Who still uses cash? | Hacker News Reader

Who still uses cash?

voronoiapp.com

38 pointsKaibeezy90 comments

Me. I don't want every single movement I make during the day recorded in a database by people who hate me. If I can avoid using a card, or avoid taking my phone, I don't.

In such a short time we've gotten to total coverage of every act by every single person in America in very few databases, trivial to coordinate. I don't need anybody to know I always buy a bottle of water on the way to my board game night on Thursdays from one of the stores down the same road between the park I kill time at and the house where we have it. But then there's all these phones coming together, in that house, every Thursday. Even if I don't take my phone, even if I don't buy the water, they'll see I used my transit card to take the train to the park rather than to my apartment. It's horrific when I think about it.

They know when I turn on my computer, they know when I turn off my computer, they know when I turn on my television, they know when I turn off my television. With "smart" homes, they'll know when I turn my lights on and off, they'll know how often I cook, be able to guess what I'm cooking by looking at my shopping list. I don't have control of my phone, and it has a microphone in it. My car reports its location to the manufacturer. None of this is of any benefit to me.

The only barrier to total control is manpower, and historically the manpower has been easy enough to find. I'm looking to move counterclockwise on this circle. From 8:00 to midnight we're probably on the verge of getting questioned by the cops if they can see you but can't ping you. Let me go back in time.

I use cash (USD) almost exclusively for small transactions. It's still the best way to pay if you care about anonymity and privacy.

Same.

Plus I can tip easily, split bills, not have to worry about internet connections, etc

I think you spend less if you pay cash because you see the money.

> I think you spend less if you pay cash because you see the money.

This may be true for some people. Doesn't work for me at all. I see the money equally in digital and print formats.

Nah, once the cash has left my bank account I see it as already gone and spend it freely.

Same. If it doesn't show up in my bank or savings balances it's effectively already spent.

My credit cards, both the physical ones and the ones on my phone, work without an internet connection.

Cash "just works" until you run out, or have too large denominations that people refuse. And there are more stores now that don't take cash at all.

Well turns out that even with cash, you can still carry your debit card, just in case... Good God it really isnt that big of a deal to carry cash.

Getting cash is usually the issue, I don't get paid in cash and I have to make a special trip to get it.

Really?

I’ve had multiple places not able to accept credit cards due to internet issues.

Literally had that last week. (Library, they had to call me later for payment.)

Accepting an offline transaction is at the discretion of the merchant, a payment terminal is going to be able to certify that a payment card is genuine, however as the issuer of the credit card may have the card reported stolen in its database, the merchant takes the risk of fraud in card-theft cases. So if as a merchant you have a well-known customer in front of you, you can still do the sale. Every acquirer can configure this to be more or less lenient for each issuer, and the tendency has been to be less and less lenient.

That makes sense, because I have paid in remote areas (no internet) before, thanks.

> My credit cards, both the physical ones and the ones on my phone, work without an internet connection.

Of course not. I guess you haven't been to shops that say their network is down, so it's cash-only until it comes back online.

It used to be shops had those credit card imprint sliders to handle payments when phones lines were down, but nobody has those anymore (many credit cards don't even have the raised numbers anymore).

> or have too large denominations that people refuse

In the US, if you have actually incurred a debt (e.g. you've already eaten your meal, or you've already had the repair performed, etc), the business can "refuse" payment in cash, but by so doing, they have effectively declared the debt void.

US legal tender case law permits businesses to refuse cash for non-debt-mediated transactions, but if a debt has been incurred, they have to accept it.

Cash also helps staff (tips) and small business owners avoid taxes (assuming they don't declare cash). Obviously depends a bit on your own morals regarding taxation.

Although tips won't be taxed, that only affects federal taxes, starts 2026 and finishes 2028 (amongst other limitations).

One more advantage:

A number of random places will charge extra for a credit card.

Not a lot, of course. But something.

Just today I listened to an article from NPR talking about some sort settlement involving small businesses and credit card vendors. I want to support my local business and not have them pay the credit card charges. But the convenience of carrying around just one card vs various bills and coins is hard to give up.

