No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision.

Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don't hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it's frozen?

So yes have some cash but behind the scenes data sharing does go on, it could be a simple conversation down the pub or a contract to process some data or provide a service.

Signwritten vans & trucks give the game away to neighbours as to whats going on.

Get some crypto where you can draw cash out of a machine, there are plenty of bitcoin machines and online crypto currency exchanges to move money around the world. When the Greek govt debt crisis kicked off, bitcoins spiked as people moved their money out of Greece, some events like this will also trigger a spike in crypto because its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.

The less reliant you become on any one entity the less any one entity can mess you up especially when you dont agree with their politics, methods or employer.

I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and make the effort to anonymise your wallet is now.

I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know what to do in order to use Monero.

As for exchanging for Monero, there's starting to be the option of atomic swaps with Bitcoin. Alternatively, you could also try going through one of the various non-KYC automated swapping services.

We must fix and strengthen our governments - there's no way around that.

> its less bulky remembering a string than shipping tonnes of gold across borders.

Assuming you completely disregard the computation costs, yes.

Edit: I've always found his ability to track me down in the middle of some woods when I was out walking to be a rather curious use of technology considering he was retired and wouldnt have access to mobile phone triangulation facilities or the gps facilities on my phone. However he outed himself when he went back to get some answers for me!

Also always keep £500 rolled up in £20 notes somewhere. And make sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Make sure you have a passport, because myself and someone else spent the best part of an hour or two trying to past Google's I'm not a robot when trying to get a passport. The fact Govt uses Googles I'm not a Robot should also show you there is more to Google than meets the eye.

I can see why the rich have dual citizenship and multiple passports, with the richest having diplomatic passports, making them untouchable anywhere in the world!

It might seem like a lot of effort, but when you realise who easy it is to set people up, buy off judges, police, medical experts, etc, you'll realise blackmail can come from everyone and anyone including your family, because there are some messed up beliefs out there.

This is good advice, always have some cash around; in these uncertain times, I'd even argue to increase the amount. Make sure to have a record somewhere that you have it (a photo on your phone with e.g. ID and a dated newspaper? I dunno) so that IF you get your home broken into, you can prove it to your insurance.

Of course, there's plenty of places to hide a stack of bills, or distribute it across multiple spots.

If you're concerned about the downfall of the economy, you can get 'slabs' of valuable metals as well, that can be broken off into smaller denominations. The downside of going for those (at least in NL) is that you can't really use them to bet on the price of gold going up or down, because as a consumer you have to pay VAT for them (21%).

They are all subject to the same regs, and most credit unions aren't any better than large banks.

People get setup without even knowing it but the setup might not occur until years or decades later.

You can also get e-residency in many countries like estonia, lithuania, etc and avail their government services digitally. You will be able to open a bank account and sign stuff.

There are many options available.

People think that e-residency is just a breeze to do, but people who try, discover that its much harder than thought. Still easier than normal residency, thats true.

Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC & SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.

However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China's CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors.

The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn't work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while "digital due process" is slowly constructed.

Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street. If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (https://usa.kinokuniya.com), it's a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews. The online-offline playing field is now less tilted.

Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators.

The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end.

  <there's always a bigger shark.jpg>

Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can't force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient.

So let's figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. "Everyone decides to use cash again" just isn't going to happen.

In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins.

The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.

We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.

You won't even need one of these trademarked devices on your right hand if the Chinese brave new world is rolled out over here. Imagine the unique biometric markers of your face being used by an AI to link you to your government-run wallet.

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-tiktok-from-china-shows-fa...

I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie.

The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.

Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.

If you don’t believe that the government will accept regulations that protect its citizens, at the expense of losing surveillance, then the primary goal is to replace that government, not to fight a losing battle for the sunlit uplands of a disappeared past.

I'll believe in the benevolent government that rejects abusing their authority for the purpose of mass surveillance when I see one. I believe people still have the power to push for small/minor changes in government so long as those changes don't threaten the powerful. Anything else is pretty unlikely. You can call it cynicism, but it's been known for a long time that the only people who can substantially influence government are large corporations or the extremely wealthy (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...)

I still support the ideal that people should be able work within the system to challenge the entrenched powerful, but the evidence for it actually working in most cases isn't strong and my government has spent centuries making adjustments when they've been shown to be vulnerable in order to make it harder. I don't think people should stop trying for change, but at a certain point, you have to accept the situation you actually have while you try to find a realistic path to something better.

I use to think the same but apparently the anti corruption tech is getting every bit as draconian as everything else. Governments will eventually have to go full retard and be openly corrupt or they have to deal with oddities retroactively.

For example, many would love to award contracts directly without holding a proper bidding process but it gets increasingly unlikely to get away with it.

It isn't just confirmation bias. We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. It doesn't get much clearer than that. We also had at least two decades where we only ever saw increased surveillance.

And it isn't necessarily cynicism in my opinion, it is realism. It is an fearful older generation that feels it loses control. Sure, government could change course, but I don't see it. To believe otherwise is almost naive at this point. We can be really glad the people that worked on the technology for a global network anticipated such behavior, so I might even want to encourage more cynicism at that point because it provides real safety instead of the fake one that is promised by government.

But it doesn't even matter, because your vote does not count on such topics. Experts in the field do not count on such topics. The older generation is set in their way and we will have to endure it for quite a few years at laest.

Or longer, if life extension research is successful..

It's not just a matter of voting in a new government, we need some serious structural reforms to how politics works with an emphasis on subsidiarity making it very hard for a single entity to consolidate power and we also need severe taboos on things like building surveillance infrastructure. We need governments that assume some percentage of every electoral intake will be corrupt or self-interested and correct for this accordingly rather than assuming all politicians are honourable by default. Political power should be treated like enriched uranium: a vital resource for society that's nonetheless extremely dangerous if it's allowed to reach a critical mass.

Is there much evidence for the reverse? Ignore the US Patriot act bullshit and focus on democratic countries where the political system isn't fundamentally broken.

All governments will use (or abuse) the powers they have to the absolute maximum extent they can get away with which is why subsidiarity is so important. The less power any individual has, the less damage they can do by using it as a tool for their own self-interest and the more they're forced to build consensus with other influential people which limits extremism. If it were up to me I'd abolish the office of Prime Minister altogether in favour of strong Cabinet collective responsibility and I'd also create an anti-corruption body completely outside of Parliament and the other institutions of state with wide-ranging powers to seek and punish misconduct in high office. Political office is an absolute magnet for people with unpleasant personality traits, instead of assuming good faith in politicians we need to assume bad faith and build the machinery of government defensively to accomodate this.

Another remedy to our issues is abolishing general elections in favour of rotating, asynchronous by-elections. This would give us exactly the same amount of democracy, but it means that the media's influence is massively reduced due to a lack of national election campaigns and it also means parties are forced to stick to their manifestos as they're effectively forced to campaign locally at all times so pulling a Nick Clegg becomes much more risky. As well as preventing the election result essentially being a function of how good the media strategy is, it also means the makeup of Parliament changes much more gradually which allows for long-term planning instead of the insane pendulum swinging where nothing gets done if it takes more than five years.

I like your election formula. My ideas was to allow people to change their vote whenever they like. Crappy decisions would have to be paid for in votes immediately. Ideally after one truly bad move you are out the next day and the bad move is immediately reverted.

