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>When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines.

Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime". Your buying something is not logged anywhere, for example.

> Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime".

Exactly. Almost all cash transactions remain anonymous because there's no criminal investigation involved.

Most people are honest and just going about their business with friends and family.

That's how it should be.

A cost bar for tracing is a desirable feature for non-authoritarian societies.

Digital currency mediated by bank apps, active cards, smartphones or whatever, makes for "convenience" but also zero cost to spy on people who are not criminals. And that's a problem.

So maybe it is here. Or there. I'm not sure where you're standing :)

>Exactly. Almost all cash transactions remain anonymous because there's no criminal investigation involved.

It's disingenuous to even suggest that the traceability of cash transaction is even remotely close to that of credit cards and e-payments, and that what keeps them anonymous is that "there's no criminal investigation involved".

It's the exact opposite: cash transaction are anonymity friendly by nature, and only when there's a great need, and with quite an effort, like in a criminal investigation, are they attempted to be traced, and even there it's more difficult exacty because of the nature of cash making it more difficult.

That's exactly what I am saying. You are repeating my own argument back to me and labelling it "disingenuous". You've misunderstood something, somewhere. Do please read again with care.

You fell for a simple fallecy. The line isn't that cash is used in a major crime. It's that someone in power wants someone in prison.

1. You might not be involved in a major crime but you might be a suspect. Lots of innocent suspects get convicted.

2. You might be a whistleblower. Lots of whistleblowers get framed.

Etc.

"If I've done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide" didn't work out well for Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

A lot of the reason many of us want privacy preserved is to prevent a similar path here. Totalitarian governments don't always pop up overnight on a revolution; they often creep up on you.

The creeping process is also often:

1. We'll track X with major checks on privacy; it will only be used for terrorism and child abuse investigations and held in a secure vault

2. We're just doing a better job of sharing / using data we already collect

Neither off those is objectionable, but together, you end up in a distopia.

What are you responding to?

Cash is anonymous, by and large. That’s a fact, not a fallacy. I’ve never in my life seen any shops track serial numbers of cash transactions, nor associate them with me. I’m skeptical that anyone does it, but I welcome any evidence of this dubious claim that you’d like to provide. Having your face capture by a camera does not track the bills you used, nor the items you purchased. You’re spinning a mostly false tale.

E-money on the other hand tracks everything you buy, what you buy, when you buy, what you paid, where you bought it, and that information is used to construct a valuable profile of your purchasing habits. That profile is used for advertising. But it could also be used to deny insurance claims. Should be illegal, but I knew someone who worked for a credit card company that informed me they were thinking about how to do this legally.

E-money is tracked on everyone for everything by default, and cash does non of this. It’s insanely expensive for the police to try to trace cash, and they can only do it for one criminal at a time. They do not, and cannot, track everyone’s cash.

Spending profiles captured via e-money tracking are captured by private corporations and they are offered for sale. Any criminal cash tracking by police is used solely for capturing criminal and is otherwise not available to anyone else.

> Modern cash is high technology

Again, who’s even arguing? This is a straw man, the context is digital money. There was no debate about how much technology is used for printing bills.

> Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay

So you say? I’m not going to argue or pretend to make predictions, but one thing we know for absolute sure is that there is a downward trend of cash transactions globally.

You're making an argument which is a variant of "if I'm not doing anything wrong, then I have nothing to hide." Privacy is a worthwhile value in and of itself, not least of which because different people have different notions of what "wrong" is and their conception of "wrong" changes over the course of their life.

An example list of completely legal transactions which you might not want someone in your life knowing about:

  a) You don't want your spouse to know that you bought some beers / fast food / pornographic magazines / cigarettes / other vice
  b) You don't want your employer to know that you saw a therapist / oncologist / family planning services
  c) You don't want your parents to know that you bought contraception
  d) You don't want your car insurance provider to know that you purchased a repair from a mechanic (i.e. you don't want your rates increased).

Making payments in cash is making a decision for them not to be entered in some database which may be hacked and sold for profit to someone who values their interests more than your privacy.

