Completely agree. While there's nothing wrong with digital payments, a society without cash just terrifies me. I don't have much to hide, but I don't want every action I take with money to be traceable and that data of what I do with my money to be available to all sorts of private interests without my express written consent. No corporation should get to know if I tip my barber, waiter, uber driver, etc... in cash let alone if I decide to buy a bag of weed.
I prefer to keep a bit of cash on me for many reasons, and I don't think it's appropriate for any organization to tell me 1. that I can't; and/or 2. that they have the right to know what I'm using it for (or that they have the ability to deny my ability to use my capital in whatever ways I desire).
We're not China. As someone who worked with Chinese nationals, even some of them who were complete simps for The Party had no desire to have all their finances completely digitized and tracked.
Modern economies have a need for cash, no matter what big banks or credit card companies or FinTech companies think.
> As someone who worked with Chinese nationals, even some of them who were complete simps for The Party had no desire to have all their finances completely digitized and tracked.
Heck, even if I/they were ok with the government tracking them, our current big private payment networks (Visa/Mastercard) actively track you and sell your transaction data to buyers - I really don't want that.
Unless and until Visa/Mastercard/et al are legally forbidden from selling or sharing your transaction data, there will always be a legitimate use for cash, and it's immoral to not take cash payments.
I have everything to hide from corporations. If they want my data they have to pay me. Why are governments forcing me to feed a database owned by some corporation for free? Every product you buy and pay for collects data about you. Now they want to know everything i buy from other people and corporations too. Guaranteed transaction data will be made available to the highest bider. Crazy times.
> As someone who worked with Chinese nationals, even some of them who were complete simps for The Party had no desire to have all their finances completely digitized and tracked.
HA! Reminds me of Bertolt Brecht's postwar life when he returned to East Germany. In public, good socialist playwright who wrote laudatory letters to the SED, in private, critic of Stalinism... the great firewall between the two? The East German authorities let him keep a Swiss bank account and Austrian citizenship, so he could hold the earnings from his plays out of their reach.
Sure, but that also means that taxes on those businesses are burdensome to the point where it's better to not accept digital payments or credit cards.
Or people just don't want to pay inflated prices just so a payment processing company gets a nice % of every single purchase.
As I said in another post in this thread, I myself run a small business, and the vast majority of my sales are done through digital payments. I have no problem with this, but if I was to cut the payment platforms' fee, I could offer much better prices without having to take a hit on my margins (which themselves are sustainable and healthy, but not fantastic). It's not about me bypassing taxes, it's about providing a better price to my customers.
I'm paying the same taxes, yes, but on top of taxes, I'm paying a cut of each (pre-tax) sale to the CC company or payment processing platform (Stripe, for example, charges 2.3% of each transaction). That cut, while it might seem like pennies to a customer (because in a sense, it literally is roughly a quarter for a given $10 charge) but over time and at scale, those cuts really add up.
If my revenue is say, $1m, that's roughly $23k that a CC or payment processor gets right off the bat, so I'm paying taxes on the $1mm but the cut takes a nice hit off my end profits. That $23k would be infinitely more valuable if I could reinvest it in my workforce, my product, my team, or myself.
I'm not a restaurant but I am a food service provider. I wish I could go cash-only but that would restrict who I do business with, which at the stage I'm at, is not really an option.
>If my revenue is say, $1m, that's roughly $23k that a CC or payment processor gets right off the bat, so I'm paying taxes on the $1mm but the cut takes a nice hit off my end profits.
If you are talking U.S. income tax, that is incorrect. You are not paying taxes on $1 million, rather you are paying taxes on $977K since the payment processing fees are tax-deductible.
I always wonder if processor terms force vendors not to offer a separate cash price (or cash discount) or if it's just the pain of doing it that makes it not super common. I only use points cards because I'm trying to claw back the premium for everybody using credit. I'd love to just pay less in the first place and do cash everywhere.
In the US, processor terms and state laws often prohibited charging processing fees, but a cash discount was ok. Recent court decisions support merchants charging processing fees or offering cash discounts, and most merchant agreements and state laws have been updated to be compliant.
There's rules about the fees and making sure things are transparent to customers, but I think merchants are tending not to do it because of the pain of doing it. Otoh, the last time I was at my car dealer service center, they wanted to charge 3% to run a credit card, so that one went on debit.
In 99% cases, privacy is used to commit crime. Outlaw privacy, tracking collars on everyone, telescreens in every home and house. Turn your societies into open-air prisons, so you may live in crime and tax-evasion free utopias.
This suggest to me that we should have a more sensible taxing system not that we should build a tax system in which the government must observe all transactions.
Physical cash is also the only thing preventing central banks from running large negative interest rates since people would simply start hoarding cash.
If the government would care that the citizens are very honest with their taxes, they would create taxation laws that make it incredibly easy to be honest ("a market is controlled by incentives"). The mere fact how complicated the German taxation laws are should be a clear evidence that this is not the case.
Cash prices in many places are lower, so places like gas stations do tons of cash business. I highly doubt Exxon is using cash to evade taxes, thus this is a fantastically poor take.
Then why would they encourage to use cash using lower prices? It’s more costly to handle cash than to pay credit card companies.
Also, countless examples of people digging into the cash register as part of their position perks, or usual management of remote petrol stations. Need to pay protection money? Cash. Need to pay a provider? Cash.
Some business can more easily avoid reporting income if they transact in cash, but gas stations are going to leave an awful lot of audit logs regardless of method of payment.
You can run the logs from the pumps vs the log book of fuel purchases. Similar for the convenience store. A brand name station is going to have a computerized register, and sales need to match supply for the most part. There will be some mismatch due to theft, but you can't hide enough cash sales for the tax savings to be worthwhile, IMHO.
What is your basis for "It’s more costly to handle cash than to pay credit card companies."? It seems much more likely that they are encouraging cash with lower prices to avoid paying the typical ~1-5% transaction costs to Visa/MasterCard/Amex rather than a large scale tax evasion scheme.
I understand your point about handling cash requiring more labor (no self serve, armored trucks, etc) but I'd be surprised if the cash sales were less profitable than credit cards.
I don't believe that but there is some truth or less exaggerated percentage of tax evasion that could be quoted. Cash is also necessary for buying illegal drugs for example which a lot of people do in all strata.
Other factors that are rarely mentioned in these debates include that cash must be counted and is far more error prone than cashless transactions. Most people counting this cash are actually 19 year olds or people who just aren't enthused by their job, so plenty of mistakes mean cashless transactions have a significant advantage in retail.
