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Comment by shishy | Hacker News Reader

Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially responsible with it.

Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used.

But yeah, nice to have the option to use both!

I also know that credit cards have their advantages, but what are the main benefits of going fully cashless (at the individual and systemic level)? Is it mostly crime related shenanigans?

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> what are the main benefits of going fully cashless

One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card. Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office.

At the systemic level, the main benefits of going cashless are:

- Being able to track everyone's purchases (for taxation, law enforcement, and in some countries the blackmail of political opposition or assigning "social credit" ratings)

- Have realtime, near-total visibility into the movement of money, for economic management and personal profit

- Being able to cut off individuals or members of a political movement from the ability to purchase basic necessities, if they fall afoul of the party in power[1]

[0] https://www.wlox.com/2022/09/20/gop-ags-call-credit-card-com...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trudeau-canada-freeze-bank-a...

[edit]: I should have also mentioned freedom of movement and association. You cannot buy a plane ticket or a hotel room anymore for cash - even if your bank's ATM allowed you to access enough of your cash in a single day to do so. Cards enable the granular tracking of everyone's movement, whether or not that person chooses to carry a cellphone.

> Don't put your groceries on a credit card.

...huh? "Don't use store membership cards that track your specific purchases" is one thing, but in what world does your credit card processor get info about the individual goods on your receipt?

Pretty sure the data about individual goods is up for sale.

Didn't Google start buying this kind of data to match up online purchase intent with real-world purchases?

If you apply for a loan, especially a mortgage, the lender could ask to see your outgoing cash flow statements. Which wouldn’t get into receipt-level detail, but could still potentially allow the lender to discriminate against you.

A person with habitual transactions at a casino or liquor store could be perceived as high risk and the lender could jack up the interest rate for that person. I have no clue if lenders _actually_ do this, but they could since they do ask for your outgoing transactions.

They could, but for the vast majority of people they won't. Credit scores exist so that they don't have to.

Credit card company rolls up your behavior into a number, and passes that to a credit agency like Experian, and they pop a number out to anyone who asks.

No one is asking for outgoing transactions unless you're trying to buy a business or are getting a non-standard loan for something

The vast majority of people don't have to pass intensive government background checks or face potential rejection during a political vetting process. (And I'm talking about in the United States, where questions raised about personal peccadillos during this process wouldn't necessarily result in the sort of watchlisting they would in most nonwestern countries).

The fear of having oneself audited is the main reason more people don't run for office.

Yes, some narcissistic maniacs have managed to slip through by portraying themselves as victims of witch hunts, but the average married person will not run for office if it means their spouse will find out they went to a strip club.

Everyone is susceptible to blackmail. The digital trail of expenditures is the key to letting the people with access to that data remain in power.

CC doesn’t, the grocery chain does. And they’d love to make money on it.

What's the basis for this advice?

Personally I'd be far more interested to learn that someone running for office refuses to use a credit card to buy groceries because they fear having that information collected and used against them... than that they once spent $500 in a single month on Twinkies.

If someone wants to use your spending history against you they don't actually need your credit card bills these days, they can just make something up. Look at the insanity that people managed to create out of John Podesta's office pizza orders.

I interpreted it more as “it’s a trail of information that could be used against you” instead of literally, but I could be wrong

If you look at the recent history of scandals that have had zero to negative reputational impact on politicians and public figures in Western democracies - we’re talking Access Hollywood, tax fraud, undeclared gifts, gross nepotism, punching journalists, flouting public health laws, sexual impropriety, lying about your career and life story, mishandling of classified information, and just plain incompetence - what on earth do you think the harm could be of someone getting hold of someone’s old credit card bills?

A resourced adversary relentlessly publicizing them?

Given how relentlessly (just to pick a particular example) Epstein's crimes, accomplices, and associated have been publicized, and the negligible impact, why do you think that would be impactful?

Seems like it’s pretty tricky to make anything stick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/supreme-court-...

And literally nobody would care. Regardless of whether the accusations are true or not, the other side is already convinced the politician's in question is a baby-blood-drinking child abuser, while their side will be convinced its just a baseless smear campaign by done by butt-hurt losers.

