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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

Dropping hard currency raises the bar to entry and kills a lot of low end business. No more street vendors, cash only local business, friendly card games or bets, informal services, or convenient tips. It would also give the plastic channel immense power over businesses. You might not use cash very often, but dropping it altogether would not be a good idea.

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Additionally, I like to pay with cash when I don't want my purchasing habits to be collected by the store or my creditor. I find it disturbing how our modern economy makes the task of collecting information on one's interests and identity so effortless. I wouldn't want it to become all the easier.

The plastic equivalent of cash would not necessarily have your personal information attached to it. Think of it like a prepaid phone. You could go to a Post Office and buy (using your credit card or check) a card with a predetermined value.

You could go to a post office and buy, in a transaction which is linked to you, a uniquely identifiable card with a predetermined value?

Yes. You could then show that the person has "bought cash", but not what was bought with it.

How is it different from a $100 gift card from any store?

A gift card also lets the store track your purchases (unless of course you give it away).

The anonymity advantage of cash is that it cycles through the register in a non-deterministic manner. If I buy a $20 bill (serial number 123) from an ATM, and it later winds up at PotMart, that is not compelling evidence I went to PotMart. If I bought a prepaid cash card and it was spent at PotMart, that indicates with decent probability that I purchased some weed.

It would be easy enough to identify regular customers when they in their home town. These days it isn't all that difficult to pair someone's spending habits with their location an do a bit of online research to find out who they are.

If one was careful about it they could probably stay relatively anonymous though.

I have serious doubt about "killing a lot of low end business". I'd imagine that we'd start seeing lots of alternate, local currencies. Card games and bets would probably have other medium of exchange (poker chips) or in-kind value (a 12-pack of beer).

Probably. Hell, we could all just start using Euros (or whatever) for cash, and then exchange our Euros for plastic-only US dollars at changing booths (which would suddenly become a lot more common).

This, of course, doesn't make life any easier for anyone, except the jerks who already use cards for everything (aka the jerks I always get stuck behind in line while I wait for their little receipt to print and get signed).

You want to stop using hard currency so that you can use a different hard currency? Additionally, the Fed(s) aren't fond of competing currencies.

The overhead for taking credit cards in a small business is huge. A small bookstore owner I knew said the card processing fees were more per month than the rent or utilities.

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