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...
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.
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!
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.