Life isn't a song, nobody in politics these days actually faces the consequences just because they were a rapist/adulterer/wearing blackface/drag/doing felony fraud/etc.

Because three letter agencies have a huge incentive to trawl through politicians' private lives through credit card purchase data, and use that against them if they don't want to toe the line of these agencies, whose ex-employees are guests on the main stream media. Just leak enough to derail any politician.

There's presumably a lot of evidence of this you can point to...?

Read about J. Edgar Hoover.

Is he back?!

Obtuse reverse skepticism is not a good look.

Pointing to a guy who’s been dead 50 years seems like weak evidence for the claim that government agencies are widely incentivized to undermine political candidates by… selectively leaking their grocery shopping habits?

They’ll look for anything they can find, when they need to. There are whole organizations devoted to digging up dirt, and others devoted to countering/deflecting it.

Risk minimization sounds prudent if you’re a target.

If the very first director of the FBI immediately abused his position to blackmail everyone around, what do you think has been going on in the intervening 75 years?

The front page of HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36123670

The constraints and incentives for agencies like the FBI have changed a lot since Hoover (in no small part due to the abuses under Hoover.)

“Read about J. Edgar Hoover” is a handwave, rather than an argument, and its made worse when it supposed to support a position on the current state of affairs.

The OP asked for examples, not arguments.

> What's the basis for this advice?

"The GoBeRmEnT Is GoNa TrAcK YoU"

Listen, you got a cell phone, and chances are that's going to give away far, far more than data that your credit card company holds on to.

They're just going to have a line -- "Food Lion, [Date] $88.23" -- not detailed list of your purchases.

Meanwhile if you use a membership card at any sort of grocery store, they absolutely will associate it with you; in many cases you have to register that card with your name and phone in order to use the points. Cash or credit, that's tracking you.

Until modern social media that -- grocery store membership cards -- were one of the best predictors of age, income, gender, etc. available.

That's why you should always check to see if some kind soul has pre-registered [local area code]-867-5309

I once used that as my number at Garage Center, then didn’t shop there for ~10 years. When I went back, I’d forgotten. The kid at the register tried looking me up by email, my actual cell number, my previous one, and then finally resorted to *gasp* my actual name.

Then, having found me, I asked what number was in there, and he proceeded to read, with exactly zero recognition, <area code> 867-5309, and I just laughed on the outside, and cried a little on the inside.

It’s not the government that concerns me, it’s the corporations. And I don’t think it’s a contest or even matters if cell phones give more data. I’m worried about both.

No corporation can point a gun at my head and force me into a steel cage.

No matter how evil and corrupt a given corporation is, it could never be as bad as a government.

Not yet [1]. Total symbiosis of corporations and government—to the point of making Mussolini blush—is the ultimate goal. Sure, that sounds paranoid, but look at how far we've come on that spectrum in the last 30 years. Proliferation of technology (due to its enabling of surveillance and weakening of the state) all but guarantees that future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk

When you make statements like ‘Total symbiosis of corporations and government … is the ultimate goal’ without attributing that goal to anyone, you come off as sounding a little bit tinfoil hat.

Boston Dynamics is no more (and honestly in many ways far less) enmeshed in the security state than any number of military suppliers. Seems like a poor argument that things are specifically bad now or getting worse on this front.

If you’d pointed at Palantir perhaps you’d have had a point.

Not that you'll view it as valid but I'm using abductive logic. I shared the Boston Dynamics thing in jest, but I'd love to hear valid reasons for the existence of a bipedal robot that can run and scale over objects. Are these things being used to down dissidents a reality today? No, but it's a perfectly logical conclusion for what's down the pike.

FWIW, too, the "tinfoil hat" thing doesn't work on me. I will smugly tighten mine as I look down upon the naive proletariat being manhandled as "Do You Love Me" [1] is played over the crowd control loudspeakers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

I think "to the point of making Mussolini blush" gives enough background to take the comment seriously without demanding piles of documents.

