[HN Gopher] Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing ...
___________________________________________________________________
Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they
bargained for
Author : walterbell
Score : 222 points
Date : 2023-05-28 16:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| walterbell wrote:
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/war-on-cash-nyc-enfo...
|
| _> In 1978, Massachusetts became the first to enact such a law,
| requiring retailers to accept cash and credit. In passing its ban
| in January 2020, NYC joined New Jersey, Philadelphia and San
| Francisco, which all approved such bans in 2019.. Two rationales
| motivated NYC's ban. First was the large number of NYC residents
| - more than 10% - who lack bank accounts, and thus access to
| credit cards.. Second is general skepticism over the security of
| cashless transactions, with the NYT noting they raise "the
| specter of hackers stealing personal data tied to digital
| transactions."
|
| .. NYC went after the upscale Van Leeuwen ice cream shop for
| repeated violations of the cashless ban.. In October, the city
| charged the ice cream shop with 17 violations of the cashless ban
| and penalized the company with $12,750 in fines._
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Even if it weren't a terrible, awful idea from a democratic point
| of view, it's just silly from a logistic point of view.
|
| This means you create a single point of failure for your entire
| society: electricity provision.
|
| Got a power shot down? Suddenly nobody can buy anything.
|
| Got a war on your territory? Your trade routes will get destroyed
| 4 times faster.
|
| Want to be a reserve currency? Guess what, now you have to do
| like China and have 2 currencies cause the rest of the world uses
| cash.
|
| And congrats, a cyber attack can now hurt your economy.
|
| Hope nothing in 70000 years of history won't repeat itself cause
| you are now going down next time something goes wrong.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Most stores aren't going to be able to sell you anything with
| no power, regardless of taking card or cash, because sales need
| to go into a database via a register, update inventory, etc.
| Sure a few small family run businesses, maybe restaurants,
| might be able to take cash, but almost no chains will be able
| to run and that's most stores in most places.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| Home Depot has a backup generator or battery in order to
| still allow transactions to go through in the event of a
| power outage. It even ran the air conditioning. They stored
| the payments offline until they were able to connect online
| again.
|
| What I've seen happen more often is that there is a network
| error and digital payments can't be processed for hours.
| Digital money relies on a lot more complex infrastructure
| than just electricity.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| It's the network that's the problem.
|
| In Europe, the Visa network went down in 2018. see
| https://www.wired.com/story/visa-outage-shows-the-
| fragility-...
|
| In Canada, the Rogers network went down in July 2022 for
| several hours which caused debit card transactions to fail
| (after the outage, Interac said it was going to add a SECOND
| network provider - *facepalm*). Many businesses which relied
| on the Rogers network for credit card transactions were also
| affected.
|
| from https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-outage-interac-
| debit...:
|
| "Small business owners were among those hardest hit by the
| outage, which left them unable to process debit card
| payments.
|
| Sharif Ahmed, the owner of Plantforsoul plant shop in
| Toronto's west end, said the outage left him feeling
| helpless, as he turned away customers who didn't have cash."
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| First days, you don't need all stores, a few is enough.
|
| After a few days, I guarantee even the big ones will manage
| the inventory with pen and paper, with the blessing of the
| boss and the gov.
|
| But even without all that, having the ability to have a black
| market in a time of crisis is priceless.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Stores used to process card payments before they had digital
| registers. So it's not required. And now I suspect even cash
| won't work without power.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Something often not spoken about (as the discussion often focuses
| on privacy and "power") is the price.
|
| As someone who uses card for most payments (maybe paying in cash
| a couple of times a year), cash is expensive to use. It requires
| time out of my routine to take the cash out, unless I can take
| out an exact amount there I'm then left with change, and then
| because I don't want the change I normally spend it on things I
| don't need. If cash in another currency that's very expensive as
| I have to pay to convert the small amount. On the other hand
| cards are effectively free to me, even paying in other
| currencies. I travel a lot and never use local cash.
|
| However, for many people, the reverse is true. If your cash flow
| is primary in actual cash, then paying into an account can be
| annoying or even cost money, current accounts without sufficient
| funds in them often charge a fee (in the UK current accounts,
| checking accounts?, are typically "free"), some users can't even
| hold a real bank account and are forced to use pseudo-bank-
| accounts based on prepaid cards with exorbitant fees, and cash
| could be argued to subsidise card fees (which are rare in the
| UK).
|
| I hope that for the foreseeable future both options are accepted
| at the majority of places. I'm never going to take cash out for a
| truly discretionary purchase so only accepting cash limits the
| market, and some people are rarely going to have a card they can
| use at card-only merchants.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > On the other hand cards are effectively free to me
|
| The average card merchant fee in the US is 1.5-3.5%. You're
| paying that much more for everything you're buying. That
| applies even if you use cash. So it's effectively a private
| sales tax.
|
| You absolutely pay for the convenience. It's just not on any
| receipt.
| danpalmer wrote:
| In the EU/UK it's capped at 0.4% for debit cards I believe,
| and not much more for credit cards. I agree it is a private
| sales tax, but cash handling isn't free so it's not a perfect
| comparison.
|
| In Australia it's actually very common for the card fee to be
| applied on top of the charge, especially in restaurants and
| small businesses. And I actually don't mind. It's about
| 1-1.5%, which on a $50 bill is small enough that I'd rather
| have the convenience, and the annoyance (or risk) of cash is
| enough to not bother.
| gedy wrote:
| I buy all fast food with cash, don't trust the data won't be used
| in future for insurance or other data mining :-)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Indeed. Recently I grudgingly went to a ticketmaster concert.
| Shit you not, it was like boarding an international flight. It's
| not possible to buy a top performer ticket anonymously any
| longer, and you are _required_ to present ID and have a
| smartphone.
|
| Who the hell asked for this? I didn't. It will be my last tm
| concert, that's for sure.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| People who want to go 100% cashless at the current state of tech
| progress / society are the enemies of humanity. They are
| advocates of totalitarian regimes and whatever comes with them,
| no matter what they glaze their poison with - convenience,
| crypto, futurism etc.
| [deleted]
| jupp0r wrote:
| I understand and agree with the arguments for cash as an option.
|
| On the other hand, I think it's completely irrelevant if nobody
| is using it. I'm in my 30s and literally nobody uses cash among
| my friends. Is this debate even relevant?
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Not among your friends.
|
| I use cash for every single in person transaction I do, and
| only use a card for Amazon and whatever other online things o
| buy every so often.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| I am younger than you, and I use cash.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I can't believe how willingly people submitted to going cashless.
| I was at a trendy rivertown restaurant, went to pay with cash,
| and the shock on people's faces was unbelievable, like I was some
| ancient alien. It honestly feels pretty forced, like there's a
| hyper-fashionable status attached to paying digitally. It's not
| the first time people lapped up a status marker hawked to them by
| some globocorp, just like iphones, luxury cars, etc.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Paying with a card is not a status symbol, it's convenient.
|
| If anything it's the opposite, if you want to flaunt wealth
| then you normally pay cash and round up to the nearest 50.
| ThorsBane wrote:
| Good. Keep it that way.
| elwell wrote:
| Credit card fees (arbitrarily chosen by credit card companies)
| are a source of inflation because they get integrated into sales
| pricing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've just gone several months without access to any electronic
| money (e.g. debit cards, credit cards, phone etc) and it has been
| complicated. I've been thrown out of several stores at the
| checkout because they couldn't or wouldn't take cash.
|
| You also lose the ability to take advantage of many special
| offers that are available only through retailers apps, e.g.
| McDonald's. You can get the discounts, free items, nor can you
| accrue any credit (e.g. Walgreen's Cash) or points towards future
| discounts.
|
| I also couldn't ride any of the scooters or bicycles in my city
| that are available everywhere, because it is incredibly difficult
| or impossible to use cash to access these forms of transport. You
| can't even use your cash to buy a prepaid debit card as they
| won't accept prepaid debit cards to rent the items.
| jjgreen wrote:
| "Paper money" is such a strange expression to use here: it's
| inaccurate (because coins) and much longer than the obvious word,
| cash.
| f5ve wrote:
| In the context of the WSJ, _cash_ doesn 't mean _physical
| currency_. It just means dollars, i.e. not treasuries or any
| other type of asset. Most people would interpret that headline
| differently -- to the point of it being inaccurate.
|
| [edit: also the wordplay wouldn't work]
| jjgreen wrote:
| I'd never heard of that before, interesting, thanks; Rich
| people speak a foreign language ...
| [deleted]
| mulmen wrote:
| That usage is not unique to rich people.
| ericd wrote:
| It's any investor, not only the rich ones. Typically
| includes things like very short duration bonds (like
| t-bills).
| lxgr wrote:
| It's also used in other contexts, e.g. cash vs. stock
| compensation (and I wouldn't necessarily call everybody
| offered that choice "rich" these days).
| hnthrowaway8860 wrote:
| I would. People in the tech bubble don't understand their
| privilege. If everybody you interact with daily makes
| less than you then you are rich. Or how does you total
| compensation compare to that of the Walmart worker, the
| guy behind the McD counter, you hair dresser, the lady
| cleaning your office toilets or the waiter at your lunch
| restaurant or staffer at the bouldering gym? You think
| they get stocks?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've replaced the article title with a bit of its subtitle
| (edit: plus a representative phrase from the main text).
| mhh__ wrote:
| "cash" in your pocket is central bank money. Current president
| keeps the dead presidents good (in theory). In the bank it is
| merely a promise of money.
|
| Cash can (arguably) mean paper money but there is often a
| distinction made in capital markets - physical cash is for
| retail banks.
|
| An applied example of a cash position in finance is repo: You
| need some short term cash - a simple hack financial markets use
| to do this in an administrative/credit efficient way is to
| simply sell (say) a bond (the collateral), receive some money
| (your cash), then agree to buy the bond back tomorrow for
| slightly more than you sold it for (the interest rate).
| sschueller wrote:
| Switzerland has cash written into law[1] (You must accept all
| denominations of notes (that includes the CHF 1,000 note) and at
| minimum up to CHF 100 in coins) but sadly it is missing any
| penalties if you don't do it so there are now some that just
| ignoring it.
