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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Cashless society is an orwellian horror. I am so endlessly sad Switzerland apparently is the only nation to value their cash.

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Does current cash travel very far ?

If we’re in to do Orwellian things, I’m not sure what’s technically stoping us from doing it now. All bills are scanned at the banks, we can flag who got which lot from the ATM, major POS systems scan for counterfeit, and retailers will return to the bank any excess from what they need for day to day exchanges (or not bother and return everything to the bank to get new bills in packaged stacks).

We’re already trusting our govs for not abusing the situation. The bridge is already crossed in my mind, going pure cashless is a small step in comparison.

It's the obvious choice when a great deal of your wealth comes from helping foreigners bypass their tax laws.

Sadly even in Switzerland convenience has a very strong position in this. We have the same issue with the SBB getting rid of ticket machines in favor of apps and digital train tickets.

I'm not really sure where you're taking Switzerland being the only one from. As far as I know there's currently no country in the world that's cashless?

Switzerland is one of few countries in the world where the citizens WILL decide if they reject a cashless society. In most other societies, it is the politicians who decide, who are by and large beholden to corporate interests. And because corporations are more or less uninterested in freedom, and love big profits, corporations are fine with a cashless society.

I would like to read about countries where politicians implemented a cashless society and what happened.

China?

Many other are not completely there yet but move in the cashless direction steadily.

For example China already is experimenting with digital "money" you can only spend until specific date (before it expires) so people won't have savings (needless to say they also control who pays for what and can even block you completely once you say something the state doesn't like).

Israel is not a cashless society yet but already requires people to specifically declare cash savings exceeding certain (pretty humble) amounts even if they have already declared the income and paid the taxes.

What's orwellian or horrific about a cashless society? Sure, there are valid arguments against it, but that doesn't make it orwellian or horrific, this is just hyperbole.

It does. It wouldn't happen on day one. But, slowly, it would start creeping in. As someone else commented: what if, you buy some mega turbo sex toy 3000 and a couple of years later super religious orthodox government wins elections. What if the government decides that you can buy one thing but not another. What if you want to organise a little poker night with your old buddies and so on. Look what happened with the internet. Endless scare stories about terrorism, pedophiles and eventually mass surveillance is in legislation..

If a super religious govermment wanted to punish you specifically - they don't need your transaction history. They can put you in prison using a completely made up reason. Just look what the Russian government did to Navalny.

Scare stories about authoritarian governments that still somehow respect rule of law and due process are funny.

You're missing the point, it's not a case of "we've identified zirgs as someone we want to punish so let's go through their browser history to find a reason to do it" a tyrannical government hardly needs to go to such lengths as you point out. The nightmare scenario is you get people in power who say "we can make the world a better place if we just eliminate all the people who do X" and they have the digital tools to simply filter all citizens by X and get a nice big list they can hand out to the secret police.

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