[HN Gopher] With the death of cash, privacy faces a deeply uncer...
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With the death of cash, privacy faces a deeply uncertain future
Author : smooke
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-01-18 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackernoon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackernoon.com)
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal
| operations? Transactions are slower than sending money
| electronically, the paper is subject to decay, and if your cash
| gets stolen you have no recourse to getting it back. The fact
| that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real dollars is
| insanity and proof that its value is a speculative bubble that's
| being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
| proc0 wrote:
| You've never traveled around and used cash because you are at a
| small shop of some kind with no ATM around? I guess you welcome
| the Great Reset then. I would rather keep the option, no matter
| how obsolete. Even crypto can have an equivalent, it's just
| more options, more flexible. Why would you want a more rigid
| system with less options? (unless you want absolute control)
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Apparently the /s is actually required here.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| It's pretty sad.
| grahamburger wrote:
| Legitimately surprised at sibling comments missing the subtext
| here. s/cash/cryptocurrency of parent post and you have word
| for word the standard complaint against cryptocurrency, which I
| believe is the point @camjohnson26 is trying to make.
| glogla wrote:
| That's Poe's law then.
|
| It doesn't help that we've all seen other / real (depending
| on whether GP is being sarcastic) authoritarians making
| exactly that argument I guess.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Calling out the subtext would probably lead to completely
| different responses. The truth is most people don't
| understand money or the very real reasons why cash and
| digital currency are important.
|
| Thankfully some brilliant souls pointed out you can buy
| things with cash. The comments about donating to political
| parties are especially ironic. Hacker News is great for
| technological information but way off base when it comes to
| finance and economics.
| remirk wrote:
| > Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal
| operations
|
| Buying groceries.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Even that is becoming more and more rare. The makeup of a
| 30-checkout supermarket here (Sweden) is probably 20 self-
| checkout, 5-no-cash manual ones and 5 that can handle cash.
|
| Many if not all small businesses like hotdog vendors, flea
| markets etc have completely dropped cash because it's
| expensive and inconvenient.
|
| Once the costs of cash management is higher than that of
| cards or digital transactions, there is no incentive.
|
| It's easy to say "we need cash for privacy" but if people are
| doing better business without cash, it's hard to convince
| them.
| generalizations wrote:
| > Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal
| operations?
|
| That sounds like a restatement of 'who needs privacy if you
| have nothing to hide'. I use cash because I don't feel like
| making my purchase history available to anyone with deep
| pockets. If someone wants to figure out what I buy, I'd rather
| they just go ahead and hire someone to follow me around.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| Giving money to homeless people.
|
| And as a general principle I don't like having all of my
| transactions logged and tracked. That's the same fallacy of "if
| you have nothing to hide, then submit yourself to complete
| tracking"
| Solocomplex wrote:
| "it turns out you transferred $20 to a known drug addict and
| murderer. Mind answering a few questions about that?"
| loceng wrote:
| I think cash is a failsafe against potential tyranny - so if
| you value that then there's a need to maintain the cash system
| and requiring accepting cash as an option.
| glogla wrote:
| You can't be stopped because Visa and MC don't like what you're
| doing.
|
| EDIT: here's a quote from when this was discussed in HN last
| time:
|
| > A society without cash is a society in which every person has
| no choice but to get the permission of someone they don't know
| and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain
| food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission
| can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Alms.
|
| Cash tips to underpaid workers of various stripes.
|
| An "Oh, Shit" emergency envelope in the home.
|
| An "oh crap got a flat" $50 in my bike jersey.
|
| Lots of reasons!
| rietta wrote:
| Cash can be stolen but it can't be data breached. Steal my
| wallet and get $40. Steal my card and I have hours of work todo
| to get back to whole even "getting any stolen money back". I
| prefer cash for small transaction walking around money.
| gruez wrote:
| >The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real
| dollars
|
| what? You're saying I can go to a bank, withdraw 90 one hundred
| dollar bills, and sell it to someone for more than $9000?
| cowboysauce wrote:
| >Has anyone found a use for cash outside financing criminal
| operations?
|
| I've gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have no
| cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.
|
| >The fact that a hundred dollar bill is worth a hundred real
| dollars is insanity and proof that its value is a speculative
| bubble that's being driven by anarchist fanatics and criminals.
|
| Or, you know, because the government says that it's worth 100$
| and lets you pay 100$ in taxes with it.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > I've gone camping and hiking in plenty of places that have
| no cellular service so cash is the only way to pay the fees.