I’m curious, how do you personally handle change specially small currency like pennies and nickels?

Keep it in my pocket until I get home. Stick it in a jar. It becomes a little fun or emergency money. I find that using cash, I tend to not buy dumb little things as I'm out and about and don't actually carry change around all that often.

We may need to help them by looking at the POS interface and make sure they're using/requesting debit for debit cards.

I suspect the POS defaults to credit. But I've never looked at any of the interfaces.

I know US Postal Service somehow detects my card is debit and then requests a debit transaction because the credit card pad asks for a PIN not a signature. So maybe some POS have an autodetect option.

(See also my other comment)

Cash-only here. I have not (generally) accepted pennies since the mid 1980's.

Many of the local places (Seattle - Belltown & the Market) are cool with rounding transactions to the nearest dollar, so that helps. It might also be part of being an active participant in the local society.

I don't use cash anymore, but if I still was. I'd just chuck them all in a tub and every now and then dump them in the coin counting deposit machine at the bank to get notes back.

I use cash still and this is exactly what I do with my coins. I have a huge vase that I keep all my coins in. Years ago, I used to convert the coins to bills maybe once or twice per year when the vase filled up now. I use cash so infrequently now (and also usually get change rounded to the nearest dollar) that it’s been several years since the last dump and the vase hasn’t filled up yet.

> the convenience of carrying around just one card vs various bills and coins is hard to give up.

How hard is it to carry cash? You don't have to take coins; you just take your wallet which already has the bills. "various" doesn't make sense: you don't need to make sure to bring some 1s, a 5, 4 10s, etc.

Just put the change in your pocket and put it in a bowl when you get home.

I wonder why companies don't scan cash as part of fraud prevention. (You do know that all bills have unique serial numbers I hope)

The 'scan' part would be OCR with errors or humans with errors

How many shops actually use the fake bill checker device?

It's funny how crypto became branded as "decentralized" when actually it's the exact opposite. Every single transaction ever made is recorded onto a single central ledger. It's not even anonymous; pseudonymity (your wallet address) is not anonymity.

It is in fact cash that is decentralized and anonymous. If I go into a dark alley and give you a $100 bill, there is not a single soul other than you and me who knows about the transaction that took place.

Cash eventually passes through banks: Can't the read the serial numbers, and pretty easily at this point?

It's not like tracking credit card or Venmo transactions, but if you take out $500 and give it to someone who deposits it, and if they read the serial numbers, it's clear what happened.

Crypto tornados for rough anonymization

If you have life insurance, and you die of, say, cancer, they will go through all of your credit card transactions. You agreed to it. If you died of a car accident, maybe they go through it too, just to see if you were purchasing excessive amounts of alcohol. They won’t necessarily deny the entire claim, but they may deny as a gambit, then negotiate it down with your estate in a settlement.

At a minimum buy all vice purely in cash. Bars, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and anything that could hint at a certain lifestyle. Also protects you in civil lawsuit and divorce.

During Covid, my business slowed way down, and I took a part time job at a gas station convenience store (because selling cigarettes made be essential). The store was in a suburb of Portland with an average household income in the top 10 of Oregon, but there were also a lot of trade workers, undocumented immigrants, and generally a good mix of income levels.

Some relevant observations:

- Lower income customers used cash much more than higher income.

- Men used cash way more than women, with the exception of retirement-age women buying their smokes / wine / beer.

- Undocumented workers almost always used cash. Most were paid in $100 bills on Fridays, so they were probably paid under the table.

- Phone tap-to-pay was almost exclusively iPhone. In fact, I don't think I ever saw an Android user pay by phone tap.

- A surprising number of people didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip.

- If the till ran out of pennies for change, no one gave a shit.

> didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip

The tap zone is often not clearly marked. Some places (e.g., Walmart) it doesn't work at all (yes, even using a card instead of a phone). If you pull the card out anyway, I find that I end up having to use the chip about one time in ten. If that were, say, three times in ten, I'd just stick to inserting the card in the chip reader. Those rarely seem to fail.