|
| The law needs to be updated to add penalties and exceptions for
| businesses that have no physical presence.
|
| There is an initiative to prevent cash from going away[2] but
| it's too little to prevent the above. Also organized by the
| people that are against vaccines, 5G and don't believe in climate
| change so the support is probably quite limited.
|
| The SNB is also under pressure from the rest of the world
| regarding the CHF 1,000 notes but decided against getting rid of
| it. I also don't understand why a CHF 1,000 note today is such an
| issue when it existed already in 1907 and back then CHF 1,000 was
| a lot more than in today's money.
|
| [1] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2000/186/en
|
| [2] https://fbschweiz.ch/index.php/de/ich-zahle-bar
| petilon wrote:
| When you pay cash you are paying for the credit card convenience
| (the fee that is built into nearly all price tags) without
| benefiting from it.
|
| My bank returns 2% of the charged amount. If I paid cash I would
| forego this benefit.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I don't have a credit card, and don't know anyone who does -
| only debit cards. So this might be specific to your bank and/or
| country ?
| petilon wrote:
| Most US credit cards return 1%, some return 2%. Another
| advantage of credit cards is that the bank acts as a mediator
| in case of disputes regarding the charged amount. Also,
| rental cars and hotel rooms are only available if you charge
| them to a credit card.
| raincom wrote:
| Big brother wants to surveil on everyone, that's the goal of any
| cashless society. How the big brother can force shutdown a
| business, say, X, which doesn't comply requests without warrants?
| Just have visa/master/paypal (third party) to not do business
| with X, because X violates some TOS.
|
| Even though inflation has increased three folds since the bank
| secrecy act, they have kept the limits so low to track any cash
| entry/exits out of the financial system. Big brother doesn't want
| the powerless people to unite--thats the end goal.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Governments would have loved this power during the Covid
| lockdowns
| user3939382 wrote:
| Whether or not you agreed with the trucker protest in Canada, I
| hope we all agree it's pretty terrifying that the method the
| state decided to use to silence protesters was freezing their
| bank accounts without due process, any trial, anything. Cash is
| the best weapon against this.
| billy_bitchtits wrote:
| It seems like being able to do this sort of thing. And being
| able to make government payments to people that must be spent
| (use it or lose it) and only on approved things are the big
| motives. Control.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Do you have a link you can give to explain what you are talking
| about? I"m familiar with the protest but not the other part.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/trudeau-canada-freeze-
| bank-a...
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I see that the Wall Street Journal has switched to Artificial
| Intelligence/Real Stupidity to write articles.
| piuantiderp wrote:
| To add to the concerns, imagine a small town which mostly
| conducts transactions within the community.
|
| Why should they effectively pay a +2% that will never return to
| it and go to a processor far away?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Now imagine how does that small torn get all of their goods to
| sell to each other?
| walterbell wrote:
| https://archive.is/FR8Nv
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| In the US it is catching on, particularly outside of the
| population dense centers of cities. You see signs now charging
| surcharges on card payments to cover the processing fees, thus
| disincentivizing card payments.
|
| Personally I do everything in my day to day life with cash. I
| don't want to use a card, ever, if I can avoid it.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability
| to be lazy. You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to
| count out cash. That's the major benefit. All things being equal,
| sure, it's more convenient. But all things are not equal; in my
| opinion the potential negatives that others in the thread have
| listed overwhelmingly outweigh the ability to be more lazy. That
| so many people have the desire to ditch freedom in exchange for
| the ability to be slightly more lazy is such a disappointing
| state of affairs and says a lot about society.
| scoofy wrote:
| The fact that getting mugged is so uncommon these days shows
| how naive this comment is to the second and third order effects
| of a cashless society.
|
| I think cash should always be an option, but I don't pretend
| that cards haven't dramatically improved our lives.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| This might have something to do with an increase in
| surveillance and criminal record keeping.
| scoofy wrote:
| It might, sure, but it might also have to do with the fact
| that people carry almost nothing in cash compared to 40+
| years ago.
|
| In 1985, when I was a child, my father would care around
| $300 on him effectively at all times. Credit cards were
| still new, and checks were a limited option, most places
| you still needed cash. That's the equivalent of $850 today.
| I rarely carry more than $200 on my person today (less than
| the cost of a fancy dinner for two in San Francisco). The
| only reason I'm able to do that is because the vast
| majority of my transactions settle on a bank card.
|
| You can argue that the change is surveillance, but the
| stark decrease in untraceable value I carry on my person is
| clearly an incentive for robbery that has been lost. It's
| also likely a major reason for the near-elimination of
| pick-pocketing in western society.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| I agree. It was more convenient to rob cash which is
| fungible.
|
| But I actually wonder if the rewards are higher today,
| with everyone carrying >$1000 phones.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's easy to use a stolen credit card, nobody asks for
| ID. Mugging isn't that uncommon, I interrupted a robbery
| just over a week ago.
| scoofy wrote:
| Again, since the system is based on trust, the vast
| majority of stolen credit cards results in no serious
| loss of value to the individual.
| frfsfgxffd wrote:
| Brazil is almost cashless today.
|
| first month with central bank digital currency, instant
| kidnaps were thru the roof.
|
| the "solution" lower limits of how much you can transfer.
| what a joke.
|
| now only 100usd per day can leave your pocket. wish i was
| kidding. even lower at night when traveling i have to wake up
| at 3am to make payments thanks to timezones.
|
| people can raise limits, but if you pay for something
| expensive once you're probably marked forever as having lots
| of money in your pocket. with cash, that would be a one time
| opportunity to be robbed. with cashless, you signaled that
| forever you're a good target.
|
| there's zero benefits for safety.
|
| you fell for the oldest trick in the book.
| scoofy wrote:
| Bank transactions are trivially traceable and reversible by
| the state. I've been actively against bitcoin and monero
| _exactly because they facilitate kidnapping_ and other
| forms of effectively irreversible digital theft.
|
| The best part about living in a society with institutions
| based on trust instead of non-trust, is that it's trivially
| easy to eject bad actors from the system.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a
| dead drop.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_drop
|
| "But the police can watch the dead drop."
|
| True.
|
| "No police or the victim dies."
|
| Also true.
|
| Bitcoin does make kidnapping a bit easier though. It is
| true.
|
| It also makes hyperinflation by the state impossible.
| Hyperinflation does a lot more damage than kidnapping.
| scoofy wrote:
| > Without bitcoin, you collect the ransom in gold with a
| dead drop.
|
| Where the perpetrator needs to:
|
| 1. Be in the general area.
|
| 2. Only ask for enough currency that's easy to physically
| move (an actual real limitation in many countries)
|
| 3. Be sure the bills aren't marked (practically
| impossible). Because of this:
|
| 3(1). Be sure to not deposit the currency, ever.
|
| 3(2). Be sure not to use the currency with anyone who
| knows you who will every deposit the currency ever.
|
| 3(3). Allow the victim only enough time to procure a
| large amount of currency (likely days), but not enough
| time to procure a large amount of marked currency (this
| is an inherent conflict).
|
| Obviously kidnapping is possibly via use of physical
| currency, but the practical limitations of cash over
| anonymous digital currency with regards to kidnapping are
| massive.
|
| Your concerns with hyperinflation are alleviated by
| investing in any commodity, and trading on a black
| market. The fact that the commodity is a blockchain asset
| is effectively moot. The days of states not forcing
| individuals to be up front with capital gains on
| blockchain assets are over.
| asdff wrote:
| Everyone you see on the street has a slab of metal in their
| pocket that you can take apart and sell for parts online, or
| sell as a bricked device to some sucker. This cashless
| society is dealing with a robbery problem in places like
| Beverly Hills, because for some segments of our society its
| common to wear $30,000 on your wrist. A couple hundred cash
| perhaps in a wallet is honestly the low end of the potential
| take for a mugger these days, if they know where to mug.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| _> The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the
| ability to be lazy._
|
| By this logic, the primary benefit of just about every
| technological development in human history is the ability to be
| lazy. The wheel is just a crutch for those too lazy to drag
| their loads on sleds.
|
| The downsides of a cashless marketplace are indisputable, but
| "laziness" is a reductive view of the upsides.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "laziness" is a reductive view of the upsides.
|
| They're obviously not clear enough to elaborate upon,
| although there's room for a discussion about wheels. A
| cashless society saves almost no effort.
|
| The reason I support government fiat crypto is because banks
| get a free ride, holding customer deposits and playing with
| them, but giving nothing in return. But I also think that if
| you have a physical store that sells to the general public,
| you should be required to accept cash. Government crypto is
| still an account (or any number of accounts.) The physical
| token is cash.
| blown_gasket wrote:
| Using your example, the wheel allows us to perform more work
| per unit of time. I think it would be good for discourse to
| identify that within society there is the general consumer
| public and then there is education, government, research,
| etc. Could you argue that the wheel allows an individual to
| be lazy? Definitely. Is it correct to argue that a wheel is a
| crutch and makes every individual that uses it lazy?
| Definitely not.
| asdff wrote:
| That question of "does this allow for more work per unit of
| time" is honestly a pretty interesting way to stratefy
| whether an innovation is actually innovative imo. For
| example, the first iPhone? Sure, you can email and video
| chat on the go and conceivably do more work over time. But
| the 14th compared to the 13th? No, all that effort spent
| didn't really unlock more work per unit of time. If
| anything you are doing the same work, at the cost of more
| resources because the hardware is more overpowered, the
| screen has more pixels, and the bulk of the resource load
| on the hardware is from rendering stuff like sexy window
| dressing instead of the actual functional process, like
| checking your email.
|
| Pretty interesting parallels to biology too, like in some
| birds there's the race towards sexually selecting ever
| fancier tail feathers that might cause more female birds to
| ooh and aah perhaps, but hurt your chances of flying away
| from a hawk, and lead to an overall reduction in fitness in
| the species as the hawks start finding more success and
| expanding their population size at the expense of yours.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Surely the same happens with cashless payments? A teller in
| a store can process way more transactions via contactless
| than with cash in the same amount of time.