I quite like your proposal for elections too, although its implementation might be difficult when it comes to paper-based electoral systems! It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on the Overton Window, I suspect it would lead to policies becoming more incrementalist and less radical across the board. I would be concerned about it giving more de facto power to the press though.

There are a lot of assumptions about the role of government in society in your comment.

There's a heck of a lot of people out there who think society can be improved by refining, restricting or reducing government's role in specific areas or generally.

Cashless is so much more practical the battle has already been lost, a while ago. It's only a matter of time before it's fully everywhere.

One of the big motivators behind the general data protection act is how personal data was historically used for genocide.

We still have plenty of politicians that want to target people categorically and make them second class citizens.

Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.

there have been big pushes against red light cameras and similar automated license-plate enforcement in the US. which is actually kind of a wash, when you consider the alternative is often the unequal manual policing instead.

in an older version of this, I know some places had and then removed the ability of tollbooths to cut speeding tickets. (It's pretty trivial to establish speeding if you get between two tollbooths faster than the speed limit would otherwise allow.)

Some countries took the opposite approach, and introduced lay-bys just before toll booths, enabling drivers to speed to their heart's content, and then have a rest before going through the next toll booth.

It doesn't matter if lots of people, even most, pay with digital transactions. As long as a substantial minority is using cash, the option will be available for those who need it.

> Very few people will ever hit this. Ever.

And this story has not been #1 on HN for five hours, nor has 500+ comments, and is not being read by journalists in multiple countries, or city-state regulators who care about equality, or engineers who build payment and surveillance systems, whose opinion can't possibly factor into the feasibility of building one of several alternative futures. Not one of those "few" people can change the future of electronic trade, of which payment is only a subset.

Nope, we have a singular cashless trading future and it's not subject to human negotiation beyond surrender. Or is it?

The fallacy of thinking that software engineers as a profession will base what work they are willing to do on any form of ethics rather than getting paid.

And finally the fallacy of thinking that because I predicted what I think will happen that I also think it should happen.

The post I replied to, to remind you, claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned. But most won't be subject to that. Most will rightly or wrongly think that only affects bad people, and given that, most won't change their behaviour. Software engineers in general will do what they're paid to, very few make any sort of principled stand, if they do someone else will be hired.

Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour in the face of a small minority having their rights or liberties infringed? Because if so I'd like some of your happy pills.

As stated in the original article posted to HN, the potential for change is not with those few who break the law, it's with the much larger group who believe in due process and social contracts. When trust is lost in a system, it affects many more people than the few humans who unexpectedly set a precedent in policy and become an exhibit in history books.

> Are you contending that human beings are generally very good at inconveniencing themselves and changing behaviour

When trust is lost in a system, it creates an opening for other systems, with different properties.

People don't choose inconvenience, but the failure of one system can motivate action beyond stable equilibria. People can then consider alternatives which may offer more convenience in some dimensions, less convenience (but other benefits) in other dimensions, and new properties which are not comparable between the two systems.

Most importantly, the loss of trust in one system creates an economic opportunity for competing systems, including investments that can change the calculus of convenience.

According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the general public is using more cash, not cashless.

Are cashless advocates in an HN bubble?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

Yet. Some fintech/crypto/CBDC proposals on the table are orders of magnitude more intrusive than anything in the history of money. Let's see how current events impact public perception. How many people have seen this clip from the IMF meeting in Oct 2020, where Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s

> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.

On a topic of interest to children everywhere, a June 2021 comment, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-...

> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”

It's very inconvenient if you can't buy food or pay your bills.

>We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.

if a person loses access to their account by government or banking ruling then they cannot take part in electronic payments. What is your solution to this? I mean obviously the solution is that governments and banks cannot just turn off access to your account, but that is not an answer, you need to explain all of the processes that will need to support this possibility, because obviously banks and governments do need to turn off access to accounts at times.

But if we allow cash as a fallback, then we already have a system that works. All the various rules and processes about cash have been worked out long ago, over generations!

replacing the security that cash provides for people not to starve or freeze because of any number of possible problems would be an incredibly expensive and error prone process.

Obviously the law would probably be more involved than that - but no matter what a law mandating the acceptance of cash would be simple and straightforwards because all the technology and processes for handling cash exist right now and would not need to be defined.

Other laws to protect people's rights in a cashless society seem like they would not be simple, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise, hence (and here I do not think you are really engaging with what I wrote) I suggested that if they had an idea of what these protections would be they should list them - why? Because it is not enough to say oh there should be some system to handle edge cases when there is already a system to handle edge cases but not at all delineate what the features of the proposed replacement system would be!

The cashless proponents, as opposed to mainly credit and small remaining cash usage, are like people who have a large enterprise system written in Fortran that works with very few problems for billions of transactions a year, handles down time and performance problems impeccably, but would like to rewrite the system because one type of transaction that the system handles is becoming less used (even though that type of transaction is the by default secure fallback should other transactions experience processing problems) and this seems like a really great time to modernize our architecture and infrastructure!

This is a prediction, not a historical fact. It is repeated in multiple comments on this HN article. Yet the Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR

Like others, I incorrectly assumed US was using less cash.

Cash is winning in the world reserve currency, and the cashless doth protest..

N=1.

No need to be condescendingly wrong. Contactless payments have been supported with Google Pay since wearOS 2 ( came out in September 2018) vs with Apple Pay since watchOS 5 ( came out in September 2018). Not every single thing is the result of Apple innovation - their chips are good, but for instance it took them years to copy Android's picture in picture mode.

And besides that, there are banks doing their custom payment apps and others which sell custom hardware to put on your keychain for small contactless payments.

Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!

The CBDCs are inevitably going to fail for the exact same reasons the central banks want them. The more control the central banks have, the more the CDBCs become merely 21st century company scrip and not currency. The more the central banks can arbitrarily reward and penalize you for political reasons, for social reasons, for economic engineering reasons, the more their "currency" fails to be currency on the most fundamental level of being a reliable store of value. People will realize they don't want them and they are too dangerous to hold.

But ye gods will they damage the world on the way to realizing this is too much control, because the once the elites think they have this, they aren't going to give this power up. They'll do everything they can to "ban" any other attempts at having ways of storing or conveying value until the whole system breaks, and they won't care, because even a failing system that they're still in charge of will be better than a system they aren't in charge of.

It is legal in most jurisdictions to give discounts when paying with cash. That is enough motivation to use cash for larger purchases, since it saves costs for both the merchant and the customer. The only loser is the now-redundant payment processor.

These proposals that we need to focus more on cash-ed people are mishearted & distracting from the core topic. Sure, a more cash-ready society is better able to help someone who has to rebuild their life, forced into a cash-carrying state. But it does nothing to prevent or remedy having your assets stripped from you by the whim of some megacorporation trying to improve their PR spin on a hot-topic.

People need assistance before being thrown to rock bottom by the corporation, not just after.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435574

In my circles, I often see people withdrawing out pocket money on a regular basis for small purchases, and using cash for large peer-to-peer purchases that they're unsure of the tax implications of. Cashless is largely reserved for restaurants and grocery stores.

