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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> Secondly it costs the consumer nothing. The cost goes to the merchant. If anything the customer gets rewards.

Just like tariffs, right?

Visa/MC is a +1% income tax on most of the economy.

It isn't - using cards, with fees, is cheaper than cash. I realized that when shops started to refuse cash (even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash). The argument? Cash is too expensive.

They only use cards because credit cards can allow them to get sales from people who wouldn't have been able to buy the product through debit itself, but they can buy it from credit.., so they are okay with eating 1-2% of costs in the fact that sale might happen and the companies will get 0.5-1% of it to you back as rewards (hopefully) and so there is incentive to buy using credit card for rewards but they might also give incentives of 1-2% if you buy through cash since they aren't eating that 1-2% cost.

And this whole network has now been built in such a way that now even debit costs the same charge just as network fees

Open sourcing this might be a step in good faith and I mean, we have UPI where I live and it has 0 fees and trust me its crazy good. I personally wish that either everybody in the world could use UPI or pixis from brazil.

The argument doesn't hold - if cards were only about getting sales which they otherwise wouldn't get - and the part about "getting sales which they otherwise wouldn't get", is true enough - then there's no reason to refuse cash payments. That's additional sales, right? But the fact is that more and more shops refuse cash payments entirely. "Pay by card or go somewhere else".

I can't comment on this fact of more and more shops refusing for cash payments entirely as I personally have NEVER seen that?

Provide me an article or some proof to this fact for me to comment further as currently we are at an disagreement on this thing which I hope we can turn into meaningful discussion.

Well.. just a quick search (as I won't be talking a walk and photograph all the "cards only" signs I now see in so many places):

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/mar/16/uk-high-street...

https://www.dnb.nl/en/general-news/news-2023/some-retail-sec...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20gevkx8gyo

https://www.aarp.org/money/personal-finance/no-cash-accepted...

https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/legal-news/do-you-have-the-right-t...

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...

Well I appreciate the effort, might need to look a closer look since my country has UPI and its basically free transactions instantly and even then we are constantly warned by our older generation to always carry cash too as there are places that will still not accept UPI or you would need to go to shop, do upi payment, get cash etc. and I kinda agree, I have seen/heard of even many fights happening because UPI wasn't accepted.

and that is when UPI is almost ubiquitous, I can't imagine a shop saying cards only. I think it might be illegal where I live.

> even if cash is legal tender and they, by law, _have_ to accept cash

this is not true as it is not what "legal tender" means. Legal tender is something that the government must accept as payment, not private enterprise.

> Businesses don’t have to accept cash.[0]

> There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.[1]

[0]: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic...

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

That depends on the country. There are many countries (including my own) where any business must accept certain parts of the cash payment system (around here a taxi doesn't have to accept the highest-value bank note, but the rest cannot be refused). And shops, of course. That's why newspapers bother to write articles about it.

Note that legal tender does apply to private entities when it comes to paying debts, at least in the US. Creditors must accept legal tender, or give up claim to the debt.

It’s true that private businesses can set pretty much any payment terms they want for a transaction that hasn’t yet taken place. But the moment you move to a situation where you owe money, they do have to accept cash.

They don’t have to accept cash in advance. They do have to accept cash for debts, such as when you have already eaten the meal.

They have to accept cash, huh?

* Cash Payment Method Will No Longer Be Accepted A Notice by the Patent and Trademark Office on 10/03/2017*

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/10/03/2017-21...

how is cash too expensive?? huh?

_Handling_ cash is expensive. I never thought of that until my SO started working in a shop. To and from the bank, with stacks of coins and notes.. and there's presumably much more than that for larger firms. In general I rely my statement on what merchants themselves are saying. Newspapers are writing interviews with merchants who (illegally) have stopped accepting cash, even though it's legal tender. "It's too expensive. It reduces our bottom line." That kind of thing. When I look around I see "Cards only" a lot of places.

> Newspapers are writing interviews with merchants who (illegally) have stopped accepting cash, even though it's legal tender.

That's legal. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

Legal tender applies only to debt/creditor relationships.

The USA is not all the world. The US rules don't apply in other countries. Rules differ. In many countries _businesses_ have to accept legal tender. Including in my own. That's why it's such a big deal when businesses actually still refuse cash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender

> Legal tender is a form of money that courts of law are required to recognize as satisfactory payment in court for any monetary debt.

A country may separately require businesses to accept legal tender, if they feel like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#Status_by_country would appear to indicate this distinction is very common in the developed world.

Of course cash is expensive, you have to handle it, count it, transport it. Haven't you ever seen those heavily armoured cash delivery vehicles? I mean just think how inefficient cash obviously is in every aspect of how it works compared to modern tech.

Time spent totaling it, transporting it to from bank

Having to buy a register / point of sale which can handle it

Hoping you employees don’t pocket a few bills here and there

Hoping you don’t get robbed

That’s an acceptable fee for the consumer protections I receive.

There is another hidden cost: total mass government surveillance of the entire economy, including the ability to arbitrarily veto any transaction or participant for any reason (such as publishing) without trial or even burden of proof.

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/realtime/

People are only okay with this because it hasn’t been visibly abused on a large scale yet.

Imagine Nazi Germany having this sort of access to the private transactions of everyone in an entire country.

The abuses won’t ever be front-page news, either, because they’ll only ever be targeted against tiny fractions of society, and most people won’t be directly affected by their lives being surveilled and their rights being so infringed.

https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

Generally and commonly used payment systems (ie cash) that cannot be centrally censored are the only way to avoid this. Presently that means physical cash, physical precious metals, and cryptocurrency.

The first two are impractical for large-scale use.

> Generally and commonly used payment systems (ie cash) that cannot be centrally censored are the only way to avoid this. Presently that means physical cash, physical precious metals, and cryptocurrency. The first two are impractical for large-scale use.

Tether freezes accounts. Bitcoin gets confiscated. Eth forked when big stakeholders didn't like how the DAO went. And it's a bit hard to take seriously privacy concerns that propose a public transaction ledger as a solution.

(And of the three, only physical cash has actually been proven in large-scale use.)

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