And GP really doesn't know how many of those people had tap-to-pay cards, but just assumed everyone did.

I have several payment cards. Only one is tap-to-pay.

You must have some old cards, then. I don’t think any I’ve been issued in the past five years have a chip but don’t have tap-to-pay. (Gift cards are usually swipe-only, for cost reasons.)

But good point.

I only brought it up to customers who had tap symbols on their cards. The surprising part wasn't that they didn't realize that they could tap, it's that they didn't even know that the technology existed.

> Undocumented workers

How could you tell who was undocumented?

They didn't speak English, and I speak a little Spanish. I got to know a lot of these guys, so I asked them. My boss immigrated from Mexico, and he explained the under-the-table pay setup. Many landscapers and contractors in the area pay workers under the table because a lot of them under report income to the IRS. Plus, my stepmom was illegal before my dad and her got married, so it's no big deal to me.

> Some relevant data-free guesses:

I just visited China and seeing it as 3rd lowest on the list makes sense. Everything is done by QR Code with AliPay or WeChat. Even the old man selling bamboo cane for less than a dollar takes it.

Some restaurants do not take cash, period - it adds a staff member. A few places like a massage parlour I even tried to offer cash instead, and they didn’t care which leads me to believe the fees are very low. Of course, it is China so there’s no privacy.

How do people pay for drugs and other illicit services in China without cash? Does the government turn a blind eye to most of it?

> Does the government turn a blind eye to most of it?

Sort of. It's difficult to track private transactions on WeChat between friends to actual goods being sold. From what I've seen, most illegal goods/services sold just have you add them as a "friend" and send the agreed upon amount. Somewhat informal but neither side tends to scam since the consequences of escalating (e.g. getting a WeChat account banned) essentially makes it impossible to live. I've also seen Taobao being used where they place an overpriced real product that you buy and the margin is what you pay for the illegal good.

I'm not sure if it's truly turning a blind eye or whether the scale is just too large for the government to do anything about it.

Do you think most bigger drug dealers and prostitutes pay tax on their income?

I'd think it would be hard to have $100k+ flowing into your account with no explanation.

I've been curious what most countries will do for these situations as they go cashless. Non-KYC'd crypto seems like a natural solution, but I haven't seen it used much outside larger organizations.

Don't know how it works for large drug dealers but I would assume they use the same channels as money launderers: overseas accounts.

You get in contact with a connections guy and they give you a list of accounts to pay in yuan (usually business owners that makes profit overseas), they pay you in USD from their legitimate businesses for some made up invoice. Each transaction is under the limit for being scrutinized. Once money is out of the country, you can pay people off however you want.

Prostitutes would probably just take cash if close to limits.

I glanced at this and thought "they are going to make a generalization that excludes Italy". And sure enough they did, then listed it as one of two outliers.

I wonder if there's something else they are not understanding, and that their exceptions of Germany and Italy are demonstrating the conclusion doesn't fit.

I started looking for Germany at the top and was surprise to find it so low, I suppose the outlier thing means it's higher than expected for non-Germans :D (also Austria is higher but ignored, I'd say the general culture in this regard is not too different than Germany)

This assumes cash transactions are actually recorded. Given the increasingly invasive surveillance of digital transactions, I expect the numbers and reality to diverge more as time progresses.

Also, to be pendantic about it, I've never actually seen someone spend hard cash, just fiat currency, which has much lower value.

I do keep a US Minted dollar handy, should the need arise for hard currency. Made in 1901 at the New Orleans mint

edit/clarify: Yes, a 1901 Morgan Silver Dollar, a coin with a current melt value of $39.64 according to coinflation

the extra value in that bill comes from the collector and historical interest; I'm not sure the US government is really obligated to pay out rare metals for your bill, if that's the distinction you're making.

Anyway, I think we as a society should normalize using silver coins for personal wealth transfer, because they are a good size and weight for not too much value, and they are shiny and make a satisfying jingle sound when kept in a bag

It'll be a dollar coin, its value being the metal it's made from.

