High-altitude heist – 500 dollars stolen | Hacker News Reader

High-altitude heist – 500 dollars stolen

bbc.com

42 pointsdosinga16 comments

In a way this story is uplifting - that $500 stolen from a donation box on a climbing route is so surprising and infrequent for it to make international news. It’s something I’ve always loved about the outdoors/adventure communities: in general you can trust folks more than normal to not steal from your tent, ignore calls for help, or screw your over so they can have a better time.

The ending of the article is weirdly anti-cash

Ironically, the problem in this case is that cash requires too much trust; trust that local deposits won't be raided by thieves.

A more "trustless" approach could involve the collection box being replaced by a link or QR code or a bunch of detachable paper slips with said link. Link leads to online donation portal. Of course, someone could try to tamper with those links.

And cards and QR codes require too much infrastructure out of your control. Once someone flips the switch, everyone's basicaly cashless.

What switch?

The electricity switch.

Implying a national payments system wouldn't be distributed across multiple AZs...?

So what do yo do when the AZ you are in is down? You use cash. Remember what happened in Hawaii this summer? Don't take anything for granted. It mostly works but what do you do when it doesn't?

When your closest AZ is down, it failovers to the next closest AZ. That's what AZs are for, there is no single "electricity switch" that could get hit by a tornado.

Switzerland already have QR code based payment (twint, can debit directly from your credit card). Bunch of self service farm products simply have the qr code.

It's also common to have qr-code or cash only payment available in mountain restaurants.

(or even in other venues, was surprised to have a large festival in Zurich which was mostly qr-code or cash).

Switzerland has a national payment network called Twint, created by the Post, that’s based on QR codes. I think the bigger challenge is getting cell coverage to all of these remote peaks.

but you don't actually need cell service on the hill, do you? there's no payment enforcement anyways, so you can just record the bill and submit the payment once you have service.

Once you are at the peak you often have cell signal :)

> Millions of francs have been stolen in the last three years alone, causing the Swiss Federal Police to warn that ...

More than much money in cryptocurrency is stolen every day.

> far better protected ATM machines.

Unless the ATM machine (sic) in question is 2350m up in a technical climb, I’d say that’s up for debate!

Carried all the tools to break open the box... like a rock? That doesn't look like the work of any tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com