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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Amen.

Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added.

Cash is also the only payment system I can think of which is truly “private”. I think this is important too.

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You're probably right, but it doesn't always feel that way when you have serial numbers on every piece of currency. And coins are so uselessly low value today that they're hard to use.

It’s pretty hard to track serial numbers , you can easily wash the money” yourself ?

Some ATMs likely already track serial numbers, so you know when the banknote left the bank's custody and who withdrew it, using which card.

You can also track serial numbers when businesses return daily cash collections to their bank.

Especially the biggest denominations won't be passed back to other customers in the meantime, but rather sent back to the bank early.

Is it really private? You have to use it in person and every place of business has cameras nowadays.

It’s way more private than all of your transaction history rolled up by your card issuer.

Does some central authority have access to and the compute power to correlate all of the data available in those video feeds? No

You only need to know where the person was or when crime was committed,

You’re right but I don’t think we’re solving for the same thing.

>Does some central authority have access to and the compute power to correlate all of the data available in those video feeds? No

*TrapWire, the bank secrecy act, and the Utah datacenter enter the chat*

the lack of privacy at a business isn't a problem baked into cash. cash helps solve that problem because I don't need to go to a place of business to use it. It can be exchanged anywhere in reasonable amounts, and I don't have to deposit it I can just keep it and use it.

my wife and I always keep some cash on hand in case of some sort of problem with the card, or tap device etc. never had my cash declined because a computer thought some other purchases that afternoon looked suspicious.

Monero too. But I guess suggesting crypto on HN will not get me any upvotes ;).

No, it will not. They are missing the financial and historical perspective here to appreciate it.

> They are missing the financial and historical perspective here to appreciate it.

Or people know financial and monetary history and can see the backsliding with most cryptocurrencies:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency

* https://archive.ph/FWKcL / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...

Nicholas Weaver once remarked that cryptocurrency is “speed-running 500 years of financial history” :

* https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8425604

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