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Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability to be lazy. You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to count out cash. That's the major benefit. All things being equal, sure, it's more convenient. But all things are not equal; in my opinion the potential negatives that others in the thread have listed overwhelmingly outweigh the ability to be more lazy. That so many people have the desire to ditch freedom in exchange for the ability to be slightly more lazy is such a disappointing state of affairs and says a lot about society.

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> The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability to be lazy.

By this logic, the primary benefit of just about every technological development in human history is the ability to be lazy. The wheel is just a crutch for those too lazy to drag their loads on sleds.

The downsides of a cashless marketplace are indisputable, but “laziness” is a reductive view of the upsides.

Using your example, the wheel allows us to perform more work per unit of time. I think it would be good for discourse to identify that within society there is the general consumer public and then there is education, government, research, etc. Could you argue that the wheel allows an individual to be lazy? Definitely. Is it correct to argue that a wheel is a crutch and makes every individual that uses it lazy? Definitely not.

That question of "does this allow for more work per unit of time" is honestly a pretty interesting way to stratefy whether an innovation is actually innovative imo. For example, the first iPhone? Sure, you can email and video chat on the go and conceivably do more work over time. But the 14th compared to the 13th? No, all that effort spent didn't really unlock more work per unit of time. If anything you are doing the same work, at the cost of more resources because the hardware is more overpowered, the screen has more pixels, and the bulk of the resource load on the hardware is from rendering stuff like sexy window dressing instead of the actual functional process, like checking your email.

Pretty interesting parallels to biology too, like in some birds there's the race towards sexually selecting ever fancier tail feathers that might cause more female birds to ooh and aah perhaps, but hurt your chances of flying away from a hawk, and lead to an overall reduction in fitness in the species as the hawks start finding more success and expanding their population size at the expense of yours.

Surely the same happens with cashless payments? A teller in a store can process way more transactions via contactless than with cash in the same amount of time.

I agree that contact-less transactions are able to be performed faster. In the situation of a grocery-store checkout there are other factors at play. Have you paid and everything is still being bagged up? Is there anyone waiting on you? Probably others I'm not considering here.

Essentially I think this gets into a estimation of magnitude problem (outside of ethical, security, and other concerns). Where if the payment isn't ever the action being waited on, a contact-less payment while convenient doesn't save you any time to get out of the store. If you have just a snack and no lines then the payment will be the action causing the bottleneck.

> “laziness” is a reductive view of the upsides.

They're obviously not clear enough to elaborate upon, although there's room for a discussion about wheels. A cashless society saves almost no effort.

The reason I support government fiat crypto is because banks get a free ride, holding customer deposits and playing with them, but giving nothing in return. But I also think that if you have a physical store that sells to the general public, you should be required to accept cash. Government crypto is still an account (or any number of accounts.) The physical token is cash.

Even though I would not like to ditch freedom with a cashless system, I would not like a cash only system either, and it is not about being lazy.

An advantage of a system where cards or checks are widely used is that it decreases significantly the risk of getting robbed.

In some country with cash only, the citizens would travel by bus with big amounts of cash while bringing back money to their family. Sometimes the bus was stopped by armed robbers. Everybody would have to give their money, or to take the risk to hide it, or to take the risk to fight back. When a minimal system of money transfer was introduced in the country, those kind of robbery disappeared: there was no point anymore for the robbers to stop busses since the citizens didn't have huge amounts of cash on them anymore.

The fact that getting mugged is so uncommon these days shows how naive this comment is to the second and third order effects of a cashless society.

I think cash should always be an option, but I don’t pretend that cards haven’t dramatically improved our lives.

Brazil is almost cashless today.

first month with central bank digital currency, instant kidnaps were thru the roof.

the "solution" lower limits of how much you can transfer. what a joke.

now only 100usd per day can leave your pocket. wish i was kidding. even lower at night when traveling i have to wake up at 3am to make payments thanks to timezones.

people can raise limits, but if you pay for something expensive once you're probably marked forever as having lots of money in your pocket. with cash, that would be a one time opportunity to be robbed. with cashless, you signaled that forever you're a good target.

there's zero benefits for safety.

you fell for the oldest trick in the book.

Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by the state. I've been actively against bitcoin and monero exactly because they facilitate kidnapping and other forms of effectively irreversible digital theft.