| blown_gasket wrote:
| I agree that contact-less transactions are able to be
| performed faster. In the situation of a grocery-store
| checkout there are other factors at play. Have you paid
| and everything is still being bagged up? Is there anyone
| waiting on you? Probably others I'm not considering here.
|
| Essentially I think this gets into a estimation of
| magnitude problem (outside of ethical, security, and
| other concerns). Where if the payment isn't ever the
| action being waited on, a contact-less payment while
| convenient doesn't save you any time to get out of the
| store. If you have just a snack and no lines then the
| payment will be the action causing the bottleneck.
| guyomes wrote:
| Even though I would not like to ditch freedom with a cashless
| system, I would not like a cash only system either, and it is
| not about being lazy.
|
| An advantage of a system where cards or checks are widely used
| is that it decreases significantly the risk of getting robbed.
|
| In some country with cash only, the citizens would travel by
| bus with big amounts of cash while bringing back money to their
| family. Sometimes the bus was stopped by armed robbers.
| Everybody would have to give their money, or to take the risk
| to hide it, or to take the risk to fight back. When a minimal
| system of money transfer was introduced in the country, those
| kind of robbery disappeared: there was no point anymore for the
| robbers to stop busses since the citizens didn't have huge
| amounts of cash on them anymore.
| dataflow wrote:
| > You swipe a card in a reader instead of having to count out
| cash. That's the major benefit.
|
| It's not just the _counting out_ part that 's inconvenient, and
| it's not just _cash_. There 's also _receiving_ some arbitrary
| amount of cash _and coins_ that you then have to dump into your
| pocket /wallet/purse and deal with until your next shopping
| trip. Coins dangling in your pocket and having to fish them out
| every time while making sure you don't lose them beforehand is
| not exactly fun.
| matsemann wrote:
| It's dishonest to portray it as if it is only about being
| "lazy".
|
| If _all_ digital payment did was that I didn 't have to present
| the correct amount of bills from my wallet, you might have had
| a point. But that's like almost on the bottom of the list of
| benefits being cashless provides.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Is not taking cash common in the USA? I'm in a small city in the
| midwest so I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't reached here yet
| but aside from a couple of rare stories I haven't heard much
| about it happening here.
| standardUser wrote:
| On a recent trip to Europe I didn't take out cash once over 3
| weeks across 3 countries. I brought 50 euros with me and that was
| all I needed! Everything else was just a quick tap of the phone,
| including every metro system outside of Paris.
|
| My only hesitation to getting rid of cash entirely - how will I
| buy drugs? I don't gamble illegally or pay for sex, but I imagine
| those services would also struggle in an increasingly cashless
| world.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Drugs/gambling/prostitution may be considered contraband now
| (in some jurisdictions) but the decision over which
| goods/services fit that distinction is a political question so
| the answer will change with the political winds. Eliminating
| cash is inherently centralized: You can't pay someone directly
| for something. The transaction has to go through a walled-
| garden intermediary. This is a chokepoint where political
| policy can be enforced. It is a very useful and obvious tool
| for those with an authoritarian mindset-- or a utopian mindset
| but who knows if their idea of utopia will match yours.
| asdff wrote:
| You don't have to do anything that seems illegal to participate
| in the illegal cashless society. A person selling ice cream out
| of a cooler at the beach is an example of a business that
| probably would not exist if they couldn't take under the table
| cash payments, considering the business model is a simple
| arbitrage opportunity on wholesale ice cream that probably
| wouldn't pencil out with the overhead of credit card fees or
| taxation.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> how will I buy drugs?_
|
| A decade ago my friends were already paying for drugs with
| Venmo. The dealers aren't very careful because they're rarely
| caught on the financial side. If the recent revelations are
| anything to go by, they're probably using Cash app now.
|
| Ironically it's the legal dispensaries that have problems
| accepting digital payments - they usually require cash with an
| ATM on-site.
| asdff wrote:
| It depends on where you live. You can pay with a debit card
| in some place.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Dispensaries can use virtual ATMs.
|
| https://fortune.com/2022/04/01/cashless-atms-at-cannabis-
| dis...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Digital money is an ideal slip noose that keeps you under total
| control and surveillance. People who fought the government in
| my country have found it out the hard way.
|
| What, the government in _your country_ is benevolent and would
| never do something like that? Oh, my sweet summer child...
| medler wrote:
| If the only argument against getting rid of cash is that it
| would make it harder to commit crimes, that sounds like a good
| reason to get rid of cash.
|
| I like cash because I like my privacy but cash making it easier
| to do crime is an unfortunate side effect, not an end in
| itself.
| b800h wrote:
| Disagree with any laws?
| [deleted]
| standardUser wrote:
| Many people see laws against victmimless activities to be a
| direct curtailment of basic human rights. Even in our own
| lifetime we've seen completely arbitrary changes to which
| substances and banned or not banned, so we should be
| extremely wary of future, similarly arbitrary changes (that
| we can easily get around using cash).
| harimau777 wrote:
| The problem is that the government often creates crimes that
| citizens don't agree with. Or the majority uses the law to
| try to force their preferences on the minority.
| medler wrote:
| So should everyone simply disregard any laws they disagree
| with, provided they can get away with it? Where does it
| end?
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Yes.
|
| It ends where someone else's rights begin.
| standardUser wrote:
| I think the depends entirely on if the "crime" has a
| victim or otherwise causes severe problems to society.
| Though those problems should probably be more severe than
| then the problems caused by trying and failing to ban a
| victimless crime, which always creates a black market
| (and associated violence, which does have victims).
| realce wrote:
| It doesn't "end" whatsoever. Your notion of it ending
| means total governmental control or total anarchy. Life
| is in the middle of the two, the resting point is a
| continuous balance of two extremes. It's not simple to
| disregard laws, it's risky and makes you vulnerable.
| b800h wrote:
| With laws being changed, unlike in totalitarian regimes.
| harimau777 wrote:
| At least in America, there's not a lot of alternatives.
| The system is setup in a way that favors minoritarian
| rule (particularly, but not exclusively by the rural) and
| lobbyists. Unfortunately, that means that diregarding
| laws that they disagree with is often the only way to
| represent the will of the people.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Obviously yes. If you don't agree with a law and there is
| close to no chance of getting caught then why follow it?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The absence of cash should terrify anyone. So ridiculously easy
| to quash any dissidents if you can cut off their ability to buy
| anything with a single click of a button.
|
| I don't use much cash at all but if my government was planning
| on ending all cash, I'd go out and buy a bunch of precious
| metals. Can't trust my basic freedom with Visa and Paypal.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah I completely understand a business not wanting to handle
| cash. It's bulky, dirty, easy to steal, must be secured in a
| heavy expensive safe, it takes time to count, it has to be
| physically transported to the bank or picked up by an armored
| car service, it's error-prone.
|
| But in terms of personal freedom, I don't want cash to go
| away.
| lottin wrote:
| Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the
| ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has
| the ability to employ much more brutal and effective methods
| of quashing dissidence.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They have to find you first, which is quite labor-intensive
| compared to just tracking and/or halting a person's
| financial transaction ability.
| lottin wrote:
| Really? Did you read that somewhere?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| If you travel around the central Asian "stans", especially
| Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - you'll notice that a
| surprisingly large number of people, especially older
| people, have gold teeth.
|
| They didn't do this as a fashion statement - being able to
| escape with whatever gold you could carry was a means of
| survival against a brutal communist regime.
|
| My own great grandparents escaped during the partition of
| my country by bartering my great grandmother's gold bangles
| and earrings for safe passage.
|
| The government _can_ and will try to quash dissidence. That
| doesn 't mean you have to make it completely easy for them
| and hand over complete control on a silver platter.
| standardUser wrote:
| Not really. Elaborate black markets exist and thrive all
| over the world. Maybe in the most brutally restrictive
| regimes they can _truly_ ban something people want. But the
| rule across most societies is: ban something people want,
| then an unregulated black market will fill the void,
| regardless of laws, and will probably bring otherwise
| avoidable violence.
| lottin wrote:
| Yeah, I agree... that's what I'm saying, it's
| ineffective.
| endingworld wrote:
| [flagged]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| We already have a cashless society, effectively. Let's say 1% of
| transactions worldwide are done with cash. Is that 1% really
| holding back all of these bad things that pro-cash folks imagine?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 15% of UK transactions are cash FTA.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Using cash is a basic human right, like freedom of speech.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Pro cash movement wants those who never use cash to pay for their
| hobby.
|
| Besides doesn't HN champion the free market and hate regulations?
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I have such mixed feelings.
|
| On one hand, it clearly creates a power problem where too few
| have too much power.
|
| On the other hand, you don't run a company without a dashboard of
| statistics and information to inform the decisions you make and
| theoretically the higher fidelity of the information you use to
| make decisions, the better decisions you can make. It's also very
| convenient.
|
| Since people can exercise power without consequences it seems
| like anything that centralizes power is bad and therefore
| preserving cash is fundamentally good, but if people could
| provide consequences to those who abuse power, then things like
| digital currency could be used for great good.
|
| I have to admit, relatedly, I am incredibly skeezed out by square
| e-mailing me itemized digital receipts for purchases made against
| a square terminal. What are they doing with that data? Are the
| regulated? Are they selling it? Are they using it to collude
| against customers (like the people who suggest rental prices
| creating a de facto cartel)?
|
| Cash doesn't _really_ have metadata.
| Animats wrote:
| I've been using cash more due to the proliferation of sluggish,
| badly engineered, or dark-pattern point of sale systems.
|
| There are two eateries across the street from each other near me.
| At both, you go to the counter and order, and they later bring
| food out. The first has a good system, from Stripe. Big, clear,
| uncluttered screen facing the customer, with the amount the
| biggest thing on the screen. When the system is ready to read the
| contactless card, the contactless card logo lights up, above the
| screen. The reader always reads the card once it's within about
| 1cm of the reader. The display immediately changes, by a smooth
| horizontal scroll, to a tip screen, which needs only one touch on
| a screen that senses the touch without difficulty. One more
| smooth horizontal scroll, with receipt options and a big "you are
| customer #5" display. One more touch and you're done. If I select
| "Paper receipt", the receipt prints within 2 seconds, and I tear
| it off and take it. Done.
