Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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.

> Data surveillance

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.

In USA (for example) if we were cashless then then millions of tax dollars collected by state governments from cannabis sales would not have happened.

This is because 100% of the electronic payment players currently block it; and they block it because the federal government blocks it.

The only path to legalized cannabis there would have been at the federal level; it would have blocked 20+ states with their experiments.

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.

That's actually not true.

It may have been at first. But, in my state, you can pay by debit card these days, albeit for a small surcharge.

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.

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.

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