The best part about living in a society with institutions based on trust instead of non-trust, is that it's trivially easy to eject bad actors from the system.

Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a dead drop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_drop

"But the police can watch the dead drop."

True.

"No police or the victim dies."

Also true.

Bitcoin does make kidnapping a bit easier though. It is true.

It also makes hyperinflation by the state impossible. Hyperinflation does a lot more damage than kidnapping.

> Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a dead drop.

Where the perpetrator needs to:

1. Be in the general area.

2. Only ask for enough currency that's easy to physically move (an actual real limitation in many countries)

3. Be sure the bills aren't marked (practically impossible). Because of this:

3(1). Be sure to not deposit the currency, ever.

3(2). Be sure not to use the currency with anyone who knows you who will every deposit the currency ever.

3(3). Allow the victim only enough time to procure a large amount of currency (likely days), but not enough time to procure a large amount of marked currency (this is an inherent conflict).

Obviously kidnapping is possibly via use of physical currency, but the practical limitations of cash over anonymous digital currency with regards to kidnapping are massive.

Your concerns with hyperinflation are alleviated by investing in any commodity, and trading on a black market. The fact that the commodity is a blockchain asset is effectively moot. The days of states not forcing individuals to be up front with capital gains on blockchain assets are over.

"Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a dead drop."

maybe you missed the bit about gold.

I wouldn’t have much idea how to purchase that much physical gold in a short time, and if I did, I’d surely get a call from my bank.

I'm sure the kidnapper could help you with that.

Curent ransomware helpfully tells you where to buy bitcoin.

Btw as a bitcoin maxi, this doesn't make me happy.

> Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by the state

instant, cashless, transactions are not reversible, and can be withdrawal instantly on the other end. sum that with the usual practice of employing disposables young criminals to quickly withdrawal the funds and you have even less risk than btc or cash based crime.

sheltered engineers in silicon valley or theoretical economist in boston... will never get how easy it is for criminals to sidestep rules.

This might have something to do with an increase in surveillance and criminal record keeping.

It might, sure, but it might also have to do with the fact that people carry almost nothing in cash compared to 40+ years ago.

In 1985, when I was a child, my father would care around $300 on him effectively at all times. Credit cards were still new, and checks were a limited option, most places you still needed cash. That's the equivalent of $850 today. I rarely carry more than $200 on my person today (less than the cost of a fancy dinner for two in San Francisco). The only reason I'm able to do that is because the vast majority of my transactions settle on a bank card.

You can argue that the change is surveillance, but the stark decrease in untraceable value I carry on my person is clearly an incentive for robbery that has been lost. It's also likely a major reason for the near-elimination of pick-pocketing in western society.

It's easy to use a stolen credit card, nobody asks for ID. Mugging isn't that uncommon, I interrupted a robbery just over a week ago.

Again, since the system is based on trust, the vast majority of stolen credit cards results in no serious loss of value to the individual.

I was responding to your argument that there are no economic incentives to mug people. The mugger isn't out to impose a cost on the victim, but to get some free money. Purchasing power on a credit card is just as good, although it's not as flexible/reliable as a wad of cash.

I agree. It was more convenient to rob cash which is fungible.

But I actually wonder if the rewards are higher today, with everyone carrying >$1000 phones.

The street resale value of a stolen $1000 phone is far less than the value of $1000 in stolen cash.

iPhones are hardware locked now they can only be sold for parts.

Or scams on eBay

Everyone you see on the street has a slab of metal in their pocket that you can take apart and sell for parts online, or sell as a bricked device to some sucker. This cashless society is dealing with a robbery problem in places like Beverly Hills, because for some segments of our society its common to wear $30,000 on your wrist. A couple hundred cash perhaps in a wallet is honestly the low end of the potential take for a mugger these days, if they know where to mug.

It's dishonest to portray it as if it is only about being "lazy".

If all digital payment did was that I didn't have to present the correct amount of bills from my wallet, you might have had a point. But that's like almost on the bottom of the list of benefits being cashless provides.

> You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to count out cash. That's the major benefit.

It's not just the counting out part that's inconvenient, and it's not just cash. There's also receiving some arbitrary amount of cash and coins that you then have to dump into your pocket/wallet/purse and deal with until your next shopping trip. Coins dangling in your pocket and having to fish them out every time while making sure you don't lose them beforehand is not exactly fun.

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