Few Americans are aware even now of the role of IBM in mechanizing and tabulating the murder of Jews for the Nazis, and basically no Americans were aware of it then[0]. "They" who desire "symbiosis" between corporate power and government power - a better word would be fusion - are the same corporations who promoted fascism in the US and abroad throughout the 20th Century, whose continued efforts we can see daily through virtually all channels in our society.

Name one sphere of society in which corporate power has not merged with or overrun democratic governmental oversight. Name one environmental, social or economic battle that grassroots democratic movements or western governments have won against the corrosive force of corporate profiteering in the last 30 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

This line of argument seems to be common to other responders telling me my concerns are "fringy" insofar as they invoke concerns about governments.

My concerns aren't exclusive to governments or corporations. The degree of co-mingingling of personnel and regulatory capture at this point makes the difference moot. Whoever has the data on every purchase you made since 2012 can silence you, threaten you, blackmail you, or force you out of a public or private position, if there's any difference between those things now. It doesn't matter if you're innocent or the law is on your side; all that matters is perception. Someone who wants you in can hide anything you did; someone who wants you out can find the smallest detail that you accidentally allowed to be recorded, and amplify it. It really makes no difference whether it's a government agency, or a corporation. Splitting hairs on that or saying I'm necessarily paranoid because my concern runs more toward government abuse is an argument about nothing more than the superficial, speculative scenario. The data is the data, and anyone who has it has power. Power is power, and it's only realized when you can wield it over people. Handing anyone your full purchasing history is giving them the power to subjugate you.

A friend who worked in credit finance many years ago warned me they were “thinking” (wink wink) about doing things like selling your food purchase history to medical insurance companies for the purposes of declining claims on the basis of long-term bad eating habits. I believe it was and still is illegal, but if corporations are allowed to do this, then they will, and it’s worth it to them.

I wouldn’t conflate political shenanigans and things that make the news with systemic forces. Made up things don’t always, or even often, pass muster in court. But true information being lawfully used against you will result in no legal recourse.

...this is already legal for some decades. if you are in a rewards program you agreed to have you anonymized sales history (i mean, they will not list "ate burgers" but "ate at fiveguys" is pretty similar).

after that you need some magic to deanonymize the anonymized data, but in the 90s plenty of people claimed to do that already. the famous case was infact with health insurance and burgers... but i can't recall any names.

edit: in the usa

What's wrong with junk food?

Health insurance companies could buy the info, charge you more.

Same reason why, if you insist on installing an app from your auto insurance company, you should not let it access location data.

Tbf, in a ideal world I think it's justifiable and even helpful to steer ppl towards healthy options. Unfortunately there is no ideal world

Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!

And, if I had to guess, the booking of hotel rooms probably has more to do with liability rather than tracking. There are plenty of ways of getting a roof over your head without using a credit card; though IMO they are likely a downgrade.

While your statements resonate with me, it's a bit hyperbolic to say that electronic payments/banking are the only way of exerting the control you're worried about. I think there are a lot of good points in this line of complaint about centralized private financial systems, but the ones you're raising are a bit fringe.

> Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!

Why is that a good thing? You used to be able to walk into the airport, pay cash at the ticket counter for a ticket, and get on the plane. Compared to the fantastic level of nonsense we put up with today?

In the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, one of the characters boards a plane at LAX, and then purchases a ticket from the stewardess. It is the most jarring scene in the entire film.

In this film they used to trust people? What a novelty in today's society. I wish we had more of it.

Well many (not sure if all) strip clubs are basically legal brothels that run on cash specifically because a) they are (usually) in with local organized crime and b) so when the girls get their "tips" they can't be scrutinized about what service they provided to acquire it.

I know a lot of women who work at or have worked at strip clubs (including my partner of many years). While there's sometimes an organized crime element, those are often the safer ones for girls to work at. The blanket statement that they're "legal brothels" is far from the truth. In fact, most will fire girls for any sort of illegal contact, onsite or offsite, with customers. I've heard myriad stories of girls being fired for selling services.

That said, your comment doesn't deserve downvotes, because this very much depends on where you live. It's true that some of them are as crooked as you say. I can usually tell within a minute of walking into one. And if that's been your experience then I can't blame you for holding that perception. But I don't think it's true over all in America.

