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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. Who still makes significant purchases using cash? People buy McDonalds hamburgers with credit cards.

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Who still makes significant purchases using cash?

Me. I'd been slowly weaning off credit cards due to the potential for purchase profiling and then two years ago Visa and MC both started in double-talking about selling "anonymized" purchase histories for online ad targeting -- as if you can anonymously target specific individuals.[1] That obvious prevarication was enough to convince me it was now open season on customer privacy so I cut my usage down to the bare minimum necessary to maintain one account for emergency use.

For me, $100 bills are the new credit card. I get a stack from the teller at my credit union about once every 6 months (careful to stay under the $10K mandatory government terrorist hysteria snitching limit[2]) and spend as necessary. It took a little getting used to, but it quickly became quite normal. I'm confident that my CU does not participate in any schemes to correlate serial numbers on bills with purchases. At least not any non-government schemes.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020400230...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act

If you think staying under $10,000 prevents you from being reported for suspicious behaviour, I have bad news for you.

That is an unhelpful response. If you have more to add than what the wikipedia article spells out regarding reporting requirements for under $10K transactions, I would very much like to hear it.

Banks are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) for anything unusual or, erm, suspicious, regardless of the dollar amount.

Exactly this. Algorithms have moved well beyond a simple "> 10000", and banks are interested in enforcing this, since the penalties are very signficiant (vastly outweighing any profit to be made looking the other way), and the modern anti-terrorism/anti-money laundering treaties are fairly non-gamable (in that they set outcomes and high-level behavious which are expected, rather than giving a precise set of criteria and rules that can be gamed).

Unless regulations relax, there will be an ongoing profitable business for people who sell software that does behavioural analysis on compliance-related cash behaviours for the finance sector.

So, exactly what part of that qualifies as, "more to add than what the wikipedia article spells out?"

This is really interesting. Why do you get out lots in one go? Why not small amounts amounts often (1-2 times a week)?

ARghh... my mother in law carries her money around in $100 bills. It's a total PITA. Cashiers have to call managers to make change, or they just say "I can't break that." $20 bills are much more convenient, if a bit bulkier.

Yeah but now you have to deal with change... I'd take more relevant ads.

I don't really give a damn about the ads. It is the database behind the ad targeting that I have a problem with.

Best case it is really no one's business where, when and how I spend my money. Worst case the info could be used to directly harm me, maybe through blackmail, maybe to enable some other crime against me or maybe even to falsely implicate me in a crime that I would then have to spend time and money to defend myself against in court.

As for the change - my credit union has a coin counter, I bring in a bucket of change, they give me dollar bills in return.

The U.S. has an extreme obsession with credit (and debit) cards, but cash is still much more common in many other countries.

Some of this is probably just due to historical accident, but some of it is also due to differences in the tradeoffs between the various payment methods in different countries.

In Japan, for instance, (1) cash is both easier to deal with in many cases (e.g. ATMs will happily give you very large quantities of it, a lesser crime rate makes using it safer, vending machine bill readers are much more accurate, shops are much more willing to deal with large bills, etc), (2) the presence of other mechanisms like very easy/cheap bank transfers replace some of the use-cases of credit cards in the U.S., and (3) credit cards are more restrictive (e.g. by default you have to pay your entire balance every month).

Also I think credit cards started their climb in the U.S. by replacing checks (which were in many ways very inconvenient), and that gave them enough familiarity and infrastructure to continue from there; in Japan, on the other hand, checks were never really used at all, so credit cards never had that "in."

As a New Zealander, I found the US to be obsessed with cash when I visited for tips, payments, transport etc. In NZ I was recently given a $20 note by a colleague who owed me some money, and I spent it. I commented to a cashier how small our 50c coin is - they looked at me funny and told me it had been like that for 5 or so years. I don't use cash. Never do. I don't have a wallet that holds anything more than 2 cards. I try to avoid cash and never have it on me. I can't remember finding this inconvenient in NZ as we don't tip and everything takes cards.

I had a similar experience as an Australian tourist in the USA. Suddenly I needed a bunch of 1s, 5s and 10s just to handle tipping. It was very annoying.

You were likely being taken for a ride (proverbially). Most Americans don't/wont tip unless there is a tip line on the receipt.

So, in actual fact, there's two layers of annoying wastefulness at work.

Basically I used the small notes when my total was close to a round figure. I could leave a $1.39 tip on a $20 meal or I could add a few $1 notes.

Most of the time I used my card (which is another story) so I could do this more easily, but sometimes you're in a hurry and the extra steps involved in US dining are a pain in the posterior. Hence: carrying small bills to allow tipping flexibility.

Huh... only in the US I guess. There are many countries where cash is the main way of exchanging money, or even the only accepted way. Look at Japan: it's a cash loving country.

In Germany paying by credit card isnt very common. Many people pay with debit cards but still a lot of stores/restaurants and even McDonalds etc dont accept any cards at all. Something like Square would never take off here, but i wish it would.

Here in Australia, we still have numerous retailers who don't accept credit cards or have minimum purchase amounts - due to, I presume, the cost of accepting credit and debit cards here.

I don't know whether costs are reduced for PayPass (tap to pay), but it seems anecdotally that any place supporting PayPass has removed credit card minimums.

PayPass is used by high volume merchants where the cost is low and absorbed. The retailers who have minimums on EFTPOS are using expensive PSTN units that cost up to a dollar per transaction.

I haven't carried cash in months due to PayPass (and discovering my debit card actually had it). I still don't like the "always on NFC" nature of it (I want a button on the card to turn it on), but it's quick and seems to go through a lot faster then the old PIN systems.

I've seen "offline approved" as a response from some of these terminals - I wonder if that means it's checked later?

Nearly every single consumer goods purchase in Japan is done with cash. Most people have around $300 on them at all times. Card readers are becoming more common but still prefer cash

When my car was shipped cross country, the trucker demanded a cash payment. That was $800 -- not massive but quite a lot of cash to hand over. I have also heard of people spending thousands of dollars in cash on a mattress or on appliances.

Yeah, only criminals, if you believe David Wolman:

http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Money-Counterfeiters-Dreamers/...

Here is some data on transaction types for a few countries. Page 446 shows the number (millions) of transactions for credit cards. Should give you an idea of how people are using credit cards.

http://www.bis.org/publ/cpss112p2.pdf

Counterfeiting still happens, right?

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