Hacker News Reader

Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

If both parties are offline, exchanging cash trivially solves this problem.

:-) that assumes cash is trivial. It is not for so many reasons. Cash is bulky and discrete. Cash is visible and easily snatched/coerced from you.

Apart from classical robbery held at knifepoint or gunpoint and taken to an atm and being robbed or being blackmailed to actually do instant money transfer online which do happen, there are other lower threshold but more frequently occurring and more painful cash "thefts".

One eye-opening story I learnt a while ago was this: the women daily wage workers (or the household help that comes to my home) who are typically the breadwinners for the family are coerced by their drunk husbands to give their hard earned cash which they will waste on more alcohol or gambling. This was the situation for decades. Now, with zero-balance, zero-cost bank accounts being made available at scale in India, these women can now keep their money safe and provide care for their children by refusing to give money to their husbands (usually it involves telling them they don't have the money to give when in fact they do in their banks). Such is the social reality for so many.

That doesn’t sound a lot different than “hiding” the cash. If she is working, the husband knows she is getting money.

I do not think the loss of privacy is worth the convenience when talking about replacing cash in a society.

I fully agree, but in fact stored-value cards offer a plausible path forward for private electronic money:

Most existing stored-value systems use "shadow accounts" for reconciliation (in case one of the card-level private keys gets compromised and makes it possible to "double-spend" electronic cash), but that's not really a required part of the system. If it's secure enough, it's possible to just leave these out!

It's probably also possible to create some kind of hybrid system which does create pseudonymous traceable logs which offer some trade-off between privacy and security, similar to how banknotes have serial numbers which can theoretically be traced, but practically mostly aren't.

And the enormous advantage of a privacy-preserving e-cash/stored-value system over cash is that it works on the internet too.

I don't quite get the example, like the other user said in this case the husband would clearly understand his wife is still working, so of course he won't believe it? So if he has a alcohol and gambling problem then he will still try some method?

cash also has a fantastic advantage that no piece of technology will ever have - its ability to level the playing field in terms of access. No government can invalidate your cash without simultaneously invalidating all cash. This is not the case with any digital system.

See here for one example where the indian state denied citizens access to their money by freezing their UPI accounts after unproven allegations. https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/bank-acs-can-be-frozen...

The story and the connection to bank accounts don't sound logical at all. It's not like the husbands wouldn't know that the money is there somewhere. If a random person can do to another person a "classical robbery held at knifepoint or gunpoint and taken to an atm and being robbed or being blackmailed to actually do instant money transfer online", why wouldn't husbands catch on to this? The women could, in theory, have more than one bank account and hide how much they earn and save by keeping a lower balance in the account known to the husband. But the same could also be done with physical cash by handing a chunk of it to a trusted person (for expenses and savings) and keeping a smaller amount at home to be snatched.

With one or more bank accounts, the woman must now keep her phone safe and inaccessible from the husband too. Or she must be very quick and diligent in deleting all the SMSes sent by banks for all kinds of transactions. This adds more hassles than saving cash with someone else.

In all the cases of alcoholism and men snatching money from the women/household without any other care, it's violence that keeps that relationship and "contract" alive. That violence isn't going to disappear just because physical cash is replaced by a bank account.

In summary, I don't buy the conclusion you've quickly jumped to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com