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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

We need better “cash” today. Perhaps bring the $50 back.

It’s easy to go through several hundred dollars a week. But since the $100 is barely legal tender, if you want to carry that much money, it’s a stack of $20s.

And, it’s a big stack, it’s uncomfortable to carry, and ungainly to use. Maybe if I was a mobster, used to a roll and a rubber band, it would be different. But I’m not, and whipping it out to thumb through it, just not comfortable with.

So the other alternative is constantly hitting up ATMs to reload. Or, I guess, take home a large stack on the weekend and withdraw from that throughout the week.

Before this was less of a problem. Couple 20s and you were set.

Nowadays, it’s kind of a pain in the neck.

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$100 today is worth less than $10 fifty years ago, and accelerating in that direction. We need to go the _other_ way, we should print $500 and $1000 notes. And while we’re at, stop minting cents, nickels, & dimes.

I was lamenting yesterday how coins should all just go away. Round up or down.

Won't somebody think of the gumballs :(

Pennies and nickels and even quarters might be useless.

But coins for $1, $2 and $5 is likely more convenient. In particular, coins last like 20+ years in practice while paper degrades in 1/10th the time

Interesting how a lot of countries have these coins if I'm not mistaken (e.g. Canada with the toonie) but they're not relevant at all in US currency.

I still like $2 bills though

The US has a $1 coin, but stores never give it back in change, using $1 bills instead. Some vending machines do give it back in change.

Indeed, I'm a fan of the USD Kennedy half dollar but haven't seen one in years

I used to keep a stock of $2 bills around specifically to pay bus fare - with the bill and a couple quarters in hand, I could step onto the bus, pay, and move back to a seat with barely a pause. This sometimes confused the drivers.

I love coins ... Specially the 1$ ones... Apparently that's what they give you for change at Atlanta train stations

hmmm, that seemed very high and a quick check on usinflationcalculator.com shows 100$ are more like 15$ from 1973. still impressive, though.

My $10 estimation is generous considering the number and creativity level of changes applied to CPI calculation over the past few decades.

I hope your use of "creativity" was not to imply the fiddling of the numbers.

It is very hard to figure out how to adjust the CPI over time; some things in the basket decline in volume (more efficient cars need less fuel per mile driven, but then again have people also changed their driving patterns or not?) and of course products switch in and out (who buys ring binders any more but of course a smart phone is a pretty necessary purchase yet didn't even exist 20 years ago).

Also you want to record the influence of high frequency signals (volatile commodities) yet damp it so it doesn't cause noise (fluctuations) in the signal.

Any then there are wholesale service changes (people eat out a lot more; when I was a kid I hardly knew anyone who could afford to eat in a restaurant more than once or twice a year).

There's a similar problem with GDP but GDP is so stupid that I don't care about that. It was "designed" (actually just spontaneously thought up by Kusnets) as an interim way to get some idea of what the hell was going on in the economy using just pencil and paper until somehting "real" could be developed.

And on top of that, CPI is not just some politicians deciding what they want. It is long term employees at the Fed and they take their work very seriously. They choose thousands of specific products from randomly selected retailers and they literally call on a regular basis to check the price changes over time. They keep these specifics top secret to reduce the chance of meddling. The kind of people that do this are the real "deep state" and they are the kind of people that actually keep our government working.

Ironically, you are making the argument for a cashless society.

If I use my credit card everywhere, I can't be robbed. If someone rips me off, I have a giant bank that will get my money back. I never have to hit up an ATM for anything; I never have to deal with coins and change. I don't even need to have my physical wallet on me to make a transaction. I don’t need to talk to the cashier or wait in line to order and pay for lunch or coffee. Since you mentioned mobsters, if I pay for my lunch with a card, I know that the business owner can’t as easily evade taxes, stealing from coffers that fund the government services I rely upon.

What exactly would compel me to want to use cash for anything? What about my life would improve?

I would just like to see better data privacy protections surrounding cashless payments, disallowing my card issuer and merchants from abusing and selling information about my transaction history. I would also like to see a low limit placed on transaction fees.

Technically, those are really small problems to fix, if we can get some political will around it. Many other non-US countries have probably already fixed those problems.

> What exactly would compel me to want to use cash for anything? What about my life would improve?

You can buy things without a third party bank skimming a bit from your purchases.

You can buy things even when Chase and Visa outages occur.

You can give cash to people without credit cards.

Children can manage money without their parents knowing or being able to monitor their spending.

Same with people in abusive relationships; the abused party can hide cash under their bed (or somewhere else) more easily than they can hide their bank account from their abusive partner.