With government reporting regulations hitting paypal and other fake banks, I bet this pattern will become more widespread. Just let somebody have to fill out an extra form on their taxes because of excessive bill-splitting; they'll change their habits instantly.

In the case where they don't accept credit, and I can't be bothered to go make the purchase somewhere else, I'll just tell them to take the dollar bill and keep the change. Not having to deal with loose coins is worth it.

How is carrying, paying with, and managing cash in your wallet more convenient than tapping a credit card or your phone?

The inconvenience of credit cards manifests itself after making the payment: when you're filling taxes, or when whatever information derived from your payments is used against you.

You're trading immediate versus delayed inconvenience.

At least that was the argument. I won't argue that most people will never feel these second order inconveniences.

From the point of view of the consumer, I don't think I've ever done anything differently in regards to tax paperwork with regards to differences in method of payment.

Even from the merchant's point of view, I would imagine credit card payments are easier to keep track of for documenting purposes. Unless, of course, your intention is tax evasion, which I know quite a few merchants (including family) do with cash.

In the generalised case, e.g. I need to pay my friend, or a builder, or a taxi driver, or someone at a market stall - essentially any standalone human, it's a complete mess. You need an account, so you need to decide whether you're an individual or a business, then you have that account, then you need a terminal for cards or an app or bank numbers for them to use an app to transfer or...

With cash: here is $20, done.

Cashless payments impose a bureaucratic structure which simply does not exist with cash. You give me thing I have thing, job done, bish bash bosh.

Unless, as I mentioned in another reply, your intention is to hide such transactions for whatever purpose - i.e. I know quite a few merchants use cash payments to avoid paying taxes.

But that's all from the merchant's perspective. From the consumer's perspective, how does any of what you mentioned above matter? I have an account, a friend has an account. I send him money via Venmo or Paypal or whatever. The middleman might take a trivial fee for the transaction, but it's so trivial I nor the recipient are likely to care, and is outweighed by the convenience factor over using cash.

With cash, we have to meet and exchange the money. Or use snailmail. With say Venmo, I open the app, press a few buttons, and my friend has the money in seconds even if he is physically hundreds of miles away.

If I'm paying a merchant, then I just swipe or tap my card to the reader, wait a few seconds. I get a receipt and I'm on my way. I'm old enough that I made a few online purchases by sending cashier's checks through the mail. It was not a pleasant experience.

But they very much don't have the money yet. The transaction may have posted (if you happened to have connectivity) but it hasn't settled. It may be blocked in all kinds of ways before they actually get the money. Their account might be suspended. The payment processor may simply decide to never pay it (paypal being infamous for this).

With cash, the moment the object and the bills change hands, the funds transfer has irrecovably settled without any external dependency being possible.

It isn't even remotely true. You might get mugged, you might lose money, you might get counterfeit money.

Cashless systems also have their own pre/post-transaction risks.

There is no consumer, or merchant, or hiding of transactions, or taxes, or Venmo, or Paypal, or any of this stuff.

I'm standing next to you and you have an apple. I give you $1 for apple. I don't care about any of that other shit, it's like this whole invented set of problems that you've got a whole lexicon for.

Yes, if I buy something online I don't send cash in the post. That should be bloody obvious.

Believe it or not, my wife is actually a proponent of cash transactions. She has not been able to convince me of the benefits either. We've agreed to disagree. She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.

"Accepting" credit card payments or bank transfers is meaningful. Accepting cash is not.

Anyone can by default accept cash. There is no-one who cannot accept cash. You don't even need to have like, hands to count it with, I can put it in your pocket.

In order to "not accept" cash you have to intentionally make the choice to be an arse and decline it.

By contrast digital stuff is this whole web of "need an account, need an app, need a terminal, need this, ...". It's not automatic.

It's like the difference between walking and having a car.

…

> She carries the cash, and to my benefit she spots me whenever we encounter a merchant that doesn't accept credit cards since I don't carry cash.

I’m having trouble understanding these sentences written together in such short succession. Are you being serious?

I rarely if ever carry cash. Nearly every transaction I make is via credit card. The only time I'll usually have cash is when traveling overseas (for emergencies, in the foreign currency, not USD). I find cash terribly inconvenient and annoying to use.

Meanwhile my wife loves using cash. I don't understand it. It's not for any privacy or idealogical reason - she says she just likes the old fashioned feel of handling physical money. She doesn't understand my dislike of using cash. As I said, we've agreed to disagree.

Every now and then when we're out together we'll encounter the rare merchant that doesn't accept credit card. Then she'll spot me with her cash. Otherwise we'll typically use our joint credit card. When she is out by herself she's much more likely to use the cash she always carries.

The only real advantage to cash is avoiding government overreach. It is most definitely not convenient in any way

It’s clearly to have difficult to trace accounting.

It’s a blip, but still, that exists and I don’t see that changing any time soon for those particular places.

That doesn't matter. If laws mandate that services must take cash then a cashless society is impossible, so people who choose not to go cashless can't be forced to give up cash. Hence the war on cash has been won, and cashless lost.

In SF, despite the laws, many businesses openly had a no-cash policy once the pandemic started. "Sorry, Credit Cards Only. Touching money might transmit Covid" is too easy of an argument, even though it's essentially a non-concern now. And I haven't seen businesses go back to accepting cash as lockdowns have ended. Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually try to enforce this law.

> Will be interesting to see if SF authorities actually start trying to enforce this law or not.

Great opportunity for a city journalist to assemble a news story. Collect footage to document their experiences across a diverse range of SF stores which do and don't accept cash.

If "peer" stores accept cash, have good traffic and happy customers, then cashless competitors may reconsider their stance.

Credit card processors charge a processing fee per transaction, but the overhead of physically managing cash and so on isn't free. I expect many stores will decide to stay cashless for that reason, no matter what their peers decide. Being cash-friendly or cash-only is not free, even if people do tend to think of it that way.

As for SF's law, I think it's worth bearing in mind that it was originally written as a shot at the Amazon Go stores.

You foisted a potential risk onto someone without power. Don't do that.

Any place big enough to afford having retail employees that I've been to in SF was always still taking cash.

There are companies which empower workers to make decisions.

I presume this[0] is that story... If i understand correctly, federal law also requires cash to be accepted to repay a debt, which perhaps interesting to some, usually includes restaurants; you eat your meal, and incur a debt doing so. Perhaps with takeout they could refuse to hand over the bag/box until its paid w a credit/debit card, which is their prerogative (except apparently in SF, NYC, ...).

[0] https://www.technocracy.news/cash-is-king-san-francisco-to-b...

It'll be interesting to see how this battle gets affected by the trucker protests. Historically such bills seem to be largely supported from a social justice point of view[1] (ie. "we need to force businesses to accept cash because cash-only shops are exclusionary to marginalized people"). With the canadian government freezing the bank accounts of freedom convoy protesters, this push could be also associated with the (alt-)right as well. This could translate to a bipartisan push to get accepting cash enshrined into law, or a situation where cash/crypto becomes a right wing dogwhistle, eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/bitcoi...

[1] based on a unscientific analysis of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/nyregion/nyc-cashless-ban...

The relevant sections were:

>because of financial circumstances, unwilling to for philosophical reasons or vulnerable to its darker aspects.

>“We are reining in the excesses of the digital economy.”

