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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

10% is way higher than I thought. Probably <0.1% of my transactions are in cash.

Cash is cumbersome and annoying. I wish there was a digital anonymous replacement.

Nearly all of my cash use, by dollar count, is paying service folks (home repair stuff, cleaners) who prefer payment in cash to evade taxes. I very rarely use cash for any other reason, and it’s always tiny amounts when I do.

> paying service folks (home repair stuff, cleaners) who prefer payment in cash to evade taxes.

And good on them!

Yeah I mean I accommodate them when I can for a reason. The ones who want that don’t have real payroll or anything like that going on, so are never exactly rolling in dough.

I wonder who will win when the people wanting government protection for cash will collide with the desire to avoid tax evasion by restricting cash.

XMR is probably your best bet for privacy digital currency.

That said XMR isn't stable like the USD is, but it also didn't have infinite printability as once market cap is reached then only tail emmisions are rewarded for mining....iirc that a set value of 20.

XMR is the best for privacy, is resistant to asic mining and GPU mining, and is a time proven crypto. That said if your just using it so you can gain money from price fluctuations and not because of the fiction the coin provides then your never going to realise it's true value.

Just to be nit-picky, but Monero can be mined with GPUs.

I know, but it has adopted changes so it's more efficient to use a CPU to mine.

Not saying GPU mining is dead, but its at least resistant to it.

> I wish there was a digital anonymous replacement.

There are, for instance GNU Taler: <https://taler.net/>. But what you want is an implemented system of digital anonymous cash. And that’s a whole other kettle of fish, since basically everybody actually in a position to implement such a system is incentivized to do it in a way which minimizes privacy.

> Cash is cumbersome and annoying.

So is freedom. Tech that robs us of freedom offers ease of use or extra "free as in beer" services.

Freedom is usually the opposite of cumbersome and annoying. And current payment tech does not rob us of freedom.

I can wire money to virtually anyone in the EU at no cost. I can pay any merchant in the world with a credit card, in any currency, with minimal spread. It's both convenient and greatly expands my options for engaging in commerce.

Cashless system operated by regulated banks certainly comes with a risk of being used as a tool of repression (like it was in Canada during the truckers protests) but as of now it's freeing (as in speech).

You will find out how easily you can wire money to someone in the EU if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite.

The truckers in Canada for sure found out how "free" the digits of their bank accounts were.

Russian oligarchs for sure found it out in 2022.

Blocking terrorist financing is nothing new.

If you give the government the power to block financing to anyone they declare a terrorist then they'll just declare anyone who opposes them to be terrorists.

Empirical evidence suggests otherwise, at least in liberal democracies.

survirorship bias

Empirical evidence can suggest anything you want it to if you choose to ignore empirical evidence that's inconvenient to you.

The Canadian trucker protesters were not "terrorists" by any stretch of imagination, but sure let's assume otherwise because it helps us sleep better at night, right?

Pretty sure building a bomb on Parliament Hill makes you a terrorist group. Nevermind all the other dangerous stuff that was going on.

> if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite.

Then don't.

It's much easier to adhere to the status quo.

This is the milquetoast approach of most Canadians - a major factor in why Canada, in it's current state, is rather cooked.

The truckers did had their bank accounts frozen due to their actions, not due to their political opinions.

Their actions were Charter-protected freedom of expression and the freeze was a Charter-breaching unreasonable seizure.

>Justice Mosley ruled that “the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration” [0]

[0] https://www.aclrc.com/blog/2024/2/1/federal-court-rules-that...

I wasn't commenting on the legality of the asset freeze. I was responding to OP's attributing it to "if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite." As far as I'm aware, they did not survey the population and then take action against people with the wrong opinions.

A distinction without a difference. The ruling elite doesn't have to survey the population. They sandbagged the population into alignment with their own opinions, then strong-armed holdouts and specifically targeted them along every possible vector (social, legal, economic, etc.) for their adherence to wrong beliefs. I shudder at how much worse this could get in a fully cashless society.

So, everyone in the population of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions was personally "strong-armed" and "targeted"? Or only a subset of them? If it was just a subset, could there have been anything that distinguished much of that subset apart from the rest of the people who weren't "targeted?" Maybe some event they took part in or helped?

Yes, everyone in all of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions at the time saw themselves strong-armed and targeted by both legislation and vitriol from public officials. The greater the perceived threat to destabilizing belief in the elite opinion from any subset, the more severe the measures taken - as we saw, including unreasonable wartime actions to force compliance.

Well, since I don't live in Canada, I'm just going to have to hit the eject button and trust you that every single person in the country holding a particular political belief, likely tens of millions, were personally and directly targeted by the government with enforcement action, as ridiculous as that sounds.

In any country people are personally and directly affected by subjugation measures directed at their ingroup, I don't think that's particularly controversial.

Monero?

It has come to the point that I switched to a wallet that I can put 1 or 2 bills in at most before it becomes cumbersome. I just keep a $20 in it for the once or twice a month I don’t just use card.

I get the privacy issues, but in this particular case the convenience far outweighs it. I honestly sometimes get annoyed when I go to a cash only place and often just don’t go.

Money-less society with security to stop hoarders looting stores.

All digital security ends up security through obscurity; encrypt with noise the data along some algorithmic path to obscure what the data is, divide up go has admin and tier their access to obscure who is needed for what.

There still needs to be someone with full control over the AWS account or whatever to grant further permission. There’s no perfect system security and anonymity if someone out there can drill in and use admin/keys to unwrap things.

That’s why governments like CEOs and root nodes on such groups; keeps surface area for getting what they want small.

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