|
| I'll use a credit card there.
|
| Across the street, another place has a Veriphone systems. This
| one is much more sluggish. There's no unambiguous indication of
| when the system is ready to accept a card. The contactless card
| reader is separate from the customer display screen. Sometimes,
| when the display indicates it's ready, it isn't. Or it may take
| several tries before it accepts the card. This is probably
| "hosted POS", where the POS terminal is a dumb web client and has
| to wait for an overloaded server for each step in the
| transaction.
|
| Then the display wants a signature. There's no pen, and a finger
| touch won't work. Writing with a fingernail is necessary. Then
| the clerk has to ask if you want a receipt, and they have to do
| some data entry to get one printed.
|
| I pay cash there.
|
| Walgreens and CVS are even worse. Half the small screen is full
| of ads. There are asks for phone number, stuff about "reward
| points", readers that seem to be out of sync with the screen, and
| printed receipts two feet long, full of ads.
|
| It's easier to order on Amazon rather than go there.
| raintrees wrote:
| Two words for a recent real life example of decisions that can be
| made by governments about electronic bank accounts: Canadian
| Truckers.
|
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
|
| Whose turn will it be next?
| shishy wrote:
| Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get
| to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback
| loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially
| responsible with it.
|
| Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto
| the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at
| stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used.
|
| But yeah, nice to have the option to use both!
|
| I also know that credit cards have their advantages, but what are
| the main benefits of going fully cashless (at the individual and
| systemic level)? Is it mostly crime related shenanigans?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Is it mostly crime related shenanigans?
|
| Not having to carry a wallet anymore. Never going to the ATM.
| No need to pocket loose change. Quicker checkout times.
| Animatronio wrote:
| Are these really inconveniences? Most of the times I've had
| trouble paying for stuff were usually at supermarkets or gas
| stations where the credit card reader would refuse to
| acknowledge my card. Swiping/inserting/touching, not even
| cursing worked so without cash on hand I'd have had to
| surrender my ID to the clerk, take a cab to the closest ATM
| and return with cash.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I've been using cards nearly exclusively my entire adult
| life, and I can only think of one time that my card had an
| issue, and it turned out my whole bank was down for ~1
| hour. Inconvenient, but I can think of more times I've
| forgotten to have enough cash with me, and I barely use
| cash at all now.
|
| In the UK and Australia where I normally am, card
| infrastructure is just so entirely universal and reliable
| that it's not even worth considering.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| I'm in Canada and the US, but same story. Still carry $40
| on me just in case I need the cash but 99% of my
| transactions in-person are card.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Yeah when I first moved to London after uni I used to
| carry ~PS20, but about 6 years ago I naturally stopped
| using or replenishing it and ended up never having cash
| in my wallet. Now I rarely even have a wallet on me, even
| when abroad.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I was an early adopter of (debit) card only, using it for
| everything in 1999. Your experience has never happened to
| me, as far as I recall. I don't think I've ever had to go
| to an atm because the reader didn't work.
| Animatronio wrote:
| Well, it happened to me just the other day - said it
| cannot read the card or something like that (even though
| I had used it less than 15 minutes earlier in another
| shop). There was already a queue behind me so I forked
| $40 for gas and went on my way.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Where do you live that you just don't pay with a card at
| the gas pump? I'm guessing not in the USA?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| The main reason I carry multiple cards, and Cash was
| because my debit card was used for fraud once, which shut
| down my card, and it took several days to get a new one.
|
| Now days they can print you a new card in real time at
| the branch, but still I will never not have cash, and not
| have a backup card
|
| I also NEVER use by debit card for anything other than
| ATM now, credit cards and pay it off every month... I
| dont even carry my debit card anymore, it is locked in
| the safe, and a bring it out when I need to get more
| cash.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I don't use my physical credit card much anymore. Just my
| watch which is connected to ApplePay which is linked to a
| credit card.
|
| Those problems do exist, I usually just go somewhere else
| if their card/payment reader is down.
| hhh wrote:
| Yes. I cannot stand cash, I hate carrying it, I hate coins,
| I don't want to keep up with it. I leave my house with
| nothing but my phone and I'm good.
|
| I don't have a wallet, and I don't want one. I want
| efficient and secure digital currency, with easy interfaces
| between digital wallets. I pay for my lawn care via Cash
| App, most of the other small businesses have Square or
| something similar.
|
| If I need anonymous currency, I will convert to crypto and
| then convert once or twice more across different coins.
| It's good enough for my use.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Curious, do you use a tumbler or distributed exchange
| (not sure if this is the right term)? I always treated
| crypto as not-at-all-anonymous, so I'm curious how to
| achieve cash level of privacy with crypto. Any tips?
| feyes wrote:
| Points or rebates too.
| RulerOf wrote:
| I'd prefer not to spend 5% to get 2% back.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In my case, that wasn't a point at all. The added security
| of CC is also useful, but I would have gone cashless even
| if it was just debit.
| incone123 wrote:
| There is a cost to handling cash too. Don't know how it
| compares to cards but with the latter you don't need to have
| fleets of armored trucks to move money around and robbers can
| only steal stock.
| switch007 wrote:
| I thought this was a story put out by card companies. I hear
| it (the implication it's the same or more) a lot but often
| unsubstantiated
| raincom wrote:
| The cost is not so much about paying armored trucks, but most
| banks don't want to deal with small businesses that deal with
| cash.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I swear money handling cost will be reduced by one simple
| thing that some countries like Canada and Ireland have done
| (and can be improved): ditch the smaller coin denominations
| (and maybe add higher denomination coins like $2 like EU
| and UK have)
|
| Anything under 10 cents gets rounded down/up accordingly
|
| It doesn't matter. Minting and transporting it, even in
| your pocket costs more than you'll ever get in dealing a
| more "precise" denomination
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That doesn't stop theft by employees or robberies.
| AmenBreak wrote:
| That's an awful idea. Especially the "down/up" part.
| [deleted]
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| They ditched pennies in Canada and round the cent. Works
| fine.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| In the UK the banks are happy to deal with businesses
| paying cash, but there are fees, and if your holding cash
| on premises then you'll need insurance, which means you'll
| need a safe...
|
| The reason supermarkets offered cash back was that this
| allowed them to massively reduce the amount of cash held on
| site and thus reduce their insurance costs.
| raincom wrote:
| Large chains, large businesses have no problems accepting
| cash, nor do they have problems depositing cash with
| banks. Even if a mega bank, say, Chase/Bank of America in
| the states, doesn't want to deal with cash deposits from
| a large retailer, the latter can indirectly 'own' a
| credit union or another small bank that accepts cash
| deposits, as this bank can still follow AML regulations.
| Big banks consider cash deposits/withdrawals and money
| order deposits to be a big headache, and also back office
| costs for enforcing AML can be reduced by not dealing
| with cash/money orders (in other words, any untraceable
| monetary instruments).
| thebigwinning wrote:
| That security is easy to see. The cyber security and fraud
| protections on credit card networks are expensive and not
| visible.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| True. But there is no way in hell you can stop people
| paying with their smartphone or plastic card so those costs
| are fixed.
|
| An anecdote: during COVID people had to use shopping carts
| in the supermarket (social distancin). Those trolleys
| needed a 1 euro coin inserted in them to unlock. Chaos
| ensued because many customers were not carrying cash- let
| alone coins.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is so much cheaper per dollar than people think.
| Certainly cheaper than credit card fees once you're over a
| certain volume, unless you are in a very high-crime area.
| Even then, thieves will often steal off the shelves instead
| of out of the cash register because that's a much smaller
| crime. Small businesses get the short end of the stick on
| cash management, again, because they may not be.
| matsemann wrote:
| Eh, my experience is that dealing with cash is _much more
| expensive_ than people think (to be fair, most people think
| it 's "free" since there are no direct fees). At some
| places I've worked in the past, it's been like almost the
| only responsibility of a manager working full time. Making
| sure everything is in order, watch over workers, training
| them on all procedures, going to the bank to buy change,
| counting tills all the time, etc etc. Sooo many man hours
| going into this.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > Can't be tracked
|
| If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to
| severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be
| tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and
| yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors
| outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but
| the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle
| and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then
| deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this
| is quite obviously tracked.
|
| For more information I suggest getting some books on Terrorist
| Financing for the new meta. There is a former Canadian Security
| Intelligence Service lady out there that wrote a whole book on
| it recently.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I have to apologize, but you don't understand what the
| concept of "laundering money" means. It has nothing to do
| with tracking cash bills through serial numbers and it has
| never had anything to do with that.
|
| "Laundering money" means that criminals make transactions in
| order to use cash they have from their illicit gains within
| the general economy, ie get it into a bank account and being
| able to declare where they got the money from.
|
| > the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a
| motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle
| and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then
| yes, this is quite obviously tracked.
|
| Not at all.
| permo-w wrote:
| are you suggesting that the serial number of every note you
| withdraw is registered against your account?
| whartung wrote:
| I admit this is a bit of tin hattery. But that said at my
| bank the cash is distributed from machines that the teller
| uses. You go up, make a withdrawal, they type the amount
| into the machine and bills are counted out.
|
| I am sure this offers several advantages to the bank. That
| said, however, maybe I can see it being straightforward for
| these machines, along with ATMs, to log bill serial numbers
| as they're distributed.
|
| I have no idea if this is being done, simply, at least at
| my bank there's an avenue for it to happen. I would also
| freely admit that it would be an imperfect system. But
| still food for thought.
| greyface- wrote:
| Modern ATM bill acceptors have sensors that can read serial
| numbers off of bills. I don't know whether it's been
| publicly stated that this occurs (and don't have any
| relevant personal knowledge, either), but the capability
| exists in the field.
| RulerOf wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'd be surprised either way. Either they
| don't track bills because it costs too much money, or
| they do track bills because they've found a way to
| monetize the data.
|
| I scarcely use ATMs at this point because they won't hand
| out "large" bills. Inflation will be the real driver of
| cashless adoption, as the absurd number of $20 bills (and
| eventually, $100 bills) you need to pay for anything
| these days makes using cash too difficult for the average
| person.