>But critics of cashless businesses say they discriminate against people who lack bank accounts and credit cards, while also raising the specter of hackers stealing personal data tied to digital transactions.

>Bronx households, the agency said, were around twice as likely not to have a bank account.

>“I worry about the real-world discriminatory effect that cashless business can have on New Yorkers, especially in communities of color,” Mr. Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said.

>“I think it’s incredibly discriminatory not to accept cash because some people can’t get credit,”

>“It is exclusionary,” she said, “because people without means are less likely to have a credit card.”

2 mentions of privacy/security, 6 mentions of social justice

In most countries a tax payment that is due counts as a debt so is covered by legal tender laws, which do require that people accept payment in cash. It may not be an option presented to you, but it is usually legally available to you, if someone is trying to enforce a debt such as payable tax.

Note that legal tender laws don't apply to a service or product that has not yet been provided - only debts - and also note that a business that has to enforce a debt and that you pay in cash may decline to do business with you in future.

Finally, note that not all currency is legal tender - for example Scottish bank notes are not legal tender, so you can't insist on paying your debts with them.

FYI I'm in France and here cash can only be used for taxes under 300€ [1]

Maybe if you don't pay and they start suing then some other laws allows you to reimburse the debt with cash for any amount.

With that said, I know we have some laws to allow everyone (most people?) to have a free bank accounts ("right to an account" [2]), and some other laws that prevent even the state to seize what you have on a bank account for debt reimbursement if it's lower than a certain amount (565.34€ - it's called the "unseizable amount" [3]).

I don't know if it's possible to freeze bank account as they did in Canada. I'd guess they would have to have approval from a Judge.

[1] https://www.impots.gouv.fr/particulier/les-autres-moyens-de-...

[2] https://particuliers.banque-france.fr/page-sommaire/droit-au...

[3] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1437

In fact, in Scotland, neither are English bank notes. (Technically there is legal tender in Scotland, but only Royal Mint coins, and Bank of England one pound notes, which are no longer circulated).

http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow10.htm

[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

As long as you can pay your taxes somehow with cash, I fail to see the problem? The tax office doesn't need to accept cash directly. I don't really see the problem if they delegate handling cash to banks or other institutions as long as no one can be denied access to those.

In practice that's bullshit and you know it. The .gov, be it state local or fed, has show time and time again that it's not above prosecuting someone for a "failure to X" crime of which the failure was caused by the .gov's own action.

Not directly, though it works with partner companies that accept cash for an extra fee, with limits on per-payment and per-day payments. [0]

> so that cash-based businesses that can't get a bank account can still pay.

It would seem to be impractical for a non-trivial business to work with the cash payments limits.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-with-cash-at-a-retail-partn...

https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

https://www.irs.gov/payments/what-to-expect-when-you-pay-cas...

[1] https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash

Sure, if you're willing to schlep all the way to the nearest IRS office to you that has a human in it that will take your cash. Which might be hundreds of miles away.

There are good reasons why most people prefer not to pay most things in cash.

Cash & digital can be complementary.

One post office trip per quarter: one money order per vendor, one batch of envelopes mailed.

Monthly online bills will have a negative balance to indicate the credit.

Zero data leaked to payment middlemen.

In the United States you can.

Almost all bills, utility and otherwise, can be paid for in cash at most supermarkets or other money-handling businesses. ("Currency exchanges" in Chicago, or whatever your local equivalent is.)

Also, every utility company I've had serving my last five apartments has had a public lobby where people can make cash payments. I suspect even cell phone bills can be paid with cash at a cell phone company's retail store.

So long as you are on a post-paid account you don't even need this. If you are on a post-paid plan of any sort, it's a debt. You have the legal right (via the Coinage Act) to pay that debt via cash regardless of any systems they might not have setup to do so.

It's a fun game to play sometimes to remind institutions of this fact, and usually rouses some bored corporate counsel from their slumber to first argue with you, then apologize.

Probably doesn't really help build a great business relationship, however.

If money is speech, does it mean cash is protected by the 1A?

How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash.

There are bills being worked on at the federal level.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395

The machines fall back to credit/debit only when they need to restocked with cash or coins, or if the machine needs to be serviced. Some stores don't want to pay for the labor needed to maintain their cash features.

The last time I was in a Walmart was over a year ago, but their machines took cash.

They do where I live.

All of the purpose build self checkout machines at Home Depot are cashless but all the ones that can be operated by an employee do cash when in self checkout mode.

It is an important matter! Needs to be worked through, rights established and enforced.

It's lost because they’re mostly legislating that “storefront” businesses must accept cash when both having storefronts and accepting cash are things businesses are less interested in. So, what they have actually done is accelerate the death of storefronts rather than assure that cash is usable.

As far as cashless society winning, I dunno, I'm definitely worried about that outcome, but it's straight up illegal in my state to not to accept cash in a retail establishment and a good number of bars I go to don't accept cards at all. I use cash all the time and I find it way more convenient than a credit or debit card. My wallet doesn't randomly prevent me from opening it at a grocery store I have been to a thousand times and stop me from paying for groceries.

One of my least favorite experiences was telling my banks that I was going to travel so that they don't freeze my accounts for "suspicious activity" when I start spending money at my destination, and then having them freeze my accounts anyway when I got there after trying to pay for dinner. Caused a problem with the hotel and the place I rented a car from, too.

I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me.

Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper.

There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cash and so you don't have cash. Try harder.

I'm not going to argue against cash existing, but "swipe the machine" works 98 times out of 100. For the other 2 times, yeah carry some cash on you. I think it's a very good system of last resort, but especially in places with contactless payments cash is less practical

I guess my note book is less "convenient" than notepad.exe. More moving parts.

We're just not on the same page here, sorry, I don't get it at all. It's like, are we counting the waves of the hands or what? I'm literally here now and I've just pressed about 300 buttons to write this message, are movements rationed?

"That'll be $15.77"

Option 1: I look in my wallet and find a ten and a five, put my hand in my pocket and grab a few coins, hand those over. The cashier takes the cash, taps a number into the till, finds the right change and hands it back. Is it arduous, hard labour and the end of the world? No of course not, but it is what it is.

Option 2: I look at my phone to unlock it and wave it over the thingy. Job done. I don't even have to remember to withdraw cash from the bank before I go.

It's easier and quicker, for you and for the cashier. The shop knows it too, particularly supermarkets - they encourage people to use faster payment methods so they can shave even a few seconds off a transaction and push more transactions through at peak times.

All this compared to touching the card/phone/watch to the terminal, and perhaps putting in your pin/fingerprint/face ID.

Again, not saying cash is hard, we've all used it and you get used to it. But it's objectively harder than contactless by any definition.

Of course, cash has other clear advantages in terms of privacy, censorship resistance etc.

And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.

I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.

Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.

Granted, if you are fluent in local language you can get a mobile number and bank account in less than an hour if you go first thing in the morning to beat the lines, but for tourists who do not speak Chinese it is basically damn near impossible to navigate setting all that up.

That said, international tourism isn't a big revenue generator, they care FAR more about the domestic tourism market, which is many times bigger. Foreign tourists are largely an afterthought.

