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?
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.
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.
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.