Hacker News Reader

Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying.

Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade.

Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it.

That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems become centralised either through standards or legislation. It will be easy to track someones habits or location globally.

View on HN

The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse.

Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (and I mean PURELY) someone somewhere will know when and how you're spending your money.

If you want to deal with privacy concerns then it needs to be codified in law. And that involves dealing with the entire chain, not just point of sale and not just thinking cash will save you.

There are things that are justified to exist whose sole purpose is keeping things in-check. If any of your aforementioned tools gets abused by the authorities we can still fall back to using cash. If you take away the fallback alternative, then abuse is much more difficult to keep in check. This is called Game Theory.

There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far more expensive for the government, and the protesters have more options to fight back—run, hide the cash, etc. Not to mention it will probably drum up sympathy for the oppressed.

And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.

Let's be real here: You, I, and most of the people in this thread talking about privacy concerns when it comes to cash and what not are playing pretend. I say this because the odds are we have a significant amount of our money invested in some form of digital investment. Whether it's stocks, certificates, money sitting in a bank account. The nature of cash means it scales up poorly; and the nature of holding cash means you are literally losing money year over year thanks to inflation. The system is built to encourage this.

If the government wanted to freeze your accounts and take most of your net worth, they can. And while cash transactions can be secure, in our day to day life where our transactions are done cash is not meaningfully adding anything to our privacy. To actually achieve any sort of privacy with cash involves operating purely with cash: That means no bank accounts, no investments, you are paid directly by your workplace with cash etc.

That's why again, cash will not protect you. It will not protect most of the people here acting like it will.

It sounds like you're still upset about the truckers protest in Ottawa in February 2022.

What kind of dystopian dictatorship are we talking about really?

But well, no, there isn't much of a difference.

just like security it's a spectrum and not a 0 or 1. I could live on cash right now if I wanted to, so it isn't 90%. If the government stops issue it and issues debit cards only or allows banks to do it then that becomes impossible. The government could always come to your house and disappear you or trump up some charges and throw you in prison indefinitely, even in the USA, so that's not really an argument

Reply on news.ycombinator.com