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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

On a recent trip to Europe I didn't take out cash once over 3 weeks across 3 countries. I brought 50 euros with me and that was all I needed! Everything else was just a quick tap of the phone, including every metro system outside of Paris.

My only hesitation to getting rid of cash entirely - how will I buy drugs? I don't gamble illegally or pay for sex, but I imagine those services would also struggle in an increasingly cashless world.

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The absence of cash should terrify anyone. So ridiculously easy to quash any dissidents if you can cut off their ability to buy anything with a single click of a button.

I don't use much cash at all but if my government was planning on ending all cash, I'd go out and buy a bunch of precious metals. Can't trust my basic freedom with Visa and Paypal.

Yeah I completely understand a business not wanting to handle cash. It's bulky, dirty, easy to steal, must be secured in a heavy expensive safe, it takes time to count, it has to be physically transported to the bank or picked up by an armored car service, it's error-prone.

But in terms of personal freedom, I don't want cash to go away.

Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has the ability to employ much more brutal and effective methods of quashing dissidence.

They have to find you first, which is quite labor-intensive compared to just tracking and/or halting a person's financial transaction ability.

Really? Did you read that somewhere?

What's more scalable - querying a database and hitting "delete" on the payment channels of 100,000 people at a political rally, or hunting them down one-by-one across an entire country?

You're applying this to individuals. Which is never the real threat to any regime. It's always large groups of people.

I think you're living in techno-fantasy land. "Deleting" people on a database achieves nothing. Look at how authoritarian governments actually work in the real world. An authoritarian government would simply arrest the leader of the opposition on made up charges, and then they would throw them in the jail. They don't have to go after everybody who disagrees with the government. They just go after a few of them, and this is more than enough to discourage the rest.

And your solution is to make it even easier for them to do all of the above by eliminating any way to transact privately?

Not really. Elaborate black markets exist and thrive all over the world. Maybe in the most brutally restrictive regimes they can truly ban something people want. But the rule across most societies is: ban something people want, then an unregulated black market will fill the void, regardless of laws, and will probably bring otherwise avoidable violence.

Yeah, I agree... that's what I'm saying, it's ineffective.

If black markets are your backup strategy then all countries would have to abolish their paper currency at the same time because nothing prevents you from paying with dollars, yen or euros in a foreign country.

https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20181026/owner-of-vietn...

If you travel around the central Asian "stans", especially Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - you'll notice that a surprisingly large number of people, especially older people, have gold teeth.

They didn't do this as a fashion statement - being able to escape with whatever gold you could carry was a means of survival against a brutal communist regime.

My own great grandparents escaped during the partition of my country by bartering my great grandmother's gold bangles and earrings for safe passage.

The government can and will try to quash dissidence. That doesn't mean you have to make it completely easy for them and hand over complete control on a silver platter.

> methods of quashing dissidence

Some countries have constitutions, armed citizens, some police who believe in the rule of law, and would like to maintain at least an appearance of due process.

> how will I buy drugs?

A decade ago my friends were already paying for drugs with Venmo. The dealers aren’t very careful because they’re rarely caught on the financial side. If the recent revelations are anything to go by, they’re probably using Cash app now.

Ironically it’s the legal dispensaries that have problems accepting digital payments - they usually require cash with an ATM on-site.

Dispensaries can use virtual ATMs.

https://fortune.com/2022/04/01/cashless-atms-at-cannabis-dis...

It depends on where you live. You can pay with a debit card in some place.

Drugs/gambling/prostitution may be considered contraband now (in some jurisdictions) but the decision over which goods/services fit that distinction is a political question so the answer will change with the political winds. Eliminating cash is inherently centralized: You can't pay someone directly for something. The transaction has to go through a walled-garden intermediary. This is a chokepoint where political policy can be enforced. It is a very useful and obvious tool for those with an authoritarian mindset-- or a utopian mindset but who knows if their idea of utopia will match yours.

Digital money is an ideal slip noose that keeps you under total control and surveillance. People who fought the government in my country have found it out the hard way.

What, the government in your country is benevolent and would never do something like that? Oh, my sweet summer child...

You don't have to do anything that seems illegal to participate in the illegal cashless society. A person selling ice cream out of a cooler at the beach is an example of a business that probably would not exist if they couldn't take under the table cash payments, considering the business model is a simple arbitrage opportunity on wholesale ice cream that probably wouldn't pencil out with the overhead of credit card fees or taxation.

If the only argument against getting rid of cash is that it would make it harder to commit crimes, that sounds like a good reason to get rid of cash.

I like cash because I like my privacy but cash making it easier to do crime is an unfortunate side effect, not an end in itself.

Disagree with any laws?

Many people see laws against victmimless activities to be a direct curtailment of basic human rights. Even in our own lifetime we've seen completely arbitrary changes to which substances and banned or not banned, so we should be extremely wary of future, similarly arbitrary changes (that we can easily get around using cash).

There is no such thing as a 'victimless activity' so your point is moot.

Your point is lame and pedantic.

The problem is that the government often creates crimes that citizens don't agree with. Or the majority uses the law to try to force their preferences on the minority.

So should everyone simply disregard any laws they disagree with, provided they can get away with it? Where does it end?

With laws being changed, unlike in totalitarian regimes.

I think the depends entirely on if the "crime" has a victim or otherwise causes severe problems to society. Though those problems should probably be more severe than then the problems caused by trying and failing to ban a victimless crime, which always creates a black market (and associated violence, which does have victims).

It doesn't "end" whatsoever. Your notion of it ending means total governmental control or total anarchy. Life is in the middle of the two, the resting point is a continuous balance of two extremes. It's not simple to disregard laws, it's risky and makes you vulnerable.

At least in America, there's not a lot of alternatives. The system is setup in a way that favors minoritarian rule (particularly, but not exclusively by the rural) and lobbyists. Unfortunately, that means that diregarding laws that they disagree with is often the only way to represent the will of the people.

Obviously yes. If you don't agree with a law and there is close to no chance of getting caught then why follow it?

Yes.

It ends where someone else's rights begin.

Unfortunately it seems that digitalisation often removes a former middle ground and forces a choice between two extremes – like in this case either total privacy, or total surveillance, and there's no choice in-between.

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