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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

Digging through the other pieces of the story to the headline nugget, we find this: """ But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.” """

So, it's an interesting point, And it's worth noting that we are leaning very heavily in the direction of assuming that people who want to be anonymous are doing so for criminal reasons. This could be partially mitigated, perhaps, if there were a way to give cash to Amazon (but it's probably the case that large cash transactions would be looked upon with the same scrutiny).

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They threw that in there implying that it was difficult to buy gift cards with cash.

In reality, those limits are pretty much the same as any other cash transaction. You can buy a few hundred or low thousands of dollars of gift cards with little/no oversight. Unless you only engage in peer-to-peer cash transactions, any pattern of moving more than a few thousand dollars in a regular < 30 day period is an activity that is eventually reported under money laundering laws.

It's long been a trope of dystopian (even utopian! see also: gold pressed latinum in Star Trek) scifi that cash is relegated to the shadier transactions, with legitimate transactions happening in the digital realm.

That's not science fiction; it's anthropology (see: Graeber2011 ;-)). Most societies have always seen fit to use some form of credit (or other "virtual money") for more trustworthy transactions while employing "cold, hard cash" for more transactions between individuals with more transient, uncaring, insecure relations (which of course includes criminals).

The problem is that "trustworthy" has come to mean "watched over by our corporate overlords".

Agreed. Bitcoin provides anonymity and people that use it for political or convenience reasons are sometimes looked at suspiciously. But, if I go into Walmart and pay for $150 in groceries in cash, no biggie.

Services like SpiderOak that include anonymity as a feature to a small extent do a disservice so the otherwise laudable principle of "can't I be anonymous sometimes without being a criminal?" Maybe zero-knowledge features would be looked upon less suspiciously if they were just included as a feature, without being advertised as a feature? Well, I think you get my gist?

Without Zerocoin, Bitcoin is NOT anonymous. And acquiring bitcoin anonymously is rather difficult. Local meetup for cash? Person can take audio/video or track you. Deposit at bank? Precise datetime and camera video is recorded. Mailing cash might work, if you're cautious about DNA, fingerprints, printer fingerprint, etc.

But mailing cash reveals your general location and in less populated places might be enough to find your identity. And in larger areas, if you mail cash often, you can probably be correlated from video with sufficient technology.

With Zerocoin the problem is mostly solved, from what I can tell (so long there's sufficient volume).

yet another outcome of the War-On-Drugs (as used by some people; results may vary by skin color and whether a corporation sold you the drug or if it came from columbia)

Buying giftcards with cash is effectively the same deal. Why would anybody shop at a store where the operator states they might arbitrarily call the police on you?

> Why would anybody shop at a store where the operator states they might arbitrarily call the police on you?

Why indeed, but that's not what's happening here. Regulation requires reporting in specific situations, like large cash transactions. It's not arbitrary on the store's part, and it's going to be the case across the board in the US and (I'd imagine) most of the developed world.

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