It's also necessary for when some states have a super low minimum wage for restaurant/bar/food workers (because the idea is that you'll make the difference up in tips) - in my state (FL) I believe it's something like $2.75 or $3 per hour. Tips are taxed, and you'd better believe the owner of the establishment takes a cut of those tips, too, if they are reported. You tip cash, all that goes straight to the workers, most of whom are probably not rolling in the dough. It goes quite a long way for those types of folks.
The lower the rung you're on economically, the more use you have for cash.
This is a good example of one way that cash is useful today, but hopefully it's also one that will go away as soon as possible. We should keep cash, but end tipping and slave wages.
Tax evasion in what sense? Surely your earnings are your earnings. If you are a business you have to drop that cash into your bank account at the end of the week or else really it's just petti cash and not significant.Then you have to declare it at the end of the year -- and it could be subject to an audit at anytime.
However buying things at a sex shop for example or how much I drink at the local bar on Fridays might be nothing I want my bank to know about.
i think the comment you're replying to is wrong, but taking payment in cash and spending it as cash lets you buy a hell of a lot of stuff without being tracked. i've known several drug dealers and handymen who have had entire wardrobes, all the tech they own, bikes, even cars, all paid for in cash that never went anywhere near their bank accounts. pretty much the only important thing you can't easily buy with cash is a home.
You could be right about the comment I'm replying too -- when I click on "parent: it brings up a flagged comment.
But either way -- you also might be responding to the wrong comment.
My comment was about tax evasion, not tracking the purchasing habits of consumers -- which I think is bad.
I'll restate what I said: at the end of the day you'll have to deposit your earnings cash or not in a bank account and declare it as part of your business revenue to the tax man.
If you want to keep piles of cash under your mattress somewhere I guess you can, or if you want to purchase things in cash continously -- this might work for individuals like a single man operation-- but to run a legitimate business you will have to hit bank accounts with the money you earn one way or another and this will be eventually subject to an audit should it look suspicious enough.
I agree with some of what the author says. Especially about how cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change.
But having worked at a cash register at for a period in my life theres a lot of good reasons businesses do this.
Stores dealing in cash need a float at the register. Where I was that was 500 euro. That's 500 euro in coins and lower value notes that has to be at every register so that anyone that pays in cash can be given the correct change.
A large store near me has about 20 registers, that during very busy periods could all be open. So to guarantee they can accept cash on a busy day like that means having 10 grand to just park in these registers.
That's 10k that's vulnerable to theft either from employees or robbers.
Security vans have to be hired to take the days takings to a bank and bring lower denominations to the store to fill these floats.
When someone finishes a shift they have to spend time what they have, that doesn't take long but it's another cost for the company.
It also means insurance costs are higher.
The guy only accepting card payments from his horsebox converted to a coffee shop doesn't worry about any of this.
At least where i am *living cash is more expensive than electronic
I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash.
With digital payments you see exactly how much the payments cost. Swipe fee + processing fee, and it isn't fun as a business owner to see ~3% of your money going to a bank.
With cash, it takes some effort to tally the costs. Cash handling equipment: POS, safes, bill counters for larger merchants, etc... Then you have to add the amount of time your employees spend on cash: counting drawers at the start, counting drawers at the end, managers counting money into and out of the safe, managers taking cash to the bank, or hiring a service to do that, cash goes missing through malice and negligence, etc...
Dealing with it a register was a pain to say the least. You'll constantly have people demanding change in particular notes etc.
You often have to watch out for people insisting they handed you a 50 so they can scam you into more change. Or get chewed out by someone for the wrong change when really they just dropped the note on the way back to their car. None of that can happen with a card.
The card payments are nearly atomic, you paid or you didn't. In a year doing the work I only once had someone claim a card payment took the wrong amount and it was a very dubious claim.
For cash i'd often I'd have to call a manager to request more cash for the float. Because the older customer base would spend their morning queueing outside at an ATM the buy the smallest cheapest thing to get change, which they only needed to pay another businesses that only dealt in cash.
It goes without saying my views are biased from dealing with cash paying people.
I’ve had a theory for many years that incorrect decisions are often made simply because the cost or benefit of one option is tangible and that of another aren’t.
For instance employers underpay employees because the cost of paying your employees more is easy to calculate but the cost of not doing so (turnover, etc.) is real but hard to determine.
Another one in the same vein is bad hiring processes. It is somewhat easy to tell when you hired the wrong person. It is close to impossible to know if you passed on the right person.
And yet, there are lots of businesses that give a discount for cash specifically because of that 3% fee. Yes, I know the standard trope is that it's so they can avoid taxes and in some cases that's surely true. But, for many, if not most businesses, there are way too many paper trails for the IRS (or whatever the taxman is called in your country) to follow that would make that difficult to pull off at any worthwhile scale.
If I had to guess why some businesses do this I would speculate on two things:
1. Like I said, there are a lot of indirect costs with cash, and a lot of businesses are just bad at calculating these things (a surprising number of business owners are REALLY bad with money and valuing time). For example, an owner managed business might not value or care about the owner having to count and make trips to the bank.
2. Something in the nature of the business favors cash. For example, if your average transaction value is < $5 and you are running 100+ swipes per day, the fixed swipe fees of $.10-$.30 are going to HURT (think convenience store). Another example might be low/no margin stuff like gasoline, gas is the loss leader for stations hoping you'll buy a snack with a huge margin, so they offer a cash discount since it is cheaper for them AND you have to go into the store, which increases the chance of an impulse buy.
Someone with average transaction value of > $100 who only runs ten transactions a day isn't that worried about losing a dollar to swipe fees in exchange for not having to keep thousands on premise at the end of the day (think car mechanic).
> I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is. I worked as a cashier at a store, and at a bank branch that mostly dealt with commercial customers, and there are a LOT of indirect costs associated with cash.
Then powerful trade organizations should lobby for introducing a system of digital payments that offers at least the same level of anonymity as cash.
It' s the cost of doing business. With cashless you need a POS, digital infrastructure, the bank takes a cut, Visa takes a cut, no cell service or too many people on a cell means not doing business, doubled payments mean headaches for both cashiers and customers.
> I think a lot of people miss out on how expensive cash is.
If the expense is that big of a problem, then stores could put in a surcharge for using cash. I'd pay it. It would be well worth it to avoid having to use cards.
These are all very good reasons why a business may not want to accept cash. Cash adds a lot of overhead and security risks that can completely negate any savings gained by not having to pay credit card fees.
The problem is that if enough businesses stop accepting cash, then it becomes nigh impossible to participate in society if you can only pay in cash. Which can be a big problem in the US, where not everyone has access to credit cards or free checking accounts.
This is why I support regulation that requires businesses to accept cash. Yes, it adds overhead. But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.
An alternative might be regulation ensuring people have access to banking services, either privately or by the government offering these services directly
> But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.
