or cash (the distribution between these varies per country). I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail. It probably works more often now, but don't expect it to work everywhere.

People in Europe tend to only use a credit card for online purchases outside of their own country; most people don't have a credit card at all. Online purchases tend to be done with national systems like the Dutch IDeal (this even works with large international shops like Amazon and Steam).

paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange).

There is no difference between the mechanics of paying with credit card and paying with a debit card, at least none that I've ever noticed. I hold up my card to the reader and sometimes enter my PIN. I'm not even sure if there is a way for the person accepting the payment to tell if it's a credit or debit card I'm using.

I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail.

I've had places fail to accept my Swedish debit card in the Netherlands. It's more to do with some places only accepting local cards or not accepting, for example, Master Card, rather than debit vs credit cards.

> Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores

Maestro and Visa Electron are already or soon will be full discontinued. How can you even tell a debit and a credit card a part nowadays? The only distinction between my credit and debit Visa cards is a single word sign in a tiny font at the back (I live in a EU country).

So unless those Americans are trying to with Amex/Discovery/smth similar cards I'd find this really surprising.

Even a decade or two ago Germany was the only country I've been to where it was only possible to pay with these regional debit cards in some places. I really don't think this was an "Europe" wide thing for a quite a while now.

There must be a way for card processors to know if the payment is debit or credit because there are stores in the US that only accept debit.

Yeah, I think US is somewhat different, the fees for credit cards seem to be much higher there while in the EU they are caped at 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit cards + bank fees .

Even in The Netherlands where, I was told by a local debit cards were the norm, I paid for things all last week with a credit card without anyone giving it a second look or having the slightest problem. I was prepared to use my debit card begrudgingly as it doesn't cover foreign exchange fees like one of my credit cards do. But I never needed to.

The distinction between debit and credit card is not really what is at play here, but rather, whether Visa or MasterCard is accepted. A Visa credit card or a US Visa debit are both Visa, so if a place doesn't accept Visa it won't accept either, but if it does accept Visa (increasingly the norm) then both credit and debit work. It's just that in Netherlands none of the debit cards are Visa/Mastercard so people might be mistakenly attributing the card acceptance as being about a debit/crédit distinction.

I wish iDeal was accepted more widely. Stripe/Mollie/Adyen et al support it but it has enabled explicitly. This is especially annoying for Shopify stores.

I don't know what the hangup is (maybe it needs to be reported to the Dutch government since it's obviously coming from a NL national?).

Until then, we'll have to keep using a low limit credit card or Paypal for many online purchases.

If I recall correctly, if you have a valid payment method, they have to accept it. So, if the terminal is "broken", thought luck for them, it's free. That has been my experience, the few times that happened to me (and the terminal was truly broken, it wasn't an excuse).

In my experience when the terminal is 'broken' I say "ah shucks I don't have any cash" and they turn back to the terminal which is suddenly working again and, perhaps begrudgingly, accept my contactless payment. I live in a big city and routinely visit a restaurant that does this every time. You'd think they would recognize a regular and quit with the bullshit but nope.

This is exactly my experience every time. My wife is always annoyed at me when we eat out and I insist on using a card, but it's too amusing for me to watch the entire staff struggle around - as if a client with a credit card is some crazy situation they've never encountered before in the center of Munich.

Which is why many places actually assert that they don't take cards before taking any requests.

At least it is common in NRW to do so.

Restaurants, donerbuden and the like which don't accept electronic payments or "ze terminal is broken" are literally all just committing tax fraud and don't want any paper trail documenting transactions for this reason. Meanwhile legit businesses want you to use electronic payments even for small stuff nowadays because, as a bakery owner explained to me, the fees are so low nowadays that it's overall more expensive for her to handle cash.

> Restaurants, donerbuden and the like which don't accept electronic payments or "ze terminal is broken" are literally all just committing tax fraud and don't want any paper trail documenting transactions for this reason.

The solution is that you pay any of your disposable income to the government to compensate for this.

An anti-tax advocate on HN, what a surprise. The solution is that they pay their goddamn taxes. Those taxes pay for services that companies avail of as well.

Who believes in that anymore? We're in the information age and people can see where their tax money actually goes. Merchants refusing taxes are just as legit as those who chose to pay taxes. Why should the customer spend his life worrying about if the government gets more money? If that is the case, he should first pay all of his money to the government.

But to the point: Many merchants just want to skip the fees, it usually has nothing to do with taxes. Small business owners get riled up about CC fees sometimes.

> Who believes in that anymore?

Plenty of people in countries with functioning public services and social safety nets.

> Merchants refusing taxes are just as legit as those who chose to pay taxes

As a point of pedantry, they’re in fact illegitimate in the literal sense. (I don’t intend this point as serious argument, just thought your phrasing was bit funny in the context)

> Many merchants just want to skip the fees

I completely agree with you here, it can make sense for a small business to prefer cash for that reason (and it’s equally okay for a customer to choose whether to do business with them).

Once I was paying for my groceries in Germany using my American credit card. There was an old man behind me who was a bit impatient. While the payment was processing, I said to him I was sorry about the delay and he asked me why I was not using cash. I told him that I wasn't carrying any. He said "cash is king." I thought it was funny but he was very serious about it.

I’m oldish, and no longer carry around a wallet. I don’t even whip out a phone to play for things, I just tap my watch. This was after 9 years in China, where, given that WeChat payments wouldn’t support foreigners without Chinese ID cards yet, I carried around wads of RMB the whole time.

I also have a MagSafe wallet. But if Washington state would support digital driver licenses and Seattle metro had a wallet based transit pay app, I wouldn’t really need that either.

Also oldish. In our household we refer to coins as “parking tokens”, but even that usage is becoming obsolete (notwithstanding that parking machine UX is too often a horror show)

I've taken it for granted that my parking meters take credit card at the meter (or at the payment machine), but on top of that there's an app/website and you can plug in the serial number of the parking space to pay.

I have a big bucket full of coins that I need to take to the coin machine at the supermarket while such still exist.

> I think kids growing will be happy without any physical cards and banking will all be app driven.

That's mostly valid for middle-class kids, but there's lots and lots of unbanked or "badly" banked (i.e. banking with what are basically pawnbrokers) poorer people, so cash going away or being tightly regulated will be a huge disadvantage for their kids going forward.

that makes it even funnier if you know how the rest of the world operates.

for the past decade most countries (china, india, brazil, eu, etc) have central bank issued APIs for instant payments.

without being a client of visa, apple, etc... anyone can instantly transter money around. some banks require an app, others allow via sms, etc.

the US seems like it is stuck in time, still swiping credit cards, and only having a glimpse of the world via toys their kids play with, until they are old enough to go back to the american way and start swiping cards.

Mid-30s here and the only cards I carry are my ID and a couple of "catchall" credit cards to serve as a fallback where Apple Pay doesn't work, and unless I know I'm going to a cash-only bar or something I don't carry cash.

Debit cards are practically never in my wallet unless I'm going out to withdraw cash. Way too risky to be carrying around a direct line to my primary bank account.

Haha - your story reminded me of this sketch - might find this funny!

Gen Z's be like...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpYyFuHjdB0

I have kids who will be that age soon. Wondering how much more true this will be in the next 3-4 years.