With respect, you're reading too much intent into my words. I am vehemently pro-privacy. In fact I seriously consider over-intrusive authoritarianism to be a mental health disorder and have read somewhat into the works of Adorno etc [0,1] (cue a dozen responses bemoaning how everything done at Berkeley in the 1960s is now-debunked leftist rubbish)

Part of that is helping people to have a realistic but not paranoid view of technological society. My work also means I help people who have serious crimes or security issues to solve, and have legitimate investigatory needs.

I think privacy violations are not rooted in economic greed, but in unboundaried, controlling impulses that get encoded into technology.

Hope I am responding respectfully and appropriately, sorry if I got you wrong. BTW, in a safe way (ie not online) take one of those "authoritarian personality tests". It will shock you how much we have hidden in ourselves just ready to be provoked by demagogues or disinformation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rethinking-mental-he...

What the police and other authorities 'can do' is a world away from what they 'actually do', in 99% of cases.

You could be unlucky if your crime passes a certain threshold or affects someone with power but, most of the time, it will not be investigated with the resources of the state.

Exactly the feature desirable to everyone in society. Including the police.

I had a funny conversation with some LE types the other day (in the context of something we call "fly-tipping") about how, in theory, everyone who litters could be brought to book because they leave their fingerprints all over stuff.

Nobody in forensics is ever going to do that unless it's a very serious case. Nobody wants to be compelled to investigate some bs crime just because its possible. Make things too convenient and you've got China.

> Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked

Is this true? When I buy something from my local gas station is there a system in place tracking every serial number exchanged on the cash?

Not in the US. There are no laws requiring businesses to do so. Why would employers spend the resources required for such a thing?

Some scenarios I hope you see as obvious:

- you take out cash from an ATM. The machine is loaded with sequential or logged order of SN that can be matched to withdrawals and times.

- you take that cash immediately to a vending machine or supermarket auto-checkout that takes notes. The machine scans all notes it ingests and can match them to timings and purchase details.

- Even a small shop might have a camera at the till, along with a UV light frequency used to check for forgeries.

Obviously as the time between withdrawal and re-appearing in a system grows the strength of the association gets lower, as notes change hands. But in a serious crime investigation that doesn't matter, it's a good-enough capability to warrant chasing.

I haven't commented on the ATMs, I was only replying to the question, not the statement that preceded it.

I have owned a retail shop. There are plenty of rules and regulations to worry about, and labor is a massive expense. At no point would I have been inclined to purchase equipment or pay for labor to track serial numbers on bills without a specific mandate to do so. No such mandate exists.

You are describing the possible collection of circumstantial evidence, not systemic surveillance inherent to cash. Completely different thing than the transaction logs of electronic money transfers.

There is a reason why governments don't want large cash transactions. It enables illegal sales, tax evasion and money laundering. Dude/ette, if you think the police can track a single 20€ bill that precisely, they wouldn't have a problem seeing through 500k€ cash deals when drug money goes legit through real estate. Basically every restaurant and cafe on earth uses cash to do creative accounting.

However, of course, there are particular crimes where money tracking does matter. If you rob a bank or break into an ATM your cash prize comes with strings attached, as those known bills will get flagged. I think the most important implication would be these bills becoming actual evidence instead of an happenstance mysterious cash finding. If a bank scan finds them in circulation again, they may be able to narrow down your location, do statistics with mobile network data and so on, but it's not like every note is tracked by default at every endpoint.

Crime runs on cash. How often have you read about anyone getting caught on cash serials??

Why on earth would any commercial store invest in cash tracking? They only got one point of the cash flow, are you implying they are all connected in some grand conspiracy?? Such stores got an abundance of way more accessible and relevant customer data they could (super illegally) collect, like biometrics, RF device IDs, loyalty programs, ... I also never seen a self checkout store which accepted cash at all.

You are telling a fatalist narrative which only helps the abandonment of cash, especially for small, daily transactions, which matter most for privacy.

Crypto won't happen. Lol.

Sorry I missed this reply and hope you still see mine.

> You are telling a fatalist narrative which only helps the abandonment of cash, especially for small, daily transactions, which matter most for privacy.

I hope that's not true and this is the only point I dispute.

Yes cash can be tracked, down to a single note, but it's extremely hard and expensive, as most of us here with a little more knowledge understand. No big conspiracies, just a sobering appraisal of the state of the art. What that knowledge does is debunk the political lie that digital cash is the only way to fight crime and money laundering etc.