You can buy things from the black market without being traced. For example, you can set up a lemonade stand without a permit with cash (this is illegal in many US states). You might argue "oh, but that should just be legal; that's not a problem with going cashless inherently." But there will always be stupid laws and regulations like this, and cash is a good way to shield yourself from them.

> If I use my credit card everywhere, I can't be robbed.

Except for your card, your PIN, and your $1000 phone. Mugging is still a thing these days. You can also get skimmed, or otherwise defrauded using payment cards.

People still get robbed all the time (not the least of which by the payment processors).

The $50 is here. I've seen plenty of ATMs that have a choice of bills, including $50's. And even for my small bank that doesn't, it's not terribly hard to occasionally grab several thousand in $50's from a teller and cache them at home. On the spending side, I've yet to have someone balk about them the way they might about a $100.

I carry stacks of $100s with me everywhere, and rarely have bills smaller. Then again, this half of the year I live in Las Vegas, which is perhaps the only place remaining in the USA that that's not weird.

Could you explain your comment about the $100 note?

A quick peek at the Fed suggests there are more $100 bills in circulation than $1s: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircv...

People don't like accepting them because 1. It feels like a huge denomination, and with that comes fear of mishandling and counterfeits, and 2. You have to then make change... and you only have so much of that

And then on the customer's side, you're just back to carrying a bunch of 20's and 10's

Places don’t like to accept them.

- buy a pack of gum with a counterfeit $100, get 98 real dollars back

- even with legit currency, it can throw off the drawer. Business might have a policy for cashiers to never have more than, say, $200 in the drawer. Force half of that to be your $100, and now the cashier has crippled change-making ability. Business have this policy to make them less tempting to rob and limit the damage if they are.

> Business might have a policy for cashiers to never have more than, say, $200 in the drawer.

It’s easy for a cart of groceries to come out to $200 these days; how do these businesses accept cash in the first place?

Grocery stores used to be the king of cash.

It was not uncommon for someone to show up with their paycheck to do their weekly shopping, handing it over to the cashier and taking the rest in change. The amount of cash that worked through a busy grocery store must have been pretty amazing.

Put the overage in the safe.

I’m sure the exact policy adopted, if any, depends on a number of factors such as how often cash is used and typical purchase size.

Grocery stores still accept $100s. It is the places where the average purchase is much smaller (or robberies are more common), like coffee shops or convenience stores. Gas stations might accept the bill but only if the change needed is under $20. And then they drop the bill in the safe, rather than put it in the till.

I have walked out of a few places when they said they either do not accept $100 bills or cash at all. This is how we pressure businesses and fight back in the war on cash. But if you are just buying a pack of gum, you should be considerate of transaction costs for them.

circulating bills don’t have to be in your wallet. 100 dollar bills are primarily used as stores of cash abroad and for illicit wealth. which is why despite the fact you raised people will be skeptical when you try to pay with one.

Most tills don't have change for a $100, and the clerk isn't allowed to accept it even if (latter in the shift) there was, so while you can pay with one a manager needs to be called to do the transaction. Every time I've paid with a $100 they need to scramble to find enough change, i've even been turned away because they don't have enough cash on hand to give me change.

I'm surprise when places will even accept them. Was at harbor freight a day ago and the total for my two items came to $98 and I mentioned to the clerk "Wish I could just give you a Benjamin right now", he said, "You can we accept them", "Would if I had one!"

Then paid with card. That was the first time for me a dollar total made sense to pay with a $100

Nearly all the fast food in my area won't accept anything larger than a $20. My ATM defaults to $50 bills but I always switch it to $20 because it's so hard to use $50s.

Where do you have trouble with hundreds? I could imagine somewhere like Kansas but in any normal city that shouldn't be a problem. To be fair my niece thought it was odd that I had a few hundred in my wallet but at my age I prefer to have plenty of cash.

Oddly now that I live in Germany instead of the US, cash is more common since systems are down more often and it's not considered all that weird.

> cash is more common since systems are down more often

I wasn't aware of payment systems being down often in Germany, but in any case that would only be a minor contributing factor. Germany's dependence on cash is mostly due to deeper cultural reasons.

Uncomfortable to carry a little stack of paper? Maybe find a better way

I too have this problem, but I’ve come up with a solution. I pay a guy to handle transfers of my money for me. I give it to him, and he puts it in a vault, and then I tell him when I want him to give it to someone else. I’m sure he keeps it safe for me.

He keeps it safe up to a certain amount

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