Its the same case with massage parlors: they either have very well-trained masseuses and take cards, or they are just brothels that may or may not actually give you a massage. I don't think its a bad thing at all...but I can't imagine the working conditions are always great. The thing that makes people uncomfortable about prostitution is the idea that some of the girls might actually be doing it completely willingly (they might even be enjoying it): I don't think the problem, then, is with the existence of these types of establishments, but the complete lack of regulation.

> things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office.

Granted, I don't see a lot of campaign ads, but has this ever happened? Has anyone ever run an ad like "My opponent's credit card bill shows they bought nothing but Funyuns and Jack Daniels for the entire month of August. How can you vote for this person?"

There is a cost to handling cash too. Don't know how it compares to cards but with the latter you don't need to have fleets of armored trucks to move money around and robbers can only steal stock.

The cost is not so much about paying armored trucks, but most banks don't want to deal with small businesses that deal with cash.

In the UK the banks are happy to deal with businesses paying cash, but there are fees, and if your holding cash on premises then you’ll need insurance, which means you’ll need a safe…

The reason supermarkets offered cash back was that this allowed them to massively reduce the amount of cash held on site and thus reduce their insurance costs.

Large chains, large businesses have no problems accepting cash, nor do they have problems depositing cash with banks. Even if a mega bank, say, Chase/Bank of America in the states, doesn't want to deal with cash deposits from a large retailer, the latter can indirectly 'own' a credit union or another small bank that accepts cash deposits, as this bank can still follow AML regulations. Big banks consider cash deposits/withdrawals and money order deposits to be a big headache, and also back office costs for enforcing AML can be reduced by not dealing with cash/money orders (in other words, any untraceable monetary instruments).

> The reason supermarkets offered cash back was that this allowed them to massively reduce the amount of cash held on site and thus reduce their insurance costs.

But wouldn’t this increase the amount of cash you need on hand to ensure you can make change and now give cash back?

Nah. Cash back is all comparatively large notes (£5, £10, £20) and it’s mostly smaller stuff you need for making change. It vastly reduced the amount of cash they needed on site, though it didn’t really help with the need for coins to make change with.

I’m not sure they even offer cash back these days, it has been so long since I asked, and the number of cash transactions has dropped massively over the last few years.

I swear money handling cost will be reduced by one simple thing that some countries like Canada and Ireland have done (and can be improved): ditch the smaller coin denominations (and maybe add higher denomination coins like $2 like EU and UK have)

Anything under 10 cents gets rounded down/up accordingly

It doesn't matter. Minting and transporting it, even in your pocket costs more than you'll ever get in dealing a more "precise" denomination

That's an awful idea. Especially the "down/up" part.

They ditched pennies in Canada and round the cent. Works fine.

This already happens with cents. Your tax frequently comes out to a fraction of a cent, and it gets rounded to the nearest cent.

The US used to have a half-penny coin. It stopped being minted in 1857.

The purchasing power of the half-penny at the time was about as much as a quarter has today.

It wouldn't be crazy to get rid of all coins worth less than 25¢ and round all purchases to the nearest quarter.

Obligatory CGP Grey: https://youtu.be/y5UT04p5f7U

That doesn’t stop theft by employees or robberies.

You don't have to tell me that ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9563474

This is so much cheaper per dollar than people think. Certainly cheaper than credit card fees once you're over a certain volume, unless you are in a very high-crime area. Even then, thieves will often steal off the shelves instead of out of the cash register because that's a much smaller crime. Small businesses get the short end of the stick on cash management, again, because they may not be.

Eh, my experience is that dealing with cash is much more expensive than people think (to be fair, most people think it's "free" since there are no direct fees). At some places I've worked in the past, it's been like almost the only responsibility of a manager working full time. Making sure everything is in order, watch over workers, training them on all procedures, going to the bank to buy change, counting tills all the time, etc etc. Sooo many man hours going into this.

So many people overlook the cost of being able to "make change" an arbitrary amount of time with (nearly) arbitrary denominations.

Think about the last time you bought some for $1.27 and paid with a $20 and they took it without blinking.