| walterbell wrote:
| Technology exists. Policy will vary.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/NUCOUN-VC-7-Denomination-
| Counterfeit-...
|
| _> Money Counter Machine with CIS Technology: Equipped
| with one pair 200DPI Contact Image Sensors, scan and detect
| each counted bill like human eyes.. counts the quantity,
| reads the denomination and currency type, calculate the
| total amount at one time pass. Turn on serial number
| reading function to record serial number and all the
| counting details can be printed directly or exported to PC
| , very helpful for money tracking and management._
| nirvdrum wrote:
| It looks to me like there's two different notions of cash
| tracking being discussed. One is tracking individual bills
| and the other is tracking transactions that involve
| exchanging goods or services for cash.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If the bank teller counts out the cash from a drawer and
| hands it to you, no. If he runs it through a counting
| machine, or you get the cash from an ATM, maybe?
| hbn wrote:
| > if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to
| a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it
| straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite
| obviously tracked.
|
| Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000
| on a used car from another guy who then used that same money
| to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not
| in the bank's hands.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Your statement is true as long as it stays out of the bank.
|
| A motorcycle is a bad example, too, because there are
| licensing and registration requirements.
| raincom wrote:
| That lady's book is super expensive:
| https://www.amazon.com/Illicit-Money-Financing-Terrorism-
| Twe...
| lucumo wrote:
| > each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes,
| at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside
| of those that service law enforcement tracking it
|
| This isn't quite what you meant, but 20-ish years ago there
| was some crowd-tracking of Euro-bills.
|
| The Euro was pretty new and people were excited about their
| banknotes showing up in other countries. Some people created
| a website where you could enter the serial number of your
| bills. Each serial number would have a tracking page in which
| places it showed up. It felt kinda cool to find a bill in
| your wallet that had visited a few other countries.
| tbrake wrote:
| This reminded me https://www.wheresgeorge.com/ in the USA
| has been doing it a while as well. Had no idea it was still
| going strong all these years later.
| palsecam wrote:
| Said website: https://EuroBillTracker.com/ Still
| operational!
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| Dealing with cash is mainly just super-expensive because it's a
| massive volume of paper and metal that you have to count and
| move around every day, and deal with replacing it over time.
| It's not a big deal for a single individual, but it's a huge
| deal for businesses. And for banks and for the government.
|
| And there's just so much nonsense involved, like a cashier
| discovering they're $25 short at the end of their shift, and
| how do you deal with that. Unlike digital transactions, people
| are constantly making mistakes with cash, which one side or the
| other is losing out on.
|
| And then obviously theft as well -- if there's no cash in a
| cash register, there's less incentive to hold up convenience
| store clerks at gunpoint. (You can still steal merchandise, but
| it's a lot bulkier and harder to handle.)
| Frondo wrote:
| As for can't be tracked, does anyone else remember that website
| you used to see stamped on dollar bills, WheresGeorge.com?
| Early internet goofiness, crowd-sourced tracking of cash.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Cash has a lot of costs as well. For example it's easier to
| steal, it slows down transactions, and it requires a larger
| payment device and overhead of transferring it to a central
| location. It's not at all clear that cashless even with fees is
| more costly to a business.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of"
|
| Nit: you mean a positive feedback loop:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback
| noduerme wrote:
| > what are the main benefits of going fully cashless
|
| One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member
| in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card.
| Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same
| goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots
| of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being
| counted up if you ever run for office.
|
| At the systemic level, the main benefits of going cashless are:
|
| - Being able to track everyone's purchases (for taxation, law
| enforcement, and in some countries the blackmail of political
| opposition or assigning "social credit" ratings)
|
| - Have realtime, near-total visibility into the movement of
| money, for economic management and personal profit
|
| - Being able to cut off individuals or members of a political
| movement from the ability to purchase basic necessities, if
| they fall afoul of the party in power[1]
|
| [0] https://www.wlox.com/2022/09/20/gop-ags-call-credit-card-
| com...
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trudeau-canada-freeze-
| bank-a...
|
| [edit]: I should have also mentioned freedom of movement and
| association. You cannot buy a plane ticket or a hotel room
| anymore for cash - even if your bank's ATM allowed you to
| access enough of your cash in a single day to do so. Cards
| enable the granular tracking of everyone's movement, whether or
| not that person chooses to carry a cellphone.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| > Don't put your groceries on a credit card.
|
| ...huh? "Don't use store membership cards that track your
| specific purchases" is one thing, but in what world does your
| credit card processor get info about the individual goods on
| your receipt?
| ricksebak wrote:
| If you apply for a loan, especially a mortgage, the lender
| could ask to see your outgoing cash flow statements. Which
| wouldn't get into receipt-level detail, but could still
| potentially allow the lender to discriminate against you.
|
| A person with habitual transactions at a casino or liquor
| store could be perceived as high risk and the lender could
| jack up the interest rate for that person. I have no clue
| if lenders _actually_ do this, but they could since they do
| ask for your outgoing transactions.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| They could, but for the vast majority of people they
| won't. Credit scores exist so that they don't have to.
|
| Credit card company rolls up your behavior into a number,
| and passes that to a credit agency like Experian, and
| they pop a number out to anyone who asks.
|
| No one is asking for outgoing transactions unless you're
| trying to buy a business or are getting a non-standard
| loan for _something_
| smilespray wrote:
| Pretty sure the data about individual goods is up for sale.
|
| Didn't Google start buying this kind of data to match up
| online purchase intent with real-world purchases?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| CC doesn't, the grocery chain does. And they'd love to make
| money on it.
| jameshart wrote:
| What's the basis for this advice?
|
| Personally I'd be far more interested to learn that someone
| running for office refuses to use a credit card to buy
| groceries because they fear having that information collected
| and used against them... than that they once spent $500 in a
| single month on Twinkies.
|
| If someone wants to use your spending history against you
| they don't actually need your credit card bills these days,
| they can just make something up. Look at the insanity that
| people managed to create out of John Podesta's office pizza
| orders.
| raincom wrote:
| Because three letter agencies have a huge incentive to
| trawl through politicians' private lives through credit
| card purchase data, and use that against them if they don't
| want to toe the line of these agencies, whose ex-employees
| are guests on the main stream media. Just leak enough to
| derail any politician.
| jameshart wrote:
| There's presumably a lot of evidence of this you can
| point to...?
| politician wrote:
| Read about J. Edgar Hoover.
| jameshart wrote:
| Is he back?!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Obtuse reverse skepticism is not a good look.
| jameshart wrote:
| Pointing to a guy who's been dead 50 years seems like
| weak evidence for the claim that government agencies are
| _widely_ incentivized to undermine political candidates
| by... selectively leaking their grocery shopping habits?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The constraints and incentives for agencies like the FBI
| have changed a lot since Hoover (in no small part due to
| the abuses under Hoover.)
|
| "Read about J. Edgar Hoover" is a handwave, rather than
| an argument, and its made worse when it supposed to
| support a position on the _current_ state of affairs.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > What's the basis for this advice?
|
| "The GoBeRmEnT Is GoNa TrAcK YoU"
|
| Listen, you got a cell phone, and chances are that's going
| to give away far, far more than data that your credit card
| company holds on to.
|
| They're just going to have a line -- "Food Lion, [Date]
| $88.23" -- not detailed list of your purchases.
|
| Meanwhile if you use a membership card at any sort of
| grocery store, they absolutely will associate it with you;
| in many cases you have to register that card with your name
| and phone in order to use the points. Cash or credit,
| that's tracking you.
|
| Until modern social media that -- grocery store membership
| cards -- were one of the best predictors of age, income,
| gender, etc. available.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| That's why you should always check to see if some kind
| soul has pre-registered [local area code]-867-5309
| shishy wrote:
| I interpreted it more as "it's a trail of information that
| could be used against you" instead of literally, but I
| could be wrong
| jameshart wrote:
| If you look at the recent history of scandals that have
| had zero to _negative_ reputational impact on politicians
| and public figures in Western democracies - we're talking
| _Access Hollywood_ , tax fraud, undeclared gifts, gross
| nepotism, punching journalists, flouting public health
| laws, sexual impropriety, lying about your career and
| life story, mishandling of classified information, and
| just plain incompetence - what on earth do you think the
| harm could be of someone getting hold of someone's old
| credit card bills?
| courseofaction wrote:
| A resourced adversary relentlessly publicizing them?
| scubbo wrote:
| Given how relentlessly (just to pick a particular
| example) Epstein's crimes, accomplices, and associated
| have been publicized, and the negligible impact, why do
| you think that would be impactful?
| jameshart wrote:
| Seems like it's pretty tricky to make anything stick:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/supreme-
| court-...