I feel like this chart might give a false impression of daily life. For example, Taiwan is supposedly under 30%, but just about all the night markets and local mom and pop restaurants only take cash.

When I visited, luckily I brought my ATM card because most of the places I wanted to eat were cash only.

The US data appear to be based on this Federal Reserve info (or a similar document from a previous year): https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/... . However, that data includes both in-person and remote payments. The proportion of cash for in-person is slightly higher. There is also a table showing "in-person payments less than $25", and in that category cash is about 29%. This aligns with my own experience that people are fairly likely to use cash for small transactions, but cash becomes more and more unlikely the larger the transaction.

Many prefer to be tipped in cash.

I pay my barber in cash, because that's the only payment he accepts.

> Many prefer to be tipped in cash.

Tipping is about the only time I need cash. Outside of restaurants, most people I need to tip do not have an easy way to receive digital payments.

"Prefer".

I have read that, if you tip with a card, the business gets it, and they may give it to the staff, and they may not. But if you tip by leaving cash on the table, the staff for sure gets it, and the business can't stiff them. So, yeah, the staff probably prefers it.

The staff can also not report it for income tax, so of course they prefer it

I think doing away with cash is a terrible idea. That said, I'm using it less and less since 2020. Inflation is the real problem--we need a stable currency and make the small denominations valuable again. All this tracking and surveillance is bad for a free society and it ends with "programmable money" where the government can tell you what you can and can't buy with your money. That's sick and evil, particularly when we know that people in government are the most immoral, pernicious, and downright evil people who ever lived.

I'm really surprised that Ireland and Germany are so close here; I don't see cash used that commonly in Ireland (though pretty much everywhere would still _take_ it, which I understand is not the case everywhere in Europe), but when I visit Germany, places which only take cash are still pretty common.

I'd be a _little_ sceptical about how good their data is.

In the past year, the only times I've used cash are when travelling to Spain and Germany, and for entrance into one particular club night in Dublin who insist on it.

I play music part-time, on top of my regular day job. I still get paid in cash quite often, both by the venue and via the tip jar. I give it to the kids, if I need to send them on an errand.

I also keep some singles in my bass bag, to tip bartenders. Most venues provide free drinks to the band, but then there's no way to give a tip unless I bring some cash.

Cash payments virtually disappeared after Sarbanes-Oxley, but have come back. Also, bandleaders are mostly using Venmo or its competitors when the band isn't paid in cash.

From casual conversations with merchants, they are charged the same fees on debit cards as credit cards.

Apparently debit cards support either debit or credit transactions, and (some/all/most) POS systems are defaulting to credit? I notice I'm often asked to sign, rather than receiving a PIN prompt. That's how I know if the charge is going to be debit (PIN) or credit(sign).

And it is only debit that incurs the near cash equivalence due to far lower transaction fees.

While the data is interesting, this graphic is a terrible choice. There's no value to being a pie chart where every slice is the same width. And the colors only seem to be a second indicator of the same percentage.

This could have been a standard bar chart, allowing all the text to be easily read. And the colors could have indicated something like the average income to make it easier to see the outliers.

Yeah the "spiral bar chart" was an artistic but maybe not practical choice.

I use it for buying expensive stuff in tax free states.

Very smart; a family member just got "caught" for not redeeming use tax (in lieu of in-state sales tax) for expensive out-of-state equipment purchases brought into our state.

Penalty was 2x the local sales tax.

The ice cream lady that rolls down our neighborhood. My 4 yo hears the music and freaks out. We have to keep cash around now.

I use cash for any contractor, and any independent-ish merchant (e.g. anybody with a booth/tent). I.e. the people who most benefit from it, even if they support cards or digital transactions.

I usually tip delivery drivers in it. Other than that i don't use it.

Going by share of daily transactions probably isn't the best way to measure this as it's mostly going to reflect the usage decisions of the rich who spend lots of money. And there are many cash transactions that simply aren't recorded anywhere. Many, many more. If you go by number of people I think the amount of cash usage would be much higher in the USA. I don't have experience elsewhere. But 16% only? That's absurd. It does not at all reflect my lived experience. I do acknowledge that in high population density areas cash seems less prevalent. But most people I know use cash. I use cash primarily.