Even now, domestic tourists can just tap their national ID card to board trains but tourists usually have to stand in line to buy paper tickets, or even if you get your bank account and all set up to buy tickets online, you'll still need to stand in line to print out the ticket because the electronic readers at train boarding gates don't support reading passports or foreign IDs of any sort.

Goes beyond that. The visa process is the most intense of any major country (if you have a high ranking passport). WeChat (the only way to communicate) requires you to be invited by someone else already in country. Street signs aren't in English, neither are any public transport aids. You can't communicate, can pay for things, can't find your way around (once you leave the cities no one speaks English). It was incredibly hard to travel there.

To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.

There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.

If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.

Does anyone have that as a realistic expectation?

> There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.

Except English has a relatively small "native" footprint, not that many speak it as their mother tongue. There are many more secondary speakers of English than primary in the world. If the popularity of English was the result of colonialism, none of the above would apply.

> If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.

Are you implying that travelers to China (say with a Latin language as a base) should realistically try and learn basic Chinese for a weeks holiday? Do you have any idea how long that would take?

In a few short years or decades it will be more convenient to simply plug yourself into the wall. What then?

"We" simply accept that the real world is too inconvenient? Too resource intensive, too difficult, too ugly?

You do you, boo, I ain't down for that.

Of course, this doesn't mean that a technology that provides convenience can't come with hidden costs, and the cashless society indeed comes with risks. That's where the interesting debate is IMO, but the fact that people value convenience is quite reasonable and not new.

Using cash is not actually inconvenient though.

I often find that people use the term "convenient" to mean "more pleasing to me" which is completely different.

It's not more convenient for me to buy milk from Amazon than it is for me to get it from my corner shop, it might be more pleasing if I didn't like seeing or talking to people. Those are two different things.

By contrast if I had to wash my clothes in a river it would take me literally hours of manual labour every week and they wouldn't be as clean.

It's a total non issue. You probably have a bank card or phone in your pocket or on your desk.

Some of us even use _note books_. Insane, I know.

Which you, at some point, had to withdraw from an ATM. And which slows down your transaction time at a checkout.

I do have a phone in my pocket. I would have my phone in my pocket anyway. It's great that it now means I don't need to manage bits of paper and metal too.

Also freezing of your funds can benefit you -- if the bank notices suspicious withdrawals they will freeze your account to prevent you from being cleaned out.

It's never okay to take someone's money/property without any court decision (and that should include civil forfeiture). But freezing shouldn't necessarily be lumped into that because it has valid usages. There just needs to be proper regulations and consequences.

Unfortunately you are probably right. The history of computing clearly shows that convenience beats absolutely everything including privacy, security, and autonomy. The most convenient option almost always wins regardless of any other factors.

Another counter point is that cash is arguably easier and more convenient in some aspects for some people.

Maybe you could possibly argue this way if upon freezing their accounts they called them up and said "Hey, your account is closed, come pick up your cash", but I'm pretty sure that is not the case here, and it is rather more like a civil-asset-forfeiture situation, where they'll likely need to go to court to regain access.

Now, all that being said, this is Canada, so I don't honest know whether there is an equivalent to the 5th amendment in their charter of rights, or whether there is some legal weasel word (e.g. "reasonable") that somehow provides a loophole for all this.

But behave if you want to actually legally drive any of them.

You are the enemy.

Govt mandates businesses carry insurance, insurance company releases list of Bitcoin wallets that their patrons are forbidden to have interacted with. Done.

Insurance against what risk? The risk of receiving money that was once owned by a criminal? If the government is going to make that illegal, then you can just list that as your concern, without introducing the extra complexity of insurance companies.

Yeah with no internet at all, Bitcoin along with all modern financial infrastructure breaks down.

Don't see how any government could reasonably pressure enough nodes in that way, particularly ones that are in other jurisdictions.

I hate these solutions to all of the various problems. These governments and corporations don't care about any of these laws, make up new laws whenever they want, ignore laws whenever they want. You can't just undo millions of people using a system of physical money, but you can undo laws instantly, or not even follow them. All of the solutions to these types of modern societal problems have to be solved in a way that isn't just a few words in a piece of paper, because the people in charge can never be trusted.

We need but we can't have. Governments and lobby groups are slowly eroding the rights and freedoms.

And even if we theoretically have those rights, who is to enforce them?

That's the nature of rights and it's important to consider rights in this fashion because it shapes our ideas about what is acceptable in terms of obstruction and denial

That's a definition you accept, which is not a useful definition to me.

There are rights that are not inherent and sometimes the legal and moral mix. eg I don't have the right to take an organ from a human who has not yet suffered systemic death, unless they have gone through a process that includes giving consent to that process that may allow the organ to end up under my purview AND I accept it.

There are rights which are fundamental. Saying "definition", as if it is a flexible description does not satisfy the reality. These rights are defined by the fact that they are inherent.

Your example is a perfectly described granted right. You have been granted the right to something which is not yours and you have no other right to take.

The distinction is important. There is no moral hazard nor wrong committed in preventing someone from harvesting organs without permission. There is a wrong perpetrated when someone has been restricted in their speech or movement.

The usefulness, as you say, lies in the treatment of these things as distinctly different in nature

That is long overdue.

However, until we actually do move past this "wild west" digital time, rejecting it is reasonable and prudent behavior.

And those can't ever be breached, right?

We can't be trusted to honour written laws and contracts. We've shown that time and time again. The best way is to remove the possibility or at least the temptation to do it by making it too hard to violate. Physical cash has that property, as does a trustless digital cash based on cryptocurrency (I'm not sure what the best one is in this respect).

Tell that to Justin Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act in Canada and where he immediately started freezing bank accounts of peacefully protesting Cabadians under the falsely built narrative that they are "terrorists" or "funding terrorists" - all without court order.

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

This also directly solves the issue of op. Cryptocurrencies are a stop gap solution to this, but known transaction histories and inherently poor fraud prevention make them poor digital cash replacements. Today Ecuador is shilling bitcoin, but imagine if they instead sold tier 2 citizenships, no taxes no welfare type, with new and independent identities. Pay 5000$ and get a new identity and passport, along with an account in one of our many banks, or which can be used to set up an account in an international bank. Sure you wont get to share credit scores with your main identity... Various international laws mean it wont be called exactly this, perhaps its a fee for the creation of a minimum accounting requirement corporation with hidden controller instead (and trying to prevent these is already ongoing but it does not work), but it does not matter in practice. As long as it satisfies the conditions of being able to make transactions easily, has a dispute mechanism with centralized authority with the self serving interest to remain independent, etc.

I'd wager that the majority of identity thefts arent performed in order to steal money from that identity or ever even cause any damage to the original identity. They are performed in order to get around travel and work restrictions. Lets say you are from ukraine or belarus, now getting a work visa equivalent to germany or france is kindof a pain in the ass, in particular doing so quickly, but buying a stolen passport from e.g. rumania isnt hard, and all you are doing is setting up a single french debit account in that name and working under that identity. Odds are that kind of thing gets discovered 30 years latter when the original identity realizes they are getting a small pension from some job in france they never had. But why would they care.

Massively expanded surveillance states could prevent this, but while that will be the case in china, places like the usa are just to discoordinated, and the eu is actively working against it to the point both google and facebook are no longer asking. How can we make our ads better, but rather how can we keep ad quality with much less information per user.

you mean those that are taken away by governments at the blink of an eye?

