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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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