I'm in US. Haven't used cash in 15 years. Most people I know use credit/debit cards on their phones to make payments.

I rarely use cash day to day.

I do think it's also somewhat generational. I'm at the older end of Generation X. I grew up paying cash (or writing checks) for almost everything, didn't really use credit cards until my late 20s/early 30s. There were a lot of places that didn't accept credit cards back then, such as most fast food restaurants. But I switched to cards mostly out of convenience as soon as most places accepted them.

I notice a lot of people older than me (Baby Boomers and older) still pay cash more often.

And lower income people use cash a lot, I presume because they are unbanked or can't get a credit card.

I use cash because it's more convenient, faster, and I can use it anywhere rather than just in transactions from corporation to corporation. And I can use it any time rather than just when all telecommunications are working perfectly. And cash still works even when $state does some silly political blockade of transactions for $industry for performative reasons. And cash doesn't cost extra to use every time or have fees or have other rent seeking mechanisms. And when I pay in cash my behavior isn't sold to third party companies to profile and exploit me.

I really don't understand the preference to use corporate payment services. What is the upside? Is it security thing in high population density areas? Do you not use money so muggers won't be tempted to rob you?

cash everyday .. sometimes strike up a conversation with clerk or local business about it, too. Society learned the hard way, many times.

What I find interesting is that most Asian countries have top spots, while Japan is still in the 60% range. Why is that?

Because that’s the real top spot. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to realize there are many drawbacks to cashless.

At least when I lived there, Japan was a heavily cash centric culture. Due in part to the difficulty of getting a credit card and how little benefit there was to having one for day to day consumer interactions (edit to mention that I’m very much simplifying here; I know it’s more nuanced than this). 60% is lower than I would have expected but it has been almost a decade since I lived there. I closed the article once they threw that huge pop up in my face, but I did see that they only mentioned that Japan was an outlier. If you knew anything about Japanese economics and culture, this wouldn’t have been surprising to see. I’m guessing the rest of the article didn’t provide any depth to their visualization.

It might also have to do with Japan having low crime. Having too much cash is a liability

So far I haven't seen anybody give you the right answer, which is that in most Asian countries, people actually have the money they are spending vs. buying things on credit.

I wonder if cash and safety correlate?

I think it would be pretty safe to carry cash in japan, male or female.

Also, Japanese people say they are slow to change, like from cash to cashless.

From the article, cash is king in some of the most violent places in the world, so no.

Also, this "cash is unsafe" meme is wild. Robbers do not routinely detect the presence of cash on your person using millimeter wave scanners.

> Robbers do not routinely detect the presence of cash

But the reverse might not be true.

Just because it is not detectable does not mean people who feel unsafe would carry large quantities of cash.

If I was going into a bad neighborhood, I wouldn't carry a lot of cash.

But in japan, I've seen how people behave differently. for example, I saw a lady leave her purse on a restaurant table while she went to the bathroom. This kind of stuff is common in japan - people feel safe and there is little expectation of theft.

Paying for Mullvad.

was asked for spare change and replied "i dont carry cash" then said to the person with me "would be a good idea to have square pay" to which a different person, literally from inside a dumpster, yelled "i have one!" and produced a phone with a square pay dongle. felt like i pretty much had to give them $5

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Cash has near zero resistance (USD at least). Good property for day to day IMO.

A lot of places didn't take cash here, so I have the opposite experience

>A lot of places didn't take cash here, so I have the opposite experience

Perhaps you might engage your local government about that. Mine made accepting cash mandatory[0] in 2020 and the state followed suit this year[1]

As an aside, I use my debit card for many things, but use cash for many other things -- especially taxis (taxi drivers pay 5%/transaction when you use a card) and tips.

[0] https://rules.cityofnewyork.us/rule/31891/

[1] https://qns.com/2025/06/cash-payments-to-protect-unbanked-sh...

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