Forcing banks and digital wallet providers to provide users a prepaid card/digital balance in exchange for cash is a good alternative. This should be a part of the charter/license under which such organisations operate.
Here in the US most of the stores with that many cashiers are grocery stores and have become increasingly automated via "self checkout", and they're still perfectly capable of accepting cash - it's like an ATM machine, and far more challenging to rob with a gun.
The locale I've most encountered the cashless shift has been Santa Monica, not at the grocery stores with tons of cashiers, but at small restaurants and such where they've embraced cashless and in many cases menu-less as well. It's outright hostile to find yourself socializing there without a phone and just a wad of cash. And it should be made illegal IMNSHO, as these are public spaces operating with a business license discriminating against those without credit cards and/or smartphones. This is private members-only club levels of B.S.
Portland is another locale I've been affected by this BTW.
All this about the costs of dealing with cash are true. But they're especially true for the big players.
I've seen several shops (including small coffee and ice cream places) telling people more or less openly that they prefer cash. Because card companies take a margin on every transaction, and don't allow them to charge more to compensate. Some try to go around the other way (offering e.g. a 5% discount to people paying cash - I had this at a restaurant). The problem is that the big ones can negotiate lower transaction fees with the card companies...
I suspect some of it's a tax thing as it's a lot harder to hide income when all your transactions are digital.
hypocrisy on my part but I have probably benefitted from paying cash for handiwork done that was only cheap because the person might not have paid tax.
If you get paid cash and give a receipt/cash ticket, I'm not sure you can avoid declaring that revenue to the tax authorities. It's enough that one of your customers uses that ticket to deduce it as a professional expense from their own tax declaration to get potentially caught.
I was hearing that all the time before card payments were a common thing (i.e. in the '80s, writing from Europe), "didn't get a receipt... they want to avoid taxes"
I mean yeah, if you give out a receipt as any sort of tradesman you're probably going to have to report that income or risk tax evasion prosecution. I have personally never had a tradesman give me a receipt, always cash-in-hand, for anything at home. Work expenses a receipt is required though, and those I pay with card anyway.
I don't know about that. I mean there are not many places (at least around here) that don't use cash registers. Nothing eliminates fraud but just because it's cash doesn't make it obvious or foolproof.
At the same time, we often hear of ludicrous ways to try and beat the tax authority. I'm sure people try often enough.
The costs are just one side of it. A good reason to accept both cash and cards is that customers like that. No doubt it would be cheaper to stock only one brand of cereals and yet nobody does that.
If this is the argument, though, then it's a good one to let the market sort out. If customers have a strong enough preference for cash that it outweighs the costs, businesses can figure this out and accept cash.
Different stores can have different options in terms of how they handle cash. Costco only has one kind of toilet paper. Target has 10. There are pluses and minuses that they can weigh themselves.
I was thinking it's one argument for the store that has the OPTION to go cashless and might not - just so as to serve more customers.
But the store is not deciding on its own. For example if costs are pushed by outside forces too far one way or the other. Say, if the tax authority makes it hell to accept cash. Well then the store does not really have the option. The decision has been made for them.
> cashless means i can't just give a homeless person spare change.
You could, if there were just more uptake of digital payments by individuals. In China, beggars asking to be paid via app has been a thing for years now. There are beggars in parts of sub-Saharan Africa who use the local very developed mobile-payments infrastructure.
This comes with additional complications in the US—for instance, you can be booted off SSI if you have too much income for the month. We functionally have mandatory poverty in this country for folks on disability.
There are huge risks to operating any sort of physical retail establishment, well beyond managing the change in the tills. This doesn't mean the world would be better served if all retail happened online. The risks are worth the rewards.
Shop lifters are an issue but weight limits the value of what they could steal.
The shop doesn't have to pay for an armored truck to deliver the milk, a regular truck works fine because we don't have armed milk robbers.
There are risks in physical retail far beyond managing the shoplifting problem as well. In fact, theft of all sorts is only a small portion of the risk-pie here.
See my sibling comment, but it is hard to quantify how much cash costs because a lot of the costs are indirect or infrequent capital costs. Things like employee time, and money handling equipment. It will also vary enormously based on the scale and nature of the business.
A small coffee shop can get by with a $129 cash drawer hooked up to an iPad and a manager spending a few hours per week counting money and visiting the bank. A large store like Walmart can easily spend $100k+ on all of the equipment for cash handling in addition to having to contract with an armored car company.
Fine, so why they won't let us pay with anonymous cards? All the benefit of cashless without surrendering your privacy roghts. But no, they insist that every card be registered, identity scrupulously verified. Because terrorism, think of the children and what not.
I recently started seeing advertising related to products that I had purchased at a large US supermarket. I did some digging on the payment card networks and found that they are sent a lot more data that I realized. Level 3 data (the highest and most complete) sends product data about what you bought to the payment network (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc.). I have no idea what they do with this data and who they sell it to.
I love the protection of using credit cards, but if merchants go cashless, privacy goes with it.
Could you expand more on this I didn’t realize card networks actually got itemized data (e.g. $12.35 at the gas station was for a pack of cigarettes or some windshield wiper fluid and and some beef jerky)
The Level 3 data isn't sent from all merchants, but I have a feeling that larger ones pass along the info.
I also was incorrect above, only Mastercard and Visa support level 3 data. However, level 2 data is widely supported and can contain some purchase info (Clover lists the SKU of an item for example).
They don't get it as a rule, and they didn't get it at all for a long time - that is optional data for which there is a standard where the terminal can send it if it is configured to do so; and some merchants are now sending it - probably there's some agreement where they get some financial benefit for doing so.
These reasons are... dubious. If anything, many are reasons we should stop finding ways to charge for everything. Cash or otherwise.
And some of these are, themselves, falling for the odd invisible nature of how expensive some things are. Take your bike. How much does it cost to keep the roadways maintained so that you can use said bike? That isn't a balance. That is you ignoring some costs.
Data surveillance? Even if you are sending in checks for your ISP or using cash on delivery for items, they are still just as trackable. Modern computation is just too advanced to think going back to older payment styles will make a difference.
Exclusion? You can look at our history to see that you fight exclusion by fighting exclusion. Luddite holding on to older technologies is almost certainly going to be weaponized more to exclude folks than moving to cards.
Same for economic censorship. You fight that by building stronger protections for people. Not requiring older payment styles. I'm also not clear on how "cash" helps here. It can be confiscated just as easily. And nobody is going around with enough cash on hand that they can ignore literal government level sanctions.
Resiliency has a bit of a point. Is amusing when a store can't let you buy things because the register is down. I'd love to see that explored more.