|
| This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out
| wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty than to
| argue for keeping cash around. Last time I traveled Chilean
| Patagonia, I was impressed that even the most isolated
| communities now have 4G and the village general store has a
| card terminal. In Finnish Lapland, too, where there are
| almost no people, you almost never lose a mobile phone
| connection in the national parks, and the shops take cards
| like anywhere else in the country.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| I know there are many downsides to it, but I enjoy these
| places where you can get away from the 24/7 always online
| world. There are so few left anymore
| cowboysauce wrote:
| >This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out
| wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty
|
| I cannot state how strongly I. disagree. Part of the appeal
| of these places is that you are completely cut off.
| Destroying that for something as banal as credit card
| payments is abhorrent to me.
|
| I'd also much rather that the organizations that run these
| areas spend their money on things other than paying for and
| maintaining PoS systems. I've yet to see one that's as
| reliable as a steel post that you jam cash into.
| danShumway wrote:
| > This seems like more of a reason to push for rolling out
| wireless connectivity in places of natural beauty than to
| argue for keeping cash around.
|
| Is there a timeline for when America will get perfect,
| reliable connectivity in rural/isolated areas? Is it OK if
| we keep cash around in the meantime until that problem is
| solved?
|
| Just let us know when that 4G rollout is completely done,
| and then we can revisit this conversation.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| How do you explain hyperinflation?
| cowboysauce wrote:
| I'd explain it as being irrelevant to this particular
| conversation since credit/debit cards would also be
| affected by hyperinflation. Though you'd have the advantage
| of not having to push a wheelbarrow full of cash around.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| Cash is easy for simple informal transactions (e.g. garage
| sales, farm stands and the like) and where connectivity is poor
| or nonexistent.
|
| A lot of the alternatives involve unnecessary infrastructure
| (e.g. PayPal etc have various controls to block money
| laundering, which isn't the purpose of your once-a-decade
| garage sale) or are siloed, making it hard to quickly do
| business with someone who has a different brand of phone or
| doesn't have the right app installed.
|
| And asynchronous transactions are hard (I used to buy a
| newspaper by leaving a quarter on a board and grabbing a
| paper...and this setup was next to a busy subway station!). And
| farm stands are often simply goods left out on the honor
| system.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If you donate to political ideas that are unpopular a year
| later, a twitter mob of ideologues will destroy your career, a
| la Eich:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
| [deleted]
| danShumway wrote:
| > being driven by anarchist fanatics
|
| Literally backed by the government. Cash is a government-backed
| store of value.
|
| What kind of hoops do you have to jump through to say "my
| federally standardized central currency that only the
| government is allowed to print is a tool of the anarchist anti-
| state fanatics?"
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Societies need to implement rules so that any sharing of a user's
| data needs to flow through data repositories that are controlled
| by the user and so they can authorize and audit each of these
| flows. Sort of like an oAuth dialogue, "Mortage Lender A wants
| access to your 2020 after-tax income" and you'd give them limited
| access so they could underwrite the loan and it'd be illegal to
| store the user's data any longer than necessary for that purpose.
| This would give companies cleaner data and common API while
| eliminating the possibly for anti-consumer data middle men like
| credit bureaus who could be then be summarily launched into
| space.
| korse wrote:
| I don't like not being able to participate in society when the
| bank has a technical problem or my credit card company thinks I
| am committing fraud.
|
| Taking away cash puts me at the mercy of these systems, which is
| uncomfortable.
|
| I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash, and there
| are never any 'pending' transactions.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| > I'm also more financially responsible when I have cash
|
| It's the opposite for me. It is much more difficult for me to
| keep track of cash expenses while budgeting and it is easy to
| forget individual transactions. So much that at this point if I
| ever take out cash, I consider that money spent as far as my
| budget is concerned.
| decker wrote:
| Cash isn't dead. Even in a pandemic, there's a lot of stores that
| still accept it. This article seems more like clickbait FUD for
| pumping cryptocurrency.
| fakedang wrote:
| This actually got me thinking.... What if someone utilized
| GPT-3 to write incoherent garbage that can pass off in front of
| Quant firm's sentiment analyzers as trending topics? If one
| were invested enough, one could certainly pump all sorts of
| stocks too.
| danShumway wrote:
| Philadelphia recently passed a law outright requiring stores to
| accept cash; they viewed requiring a bank account and credit
| card to be an accessibility problem for homeless residents. A
| couple of fast-food places I (pre-pandemic) used to frequent
| switched from requiring credit cards to accepting both
| afterwards, which was kind of nice.
|
| There is reason in general to be concerned about the lack of
| good, private digital payment systems, but there are still
| plenty of cities where a pro-cash sentiment is strong, or at
| least a pro-"cash should be an option" sentiment. And I suspect
| (but can't confirm) that rural areas might also bias towards
| more cash transactions as well.