I live in a developing country where there are still a ton of small mom & pop shops that aren't willing to eat the cost of that externality. So it isn't uncommon to go to one of them and they'll go "sorry, I can't make change for that bill size". Then you suddenly have the hassle of needing to drive to another store or getting change somewhere else or whatever.

In practice you adapt: the ATM only spits out big bills so you make a purchase somewhere to start breaking them up. Go buy a soda at an international chain instead of the local corner store. That kind of thing.

But it is still a cost we all pay, since "making change" isn't free.

That security is easy to see. The cyber security and fraud protections on credit card networks are expensive and not visible.

True. But there is no way in hell you can stop people paying with their smartphone or plastic card so those costs are fixed.

An anecdote: during COVID people had to use shopping carts in the supermarket (social distancin). Those trolleys needed a 1 euro coin inserted in them to unlock. Chaos ensued because many customers were not carrying cash- let alone coins.

I thought this was a story put out by card companies. I hear it (the implication it’s the same or more) a lot but often unsubstantiated

I don't need fleets in my small business so I'm maybe not your target market but for us it's significantly cheaper to deal with cash than cc fees. We spend about 2-3 hours of person time handling cash per week. Compared to the cost of our cc fees I would prefer to be all cash.

> Is it mostly crime related shenanigans?

Not having to carry a wallet anymore. Never going to the ATM. No need to pocket loose change. Quicker checkout times.

Are these really inconveniences? Most of the times I've had trouble paying for stuff were usually at supermarkets or gas stations where the credit card reader would refuse to acknowledge my card. Swiping/inserting/touching, not even cursing worked so without cash on hand I'd have had to surrender my ID to the clerk, take a cab to the closest ATM and return with cash.

I was an early adopter of (debit) card only, using it for everything in 1999. Your experience has never happened to me, as far as I recall. I don’t think I’ve ever had to go to an atm because the reader didn’t work.

Well, it happened to me just the other day - said it cannot read the card or something like that (even though I had used it less than 15 minutes earlier in another shop). There was already a queue behind me so I forked $40 for gas and went on my way.

Where do you live that you just don’t pay with a card at the gas pump? I’m guessing not in the USA?

The main reason I carry multiple cards, and Cash was because my debit card was used for fraud once, which shut down my card, and it took several days to get a new one.

Now days they can print you a new card in real time at the branch, but still I will never not have cash, and not have a backup card

I also NEVER use by debit card for anything other than ATM now, credit cards and pay it off every month... I dont even carry my debit card anymore, it is locked in the safe, and a bring it out when I need to get more cash.

Yes. I cannot stand cash, I hate carrying it, I hate coins, I don’t want to keep up with it. I leave my house with nothing but my phone and I’m good.

I don’t have a wallet, and I don’t want one. I want efficient and secure digital currency, with easy interfaces between digital wallets. I pay for my lawn care via Cash App, most of the other small businesses have Square or something similar.

If I need anonymous currency, I will convert to crypto and then convert once or twice more across different coins. It’s good enough for my use.

Curious, do you use a tumbler or distributed exchange (not sure if this is the right term)? I always treated crypto as not-at-all-anonymous, so I'm curious how to achieve cash level of privacy with crypto. Any tips?

I've been using cards nearly exclusively my entire adult life, and I can only think of one time that my card had an issue, and it turned out my whole bank was down for ~1 hour. Inconvenient, but I can think of more times I've forgotten to have enough cash with me, and I barely use cash at all now.

In the UK and Australia where I normally am, card infrastructure is just so entirely universal and reliable that it's not even worth considering.

I'm in Canada and the US, but same story. Still carry $40 on me just in case I need the cash but 99% of my transactions in-person are card.

Yeah when I first moved to London after uni I used to carry ~£20, but about 6 years ago I naturally stopped using or replenishing it and ended up never having cash in my wallet. Now I rarely even have a wallet on me, even when abroad.

Im in the us and have had at least 3 times in the last year that I needed cash due to credit card systems "being down" be it from internet outage or actual issues. Twice while trying to get gas for the vehicle.