The rest of the bullets seem to be the same. Advocating for old payment styles is largely less effective than advocating for stronger consumer protections. To the point that even things I agree are bad, I just don't see "cash" as a good answer there.
Until an integrated facial recognition POS system becomes standard, in-person transactions using cash are largely anonymous and ephemeral--versus card transactions which produce personally identifiable, long-lived data joined at scale with any other other data an entity has about you. For the first time in history it is economical to surveil an entire population, and a large part of that is because of digital payments databases.
> Exclusion
Right now anyone who can't get a bank account (a significant number of people, including anyone without a permanent address or lacking personal documentation) is excluded from the digital economy. You have brought up a vague hypothetical that some future group will be excluded from the cash economy, but this is not meaningful until you explain specifically who will be impacted and how this compares with who is currently excluded from the cashless economy.
> Censorship
Hard cash is certainly not confiscated as easily as a line in a database (for better or worse), and importantly cannot occur with negligible cost at scale. But the censorship does not have to be governmental: card companies and payment processors have crafted their own rules on acceptable behavior and transactions and enforce these rules on the population. See any of the long list of stories about PayPal blocking transactions to a business that was automatically flagged as violating their ToS.
Trust me, your cash usage is far more trackable than you think it is. It is harder than credit, to be sure. Still surprisingly trackable.
And I'm sympathetic to the exclusion and censorship concerns. I just don't think cash really solves much there. We had plenty of both well before electronic payments were a thing.
Consider, you are worried about people that can't get bank accounts being excluded. But... they aren't really allowed in a cash environment, either. Without a permanent address, it is getting harder to get a license. Without a license or other personal documentation, it is nigh impossible to get a job. These are very real problems. Cash does basically nothing to help there.
Note, I'm emphatically not claiming that cashless helps, either. I'm saying it is a completely separate problem that payment systems don't really enter into.
> Trust me, your cash usage is far more trackable than you think it is. It is harder than credit, to be sure. Still surprisingly trackable.
Tracing cash money back to a specific person requires the time and resources of dedicated forensic experts and is fraught with uncertainty. There is not just a big but an astronomical difference in the ease of tracking electronic transactions vs. cash. The difference is so huge that surveillance and policing are now being automated at scale for the first time in history.
> Consider, you are worried about people that can't get bank accounts being excluded... Cash does basically nothing to help there.
Sure it does. I see homeless people paying for street food in cash. I am aware of battered women who save cash in secret because their bank accounts and phones are controlled by abusive partners. There are subcultures of nomadic people who don't have a permanent address and rely on cash jobs and payments. There are entire microeconomies in many cities that run on cash because their precariat members work under the table and don't have bank accounts.
Ish. If you are just talking about that stick of gum or something else tiny that nobody cares about, sure, cash is easier. If you want to trace larger things, it gets a whole lot easier. Especially with modern AMA laws.
Homeless people should be offered homes and food. Not given petty cash to try and get these things. I'm open to the idea that cash is the best we can do today for that. But... that is a pretty weak reason. Housing and food stability are not won with petty cash.
> Trust me, your cash usage is far more trackable than you think it is. It is harder than credit, to be sure. Still surprisingly trackable.
Are you serious? Okay, how would you figure out what a person purchased at a store 3 years ago on a given date? Can you do that just as well for 1000 people? for 10 million people?
> But... they aren't really allowed in a cash environment, either.
With cash, anyone can walk into a store and buy food. Without cash, people would be completely at the mercy of others to help them.
> Without a license or other personal documentation, it is nigh impossible to get a job.
With cash, it's absolutely possible to offer labor in exchange for money without any ID.
You seem to have bought into the big data idea that everyone is tracking everyone's individual purchases. That information is largely available, to some extent. No, it isn't happening. Yes, tracability goes up with electronic records. No, it really doesn't matter.
Big ticket purchases are absolutely traceable back to people. Pretty much always have been.
I'm not worried about the fact that purchasing a lambo will attract attention, including from the tax department, but I think we should be able to pay the rent for modest accommodation, hire taxis/car service, buy food and clothes and other basic things necessary to live with money that cannot be remotely disabled or taken from us. We should be free to give money to other people without reporting that to anyone or having anyone else be able to find out about it.
It would be a real problem to do that without cash.
This aspect of things really ought to scare everyone a lot more. All of the enormous mega-corporations involved in card processing are so heavily regulated and so dependent on the Federal Government, that it doesn't even take actual laws to make them do things. Just get a couple of regulators in place to vaguely hint that they might have a hard time at their next compliance review if they don't ban thing X that we don't like today, and boom, it's gone. Only a few companies can even afford to operate in this space, so that's all it takes to effectively ban something from the whole financial market.
Right, but my argument is that that blocking is the problem? And you'd be silly to think that any of the other concerns aren't still there for cash buyers. Hell, many of the pot shops are now scanning your ID.
I should note that the only path to legalized cannabis is still, strictly speaking, at the federal level. It is a federally illegal thing. To pretend otherwise is a dangerous risk a lot of places are willing to take.
100% of of these folks doing card-type payments are playing cat and mouse (I know because I'm very involved in this industry). Some don't tell their up-stream processors what they are doing. Others are constantly shifting their processing through various gateways. None of it currently runs on the credit-rails. But all the debit-rail processing is happening in a dark-grey area. One of these debit-rail providers has like four banking parterships per state they "work" in -- so when they strike out on one, they can move to another. You can observe that in the retail store when they say "oh, EBT isn't working today".
And more importantly, in 2014 when the regulated cannabis industry started -- electronic only would have blocked it -- or created an additional huge hurdle. It's taken eight years to get to this crap-tastick hack of workarounds and outright lies.
I don't want cash to disappear. I just want dumb grubby pieces of paper and heavy grimy coins to go the way of the dodo. With all of the logistical and security costs they entail.
Just give me digital cash that can be stored on a card, that doesn't require a bank account and isn't tied to anyone's identity, and where any cell phone is capable of transferring value between cards (and between bank accounts and cards).
The card industry has zero incentive to create a card like this. Card issuers collect 1.25-3.5% of every payment made with a card. A global sales tax paid to a small collection of companies. This is fantastically profitable. I suspect if a card was created that would mean less revenue for the card issuers it would be embraced then extinguished.
And if the government created a network for that, and asked for 0.1% fee instead of 1.5%, 3.0%, people would act as if this was the beginning of Stalinism.
So, in the end you pay the same, but indirectly. And then this needs to dispute for funding with a bazillion of other government programs in the politically charged environment of budgetary allocations. Wouldn't it be better to have this program directly funded by its users? wouldn't it be more transparent?
