Hacker News Reader

Comment by mk89 | Hacker News Reader

Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons.

We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.

View on HN

N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

Being free to dodge the tax man is incredibly valuable for small business and individuals in Germany as a lot of wealth is built on tax fraud. That's the kind of privacy people mean.

> N'ah mate, the main reason is tax fraud, not trust in data holding entities, otherwise nobody in Germany would use Google/Instagram/TikTok if they cared so much about their data privacy.

The people who are very vocal about (data) privacy in Germany (which are quite some people, though not all) indeed typically try to avoid such services.

There's a difference between "some vocal people" and "the majority of people".

And there's a difference between being vocal and actually walking the walk and doing anything about it.

This looks like the typical black or white view about things.

Germany has 80+ million people. Having nobody on Instagram/Tiktok would be unthinkable.

However, historically speaking, this hesitation to have privacy over "convenience" is implemented still everywhere.

You can't just minimize it with "people want to evade tax", although it's also true.

> We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

Exactly.

This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prosecuted). There still exist lots of contemporary witnesses who can tell you what being potentially be surveilled means in the day-to-day life.

> This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 25 years ago

In comparison to the NSDAP and SED, I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl (which actually ended a bit over 25 years ago) a dictatorship is a bit too harsh... /s

> I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl

I fixed my mistake. :-)

Didn't Germany have 3 dictatorships in the 20th century?

East Germany (ended in 1990), Third Reich (ended in 1945), German Monarchy (ended in 1918)

I'm not used to people calling monarchies dictatorships, even though they are in some ways similar. Until 1918, many states in Europe were monarchies.

Calling Saudi Arabia a dictatorship is unfamiliar to you?

Yes. And in any case, that wasn't the point. I haven't seen anybody refer to pre-WWI European monarchies as "dictatorships".

Right. Funny way to point out treaty of Darin as a breaking point.

No idea what your point is. The German empire wasn't a dictatorship, if you want to claim otherwise, find me a credible source that says so.

I heard of people being sent ... far away ... just because of jealous neighbors spying on you.

That's some level of f** up.

No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.

Don't mix cash with digitization. Japan is even more cash.bases than Germany, yet I'd say more advanced in terms of digitization.

Aren't they still faxing documents all over the place? (AFAIK, you might have to do that from time to time in Germany as well)

They are, and they still rely on hankos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...). There has been a recent push for "digital transformation", but it is still in the early stages.

True all.

At the same time, they had an early form of mobile Internet since they year 2000 (when most of the West didn't have internet at all, let alone mobile internet): https://www.wired.com/2000/06/its-a-wireless-world-in-japan/

Japan is ranked 4th/20th vs Germany's 23th/35th for mobile/fixed internet speed, so much better overall (and anecdotal evidence is that internet in Germany's countryside is rock bottom).

So Japan rather seems to me to _want_ to do their own thing (at least when it comes to preference for cash, although I agree that still faxing things is strange), compared to Germany which _cannot_, for various reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com