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Well many (not sure if all) strip clubs are basically legal
| brothels that run on cash specifically because a) they are
| (usually) in with local organized crime and b) so when the
| girls get their "tips" they can't be scrutinized about what
| service they provided to acquire it.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| What's wrong with junk food?
| kernoble wrote:
| Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing
| over all your info. Which is a good thing!
|
| And, if I had to guess, the booking of hotel rooms probably
| has more to do with liability rather than tracking. There are
| plenty of ways of getting a roof over your head without using
| a credit card; though IMO they are likely a downgrade.
|
| While your statements resonate with me, it's a bit hyperbolic
| to say that electronic payments/banking are the only way of
| exerting the control you're worried about. I think there are
| a lot of good points in this line of complaint about
| centralized private financial systems, but the ones you're
| raising are a bit fringe.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without
| handing over all your info. Which is a good thing!
|
| Why is that a good thing? You used to be able to walk into
| the airport, pay cash at the ticket counter for a ticket,
| and get on the plane. Compared to the fantastic level of
| nonsense we put up with today?
| derf_ wrote:
| In the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, one of
| the characters boards a plane at LAX, and _then_
| purchases a ticket from the stewardess. It is the most
| jarring scene in the entire film.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| At the individual level, the cost of using cash is that you are
| subsidizing the other consumers who are paying with a credit
| cards that offers cash-back or other rewards
| SergeAx wrote:
| Accepting cash also has its fees for businesses, primarily a
| cash collection fee made by banks.
| cschneid wrote:
| Not sure on the fees part of that - cash handling itself is
| expensive, both for direct reasons, and anti-theft reasons.
| Anywhere from time spent counting drawers to full-on armored
| car service. All of that is expensive, and not present when
| credit cards are used (and conversely, a network fee doesn't
| exist on cash). I think all payment methods end up with some
| costs to them.
| hospitalhusband wrote:
| Chargebacks and processing fees are expensive too.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Processing fees aren't inherently expensively. They're low
| in Europe, and high in the US only because they go to
| rewards programs. You're paying 2% more but getting 2%
| back. Legislation could easily regulate them to eliminate
| rewards programs and bring them back down low.
|
| Chargebacks are supposed to be expensive because they're a
| deterrent to businesses acting in ways that will lead
| customers to attempt chargebacks. And then they usually
| have an element of manual review which costs $ as well.
| Chargebacks being expensive is a feature not a bug. And
| they're an easy consumer protection option that isn't even
| a _possibility_ with cash.
| manesioz wrote:
| They're right. Closest electronic alternative is Monero/XMR.
| asdff wrote:
| Depending on how big of a whale you are, something like
| runescape gp or some commodity in game is probably a more
| stable store of value than most crypto.
| motohagiography wrote:
| In Canada, we saw the main use case for cashlessness last winter
| during popular protests. It was used to track donors to a popular
| non-violent movement and freeze their bank accounts. That's all
| anyone needs to know about it, really. Consider that most people
| aren't smart enough to apprehend how deeply malicious the
| architects of cashless policies are. They don't care if you
| disagree, they just need for you to do nothing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I encounter more businesses that only take cash than I do those
| that refuse it. A couple of local restaurants, and my barber.
| Though one of the restaurants recently also started accepting
| Zelle. I can't think of anyplace local that refuses cash but
| there are several others that offer a discount for cash.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Opposite in my part of the world. Lots of businesses aren't
| taking a cash anymore. The only ones I know that deal with cash
| only are marijuana dispensaries, which are popular targets for
| thugs as a result.
| walterbell wrote:
| In New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia: all businesses
| accept cash, as required by municipal law.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I live in none of those cities, so those rules don't apply.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My barber carries a Ruger GP100 357 magnum revolver to
| discourage thuggery. I'm 100% serious.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| They aren't allowed to carry guns at marijuana
| dispensaries, for federal law reasons similar to why they
| can't take cash. It's a weird business to be in, you pretty
| much have to drop all your cash into a safe as soon as you
| get it.
| ksherlock wrote:
| The OP article is about the UK and in fact many place in the UK
| do not accept cash. My understanding is that trend accelerated,
| if not started, during COVID.
| jjgreen wrote:
| It took off in London towards the end of COVID really, some
| pubs & cafes and most cinemas for some reason (with a few
| honourable exceptions like the ICA and the Picturehouse
| chain).
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> there are several others that offer a discount for cash
|
| This is relatively new; previously Visa/MC prevented their
| merchants from doing this but it changed recently.
|
| Counter example: you can penalize a company you don't like by
| paying with amex.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is relatively new; previously Visa/MC prevented their
| merchants from doing this but it changed recently.
|
| Not in all states (and maybe not recently in some of the
| states where it changed); a class action lawsuit in 2013
| changed it for several states, and over time more states have
| allowed it by (IIRC) a mix of legislation and court cases; it
| is now at 48 states that allow it (plus D.C.) and two,
| Connecticut and Massachusetts that don't.
| asdff wrote:
| Small businesses pay a lot in cc fees. I am happy when they
| give me the fee back as discount. One restaurant I frequent its
| 4%. Imagine losing 4% on all revenue just to be a participant,
| what a sham, its like being taxed by the mafia.
|
| It's also interesting how you see more knowledge on making it
| work with cash in communities where its common to have small
| businesses, like working class immigrant communities. A greasy
| spoon burger joint in socal might be open for decades, no
| marketing budget, cash payments, interior is what it is when it
| opened, word of mouth and line of sight customer base, no
| website.
|
| Meanwhile you have these "modern" hip restaurants that might
| have no paper menus nor tableservice let alone not take cash,
| have impressive marketing and social media operations, big
| grand openings, an entire merch line, brewery partnership, all
| this fanfare, complexity and overhead, just because that's what
| all these sort of restaurants tend to do. Then they tend to
| fail in like 2 years because its hard to sustain this costly
| model even if they are ostensibly bringing in customers and
| good reviews. As they say, the flame that burns twice as bright
| burns half as long.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep, exactly the places I am thinking of. Chinese place in an
| unimpressive storefront, dining room looks like it's
| furnished from an institutional cafeteria surplus auction,
| menu is handwritten on posterboard and pinned up on the wall.
| No website, no online orders, no delivery. The food is really
| good though.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a
| few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened
| to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the
| wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global
| financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This
| was done without due process and under no countries laws. That
| should scare us at least a little.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| How could a website function with cash payments at all?
| mertd wrote:
| cdnow.com or Amazon used to accept money orders. You'd place
| your order and they would give you a slip to print and send
| with your money order. Once the payment made it there, they
| would ship your item.
| walterbell wrote:
| No one is arguing for a cash-only society.
|
| Digital has use cases.
|
| Cash has use cases.
|
| We can have both.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| What? There are people in this comment section doing
| exactly that.
| walterbell wrote:
| For example?
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117704
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117435
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117805
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36116663
|
| Then there are the people defending the steps to the
| cashless society because those steps happened to be on
| people they didn't like: canadian truckers and pornhub.
|
| I recall one explicit comment I can't find now so I am
| willing to believe I hallucinated it.
| walterbell wrote:
| Those are people arguing for cash-less society.
|
| _> No one is arguing for a cash-only society._
|
| My statement was about the opposite, i.e. co-existence
| rather than exclusion :)
| incone123 wrote:
| I don't think they were making that argument, more that
| websites don't usually take cash anyway.
|
| (Can't imagine pornhub selling gift cards at the
| supermarket checkout next to the App store ones)
| walterbell wrote:
| In North America, retail stores often sell prepaid Visa
| cards that can be used both offline and online.
|
| NYC cashless ban law exception allows a fee-free machine
| to convert cash to prepaid digital payment mechanism,
| e.g. stored value card.
|
| US Coinstar kiosks offer fee-free conversion of coins to
| Amazon and other gift cards.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Prepaid VISA doesn't get around the payment processor
| refusing to handle transactions for certain businesses
| though.
|
| Maybe EFT (e-Check) or Zelle does? It's still on line and
| tracable but is not going through card processor
| networks.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. We could probably sell cards with crypto on
| it with immediate resolution by simply transferring the
| passphrase/wallet rather than on the chain.
|
| Could do it with pure stablecoin.
| landemva wrote:
| A bitcoin bearer instrument. Like this
| https://opendime.com
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's pretty hard, cash is like contraband in many cases
| efitz wrote:
| It has been happening for years. You go to 7-11 or Target and
| buy a "<app name> points card", it gets activated at the
| register when you pay with cash, and then you use the code on
| the back to get Minecraft coins or Xbox points or Fortnite
| bux or whatever. It's how kids and people with no credit or a
| distrust of banks participate online.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| Cash is nearly impossible to use on the internet. The web is
| a window into what the physical world will look like without
| cash. Incidents like Pornhub's show us the power a few
| companies will wield over us when the transition to cashless
| happens.
| throw383734 wrote:
| It depends on the infrastructure. Some websites have "Cash
| on Delivery" options or going to a convenience store to
| pay.
|
| When I was in Asia using UberEats and Food Panda, "Cash on
| Delivery" was the recommended option by most of the locals.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point of the example. It wasn't
| that websites can't function without cash payments, but that
| without cash you're held hostage to the whims of a few
| gatekeepers (like PH).
| wsgeorge wrote:
| Indirectly. Uber "accepts" cash in some countries, as do
| major online retailers in those same markets like Jumia. It's
| essentially cash on delivery, but it works AFAICT.
|
| I've only used my card with Uber a handful of times in 2016.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I love using cash for Grab in Singapore, seeing as non-
| residents are capped on how much they can spend on a card
| weekly (and it is an extremely low amount).
| nottorp wrote:
| Uber will happily take card in the app or cash to the
| driver here. Just select before calling the car.
| invalidname wrote:
| I think the point is about the monopolistic nature. Not that
| they would accept cash.
|
| Without cash we will see credit fees rise significantly.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Mullvad have made it work, but it's definitely not smooth. I
| believe their process is to assign a unique ID to your
| invoice, which you can then write on an envelope stuffed with
| cash you mail to the correct address. On receipt they match
| your cash with the invoice and mark it as paid.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This might work but sending cash in the mail is a pretty
| terrible idea. Most postal services strongly discourage it,
| or you're using recorded services which are expensive and
| add all the same tracking issues.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Postal services deny liability. If you send cash and it
| is stolen you can not sue or get redress from the postal
| system
| bombcar wrote:
| They all say that but it works fine for smaller dollar
| amounts (say under $100).
| asdff wrote:
| Registered mail is insured up to $50,000
|
| https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-are-the-Limits-for-
| Insur...
| tanseydavid wrote:
| If you tell the USPS that you are sending cash, they will
| not accept it for delivery.
|
| I found this out the hard way trying to overnight about
| $500 cash to a family member.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Which postal services? The USPS doesn't strongly
| discourage it.
| Wohlf wrote:
| They absolutely do and may refuse to mail it in some
| cases. It increases the risk of theft astronomically,
| that's why money orders exist.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Can you provide a source? I can provide two indicating
| they do not.
|
| https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/can-you-send-
| cash-...
|
| https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-
| checking-9264421609
|
| You should report to the postmaster general if you are
| refused service; they would be interested in hearing
| about this.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| The website could hold it in escrow while they wait for your
| cash? It isn't hard actually, just a couple more steps. I
| mean not everyone needs 2 day Amazon shipping.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Money order physically sent to a mailing address. Slow, and a
| bit inconvenient, and there is no support for automatic
| recurring debits. But it does work, and it worked before the
| Internet.