Mind you, I am not sure I am right and you're wrong. I am just pointing some concerns I have. And on the other side, your proposal makes sense also in the point that the government always financed the cost of the whole coins and banknotes stuff from the general budget.
But who are we fooling here? The lobbying power from the payments industry is mind-boggling, maybe bigger than the one from the Defense Industry. They would never allow a government payments program that eliminated their role as middleman.
I'm not sure what your objection is; this is a solved problem.
You don't get charged $0.05 per paper bill by the government every time you go to the ATM. Similarly, you don't get charged by the fire department if it puts out a blaze in your home. So:
> Wouldn't it be better to have this program directly funded by its users? wouldn't it be more transparent?
Absolutely not. This goes against the entire ethos of government, which is that we collectively pay taxes, progressively, for the services that benefit society as a whole.
And if supplying and managing cash isn't a core government service, then I don't know what is. Even the most extreme libertarians and anarchists are going to agree on that one.
I do not agree. Making coins of known weight and purity or metals is a role of government. Supplying cash is not. Cash is a poor substitute for money. Cash is no different than monopoly money.
Norway and Denmark have national card schemes (BankAxept and Dankort) which are used for virtually all PoS transactions. They cost a fraction of the transaction costs that Visa and Mastercard charge. These arose by banks agreeing to a standardized solution.
Was there ever any attempt to do something similar in the US?
I'd love to see a digital option not tied to identities, but I think that is never going to happen due to the KYC (know your customer) laws in place. I hate bring cryptocurrency into this, but even with "distributed" currencies, we are seeing KYC laws preventing true, anonymous payments (like Monero not accepted at large exchanges).
IC cards in Japan, like Pasmo and Suica, kind of work like this: originally intended for transit passes but also accepted at lots of retailers, usually for smaller purchases. You buy a card and load it with cash at a machine, no KYC required. It's really convenient and I'd happily use such a system in daily life in the West.
In theory correlating the card purchase with location or camera data would be possible, but even that's a win as it moves transaction surveillance from dragnet to bespoke.
This is a flaw of implementation, not of banknotes in and of themselves. Some countries moved to plastic banknotes[0] already many years ago: Australia, Romania, Vietnam, just to name a few. They don’t get grotty like e.g. American dollar notes. A cool feature is that if you are at the beach and have nowhere to leave your valuables, you can just go swimming with them inside your pocket.
They're cleaner, that doesn't mean they're clean. But they're still suffering from all of the rest of the logistical and security problems. You need to have change on hand; you need to have armored cars; you need to visit ATMs. These are flaws of banknotes in and of themselves.
What exactly does the word “clean” even mean in this context?
Certainly, that cash isn’t going to get you sick. It also is unlikely to be covered in dirt/mud/some other substance that will visibly rub off onto you.
What ritual must it undergo to purge it of its ungodliness?
I'm skeptical that this would be an improvement over credit/debit cards in the ways that matter most to the people who are most concerned about this: privacy and anonymity.
Cash is anonymous and (largely) untrackable by its fundamental nature. Once you introduce anything digital into the system, it becomes easy enough to add a tracking layer that I think it very unlikely any such system would remain free of one for long, no matter how it started out.
I mean, if it's not tied to a bank account or identity, then what's the problem?
It's not like physical cash is untrackable either -- every bill has a unique serial number. Just like Bitcoin keeps a record of every transaction.
If you want it to be private and anonymous, that's up to you to make sure you don't tie anything about your identity when you acquire a particular physical card for use/storage. The exact same way you have to be careful when acquiring Bitcoin, for example.
Sure; every bill has a serial number—but that serial number isn't going to be recorded automatically by every single hand it passes through simply as a matter of how the technology works.
It's not at all far-fetched to imagine a particular bill passing through dozens of hands in multiple states without any unique record of it being recorded anywhere.
A cash card, on the other hand, requires some kind of connection to a central authority to verify what it has on it—otherwise counterfeiting on a grand scale becomes all too easy. So every single transaction at least can be logged, whether or not it is by default—and there's no way for us as regular users of the technology to tell that it's not if the government says it's not. And given that it is a cash card, it will need to be loaded periodically if it is to remain useful—either that, or you'll just have to keep buying new ones with physical cash, which drastically decreases the convenience factor compared to either physical cash or a debit/credit card. It also drastically increases your risk footprint if you are attempting to remain below the radar.
So while anonymity is theoretically possible, untrackability is not—and the moment your identity is associated with even one use of the card (whether by a security camera, or correlation with cell phone location data, or loading it from a debit or credit card, or whatever else), the entire history of that card is at least potentially linkable to you.
> but that serial number isn't going to be recorded automatically by every single hand it passes through
You'd be surprised. The ATM knows the serial number of every bill it dispenses, and all those 20's spent at a retailer tend to go straight to the bank where serials are again scanned in.
But yeah, if you're trying to hide your activity from the government, you're going to need a complicated strategy of cards and transfers. This is no different from Bitcoin, or trying to spend cash you stole from a bank.
Digital cash is perfectly fine if you don't want to be tracked by algorithms trying to build profiles of everyone.
If you're trying to hide yourself from the police when they're trying to catch you personally... I mean, good luck. Even with paper currency.
> If you're trying to hide yourself from the police when they're trying to catch you personally... I mean, good luck. Even with paper currency.
I mean...frankly, I agree with you there. But there's a significant contingent—including around here—that seem to think that this is not only possible, but highly desirable. (Perhaps not necessarily "hide from the police when they're trying to catch you", but "avoid letting the government have even one iota more information on you than is strictly legally necessary", at the very least.)
And let me use some kind of TOTP to pay with it, then whoever's issuing the card doesn't need to have a crazy amount of insurance against stolen cards.
All over my area, I am beginning to see discounts for paying with cash. Hopefully this is sufficient to discourage sufficient numbers from going fully cashless.
There are situations where cash cannot be used; hopefully this changes in a way that is safe.
I haven't seen any discounts yet. I have started to see some shops with signs saying that cash is preferred if possible. However, I still see far more shops advertising that they don't take cash at all. It's interesting that different businesses take different views on this. Some dislike the fees charged by card processors, others dislike the hassle of dealing with cash.
> However, I still see far more shops advertising that they don't take cash at all.
Openly call such shops something like "denunciation shops" since they only offer a kind of transaction that leaks (denounces) data to the involved banks.
I recently got a 'discount' for paying my car maintenance in cash. I got cash right next to the garage just to pay in cash. Of course this discount isn't because the owner likes cash, it's because he can just grab the cash and not pay taxes, which is why I got a discount in the first place.
The paying in cash and not being traced part is directly connected to a criminal act. Wonder why governments aren't liking cash transactions.
