How could a website function with cash payments at all?
You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa, you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that number into the ATM, feed the cash into the coin and note slot, and then your goods will be ordered.
The same system is used for paying taxes in cash, utility bills in cash, etc.
They can do refunds in cash using the same system.
You do pay a fairly hefty (10% if I remember correctly) fee for using that service though.
What they don't get is the buyer's information.
...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcement-capturable.
Which has monetary value and thus will be monetized, sooner or later.
Check out "Level 3 data"
Many shopping carts don't bother sending the data, because they'd rather say "let's support 900 obscure payment platforms in a de-minimis way" than "let's support a handful WELL"
Then there's actually getting the right information into the message to the processor. There's vague and inconsistent documentation on how to tag things like "commodity codes" and data formatting (Should the per-unit price be rendered as $12.79 or $12.7903?)
Even if you have the right intentions, you can easily blow things up by just having out-of-bounds data-- encoding a nonsense discount or tax rate.
What happens is that people set up software that sets up bare-minimum and mediocre data for every order that's good enough to get the "you sent level 3 data" rates, and the actual visibility is still quite poor.
Maybe there are some top-tier merchants who actually do everything right, but there's a hell of a lot of noise amid the signal.
Absent any information, I just assumed that any supermarket that can handle EBT/SNAP etc was sending transaction details anyway -- the computer will refuse or only partially pay the transaction if any items not elegible for benifits is on the order.
Long version:
I don't think Georgia has copied what I think of as the mistake of KYC, yet at least.
I feel KYC regulations as they exist today are a big mistake, that does little good, more harm than good and causes a lot of extra work and annoyance.
People always seem to think that de-anonymizing things will always make things better.
As I get older I feel the more someone wants to know my real identify the more likely I am to be abused somehow.
Meanwhile, talking to thousands of absolute strangers here on HN or via an anonymous reddit account or something feels relatively safe.
I have also with time started to think that in the long run the risk from governments harming me or my family is a lot bigger than the risk that someone else does it.
Even if the ship has sailed on living in an identity-optional society, at least in most of the world, I still think it's good to record the benefits of such a society.
KYC is not needed as cash is still a thing. It’s accepted that pretty much anonymous physical transactions can and will occur and the police will need to do old fashioned detective work to find the criminal.
It has some limits (10000 BRL when i used it) but thats more than enough for most purchases
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/can-you-send-cash-...
https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-9264421609
You should report to the postmaster general if you are refused service; they would be interested in hearing about this.
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-are-the-Limits-for-Insur...
I found this out the hard way trying to overnight about $500 cash to a family member.
Digital has use cases.
Cash has use cases.
We can have both.
(Can't imagine pornhub selling gift cards at the supermarket checkout next to the App store ones)
NYC cashless ban law exception allows a fee-free machine to convert cash to prepaid digital payment mechanism, e.g. stored value card.
US Coinstar kiosks offer fee-free conversion of coins to Amazon and other gift cards.
Maybe EFT (e-Check) or Zelle does? It's still on line and tracable but is not going through card processor networks.
Could do it with pure stablecoin.
> The comptroller would also be required to create a mechanism that would allow the new gold-backed digital currency to be used by citizens for their daily transactions. “In establishing the digital currency the comptroller shall establish a means to ensure that a person who holds the digital currency may readily transfer or assign the digital currency to any other person by electronic means.”
Then there are the people defending the steps to the cashless society because those steps happened to be on people they didn't like: canadian truckers and pornhub.
I recall one explicit comment I can't find now so I am willing to believe I hallucinated it.
> No one is arguing for a cash-only society.
My statement was about the opposite, i.e. co-existence rather than exclusion :)
Let me be the first to argue for it. Electronic money is horrible. It obscures how much you're really spending on things. It requires a middle man in every transaction skimming a bit off the top. One company runs all the debit payments here. Mastercard and Visa used to split the credit card market but I assume they colluded to monopolize on on MC here. The government has passed laws demanding business partake in the racket but nothing to require acceptance of cash. Cash not accepted for public transport. Laws stating a maximum value of a transaction that is permitted in cash but have never increased the limit while they've been inflating the value away.
It misses the obvious fact that an elected politician needs the privacy of cash for taking bribes.
A cashless society can only work in an authoritarian regime that simply doesn't care if the populace knows about bribes or not.
Future digital payment systems can have a wide range of transparency, they are unlikely to be limited to public blockchains.
China is rumored to have a do-not-see list which excludes selected elites from detection by ubiquitious surveillance cameras.
I've only used my card with Uber a handful of times in 2016.
Without cash we will see credit fees rise significantly.
Cash is nearly impossible to use on the internet. The web is a window into what the physical world will look like without cash. Incidents like Pornhub's show us the power a few companies will wield over us when the transition to cashless happens.
When I was in Asia using UberEats and Food Panda, "Cash on Delivery" was the recommended option by most of the locals.
We don't need to be giving our governments any more control over the way that we spend our own money. And we certainly don't want to give them the power to shut people out of the system.
Hell, people would buy things from me and just post cash in an envelope.