Whatever your laws will say, the politician will find an emergency to justify bypassing it. We all saw what happened with COVID. The only viable choice is not to have such powerful governments in the first place.

Contrary to the parent poster, I really think we do need the anarcho-libertarian dream - and it doesn't mean we should't have private justice or private protection: it just means this power shouldn't be wielded centrally (eg. by having private competing companies).

Very much this. It is disappointing and scary to see tech people, of all groups, who like this idea.

Cash is a perfect currency. It is strictly peer to peer, fully fungible, can't be blocked or censored by any party, anonymous, has no dependency on anything (still works when the electricity and internet are down).

In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.

This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment.

Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.

I don't think you realize how cashless society really is. For a long time, we've been running on fiat money, debt, and other forms of monetary constructs that are, for all intents and purposes, just numbers in some database without the backing of physical bills. Imagine coordinating all of the stakeholders for a condominium building project with only paper currency; it'd be a madness only marginally better than bartering.

The idea of rejecting a cashless society is eerily similar to Project Mayhem from the movie Fight Club, with all the chaotic anarchy that supposedly comes with it.

It's about being able to pay for basic needs (rent, bills, food) via cash.

This is not some impossible crazy thing. Cash was used for >90% of purchases including weekly bills not that long ago whilst skyscrapers and big business deals didn't involve briefcases of cash being thrown around.

If you want to argue for a world where said attack vector isn't possible, then you're implicitly arguing for a world where people literally stash money under their mattress as a standard model of security, but that implies constructs like mortgages can't exist. Point being, how money is represented has a big impact on how society is able to function.

I mean, if that's the only scenario you care about, you can just carry more cash in your wallet.

But when you said "a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button", that sounded like you were worried about more than just not having enough money for groceries for the week.

One thing many don't realise is just how difficult the banks have made this for us now.

The money supply consists of three parts: physical cash, digital central brank reserves, and digital private bank money. This is how it is in the UK, but the US will be roughly the same.

Physical cash, everyone knows. It's printed (and destroyed) by the government. Digital central bank reserves exist in a ledger kept by the government which private banks use to settle up every night (to handle inter-bank transfers). Digital private bank money is money created by private banks when they issue loans. It is what exists between someone taking out a loan and paying back the loan.

Digital bank money is about 80% of the money supply. Central bank reserves about 18%. Physical cash: 2-3%.

The banks have inflated the money supply so much it's simply not possible to live with cash for most people any more. Assuming someone pays rent, it's not unusual to get paid in digital bank money and for 40% of that to be digitally transferred to your landlord. None of this ever becomes physical. There simply isn't enough physical money to go around.

How do we stop this? It would take a huge government intervention and a brave one. Society is on the brink of chaos at any moment and everyone is too afraid to rock the boat.

I'm 39; so maybe too young to have experienced that but how does it even practically work? Did your landlord pop round once a month? For utility bills, did you go to the bank and ask them to transfer cash to a utility company; or maybe at a post office? Or did the utility company send someone around to collect cash payments?

I have a bank account. You give me £100 and tell me to send £100 to 00273 00338435. Done.

As other posters have said, in many countries this is a Service(tm) but generally, unless you've gimped payments anyone can just do this.

Bills - Pay in cash at the Post Office

In Australia I still see people in Post Offices waiting to pay their bills. Some simply haven't got out of the habbit yet..

All fiat means is that it is unbacked by physical things, such as gold or silver.

Fight Club is satire.

Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.

Cashless is going to happen. The convenience gain is too large for it not to. Cryptocurrency is the only way to preserve any semblance of genuine sovereignty in a cashless world. It is a technological necessity.

And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not. Governments might even ban cash one day.

This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The problem is that people are still waking up slowly. For me the Cyprus bail-in in 2013 was the wake-up call that I need full ownership of my assets.

I agree with your broader point, which is why I prefer monero.

Implementing Schnorr signatures was a great way to get closer to fungibility improvements, as it paves the path for signature batching, which can make CoinJoin cheaper than a single transaction, and will change the incentives towards making Bitcoin fungible by default for every user.

Monero is fungible.

Source?

Bitcoin should and will die, but in its place a thousand flowers will bloom.

FYI, you can have BTC asset without Bitcoin network in trust-less manner TODAY. See recent paper by Leona Hioki on the way to do it using Witness Encryption cryptographic scheme.

We can't. Too many transactions are conducted remotely now, and you can't send cash over a phone line or over the Internet. And having those transactions remote is not just a minor convenience; in many cases the transactions would not happen at all if they had to happen in person, and a lot of wealth creation would not take place.

The simple answer is, as the article says, to view freezing people's bank accounts and credit cards as a punishment at least as serious as imprisonment, and to view doing it without first having a trial as at least as serious as imprisoning people indefinitely without trial. Right now most people do not view it that way, and governments reach for freezing assets as a tool of first resort because they do not view it as having serious political consequences. That is what needs to change.

Agreed.

Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs.

Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal for a retail business to refuse cash.

Maybe those businesses saved 0.006¢ on the transaction by not accepting cash. But they lost thousands because a fat guy isn't going to buy cookies there in the future.

They go cashless because it eliminates the threat of robbery. Them proudly having signs everywhere saying they were cashless is to announce to the would be theif there is no cash payday here..

Most businesses that do that have a history of robbery.

I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway.

So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse.

It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.

Through mistakes and malice money will disappear.

On top of that you have to spend a not insignificant amount of manager time counting and running money to and from the bank. If you deal with large amounts of cash then you get to file CTRs frequently.

In addition to all that you have to deal with the physical infrastructure. Cash drawers, safes, money bags, etc…

Having worked in both retail and in banks I can promise that cash is a major pain point.

I'm not sure where you are but in the US the banks will charge a few percent + 10c, its adds up to a lot of money. Plus you dont need to pay people to count/store cash, or get robbed which adds big savings.

You also don't need to use an attempt at humor about fat people to add authority to your argument.

Try not to invent imaginary offenses on behalf of strangers.

Then you should fight the good fight of making cash great again! :P

This is why cryptocurrencies were invented in the first place. They were supposed to emancipate us by providing private and anonymous digital cash that's free from government and bank control. Most of them failed at actually protecting us from anything but there are projects out there that are still trying, such as Monero. We should support these technologies instead of trying to turn back the clock.

We need to reject them instead. Just start using cryptocurrency for everything and cut them out.

They'll just pressure all businesses not to accept your crypto.

Just the airlines, banks, any payment processor, any gold bullion dealers, any supermarkets, any restaurants, any car rentals, any car dealers. Probably can be done in less than 10 lines of regulation. Nobody is going to risk jail for your crypto.

What then? You are going to invent some tech that will somehow make totalitarian government impossible?

Oh How the tide have turned.

You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash.

Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.

[1] http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/no-spike-in-suspicious-trans...

Despite this, the government has been able to do this.

But you can't as long as the cashless society is forced upon you. At most you can try to take refuge on currencies which aren't controlled by governments like crypto. But since crypto is very volatile, it isn't a practical thing to do. You can try to buy precious metals or other things you can easily sell for cash if the need arises.

Too bad nobody invented a stable crypto currency meant to only facilitate trade as opposed to speculation.