The paying in cash and not being traced part is directly connected to a criminal act. Wonder why governments aren't liking cash transactions.
Well, sure, sometimes. But criminals definitely use other methods to mask transactions to one another. For example: It used to be somewhat common for a restaurant to steal workers tips if the customer paid the tip by card, and I'd be surprised if they paid taxes on the tips they stole.
On the other hand: Do you want others to know how much your tipped each stripper?
Privacy matters to a point. In general, you should have the same sort of privacy you can get when using the toilet: A closed door to keep the specific details to yourself, even though everyone knows in general the sorts of things that happen in there. A few exceptions apply - most folks will come to your aid if they think you need help in there, for example.
In my country, pretty much everything is debit. A debit transaction costs maximum about €0,25 over here. This would've been about 0,1% of the total transaction. A bank transfer would've been free. Meanwhile, VAT would've been 21% and income tax probably close to 50%.
So I doubt the transaction fee is relevant at all in my garage's consideration to offer me a 'discount'. This nearly doubles his net income and saves me 21% in VAT, just because it's off the books.
Debit is the standard in my country for pretty much everything... Holds aren't actually common and even most hotels ask you to pay the room in advance for short stays. It's a very different world and something like credit card debt isn't as prevalent here.
Disputing a charge on a credit card is also a very different experience from using debit.
"In a credit card dispute, the credit card issuer may issue a chargeback, which means that the disputed funds are taken from your merchant account and returned to the cardholder. With debit card disputes, the disputed funds are typically frozen in the cardholder's account until the dispute is resolved. This means that you may experience a cash flow impact with credit card disputes, while debit card disputes may have a more immediate impact on the customer's access to their funds."
Yeah, debit disputes hardly every happen. Debit over here is only used with a card present that has a chip. Any transaction over €25 (I think) requires a code. Skimming is virtually non existent and 'card not present' debit transactions don't exist.
Like I said, it's a very different world when it comes to payments over here. Apps like Cash App of Venmo are also don't really exist, for example, because banks already provide similar functionality in their apps without transaction fees.
Cashless is simply too convenient to be beaten by "you shouldn't do this" arguments. Unfortunate but true.
I am not an expert at this by any means, but one idea I've had is for smartphones / a "credit chip" to have preloaded cash on to it, which is then used to make purchases without sending that information back to your bank account.
So, for example: you make a $100 deposit from your bank account to your smartphone. You can then make purchases from your smartphone, not from your card. The purchasing data stays local to your device.
That's essentially how smartphone IC cards work in Japan. You can load the virtual card using a credit/debit card, and spend it (offline, I think) at train stations and many shops.
You can also get a regular plastic IC card, and load it with cash or card. Works the same way, except you can only load it at a machine rather than just on the Wallet app on your phone.
Tentatively, I would say that is 'easy'. Easy because the necessary smart card technology has existed for decades, and because almost every smartphone now retailing includes Near-Field Communication features and smart card chips already. Although early smart cards had some security flaws (as would be expected in the early days of widespread civilian encryption), these no longer apply to modern smart cards.
I bought a day pass for the Brussels city transport system at a ticket machine last month, and the machine simply loaded and dispensed a smart card for me to use immediately on any bus, tram or train. This shows that smart cards are not only cheap, they can be literally disposable!
Therefore I would say that is 100% a policy issue: all it would take is one country or large city to implement digital cash with the legal and functional constructs to ensure anonymous transactions and your dream would come true.
The data would need to stay local to your phone, otherwise this wouldn't prevent tracking from card networks, etc. You could add cash to your phone via a card, but the only record would be the raw amount, not what you're spending the money on. (In other words, exactly the same as taking cash from an ATM.)
It occurs to me now that what I'm proposing is not drastically different from how crypto works. In which case, there may be some way to back up the phone elsewhere, or maybe not – we don't have a backup for cash and if you lose it, too bad. Keep your transfer amounts small enough that it won't be a disaster if you lose the phone.
>in this piece I’ll lay out 10 talking points that you can use to make even the most ardent card-tapper have second thoughts about a totally bank-dominated society.
The writer is starting with the wrong premise: that people who prefer a cashless system don't understand these things. They do. They just don't care enough to do much about it.
It's not about a lack of understanding, it's about convenience. A cashless system tends to be more convenient, and that's why people like it.
>It's not about a lack of understanding, it's about convenience. A cashless system tends to be more convenient, and that's why people like it.
Cashless is definitely more convenient (I'll give you that all day, because it absolutely is), and it's great, but there are a bunch of economic actors that would prefer to be able to pay in cash or accept cash payments, and not all of those actors are illicit actors - there are plenty of legitimate businesses that would prefer to deal in cash whenever possible. Plenty of service people such as waiters, barbers, drivers, etc...benefit from cash. I think the lower on the economic rung you go, the more useful cash is.
I'm a small biz owner myself, and I accept digital payments with no problem, but those same digital payment platforms take a nice cut of my margins. I can offer better prices if I don't have to fork over 2-5% to a 3rd party that provides little value outside of someone being able to pay me by tapping our phones together.
While you claim that there are a whole range of businesses keen on getting cash, this is region-specific. You can go to e.g. Sweden and find that those small businesses often refuse to take your cash no matter how much you plead. As soon as it becomes easy for every single person in an economy to take digital payments, even if they are just selling strawberries by the roadside or whatever, then even the people towards the bottom of the economic rung might go cashless.
I hate myself for trying to be "that guy" but I can't believe the author doesn't mention Bitcoin/Monero in an article about digital payments in 2023.
The combination of XMR for saving and something like BCH for spending is such a dead simple solution to 99% of the world's money issues it boggles my mind that it's taken 10 years for us to get to where we are now, I thought it would have been 2-3 years at most.
And still, 10 years in, a near perfect tract record, people are still unsure about Bitcoin. What's the issue exactly, people are just scared?
I will never understand it. Ive said since 2012, I will either be proven to be the biggest idiot in the world if/when crypto get regulated or hacked and comes tumbling down, or people will be begging to know how I saw it coming when Bitcoin swallows up the worlds financial system black hole style. Either way, I'm enjoying the show immensely.
Bitcoin has extreme scalability and privacy problems.
Over the course of 20 minutes, the maximum number of people who can engage in transactions is somewhat under 50,000. This is obviously unworkable as a global currency; if the user base and transaction volumes rise, you might be waiting hours or days for a transaction to complete.
The blockchain also records details of your transactions forever, and unless you carefully obfuscate your activity, every bitcoin user will have the entire blockchain and your entire history on it. Forever.
Lightning network (which admittedly has its own set of flaws) does a reasonably good job of improving privacy and increasing scalability. It's reasonable to assume that Lightning and other "layer 2" technologies will continue to develop if the Bitcoin user-base continues to grow.