I don’t use my physical credit card much anymore. Just my watch which is connected to ApplePay which is linked to a credit card.

Those problems do exist, I usually just go somewhere else if their card/payment reader is down.

Points or rebates too.

I'd prefer not to spend 5% to get 2% back.

In my case, that wasn’t a point at all. The added security of CC is also useful, but I would have gone cashless even if it was just debit.

Not having to carry a wallet anymore.

And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home? Or it's blocked for some random reason? Nevermind the services that just don't take cash, or the fact that their card reader might be down, etc.

Doesn't seem tenable to leave the house without at least some cash in a back pocket somewhere.

I barely ever use my card, so dropping it is less likely. It’s just a backup in case the payment terminal doesn’t support NFC. If their card reader is down, I just go somewhere else. If it’s a restaurant, well, that’s their problem if they didn’t warn me before hand (but it’s never happened before).

A lot of people (esp under 30) these days are running around without any cash at all. Pickpockets and muggers, or even just panhandlers, have been suffering as a result.

I do have some cash in my car I think. I put it there a few years ago for emergencies. I haven’t touched it since then.

If I really need cash for something that I can’t get somewhere else, like a visa from the Japanese consulate, I go to the bank and withdraw cash. It’s a weird request for tellers, but I only do it once every two years or so. I’ve forgotten the pin to my ATM card.

> And when we inevitably leave our card somewhere and we need to get home?

How is this different to cash? I also have Apple pay on my phone and watch.

> Or it's blocked for some random reason

I have a couple cards. Also, I've been cashless for 10 years across three countries and this has never happened.

> Nevermind the services that just don't take cash

Assume you mean card. Not a problem in many countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. I travel a lot, remote, even random middle-of-nowhere merchants accept card. From a business point of view, cash-only makes zero sense. Why would a business turn away people who want to give them money?

> or the fact that their card reader might be down

Never had it happen. A couple of times the payment network has been down, and these terminals seem capable of making the transaction offline and syncing later.

If you're from a country where any of these are legitimate concerns for you, it doesn't mean cashless is bad - it means the systems are bad. And they can be fixed, again, AU, NZ, and UK (and more, I'm sure) are proof. Haven't carried cash for 10 years and it doesn't occupy a single thought.

How is this different to cash?

Of course there's no difference in regard to the risk of getting physically lost.

I was referring risk of carrying a single value store (independent of type).

I also have Apple pay on my phone and watch.

Not sure how that's less cognitive overhead than a physical wallet, but as you like.

From a business point of view, cash-only makes zero sense. Why would a business turn away people who want to give them money?

Margins are thin. Apparently the overhead is significant for some merchants. Such that in my part of the planet, it's not uncommon for street merchants (and small shops) to only take card payments above a certain minimum amount. Oh, and some work under the table. Cash lets them do that.

Meanwhile, the card-only places turn away customers all the time.

If you're from a country where any of these are legitimate concerns for you, it doesn't mean cashless is bad - it means the systems are bad.

Mmm - from first principles, and given that one system is orders of magnitude more complex (and subject to far many more points of failure) than the other - is may very well be an intrinsic liability of that system.

Cash only places probably turn away more customers than card only places these days. People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out.

Whether cash is on it's way "out" (as opposed to contracting a bit and settling to a certain niche level) is -- as the article indicates -- far from an obvious, final matter. And in my view quite doubtful in fact.

Either way - do as you like, and nice chatting.

> People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out.

My favorite question that many of the people on this site love to ignore, what about natural disasters? Do you believe CC terminals still work when the rest of the infrastructure has failed?

Cash is far from on the way out, you’re being naive.

Sure, natural disaster occurs, then...maybe I have more things to worry about then having cash? If the POS is down at the store, the cell phone networks are surely down (since many POS these days are just cellphones attached to Stripe or similar), and I'm guessing your saying FEMA help won't come very soon, it will be everyone for themselves in the city? At least I won't be the only one suffering in such a DOOM scenario.

I also don't live in a place where natural disasters (like hurricanes) are very common. I imagine people in Florida or coastal Texas would have a very different view on things.

