Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Oof, this comment convinced me to go from loving passkeys to "maybe I should be careful". However, I don't think these are technological issues, I think they're policy issues. We need to vote for freedom of computing, and against corporations doing whatever the hell they want.

View on HN

Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.

The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.

I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.

I’ve never seen anywhere that doesn’t accept cash? Where have you experienced this?

I've seen retail businesses in NYC and NJ that were no cash. I think NYC has banned that practice, but I'm not sure if that has held.

Increasingly common at smaller businesses in western Washington (have seen this in Seattle, Bellingham, and occasionally elsewhere).

Even where it's "technically" possible, it's becoming more difficult. Some grocery stores around here don't staff traditional teller lanes at night, shrinking down to only self-checkout, which are card-only machines. To pay cash, you'll have to escalate to the roaming attendant (or at least, I assume they can find some way to accept cash for that transaction? I can't say I've tried)

Restaurants in big cities and sports stadiums. It's called a cost saving effort, but with restaurants especially it's usually to discourage poor people from trying to come in.

I think some theme parks have started. Not accepting cash should be illegal, and certain places have started implementing laws that make the practice illegal. There are various reasons why a person is unable to have a bank account.

In the UK, but parking quite often these days has machines that are out of order so please use one of these 500 apps "for your convenience".

At the market, there is a high cost to managing cash and so some of the small sellers will only accept cash reluctantly or not sell because they can't break notes.

Cash is basically dead here already; it's been months since I needed to go to an ATM and I no longer carry coins, apart from a few pounds in the car for parking. But even then parking is mostly cashless (yes, annoying app problem). Even the compressed air machine at the petrol station takes £1 contactless. Street food vendors etc seem to have gone cashless so they can avoid the inconvenience and cost of cash handling (banks hate taking coins).

Used car? Bank transfer.

> Street food vendors

I think the other part is speed. They know the cost, type it into a machine and then tap to pay, onto the next customer!

You should start using it more, even in places where card payment is also possible.

> Street food vendors etc seem to have gone cashless so they can avoid the inconvenience and cost of cash handling (banks hate taking coins).

It is also safer than carrying loads of money on you while you sell stuff on the street.

Parking is a special case because the meters aren't attended by people.

Guarantee any individual market stall seller would rather take exact cash than not make a sale at all. Small firms might not, since their cashiers have to work in the process the owner sets. Owner-operators will do anything for money or soon go out of business.

At livenation concert venues. But the concessions vendors still have a prominent cash tip jar at these cashless venues.

Common in the UK, which I feel will hit them in the face when the Internet Research Agency knocks the payment processing offline for a few days.

As mentioned super common in the UK but in the US nearly every sports/concert/event venue above a certain size is 100℅ cashless these days (on top of strictly requiring a specific mobile app to gain entry in the first place)

The law does mandate that. It's just that most purchases are not debts.

> the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions

This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.

Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.

Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.

The government can include corporations. You could even argue the American government and American corporatocracy have already swapped roles. Equifax is almost more government than the SEC is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com