Now, we were going to do a Cybershow episode on drug dealers who accept Google and Apple pay, but shelved it because frankly I'm out of my depth journalistically and can't protect sources or navigate the risks of side effects. But it happens, and those companies collude (because it must be bloody obvious from the data).

Meanwhile I think the front line is dispelling the "convenience myth". Convenience is such a dirty and dishonest word that most-times stands in for "something that makes me feel good". In reality I can pay cash for a round of drinks and tip the barmaid before my mates have got their phones out their pockets.

> - you take that cash immediately to a vending machine or supermarket auto-checkout that takes notes. The machine scans all notes it ingests and can match them to timings and purchase details.

I can tell you they don't do that, at least for the systems I know in Europe. And for manual systems obviously the cashier doesn't record serials and match them to transactions.

I'd love to hear more about what you know about the systems you've examined or designed. PM me at cybershow.uk and we might do an episode and bring in some other engineers too.

Specifically can you prove (or give compelling anecdotes why) the linear CCD array used to determine the legitimacy of the note cannot, on internet connected machines, retain and store that scan? I know that's a tall order, because I'm asking a negative.

I haven't designed such a system and as you say I can't really prove anything, but the embedded software I worked on just didn't record anything like that. Of course one can always imagine a secret government firmware or whatever, it's just highly unlikely IMO.

The most obvious proof I'd say is that there is no law mandating this, so nobody is going to bother doing it just for fun.

How about money counting machines? Medium and bigger shops probably have those and if not they probably at least every few days bring cash to bank to deposit on their account.

Remember supposedly most printers were printing some semi invisible serial codes - for tracking whistleblowers and leaks.

Probably cannot easily prove that ATM or money counter machines manufactures are not doing something similar.

Money counting machines do it by weight. They're certainly not scanning and recording the serial numbers.

Because it's basically no resources. If they're not doing it now, they'll be doing it in a few years, and if not banned, selling the data.

It's literally adding a 50 cent camera to a cash register.

where do you set up the camera to track the serial numbers and the person's identity that they're being given to?

why would the person I'm responding to say such a thing?

You mix things up. Most of the tech you describe is about making sure that bank note is not fake. The tracking part is ad-hoc and shoddy, works only in dense urban settings, closed systems like banking or a big supermarket. Cash usage itself is anonymous.

>>When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines.

Go to bank, take out 100's, to small mom and pop get change... problem solved.

Further it is highly unlikely that if some bill I got out of ATM finds it way to a crime scene or something that they will be proof of anything a defense lawyer would shoot that down in about 2 secs

>> It's well past the point of being worth forging

Not really.

>>future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash

and those should be opposed as well

>how much the police can do to trace cash

It doable but not at all trivial.

>It's well past the point of being worth forging

The news seem to indicate plenty of forgers still, e.g.:

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/poss...

>it is likely that future banknotes will use einks

einks are too expensive right now?

> einks are too expensive right now?

Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost "intelligent cash".

For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored, decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.

It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable portable artifacts to transfer value.

>track their falling cost

I do recall that patents/trademarks/tech are owned by E-Ink inc., and one of the biggest reason for the cost is them gouging the market? That mechanism can keep high prices for a long time.

> I do recall that patents/trademarks/tech are owned by E-Ink inc., and one of the biggest reason for the cost is them gouging the market? That mechanism can keep high prices for a long time.

recall? gouging? You mean you have data showing is not just simple volume issues?

> Smart people at the top...

Who exactly? Where are these people in power defending physical cash or recommending an alternative monetary medium resilient to grid failure?

You know that's the best question anyone has asked me on HN.

I simply said "smart people at the top". I didn't say there were any.

> anonymous ... you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash

That is not the point. The point is in the contract - e.g., that you are not accepting to untick a "do not track" flag. That circumvention is always possible is not what matters there.

Cash is very easily tumbled or made anonymous. It’s as simple as going to a casino, buying a large number of chips and then cashing those chips out again.

The only fallacy here is that you expect anonymity to be 100% provided by cash.

> Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked

lmfao what. Unless someone is committing large scale crimes involving bands, no one is tracking some small bills between private citizens, some stores, more citizens, et al.

For the vast majority of people, cash is anonymous. No advertising company or government is obtaining tracking data on your purchase of an apple and a cup of coffee with cash.