> If the POS is down at the store, the cell phone networks are surely down (since many POS these days are just cellphones attached to Stripe or similar)

People have calculators that tend to work and be accurate outside a POS. Many people can do basic math and add tax, and you hand them cash. Is this hard to believe? It comes from an era where a POS didn’t exist.

> I'm guessing your saying FEMA help won't come very soon

FEMA, National Guard, etc, stand up critical infrastructure first. This means hospitals, not storefronts. They also only bring in limited food. They feed some, no where near all.

> come very soon, it will be everyone for themselves in the city

hardly, for one National Guard is patrolling. You’re purposely being reductive here.

> I also don't live in a place where natural disasters (like hurricanes) are very common. I imagine people in Florida or coastal Texas would have a very different view on things.

So you, knowing you lack experience, blatantly state cash is on the way out when you now state there are some uses? What is your point exactly? Because a few people don’t need cash in the US clearly nobody needs it?

But with cash you can at least, you know, go down to the corner store and buy yourself a bottle of water. And maybe even something to eat.

Not sure on the fees part of that - cash handling itself is expensive, both for direct reasons, and anti-theft reasons. Anywhere from time spent counting drawers to full-on armored car service. All of that is expensive, and not present when credit cards are used (and conversely, a network fee doesn't exist on cash). I think all payment methods end up with some costs to them.

Chargebacks and processing fees are expensive too.

Processing fees aren't inherently expensively. They're low in Europe, and high in the US only because they go to rewards programs. You're paying 2% more but getting 2% back. Legislation could easily regulate them to eliminate rewards programs and bring them back down low.

Chargebacks are supposed to be expensive because they're a deterrent to businesses acting in ways that will lead customers to attempt chargebacks. And then they usually have an element of manual review which costs $ as well. Chargebacks being expensive is a feature not a bug. And they're an easy consumer protection option that isn't even a possibility with cash.

Chargebacks exist because the element of agency in payment is broken in the electronic money systems we've created. When using a card, you don't give merchants your money, you provide them with enough information to take your money away from you.

The UX of those two things is similar enough that nobody really cares, until it bites them in the ass, that is.

No, chargebacks exist even when you have all of your agency and you paid willingly.

If you order something that then arrives broken and the company refuses a return, you can do a chargeback.

If you had mailed cash or a check you'd have no recourse except the courts.

> Can't be tracked

If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

For more information I suggest getting some books on Terrorist Financing for the new meta. There is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service lady out there that wrote a whole book on it recently.

are you suggesting that the serial number of every note you withdraw is registered against your account?

Modern ATM bill acceptors have sensors that can read serial numbers off of bills. I don't know whether it's been publicly stated that this occurs (and don't have any relevant personal knowledge, either), but the capability exists in the field.

I'm not sure if I'd be surprised either way. Either they don't track bills because it costs too much money, or they do track bills because they've found a way to monetize the data.

I scarcely use ATMs at this point because they won't hand out "large" bills. Inflation will be the real driver of cashless adoption, as the absurd number of $20 bills (and eventually, $100 bills) you need to pay for anything these days makes using cash too difficult for the average person.

Technology exists. Policy will vary.

https://www.amazon.com/NUCOUN-VC-7-Denomination-Counterfeit-...

> Money Counter Machine with CIS Technology: Equipped with one pair 200DPI Contact Image Sensors, scan and detect each counted bill like human eyes.. counts the quantity, reads the denomination and currency type, calculate the total amount at one time pass. Turn on serial number reading function to record serial number and all the counting details can be printed directly or exported to PC , very helpful for money tracking and management.

It looks to me like there's two different notions of cash tracking being discussed. One is tracking individual bills and the other is tracking transactions that involve exchanging goods or services for cash.

If the bank teller counts out the cash from a drawer and hands it to you, no. If he runs it through a counting machine, or you get the cash from an ATM, maybe?

I admit this is a bit of tin hattery. But that said at my bank the cash is distributed from machines that the teller uses. You go up, make a withdrawal, they type the amount into the machine and bills are counted out.

I am sure this offers several advantages to the bank. That said, however, maybe I can see it being straightforward for these machines, along with ATMs, to log bill serial numbers as they’re distributed.