Bitcoin and Lightning solve many of the issues in the article and will improve.
As a society we should encourage both the use of physical cash and decentralized cryptocurrency as alternatives to the centralized banking "cashless" system.
As far as I can tell LN has been failing 18 months at a time for like 5 years now. Its never going to work is what people seem to be saying.
Satoshi had the simple solution from day one, it is just to incrementally increase the block size as needed, like the BCH fork is doing, its really no big deal.
Please enlighten us; how is this statement incorrect?
"The maximum throughput is the maximum rate at which the blockchain can confirm transactions. Today, bitcoin's maximum throughput is 3.3–7 transactions/sec. This number is constrained by the maximum block size and the inter-block time."
Satoshi had the "solution" from day one, just incrementally increase the block size as needed, the road map BCH has chosen to follow, its really no big deal.
Valid point, but we are decades away from putting the whole world on Bitcoin. In those intervening decades lightning alternatives and/or derivatives will likely be developed that can allow the entire world to use Bitcoin.
Yes, LN is a pretty dead idea from first principals since Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo.
But of course LN makes no sense if you just did what Satoshi said and incrementally increase the block size as needed, but then of course Blockstream cant sell you their SideChain(tm) products.
The whole thing became really convoluted and dumb once Adam Back got involved.
With the caveat that my knowledge of Bitcoin is limited, I know I can't be bothered to use it because
- Stories about transaction fees that are more than the cost of something you would buy with it ($25 at on point)
- Stories about Bitcoin exchanges (if I have that term right) where the person in charge just... took everything and ran; and anyone with money in it just flat out lost it
- No way to reverse a transaction if you are scammed (vs a credit card where you can almost infallibly get a transaction reversed)
- Stories of exchanges failing and everyone losing out... whereas in a bank, the FDIC handles it for you and you get your money back
Now, I may be wrong about some of that... but those are the stories I hear. And, given them, why would I even bother to try Bitcoin?
It is possible to pay with Bitcoin for a wide variety of internet services like VPN/VPS and domain names, although rarely possible for the popular providers.
Most local shops do not take Bitcoin, although there are some places where it's more recognised. Some specialist online-order retailers now take Bitcoin, such as Pimonori for hobby electronics materials.
Bitcoin transactions are typically confirmed within a minute, compared to hours or days in traditional banking. However, Bitcoin does not have credit like traditional banks do, so can't provide 'instant' payments.
Lol'd BCH will hit the same scaling issues as actual bitcoin if it becomes as popular as bitcoin and increasing the blocksizes will lead to the very centralization it purports to be against while only marginally fixing the scalability.
> I agree with almost all of his points, but it turns out I don't agree enough to forego the convenience of doing without cash.
Well, having to check the correctness of the electronic transactions (are the correct? Were some of them fraudulent? - yes, both happens) all the time, and having to get along with the "anti-fraud systems" often involved in electronic transactions is in my experience very inconvenient. Cash is much more convenient in this regard.
P.S. Of course every hacker ("Hacker News") would also correctly say that paying electronically without leaking lots of private data is hard, and thus very inconvenient. Another argument why cash is more convenient.
I buy stuff without cash all the time, but if I find myself in an establishment that does not accept cash I buy nothing at all, and usually loudly remark that it sucks that I can't use cash there while I am leaving.
In the US cash is more convenient for paying dinner. Instead of the awkward dance of check -> put card -> bring back -> tip. You just pay it with tip, can easily round up or down a bit...
it still is wild that they take the card away from the table when tap payments exist so extensively, even in the USA.
Here in Canada, the servers often will bring the card reader at the same time as they bring over the bill, because the assumption is you're likely paying with a card, either credit or debit, so why not save the extra trips entirely?
I actually prefer it - I hate having the waiter hovering over me while i decide the tip + I can continue a conversation/finalize my bill at my leisure if my card is simply returned awaiting my signature.
How is that any different from the "awkward dance" of using cash and waiting to get change back? And trying to make sure you wind up with bills of the necessary denominations to be able to leave the right tip? Not to mention when you realize you misplanned and need to visit the ATM while someone stays at the table.
No, if we're talking only about convenience, a card wins every single time.
Huh. Weird. I feel like I can count on one hand the number of times in my life where I've happened to have bills that add up to exact change for a meal. Even allowing a couple of dollars to round in either direction. Like, I always need change.
Maybe different strategies for managing cash? Which it's never even occurred to me until now that could be a thing.
As I have seen "we are a cash-free business" signs begin to proliferate, I have begun to carry and use more cash, because I don't want to get stuck in a cashless society.
I haven’t used cash in a very long time. I haven’t carried a wallet at all in almost 5 years because every business takes tap payments, so I can use my phone to pay. I don’t think cash should disappear, but I sure am glad there’s an alternative because I hate carrying it around.
The existence of the record is inevitably linked to the ability for it to be used in legal actions or criminal investigations.
However, the ability to use that record for literally every other purpose, and especially for it to be sold for marketing purposes, can be and should be made totally illegal by appropriate banking secrecy regulations. If that's not the case in USA, well, that should be fixable - there are countries in which anyone in the bank doing that would be literally a felony.
We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves. There are plenty of ways to track people (tracking cell phones via bluetooth beacons and wifi network pings, for example) even when credit cards aren't used.
> We need stronger privacy laws to stop these activities rather than trying to circumvent them ourselves.
This assumes that the government can be trusted to care about the citizen's privacy. This is an assumption that at least cypherpunks explicitly do not share. Just find some case involving terrorism or child abuse (depending on the political climate), and new surveillance laws will become passed.
The point is that the very design of Bitcoin forces the entire transaction history of the medium into every hand that uses it (and can be obtained by anyone who wishes to examine it).
You can pass all the laws that you want, but that will not change unless you redesign it.
I was thinking the other day about how much about me could be easily inferred by my credit card purchase history, both good and bad. Hitch it up into ML and sort me into good and bad buckets for insurance or advertising. It already has been happening I'm sure.
This is how I feel. I keep cash in a safe at home for emergencies like natural disasters, but carrying cash is a burden. It's easily stolen and it's unwieldy to work with. The presence of cash immediately makes it more dangerous to exist. I don't want it to go away because power failure happens, but anyone who has ever lived in a sketchy area knows that having a lot cash on your person is not the best idea.
“I’ll lay out 10 talking points that you can use to make even the most ardent card-tapper have second thoughts about a totally bank-dominated society.”
0 of these points gave me second thoughts.
As a merchant, cash sucks. It’s slow AF to make change. I have to trust my employees not to steal it in a way that I don’t with credit card. (They can just not ring something up and pocket the cash, that’s not a thing right credit.)