|
| The general trend away from cash is something to pay attention
| to, but depending on where you live, it may not be an emergency
| right now.
| upofadown wrote:
| There is a third way to have a government issued electronic
| currency that provides privacy for the purchaser. So the
| government can't cut off an individual but they can still collect
| sales taxes.
|
| * https://taler.net/
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| This is the real killer app of cryptocurrency. Monero is a
| decentralized, untraceable digital cash that preserves privacy.
| All the arguments against cryptocurrency can also be applied to
| cash, but that doesn't take away their main value proposition,
| which is a mathematically secure way to send payments while
| protecting the sender's privacy.
| blueprint wrote:
| As a monero contributor, I can say one problem differentiating
| it still from the capabilities of cash is the inability to give
| Monero to someone who doesn't already have a wallet. there's
| trust involved in every solution we know of so far.
| dougk16 wrote:
| I get what you're saying of course, but as a fun
| counterpoint, I gave my brother $50 worth of Monero for
| Christmas and he has absolutely no idea how cryptocurrencies
| work, had never heard of Monero. I simply wrote out
| instructions on a piece of paper, the seed, basic opsec, and
| there you go. He probably put it in his drawer and forgot
| about it. But he'll remember and learn how it works real
| quick if I ever tell him it's at $50,000 or something in a
| few years haha.
| crusty wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a cash replacement to me, it sounds
| like an investment vehicle. The reason cash is cash is that
| there's no inherent benefit to sitting on it. No one is
| going to be able to trade 10 $5 bills they put in the
| drawer this year for 5 $100 bills in a year or two, and we
| all understand that and operate on that shared
| understanding. If there's a hope and a real chance that I
| could get rich by just sitting on a cryptocurrency, I'll
| have to weigh its divestment against holding it. And the
| people or entities that have the biggest counterweight to
| investment are likely to be those who get some additional
| benefit besides its monetary value that they'd have to pay
| mightily for with cash anyway, like anonymity for practical
| rather than political reasons.
| gruez wrote:
| >Monero is a [...] untraceable digital cash that preserves
| privacy
|
| Not exactly. A single transaction might be untraceable but over
| repeated transactions it's possible to deanonymize people with
| a high degree of confidence. See:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o the good part
| starts at 10 minutes.
| eindiran wrote:
| See the Monero team's response here:
| https://www.getmonero.org/2018/03/29/response-to-an-
| empirica...
|
| Full original paper here: https://content.sciendo.com/view/jo
| urnals/popets/2018/3/arti...
| 99chrisbard wrote:
| Cash please;
| https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/smart-citie...
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| There will always be an alternative, maybe even just bartering.
| Aside from organized crime, simple tax avoidance will be the main
| driver.
| rvense wrote:
| This article is very flawed. It mentions two scenarios:
| decentralized, uncontrolled money, versus government control. But
| it is missing the third scenario, which is the on that is
| actually happening in most places: plain old privatization.
|
| The Chinese government might be trying to build a state-backed
| digital currency, but as the article states it is already almost
| cashless. And in Europe, as far as I know, each country already
| has one or a few de facto standard app-based solutions for
| digital payments between private persons. My country has instant
| bank transfers between banks and one mobile payment app. And at
| some point, the (American) smartphone solutions are likely to
| allow person-to-person transfer. This is all based on existing,
| privatized banking infrastructure which, while obviously not
| completely outside government control, is certainly not a public
| resource like the cash-based infrastructure was.
| typenil wrote:
| As long as it's framed as a way to cut off immoral right wing
| extremists from the financial system, Silicon Valley will
| enthusiastically embrace dystopian government control of
| currency.
| excannuck wrote:
| And 20 years ago, neo-cons embracing dystopian government
| control to make sure muslims didn't use cash.
|
| It's all control. But instead of seeing it as right vs. left,
| its better framed as authoritarians (historic and modern left
| [1], Silicon Valley, FBI) vs. people who value their freedom
| and privacy either because its innate to their being, or
| because their particular group is kept under a watchful eye
| (gays in the 80s, muslims 20 years ago, christians people
| today).
|
| Avoid getting ensnared in the identity trap the way you just
| did. Once you do, you've accepted the basic premise of identity
| politics and, therefore, things like CRT; which is just
| 's/class/identity/g' for Marxism.
|
| [1] that is all of the left's history from the Jacobins until
| today minus twenty or thirty years centered around the early
| 90s.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Christian people are kept under a watchful eye in the US
| today? All 200 million of them?
| faissaloo wrote:
| Yes, along with everyone else, the NSA exists.
| [deleted]
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