That’s exactly what gigolo chains were designed for. Police would confiscate your cash, but not your jewelry, so carrying around jewelry allowed you to post bail fairly easily (also why bail bondsmen deal in lots of jewelry). The use of gold jewelry as backup money is also common in India where people are less confident in the local currency.

Are you suggesting that every single online business that exists should have a mailing address to mail cash or checks, and have people to process them?

I imagine that you pay for software in some form, as an example of a digital good. Do we need to go back to burning CDs and buying software in physical stores with physical money?

Reject it all you want, but there is no going back.

Let's do the opposite example now: Do you >need< to use anything besides cash when you shop for groceries, pay some toilet tax when you're on the highway, or similar trivial things?No, you don't.The option of providing an alternative payment method is up to the merchant.The only institutions that are required to provide cash options are the government ones(at least where I live).You don't provide that?I sue and I win, for obvious reasons.

People want to think about cash/cashless in terms of black and white, yes or no.I used to be pro-cashless and certainly I am in some regards depending on the wanted product/service.Yet I limited my use to being restrictive because there are way more loopholes to be rendered bankrupt and have no money available.There are certainly risks to cash aswell, and yet more advantages when buying products/services in-person.

Some types of goods you can only buy over the internet, like software, and this trend will only continue.

I think MoneyGram/Western Union are a great counterpoint, but while anonymous, I consider that more similar to cashless than cash: you have to input cash into a machine and… transmit it over the internet.

I also agree it is not a binary thing.

Cashless is great as a convenience option, or when there are time sensitive factors.

But it is important that these fungible cryptocurrencies are as cash-like as possible. So, no global ledger.

Someone was arguing that we should reject a cashless society, and I was making an argument that it is impossible to do at this point.

The only solution is to have a digital currency as close to cash as possible.

Ethereum (on its own) does not meet this requirement. It is perfectly fungible, but still has a global ledger that can be used to track transactions. It is important that people move to standard L2s that don’t have a record of every transaction.

Bitcoin is actually not fungible in the first place. The Lightning network does provide transaction privacy, though.

By “no global ledger” I should have clarified: there might be a need for a global ledger, but it should be missing all consumer transactions.

Dont worry, soon everything from your toaster to your car will be internet connected and will be disabled on command

so much this. I simply do not want my money to be easy to spend. I want to enter a pin code and carry a physical card. That creates engagement which raises my awareness of what I am spending.

Same with cash, when you count it out, it creates engagement and awareness of what you are spending.

I'm sorry but I don't think that is true, unless people lose this understanding by the time are eligible to vote or obtain higher education that is.

You really wouldn't says that if you've been locked, it's one of the worst thing in the world, even more so when it's unfair -- this is a progress.

And it was abused fairly quickly. The problem is that people don't really seems to understand that this is a problem even if they do not support the current cause. I hope this is an educational instead of a neurological issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

That pressure is already there in many subtle ways.

We got at such stage in history which is impossible even to have an honest debate about freedom without having legal problems and risking our careers to just end. Let's hope internet still a safe place for this for a while.

Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience.

The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.

Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting.

The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics.

One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance.

Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abuses and risks other payment forms bring to the table.

I do not connect payments to my phone for example. Everyone I know who did has a story to tell about how doing that cost them.

I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the personnel and infrastructure to support all or most of their customers paying in person, in cash, the costs of the things I'm actually paying them for would go way up.

Sure, if you're going out for coffee and you'd rather pay with cash, it's a hassle if the coffee shop doesn't accept it. But that just means you go and find another coffee shop that does. That's a very different issue than the issue of cutting off people's access to non-cash methods of payment, which is what the article under discussion is talking about.

Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.

Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts.

And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.

The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication and I frankly tire of that discussion. You're talking about moving small physical things, it's a solved problem, everything around you right now is a small physical thing.

edit: posters are responding about the businesses that exist in their area. by this token it's "inconvenient" for me to use cash because the japanese place down the road doesn't take it. well no, they're just being dicks, there's no _fundamental_ inconvenience.

I've never heard of any bank offering that service.

> no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.

Agreed. But it should also be recognized that there are many people who have good reasons to use payment methods other than cash in many situations.

> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication

No one is claiming that cash is always inconvenient. Just that for many people in many situations, it is.

> You're talking about moving small physical things

If I have to go pay my bills in person, I have to move me, not just some pieces of paper. And if I pay my bills electronically while I'm sitting at my desk at home, I don't have to move anything at all.

I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.

I have online banking on my phone, if you wanna give me cash to send it to someone, no problem, why not.

Exactly.

No need to interact with any of those pesky humans.

Either the other user was uninformed or my sarcasm detector is broken today.

No, I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.

When there's a new bill for the services you added, it's displayed on a list with checkboxes right beside each one of them. Check the ones you want to pay, click Pay, and you're done. It's linked directly to your bank account. The website was created by a bank consortium.

Is a service like that what you're talking about?

> I said I had never heard of any bank offering the service of taking all the account numbers of all the bills I have to pay and paying them for me out of my bank account.

I wasn't talking about cash deposits. I was talking about paying bills. I can't go to my bank and give them the account numbers of all my bills and have the bank pay them for me. If I wanted to pay each bill in cash, I would have to schlep to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them.

For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.

The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.

Banks do offer bill pay services, you just set it up and they mail a check every month. To your point, I don't think there's a way to get your bank to send the recipient cash every month, but I feel like that's a moot point since your cash is already in the banking system at that point.

Telephone banking used this before internet banking.

So don't use it. Non issue right?

Otherwise, dealing with the public comes with some costs. The benefit is being able to do business and turn a profit.

Picking and choosing is an abuse of the public.

I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.

This has nothing to do with sitting at my desk. Using cash would mean spending my Saturday at one of the least interesting location I can think of.

I never said any of those things. And the idea that schlepping around all over the place to pay monthly bills in person is the best way to get physical exercise is laughable.

> physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite

IMO your posts read a lot more like GPT-3 than mine.

Coming soon for this market, "brain in a jar". Upload your consciousness into an Altered Carbon simulation, Source Code time loop or immortal-gaming-AI Daemon.

After gig economy workers unionize and raise delivery fees, hopefully they won't hire a mercenary army to enforce Code of Customer Conduct.

> The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication.

That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.

>That's a strong statement without considering that your experience might not match others'.

IMHO, both the original statement and the respond are opinions. It may well be the case that cash is universally not “hilariously inconvenient.” Without some empirical evidence, it is just a shouting match.

In my opinion, cash is actually very convenient to use and encourages reflections on spending habits.

He's saying that using cash is inconvenient because no-one uses cash where he is.

I'm saying that it's not because at its' core it's fundamentally just handing over a bit of paper.

It's not a statement about how many people accept cash where I am. I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.

There also seems to be this bonkers strawman thing going on whereby loads of people seem to think I'm saying "don't ever make a non-cash transaction" which is bloody stupid. It's like, _a priori obvious_ that it's stupid. I hate this aspect of online discourse - if the thing you think I'm saying logically makes no sense, then I probably am not actually saying that thing.

No, it's handing over bits of paper at the particular physical location of the person or entity you are paying. For some transactions, like paying for your food at a restaurant, that's no problem because you're there anyway. For other transactions, like paying monthly bills, it is a problem.

