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Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

Card payments are done through a middleman (Visa, MasterCard) and therefore require a surcharge that's going to a private company. They charge much more than it actually costs them, even including chargebacks etc, which is how they're able to offer things like credit card rewards. In my opinion it was justifiable back when it was new and not heavily used, but now that the economy revolves around it it's just parasitism, and governments should either cap their fees like the EU does, or, if they want a cashless society, provide their own EFTPOS system that doesn't charge fees to do business.

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So?

Taking cash costs money as well: more security, more auditing, more cash transport, higher insurance costs, etc

Even better, because of forced cash now every business incurs those costs even if the overwhelming majority of their transactions aren’t in cash.

The solution to “discrimination against homeless” is not forcing people to take cash, it’s forcing banks to allow homeless people to open bank accounts.

Forcing banks to allow homeless people to open bank accounts only "works" if someone is going to compensate the banks for all the costs associated with those clients.

Banks only "work" because they can earn interest on deposits. Homeless people will likely not have enough deposits to make it worth serving them, and they will likely also cost more in support and fraud.

If you compensate them too little, banks will do their best to wriggle out of it or make it inconvenient. If you compensate them too much, they will become predatory in opening homeless accounts. In any case, the incentive structure is all wrong once you try to force the free market in the wrong direction. And who's going to be paying? I hope it's not me.

There is no way this would end well.

A homeless person is not a client, it´s a human being trapped in a desperate situation that us (lucky people) cannot understand. Cashless society represents a trap for many people that are simply out of the rat race.

So instead we force every business to handle security and insurance related to accepting cash, and we force homeless people to hoard cash and present an enticing target for robbery. Certainly that sounds like a much better solution.

Adding a few rows to a database is not expensive. Hell, even saying you can't charge fees to people with less than $X means not making a profit, not taking a giant loss.

The biggest way to stop "fraud" losses as a bank is to stop automatically allowing overdrafts - this is something that banks only do because their "convenience service" of allowing OD automatically is purely a profit making tool and has nothing to do with convenience is that overwhelming majority of cases. Because those tiny overdraft balances incur massive fees and interest that further cost the victims.

Businesses understand their clientele. Some businesses cater to clientele on the lower end of the economic spectrum while other businesses are on the opposite end. Businesses that fall into the former category would likely continue to accept cash payments while come businesses that fall in the latter category may elect to go cashless in a free market.

A business can always choose to only accept debit to limit their card transaction costs to near zero.

Debit isn't always cheaper.

https://dharmamerchantservices.com/faq/visa-consumer-interch...

Scroll down and check out the debit rates. 22 cents a transaction for credit union debit cards isn't cheap.

Maestro is 0.3-0.4% in Europe, which isn't bad.

Agree that it’s still killer for small transactions. Which is why the US federal government should have long ago offered electronic money transfer as a utility where merchant fees were low even for smaller dollar amount purchases.

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