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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

It discriminates against everyone except the minority of public administrators it ensconces. It literally removes the discretion and ownership of money if you cannot physically possess it. It polarizes people involved in grey market transactions into a permanent underclass who cannot escape it, and just partial cashlessness has been used within the last several or so hours to disenfranchise political opposition. That it is being discussed seriously at all is an offensively false equivalence. The only people who are "cashless" in a cashless society are the citizens from whom the cash is taken.

The arguments back like, "I have nothing to hide," or, "cards are just convenient," aren't centerist or neutral, they are the banal nihilism of people suited to scheduling prison trains, imo.

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I agree. I personally prefer paying by card 100% of the time, but cash should always be an option. I think it's fine for cash to be a little less convenient - when paying for gas, for example, the pump might only take card, and if you want to pay by cash you have to go into the store. Or a store may not be able to provide exact change and that's fine.

I always like to remind people “when you pay with your card, you help finance the forever war”.

Coins/cash have been around for thousands of years, and war since time immemorial. Cards aren’t making us do anything we haven’t already done since, well, forever.

Exactly, the same kind of warmongering was enacted under livestock barter economies.

The one thing I like about cashless is that it makes it just that tiny bit more difficult for bad actors who accrued their money through nefarious means.

Using any form of fiat currency does the same.

The thing that I noticed, at least in Italy, is that young people seem believe all the propaganda about cashless society: they really think that it is about fighting tax evasion. I am sincerely afraid of an entity that can control all of your money if you're not "good" enough: how not-good I have to be before they forbid me from living.

But 2 things can both be true. I do believe that forcing cashless is the only way to tackle evasion, and that's by far the biggest problem in Italy imho. On the other hand I'm also terrified of the idea of preventing people to transact from the State. The solution would be to encode the "right to transact" as a constitutional right, and offer 0 interest free accounts to all (which iirc is a thing already in Italy since June 2018?). And then reduce cash threshold hard. (I know encoding things as a right wouldn't stop an evil state to prevent you from transact, but then the same argument applies to jailing you which also limits your transactions so it's a bit moot)

There should be a right to a suitable medium of exchange with very low inflation or deflation and very low unemployment.

If the government doesn't provide such a thing that is ok but it must grant citizen's the right to issue their own medium of exchange with a regulatory path to pay taxes if it fulfills the inflation/deflation criteria.

Well the previous generation that never paid taxes and never hired anyone legally did a lot to help to push this narrative.

Money is a relationship. Private ownership of a relationship is slavery. The central bank must devalue the slave contract by 2% otherwise an accumulation of slave contracts will enslave the entire society. Our money is a time banking network and time on earth doesn't last forever, people age. The "owners of money" don't care, in fact, to them aging is the greatest sin that must be punished as it devalues their "private property". They expect the young and future born to give up their time to compensate through the time lost through aging.

You get to pick negative rates or inflation. There is no other option.

Why the scare quotes around private property? Every species in nature acquires, accumulates, and defends assets and territory, evolves means to do so, or it dies out sometime before the ones who do. The opening syllogism is a non-sequitur.

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