I have to deal with handling it which in my line means sometimes even hiring private security and at least two trips to a bank. (None of the bankless or anti-financial stuff applies to legitimate businesses.)
It’s well worth 2.5% of my sales to never have to handle it again. So I don’t, and at every big event I do, there are a small percentage of people mad about it and one guy who thinks I’m violating his constitutional rights and damnit he’s going to do something about it. (He never does.)
As a consumer it’s fragile, easy to lose, easy to not have when I need it, and takes up a lot of pocket space. I’m so annoyed when I’m required to have cash for something and thank God for square and the raft of competitors it inspired for not making me do it ever again.
The article makes some great points, but it is surprising that the article doesn't mention Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, or even the theoretical possibility of a "digital cash" that mitigates some or all of the issues he identifies.
I personally think that Bitcoin and the Lightning Network (with forthcoming and as-of-yet-undiscovered improvements) is our best long-term alternative to the "unbalanced cashless" society that he rightly fears. I admit I could be wrong about Bitcoin, but the larger point should be that we, as a society, need to allow for options other than what the "banking sector using big tech devices" is offering.
Freedom and the market system are about giving people options. Cash, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies should all be available to consumers. Our right to use cash should be protected and it makes sense for individuals to "vote with their [paper] dollars" to help preserve that option and that right. The same applies to Bitcoin and other "digital cash" systems.
Not mentioned: how rewards/cash back cards are a scheme to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. It happens not just from the fees charged to merchants, but also through interest being charged to people who can't or won't pay off their credit cards each month. Merchant fees are particularly insidious, since not many stores offer discounts for cash, or charge for using a card, so those fees are hidden in inflated prices that everyone pays, regardless of payment method.
I operate on an almost 100% cash basis. I use Amazon gift cards for Amazon (one of two big corporations I regularly do direct business with) and I have a prepaid debit card for online orders for the odd thing I have to get elsewhere. Both are reloaded using cash as needed. I switched to this system relatively recently, I had a bank account but the nearest branch was pretty far, and I used it primarily for online orders and worked with cash for local stuff, it became a pain to put cash in it when it ran low. I no longer have a bank account. Life is pretty easy.
I've noticed something interesting though. Rural areas (like where I live) almost never have cashless storefronts, in fact often they have cash only storefronts. The merchants almost always have some indicator of conservative bent. Whereas in cities, you'll see cashless places all over, and it's often some business owned or staffed by people with an obvious left of center ideology, which IMO are the last people I'd expect to want a big finance company to get a piece of every person to person transaction they do.
> No one can take it from you without your error or consent.
You claim to understand crypto, yet this is blatantly false.
With cash you are exposed only to your local crime, with crypto you are exposed to a global crime network, implementation bugs (both network & wallet/device)..
Is this trolling? Is this a joke? I don't understand.
Selfish behaviour (criminality, when taken to the extreme) seems to be an inherent characteristic of humans, you cannot claim that "criminal state" creates that.
And this has nothing to do with your initial claims, which I refuted.
It is not a trolling nor a joke, this is my point you can't understand. Let me try to explain.
Selfish behaviour is indeed a characteristic of all living beings, but I won't fully agree that it is always criminality when taken to extreme – in my opinion, there are multiple dimensions to that. This behaviour can be developed into a symbiotic one too, and the environment here is one of the drivers for evolution.
Our current environment leads to selfishness turning into parasitic behaviour almost every time, and our current environment is the state, whatever you got lucky to get. Based on that I claim that state creates criminal, by creating the environment he needs, and by judging him in this same environment, no matter how disharmonic it is in the current point in time.
Decentralised finance is a great example of the paradigm shift in the right direction. It is above the state and it lets people globally interact more harmonically, because you need rules universally interpretable by all parties in order to harmonise. I don't say it is a perfect tool, but it is far better than anything we could come up with for thousands of years, and it will eventually lead us into a bit more harmonic world. Tool is misused by the criminals, created by states around them over time, but I don't care as long as they play by the same rules as me.
> You can move it around fast and peer-to-peer, without asking any authority.
Ideally yeah, but you now see some blockchains such a ethereum moving to a centralised organizational scheme with their relays and private mempool aggregators.
I'm still curious if we could have the best of both worlds with something like Taler https://taler.net/en/index.html . I don't know if it could be a genuine replacement for cash. My concern about Taler grew when they demonstrated you could fit in purchases that were restricted, ostensibly to give a kid cash that prevented them from spending it on adult items. This restriction could theoretically be applied to adults who aren't "good enough" as well.
Anecdata: before a visit to Berlin I got the standard advice that in Germany, cash is usually king. On the ground tho I found that a card worked almost everywhere that was not a humble corner shop. My largest no-card purchase was a 50€ lunch bill. Still tho, I had to prepare for the trip by withdrawing a wad of cash. This is not necessary in Scandinavia.
While I think cash is important, and I think many of the threats posed by digital payments infrastructure to low income individuals are real, I believe that the fears of surveillance capitalism are exaggerated. Google hasn't been able to convincingly provide targeted ads that reflect my obvious demographic and interest profile, data they definitely have available, for years. Amazon is incredibly crude at this as well, and Alexa obviously can't recognize our consumer habits at all. Square never informs any advertising I am inflicted with, otherwise I would be inundated with hoagie ads. People love fear, but I think it would be better to focus on reality rather than speculation. I hear you about the cost of cash -- it is clearly very high -- so high that some major banks are simply closing large numbers of branches, and, more to the point, many ATM locations. This is happening even in dense urban areas. It is increasingly difficult for me to obtain cash, particularly without paying a bank fee for the "privilege". We can't simply wish that cost away without some government intervention -- and good luck with that in many countries.
But, we are forgetting the unbanked, underbanked, the day laborers and migrant farm workers paid cash, the LexisNexis tracking leading to unbanked.
Check cashing places are slimming, buts that's more due to entry level jobs offering prepaid debit cards as payment of salary. Yum Brands I believe does this. But of course, prepaid debit cards cant be used everywhere. (Hotels, deposits, some gas pumps, etc)
I have an idea. What if we could create something that has the privacy of cash, is uncensorable like cash but could also be digitally transmitted like electronic payments.
I prefer to keep a bit of cash on me for many reasons, and I don't think it's appropriate for any organization to tell me 1. that I can't; and/or 2. that they have the right to know what I'm using it for (or that they have the ability to deny my ability to use my capital in whatever ways I desire).
We're not China. As someone who worked with Chinese nationals, even some of them who were complete simps for The Party had no desire to have all their finances completely digitized and tracked.
Modern economies have a need for cash, no matter what big banks or credit card companies or FinTech companies think.