I have no idea if this is being done, simply, at least at my bank there’s an avenue for it to happen. I would also freely admit that it would be an imperfect system. But still food for thought.

> if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000 on a used car from another guy who then used that same money to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not in the bank's hands.

Your statement is true as long as it stays out of the bank.

A motorcycle is a bad example, too, because there are licensing and registration requirements.

Like I said, this is a spectrum.

It obviously could have gone through an intermediary, but it usually doesn't for honest transactions. If one of the two people is already a person of interest to law enforcement, a warrant can be called up to figure out exactly what happened. Added to other sources of information, like the new registry of the car or motorcycle, a pretty reliable history can be constructed.

Don't think in binary. Think in continuums of likelihood. Also, this isn't a new concept. It was covered by HBO's The Wire many years ago.

That lady's book is super expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Illicit-Money-Financing-Terrorism-Twe...

> each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it

This isn't quite what you meant, but 20-ish years ago there was some crowd-tracking of Euro-bills.

The Euro was pretty new and people were excited about their banknotes showing up in other countries. Some people created a website where you could enter the serial number of your bills. Each serial number would have a tracking page in which places it showed up. It felt kinda cool to find a bill in your wallet that had visited a few other countries.

This reminded me https://www.wheresgeorge.com/ in the USA has been doing it a while as well. Had no idea it was still going strong all these years later.

Said website: https://EuroBillTracker.com/ Still operational!

I have to apologize, but you don't understand what the concept of "laundering money" means. It has nothing to do with tracking cash bills through serial numbers and it has never had anything to do with that.

"Laundering money" means that criminals make transactions in order to use cash they have from their illicit gains within the general economy, ie get it into a bank account and being able to declare where they got the money from.

> the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

Not at all.

> motorcycle

It should be tracked to some degree. If the motorcycle is designed for street use (compared to track or dirt only) then there are several interested parties that need to know about some sort of transaction (insurance companies, DMV, state sales tax). There's some difference between "my insurance company knows I bought a GSXR" and "Visa knows I bought a GSXR", but less than you'd think. Even if the insurance company doesn't sell the data, you're likely to buy a new helmet with the Visa, increase browsing of motorcycle related webpages, or have some new speeding tickets.

You launder money to obscure the source of the cash. If you sell, for example, $200k worth of cocaine and you try to deposit it all through one of your fronts you will be caught.

This isn't difficult data science.

Cash pretty much has to be fungibile, it would just be too much work keeping track of the history of each dollar in your wallet.

Maybe that's nice because you can pay your taxes with money you made selling drugs.

Maybe it's bad because you don't know what kind of activity you're supporting when you accept a stranger's money. It could be that refusing to accept their money makes them unable to set up the mining operation that would poison your drinking water.

Dealing with cash is mainly just super-expensive because it's a massive volume of paper and metal that you have to count and move around every day, and deal with replacing it over time. It's not a big deal for a single individual, but it's a huge deal for businesses. And for banks and for the government.

And there's just so much nonsense involved, like a cashier discovering they're $25 short at the end of their shift, and how do you deal with that. Unlike digital transactions, people are constantly making mistakes with cash, which one side or the other is losing out on.

And then obviously theft as well -- if there's no cash in a cash register, there's less incentive to hold up convenience store clerks at gunpoint. (You can still steal merchandise, but it's a lot bulkier and harder to handle.)

In addition, fraud by cashier and tax avoidance by owner.

Cash has a lot of costs as well. For example it’s easier to steal, it slows down transactions, and it requires a larger payment device and overhead of transferring it to a central location. It’s not at all clear that cashless even with fees is more costly to a business.

As for can't be tracked, does anyone else remember that website you used to see stamped on dollar bills, WheresGeorge.com? Early internet goofiness, crowd-sourced tracking of cash.

"create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of"

Nit: you mean a positive feedback loop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback

At the individual level, the cost of using cash is that you are subsidizing the other consumers who are paying with a credit cards that offers cash-back or other rewards

Accepting cash also has its fees for businesses, primarily a cash collection fee made by banks.

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