| AmenBreak wrote:
| How did businesses manage payments before the Internet and
| credit cards etc?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| checks and similar
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you visit Georgia (the country, not the state), they have
| a cool system for cash payments to websites.
|
| You go on the website, order your stuff. When the normal
| payment screen that comes up, instead of Mastercard or visa,
| you choose "Cash". You'll then be sent a text message with a
| number (or the number appears on the screen if you don't have
| a phone). You go to any ATM anywhere in the country, put that
| number into the ATM, feed the cash into the coin and note
| slot, and then your goods will be ordered.
|
| The same system is used for paying taxes in cash, utility
| bills in cash, etc.
|
| They can do refunds in cash using the same system.
|
| You do pay a fairly hefty (10% if I remember correctly) fee
| for using that service though.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| This is available in much of Asia actually. It is common to
| pay in "cash" in many Asian countries and this service is
| available through 7/Eleven.
| kredd wrote:
| That is still depended on some sort of payment rails
| though, no? Bank, government or whoever can decline
| transactions to that "cash" action.
| itake wrote:
| I think what is different though is they don't know what
| you're buying (I think).
| DANmode wrote:
| It's more expensive to know.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| Or it's accessible for those who operate without banks. I
| think there is a term for it, "unbanked" or something
| like that... there's some decent chunk of the population
| that doesn't have a bank account / can't get a credit
| card / etc.
| Groxx wrote:
| Not sure why that would be any different than credit card
| payments, which don't itemize every purchase either -
| they still know how much and to what seller, tracking a
| seller and banning them seems just as easy.
|
| What they don't get is the buyer's information.
|
| ...except for the time and place, with a device that
| almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which
| might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcement-
| capturable.
| atdrummond wrote:
| CC certainly has the capability for extremely granular
| and personal details. For now, this is usually restricted
| to hotel stays and airline trips. But the tech exists to
| encode quite a bit of information about both sides of a
| transaction and its nature.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> But the tech exists to encode quite a bit of
| information about both sides of a transaction and its
| nature.
|
| Which has monetary value and thus will be monetized,
| sooner or later.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| CC's do get transaction information.
|
| Check out "Level 3 data"
|
| https://www.tidalcommerce.com/learn/what-is-level-3-data
| sramam wrote:
| But this is a remote transaction - no matter the form of
| currency, an intermediary would be required.
| throwuwu wrote:
| If they have the account number. Ideally you would only
| need a bank account with any bank for this to work. That
| would allow anyone to receive payment this way.
| itake wrote:
| on a similar note, you can buy airplane tickets online and
| then pay cash at any 7-11 before your flight.
| tehCorner wrote:
| Brazil has a similar system called "boleto", you chose that
| option and the systems promts you a barcode you can use to
| pay with cash in ATMs, paharmacie and some other stores
| with no comission AFAIK.
|
| It has some limits (10000 BRL when i used it) but thats
| more than enough for most purchases
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Switzerland has (or had?) those red and blue slips that
| you could pay online or at a bank or perhaps an ATM. It
| made online payments virtually zero overhead, not sure if
| it was anonymous.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Do you have an account with the ATM provider? I'm wondering
| how these payment providers are in compliance with KYC and
| KYT regulatuons.
| skinkestek wrote:
| TLDR: it is a feature, not a bug
|
| Long version:
|
| I don't think Georgia has copied what I think of as the
| mistake of KYC, yet at least.
|
| I feel KYC regulations as they exist today are a big
| mistake, that does little good, more harm than good and
| causes a lot of extra work and annoyance.
|
| People always seem to think that de-anonymizing things
| will always make things better.
|
| As I get older I feel the more someone wants to know my
| real identify the more likely I am to be abused somehow.
|
| Meanwhile, talking to thousands of absolute strangers
| here on HN or via an anonymous reddit account or
| something feels relatively safe.
|
| I have also with time started to think that in the long
| run the risk from governments harming me or my family is
| a lot bigger than the risk that someone else does it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Perhaps expand on this into a blog post and post it here
| on HN...?
|
| Even if the ship has sailed on living in an identity-
| optional society, at least in most of the world, I still
| think it's good to record the benefits of such a society.
| londons_explore wrote:
| No - you don't give your identity to the ATM, or to the
| website. Which is lucky, because Georgia doesn't even
| have a good record of every citizen's name....
| londons_explore wrote:
| Well that's one of the points of a 'cash' transaction...
| Identity-optional.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| When ebay was new I bought loads of stuff using postal
| orders, which aren't far from cash.
|
| Hell, people would buy things from me and just post cash in
| an envelope.
| mc32 wrote:
| Also the threat to civil liberties was exposed in Canada when
| the government saw it fit to freeze people's bank accounts. I
| believe this is being reviewed and maybe something will come of
| it so that the gov is not allowed to cavalierly freeze accounts
| in the future, but you can see how even liberal people are
| ready to violate people's civil liberties when they see it fit.
| It's like principles are only followed when times are easy. In
| reality principles earn their keep when they persist in the
| toughest of times.
| efitz wrote:
| The US has wantonly applied "sanctions" all over the place,
| which in lay terms means "we take your money electronically
| and/or prevent you from moving money". This has been applied
| both against governments and individuals, even individuals
| not accused of any crime in the US.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes! We have faithless actors as well. Civil forfeiture is
| another one. They should not be able to confiscate people's
| property until they have had due process and found to have
| unlawfully come to said property.
|
| I use Canada as an example because it was a vast and wanton
| act by the government affecting and threatening thousands
| of accountholders at once.
|
| It's a shame we don't have more libertarians representing
| the interests of the people in the Congress.
|
| Can only hope whomever might be the next president would
| have the Coglioni to reform civil forfeiture.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| But as long as the people who are victimized first are
| unsympathetic, no one's going to complain about it. They
| were rednecks and vaccine deniers and white supremacists
| and blue collar workers, all the sorts of people who are
| _bad_.
|
| Thus, doing this to them was justified and good. Meaning
| the government should have such powers.
|
| If only there were some sort of clever computer algorithm
| that could create a money system that no one can track of
| block.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the
| definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro
| oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap immigrants
| labors while raise the property value sky high.
|
| They would give the plebs some scraps of coz. It's better to
| be homeless with some food than being hungry
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Not like that is different in the USA ?
|
| Or did Sanders et al. suddenly become the majority of the
| Democrats while I wasn't paying attention ?
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Maybe the poor in the US are also f? Have u considered
| that?
|
| Sanders is not pro business. He is at least trying to
| help the ppl. He is not the usual democrats.
|
| Sorry what's the point that u r trying to make? I never
| mentioned the US in the first place.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Just want to comment that the 'liberals' in Canada r the
| definition of right wing liberal - pro business, pro
| oligarch, f the poors, flood the market with cheap
| immigrants labors while raise the property value sky high.
|
| This is what I found to be the case too, it was really
| alarming; it was like MAGA was sped up and shipped to
| Canada despite it being supposedly a US-thing, whereas the
| US was dealing with Police brutality via the BLM movement,
| Canada just seemed to welcome it's draconian police state
| because it carried all those other features if you were
| from that 'class.'
|
| Terrifying and sobering to say the least.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Well, liberals are still liberals. They r not maga. U
| mean the conservative parties, they r turning into maga.
| Nobody cares the plebs regardless
| Aunche wrote:
| Would you prefer if they ended the blockades through more
| forceful means, even if that would escalate into violence?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| The usage of the Emergencies Act didn't end any blockades
| -- those had already ended through other means.
|
| It was used to disperse people from protesting at the
| Capitol, because the government wanted to crush people
| protesting without talking to them and not any imminent
| threat. People who were only parked in the street with
| signs, gathered together to demand a change in policy.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Would you prefer if they ended the blockades through more
| forceful means, even if that would escalate into violence?
|
| As an outsider looking in on that debacle I have two points
| to make:
|
| 1: What I wanted to be addressed above all was why Canada
| went so much further than any other country in N. America
| in response to COVID, and what purpose did it serve when
| it's biggest trading partner (The US) was also starting to
| pressure it from it's border restrictions?
|
| 2: As a former street demo activist, I can tell you
| violence doesn't always have to resort to physical
| altercation; it takes many forms, and those impacts can
| take just as long if not longer to recover from. Financial
| censorship is a form of violence, you are depriving people
| of their own property and personal agency. It compounds
| further when their way of living is being stripped from
| them and they are unable to feed themselves or their
| families, thus causing further discord and strife in
| Society--be it in bankruptcy or divorce etc...
|
| The vaccine-mandate is just one response to a litany of
| others that proved to have _efficacy_ in combating COVID;
| better diets, exercise, sunlight and Vitamin D proved an
| even bigger boon for people 's health and well being and
| yet those are OPTIONAL even to this day.
|
| My point is why did it even come this? And why are so many
| proponents of the State being able to ruin the lives of
| fellow members of their class (non-elite/political class)
| with such fervor in Canada?
|
| I've personally never understood the plight of Montreal as
| anything that mattered, most French I've encountered see
| their dialect as uncouth and their culture entirely
| divorced from their own; but after all of this I can
| surmise that it's they have been in a forced marriage with
| an abusive partner who is prone to take everything it has
| under the constant threat of violence as a likely POV they
| must have.
|
| Perhaps not unlike Ukraine, Catalunya or Pais Vasco for a
| more European example that spans Centuries of needless
| bloodshed.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 1: What I wanted to be addressed above all was why
| Canada went so much further than any other country in N.
| America in response to COVID, and what purpose did it
| serve when it's biggest trading partner (The US) was also
| starting to pressure it from it's border restrictions?
|
| Some of it might be due to the current administration's
| "double allegiances" to China. [0] [1]. Notice Beijing
| too is set on it's "0 Covid Strategy". Canada was
| notorious for having delayed vaccination the Trudeau
| administration funneled 44 million dollars [2] and months
| [3] of taxpayer funded research work to CCP controlled
| CanSino, with little to show for.
|
| > most French I've encountered see their dialect as
| uncouth
|
| What? We have an office in Montreal with French-
| Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never
| heard of such thing.
|
| [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/9658738/trudeau-
| foundation-china-...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65054559
|
| [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/7302194/canada-
| coronavirus-vaccin...
|
| [3] https://ipolitics.ca/2021/03/12/a-waste-of-a-lot-of-
| time-res...
