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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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> 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...

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...

Why are people so quick to assume this is anything more than a local tech demo? It's a 1.4 billion people country. Accurate biometric facial data is quite difficult (read impossible) to get for most if not all of em without making an integrated part of official ID and even then i wouldn't see it being used like this due to plenty of faults inherent to the tech.

We live in a hall of tech-demo mirrors that is sometimes mistaken for reality. After debating people claiming cash was a "tiny fringe", it turns out the Federal Reserve data reports that cash is growing faster than the economy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439095

It's all fun and games until you get a new hat and glasses and cease to exist.

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking.

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.

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

> Such deep seated cynicism shows that we are far down a bad path.

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.

> endure it for quite a few years at least

Or longer, if life extension research is successful..

Is there much evidence to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state? The GP's cynicism is completely warranted in my opinion, when given the choice between doing the right thing for its citizens and increasing the scope and power of its own bureaucratic institutions all governments (and all other very large organisations for that matter) pick the latter.

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 to believe governments won't cheerfully throw their citizens under the bus for the benefit of the surveillance state

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.

This isn't a US-specific problem, a lot of Europe and the Anglophone world at large is experiencing issues like this. It feels like the last two years especially (but a fair bit leading up to it) have utterly destroyed my trust in not just the political institutions in the UK but a lot of other ones I'd taken for granted in the past too. I genuinely feel like we've become perhaps not a banana republic but certainly a banana kingdom where corruption is the norm and the government exists primarily to serve the powerful rather than the people. We're literally at the point where the Prime Minister can openly flout the law and lie about it to the Mother of Parliaments without consequence, where there's apparently no meritocracy whatsoever in how politicians are appointed to high office, and policy positions are in lockstep with predicted media response rather than any notion of public good. The tail has wagged the dog right into oncoming traffic.

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.

Firstly, imho the UK reduced it self from a global empire to just the one island though this political funny business. You'd think someone in the right spot would eventually have enough of it.

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.

The decline of the British Empire is definitely an interesting subject, especially as its territorial peak came relatively close to its precipitous decline. While I don't think the notion of being a former superpower really defines contemporary British politics in the way many outside commentators assume it does, the speed which that decline happened definitely had a marked effect on how our political history played out in the 20th century.

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.

>Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it,

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.

Very succinctly put. The amount of people who are hell bent on staying in the past and refusing any sort of progress out of ( exaggerated, IMHO) cynical fear and slippery slope fallacies is.. concerning to say the least. Instead of those people using their concerns to help shape the narrative and regulations to fight against what they don't want, they play toddlers and simply refuse to advance.

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.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Anything that can be abused, will be abused. This is not cynical, this is just how it is. Progress is great, but cashless is not progress.

Anything involving authorization introduces the possibility of denial.

Governments can do the right thing most of the time but things should be designed for the worse case.

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.

> convenience always wins

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.

> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch

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.

it kind of depends.

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.)

Automated surveillance enforcement tends to bring the discrepancy between the law and the norms of behavior to light. The state prefers to forgo enforcement and keep the law rather than keep the enforcement and alter the law to reflect norms.

> 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.

That pretty much makes no sense as an analogy. People opposed to speed cameras aren't advocating for spending more time and effort to write tickets, they're advocating for not getting tickets.

Really? You can't imagine a large populist movement rejecting a newly developed technology based on suspicions about some kind of sinister agenda?

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. As a result most are unlikely to care very much. They'll think of those that do care as crackpots.

Ah yes, the fallacy of quantitative supremacy and human fungibility, that illusory phase of statistics kindergarten. Imagine a fictional universe where Steve Jobs was cancelled in his early career. "But it was only one person". How many human lives would have been impacted if Steve Jobs had been deleted from technology history? 2021 smartphone adoption is north of 3 billion humans.

> 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?

Ah yes, the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.

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.

> claimed that people would change their ways when they were suddenly the focus of their payments being banned.

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.

> the fallacy of thinking that because HN cares, the general public will inconvenience themselves.

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

Are cashless advocates in an HN bubble?

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

I don't know, but Americans almost certainly are, US payment systems and attitudes to them are generally far behind other countries.

A bit awkward for cashless narratives that "behind" Americans are leading the world reserve currency, where cash use is increasing. Is there public data on the decline of cash outside America?

But that's exactly the point people are making in this thread: people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

> people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

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.”

> But convenience always wins.

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.

You’re not really engaging with the argument of the person you’re responding to, namely that REGARDLESS of other merits, people will abandon cash because cashless will be too convenient. You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it. And thus the issues that you (quite rightfully) bring up will have to be dealt with in other ways. What do you think about that?

What I think about that is that solving the problems of a cashless society can be solved with a single law - any store accepting electronic payments must also accept cash payments.

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!

> You can’t sustain cash as a form of payment if only a tiny fringe care enough to use it.

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

interesting, although I expect this is not the case in all Western countries, and perhaps even less in some parts of the third world, I'm pretty sure Sweden and Denmark have less currency in circulation.

Would be good to quantify the cash decline, if any, outside the US.

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

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

You mean contactless payment which has been available outside the USA for over a decade, including Android wallet from 2011? Yes the future is unevenly distributed, but when it comes to banking and other payment infrastructure the "developed" country where it is least present is the USA

An aside: I pay with my phone more often than my watch. It’s physically easier to get my phone out than it is to reach across my body to activate watch payments (which needs two hands), and then twist my wrist to get close enough to the contactless point. In five years of smart-watch ownership, I’ve yet to find a pay point that’s comfortable for wrist payments. In London, the transit system contactless points are on the right as you walk through the gates, but I wear my watch on my left. This all sounds trivial, but it’s at the same level of “in/convenience” that the watch sits at, compared with other payment methods. I suspect we wont see watches take off for payment the way we see contactless cards and phones.

N=1.

> 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.

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.

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking.

Governments giving back power to people? What optimism!

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