Literally, if you were standing next to me, you can give me 10 quid and I can send someone else that ten quid. You have paid them ten quid using cash, reasonably anonymously in a way that cannot be easily blocked or censored as long as cash exists.

This becomes far, far less convenient or feasible if we only have barter and now you need to find someone that accepts some arbitrary valuable object of a value that isn't exactly the amount you want to send.

No-one is arguing that electronic transactions are not useful, this is a strawman. It makes no logical sense, so perhaps you should consider that I'm not making that argument.

And as soon as I use a bank for this, I am no longer protected against law enforcement preventing me from paying my bills and supporting myself, which was supposed to be the whole point of using cash in the first place. Law enforcement can block banks from making digital transactions on my behalf just as easily as they can freeze my accounts at those same banks.

I feel like people want this centralized vision of money. Just give someone cash to do a transfer.

Why so bureaucracy? What's the point?

I was just describing the fact that it's not some sort of crazy idea to pay bills using cash. If HN weren't full of 21 year olds we wouldn't even be having this chat, it's like these guys forgot that not even that long ago we just paid each other with envelopes at the end of the week/month.

Like, they're literally saying that you can't do X, where X is something that most of us did less than 50 years ago, and no we didn't spend half of our days running around.

No, I'm not. I'm saying using cash is inconvenient for me for things like paying my monthly bills because it would require me to physically go to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them in person. Whereas with a credit card I can pay all my monthly bills in a few minutes from my desk at home. Even if my utility company, for example, would accept cash in payment (as they probably would since most companies offering basic services like that are required by law to accept cash), I wouldn't do it because of the huge increase it would be in time and effort every month. I have better things to do with my time than schlep around all over the place to pay bills in person.

> I can't easily pay my mortgage with cash directly either. The point is that it's not an insurmountably difficult thing.

You're shifting your ground. Before you were saying that using cash wasn't inconvenient. Now you're saying it is for some things, like paying your mortgage. Which is exactly my point.

We could solve this problem with an a service where you'd be able to pool all the money you intend to spend on bills, and then the service would handle getting the cash to each individual company. :)

That money could even accrue 0.001% monthly interest, while it's waiting to get spent on bills.

If I don't have coffee in the cupboard is it inconvenient to drink coffee or is it just that I don't have coffee in the cupboard?

If you're arguing that it's inconvenient, then okay, that's your definition of the word.

I'm really not interested in arguing about definitions of words and neither should you be.

Project much?

The shop refusing cash is not accepting legal tender for all debts public and private.

I raised that issue and my local shop does now take cash.

And you lose nothing by having more options, including cash. Nobody said you need to pay only with cash.

I do this and all my friends have done this, and I haven’t heard any costing stories. I guess you could be in some kind of high risk group or area for digital theft (Russia?), but I’m curious what specific things have happened to all your friends.

This 2015 post suggests that in 2014, civil forfeiture exceeded burglary.

> Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually... Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, .... According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_...

I'd love to see evidence that the tide is turning, hopefully you have some.

They legally cannot, at least not in the USA, and I doubt in most countries. Thanks to the legal tender laws, businesses cannot legally refuse the legal tender, especially in its cash form. Once a deal is made and cash is offered, service must be rendered or it is considered stolen. A fun way to exploit this (before coin machines) was to go to tow truck lots, offer pennies, and then report grand theft auto to the local sheriff when they refused.

Debt

If they pay prior, not debt.

And yeah, there are times I would not choose your establishment and recommend others avoid it as well.

Being able to use cash is a basic thing I value highly. I realize we disagree, and we get to do that too.

No worries, but just know while you do you, I'm doing me.

Wish it were different.

You sure about that? Currently Chicago's mayor is trying to bring it back.

They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis.

It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.

Businesses being forced to accept all the risk and inconvenience of accepting cash to protect people from having their assets is somewhere between a security theater and a straight up pipe dream.

Also, there are a million other regulations that businesses have to deal with from license and insurance to the number of fire extinguishers. Asking businesses to accept cash is not a life-or-death decision from a business cost point of view. If anything, it means more potential customers and better PR.

Socratically, consider what would have happened if Trudeau would have had to send in the army to violently remove property from all of these people.

I'll submit that a different, far more reasonable solution would have been arrived at.

It’s harder to steal properly secured non-custodial cryptocurrency/asset wallets.

e.x. multisig or Shamir’s Secret Sharing, brainwallets or passphrase encrypted wallets, etc

Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.

If you have police seizing assets for bad reasons, allowing them to automate the process is going to make things worse, not better.

Not to mention that accounts can also be locked (at least temporarily) via software bugs, overzealous security processes and identity theft, all of which happen all the time. Cashless society is a horrible idea on so many separate levels I'm not even sure why this debate is happening.

It's not like having cash prevents you from also having a bank account and cards. No, we're debating something that's a pure reduction of personal choice.

In all seriousness, I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state. Obviously there's a whole lot of baggage with the current cryptocurrencies out there today, but there's no reason we have to resort to carrying around pieces of paper or voting for the right people to ensure our assets and livelihood are outside of the reach of the state (at least without going through the proper legal channels).

Turns out that governments do not like anonymous cryptocurrency at all.

The reason why surveillance-state-centered interests cannot ban cash is that the public wouldn't stand for it. It's too ingrained in the culture and economy. The same needs to happen with private cryptocurrencies. We need MetaMask to adopt a confidential transaction standard the same way the major websites adopted HTTPS over a decade ago. We still have time as the financial mass-surveillance laws in place were designed for trusted third party financial intermediaries, and not peer-to-peer finance.

If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.

People who have bought through sites like these have often found amazon refuses to honour warranties etc on the purchased goods, and when they've dug a little deeper it's been because the real cardholder or account holder has flagged the transaction as fraudulent.

"Haircuts"[2] are regularly floated as solutions in financial crises. Just because it didn't happen during the last crisis, doesn't mean that it won't happen during the next.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)

What a foolish strawman. As if people were to carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.

Nevada Cops Use Civil Forfeiture To Steal a Veteran’s Life Savings.

https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432736

Not anyone with any substantial wealth, ofc. But I thought it was worth saying out loud.

How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!

Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that.

In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end.

I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.

There are a lot of people who are invested via their job, their business or their literal investments, into cashless payments. Big public companies like Apple and Google have made billion dollar investments in cashless payments, and a lot of people hold their stock and/or work for them.

There are hundreds of news stories like this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-a...

Police departments often get to keep a large share of money taken during civil forfeiture. You bet this creates moral pressure to bring in more cash.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-...

Mirror: https://archive.fo/T4tgR

Money is fungible, and if you fund some <good cause> with <particular tax/fee/whatever>, all that means is that funding that was previously earmarked for <good cause> would get spent on <some less good cause>.

The solution to highway robbery and grift is not earmarking revenue, the solution is hanging the robbers and grifters off the mile posts.

If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?

Also... drug dealers are cashless, they are using Monero! :D Ha!

In US but not in other developed countries! Do not generalize.

no

> I'll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.

your "inconvenience" is the result of modern slavery

you get to not have to work hard because some other poor kid will produce everything you need, he won't get to have your "inconvenience"