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Some of it might be due to the current administration's
| "double allegiances" to China. [0] [1]. Notice Beijing
| too is set on it's "0 Covid Strategy". Canada was
| notorious for having delayed vaccination the Trudeau
| administration funneled 44 million dollars [2] and months
| [3] of taxpayer funded research work to CCP controlled
| CanSino, with little to show for.
|
| That does make sense, Tornoto and especially BC has
| always been an enclave for the Main-lander to setup shop
| in Real Estate and then eventually educate their children
| or eventually expat to, and the place is rife with abuse,
| and at times violence, towards HKers while the local
| government or schools not doing much in response.
|
| > What? We have an office in Montreal with French-
| Canadians, French and Swiss employees and I've never
| heard of such thing.
|
| Its work enviorment, and the line of thinking you're
| taking follows as:
|
| _I don 't see passive-racism in my office, where we pay
| people to work cordially for a salary with people they
| otherwise wouldn't be around, therefore racism doesn't
| and mustn't exist._
|
| Racism is an over-used word in the modern lexicon, but
| ultimately this is a racial thing: you speak my language
| and are white, but clearly not from our specific ilk
| therefore we will ridicule you for it in order to show
| how inferior you appear to me/us.
|
| I lived and worked in European/N. American kitchens, and
| restaurants frequented by all of the above; God help you
| if you only knew what they think about people from Angola
| or Mali. I was first there during the refugee crisis
| during the latter part of the financial crisis (11-14)
| when they couldn't house them so many just lived in city
| parks in any major town.
|
| Swiss-French, specifically from Geneva, always got a pass
| for some reason: must be the Banker money/wealth thing
| attached to it. My friend was from Bern (difficult native
| mundart speaker even by Swiss German standards) but spoke
| French with that accent for work as a corporate worker at
| SBB at dinner parties. Whereas Vaulis always got a
| strange look if it were in earshot.
|
| But You honestly cannot be oblivious of the way the
| mainland French perceive it's various dialects, hell even
| Alsace or Marsille dialects/accents get the cold shoulder
| from Parisian speakers at a table: but personally,
| Normandy sounds the best to my ears when spoken by a
| woman.
| [deleted]
| momirlan wrote:
| it's Canada, so no review will be beneficial to people. the
| whole judicial process is a joke. the government has carte
| blanche to do anything to you
| EGreg wrote:
| This is why we started https://intercoin.org
|
| It is everything people on HN deride. Smart contracts. Web3.
| But it is necessary to save us from a future of CBDCs and Big
| Tech payment systems being the only choice.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| This all started way, way before Pornhub.
|
| First it was federal and state moral laws (mostly porn, but
| also race and gender related stuff) with state/local and USPS
| cops handling enforcement, back when there was no internet and
| the way you got information out was via newsletters, zines, and
| such. USPS cops used to literally spend their days steaming
| open envelopes and rifling through people's packages that
| seemed like they might contain lots of flyers for unions or
| newsletters for black panthers, or nudie mags. But religious
| conservatives lost court cases left and right, eventually
| giving up on that front.
|
| So they shifted to banking to enforce a moral code in the
| private sector they couldn't do so via the government. After
| all - if you can't ban something, just starve it of
| money...making it impossible, or very expensive and
| inconvenient, to fund.
|
| For decades, porn stars have been basically shut out of the
| banking system, blacklisted, finding their bank accounts
| suddenly closed with little warning, with little or no
| explanation. I'm not talking prostitutes - I'm talking people
| who are clearly employed and receiving paychecks for being
| adult actors in films, all very verifiable. What's wild is that
| clearly banks are spending labor and resources to have
| computers and staff go through and find these accounts and
| close them.
|
| Criminals figured out pretty quick that porn stars had lots of
| cash hanging around, and they became targets for both organized
| (and less so) crime...as well as a place for organized crime to
| dump/launder money.
|
| The credit card industry claims they restrict / charge such
| high fees for porn because of fraud rates, but...look at the
| gym industry, which is infamous for fraudulent billing
| practices, and how they have access to credit card processing
| _and even ACH access._ The banking industry also seems more
| than delighted to handle the finances of boy scout troops and
| catholic churches.
|
| When ads dominated revenue, that was how censoring happened -
| major advertisers would contractually ban adult content from
| sites running their ads. With subscription fees taking over,
| it's now credit card payment processing. Most of the major
| crackdowns on adult content on various platforms have come from
| merchant and processing banks threatening to pull service
| because they don't like what they see on the site...or from the
| site trying to get an app onto Google and Apple app stores.
|
| Speaking of which: that's also why Apple is so paranoid about
| adult content in apps, podcasts, etc. They make a massive
| amount of cash off their take from app purchases and
| subscriptions. Even a slight increase in the percentage they
| pay, due to "risk" or some percentage of the fees going to
| adult content - means a huge, huge loss in revenue for them.
| Well, that and I think Tim Cook has internalized a lot of the
| conservative "gay = child predator" stuff which is why he's so
| fucking obsessed with Protecting The Children (coughCSAMcough)
| - but that's another story.
|
| ChatGPT, by the way? They didn't implement prudish (and pretty
| ineffective) censoring out of some moral code (otherwise they
| would have better filtered the training set, which clearly
| contains a LOT of porn), they did it to satisfy their credit
| card processor. The really big crackdown on naughtiness
| recently? Notice it happened right when they were submitting
| their iOS app for approval...
| rsaesha wrote:
| There is an option: a direct payment system provided by the
| Central Bank to the general public.
|
| In Brazil it is called PIX, and was implemented in 2020. Last
| month it has processed more than 3 million operations.
|
| Works 24/7, 0 fees to end users, low cost for business. IMO,
| going cashless is not an "if", it is a "when".
|
| https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en
| [deleted]
| throwuwu wrote:
| Who controls the central bank in Brazil? Who can implement
| changes to this system? How much PII is recorded with each
| transaction and who can view it?
| yesbut wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Brazil's system, but moving a central
| bank to being democratically controlled is betterbthan
| leaving this in the hands of a private company. The US
| central bank isn't currently democratically controlled, but
| it could be. Then collectively we could decide how a Brazil
| type system should function. People are better served when
| their banks aren't run for-profit.
| rsaesha wrote:
| Important comment: PIX is not a bank killer and isn't
| designed this way. Banks still exist in Brazil and they
| rake in pornographic profits just like everywhere else.
| The absolute majority of the banks profits here does not
| comes from payments processing fees. The fees exist to
| cover the transaction operating cost. Since for PIX there
| is a much much lower operating cost, it makes the service
| free for people and businesses! The ones losing here
| aren't banks, but credit cards companies.
| lazide wrote:
| Until it's politically uncool to be you, and the gov't
| bans your ability to buy food. The Nazi's got elected in
| their first time, democratically (ish).
| elzbardico wrote:
| If the nazis take power, and you happen to be one of
| their targets, having cash won't help much when your
| photo is being displayed everywhere with wording saying
| there's a bounty on your head as a dangerous terrorist.
| lazide wrote:
| But guess what makes it easier to identify and target
| individuals? Being able to do something like SELECT *
| FROM transactions WHERE recipient like 'synagogue'
| rsaesha wrote:
| What's stopping someone to doing exactly that in the
| current system?
| lazide wrote:
| There is no such central database, for one.
|
| All the transactions are controlled by multiple
| independent parties, whose interests do not align to do
| that as they'd lose their customers to their competitors
| when it came out what was happening.
|
| Some of the data does go through central clearing at some
| step (ACH, Fedwire), but credit card charges, Zelle,
| cash, checks deposited at the same bank, etc. do not.
| rsaesha wrote:
| Brother fckn nazis taking the government is a much bigger
| systemic problem that no financial system can protect
| against.
|
| The system works if democracy works. If we lose
| democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would
| crumble. That does not means everyone should stop
| building on top of democracy. Even more so for things
| that makes the life of the people better.
| lazide wrote:
| No, making it so you can't buy anything without the
| gov'ts permission makes it not only more tempting for
| someone like Nazi's to take over, but also much more
| effective for them to keep it and far more damaging when
| they're in. Germany is a strongly 'cash' society
| partially because of this, but also because of what the
| Stasi did to East Germany.
|
| You _really_ don't want the folks in power to have even
| more of that kind of power, no matter how convenient it
| is most of the time.
|
| At least Visa/MasterCard, etc. mainly just care about
| making money. The gov't doesn't even have to care about
| _that_!
|
| Using 'we're currently in a democracy' to justify
| creating an even more tempting and likely to be abused
| tool of oppression is not a good idea.
| rsaesha wrote:
| A central payment system is absolutely not a tool of
| oppression. Case in point: don't like it? Don't use it.
| People are still free to not use it just like it even
| didn't exist. For everyone that chooses to, there is now
| an instant and free payment method. Where is the
| oppression?
|
| In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov,
| lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go:
| ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives
| databases because they care about money. There, now nazi
| have central database. And in this scenario you have
| deprived the people of enjoy a really nice service.
|
| Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good
| thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing
| might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in
| ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first
| place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever
| improving services.
| lazide wrote:
| This is getting even more fantastical by the moment.
|
| I'm also pointing out not-that distant past events, and
| you're also just completely ignoring them.
|
| Good luck! Just don't do it in my economy.
| neves wrote:
| Brazil Central Bank has a well paid and competent
| bureaucracy. The very successful PIX payment was its
| initiative, but the gov in power tried to pretend it was
| their.
|
| BTW, Brazil Central Bank now is "independent", that is,
| their president was indicated by the looser candidate can
| do what he wants. In USA at least they respond to
| Congress.
| lazide wrote:
| Don't forget 'what happens when the gov't changes to
| someone who doesn't like you'
| rsaesha wrote:
| From https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/about/faq
|
| BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of
| career civil servants hired rather than appointed or
| elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives
| transitions of political leadership. They answer to the
| government, not a political party.
|
| The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term
| for the nine members of the BCB's Board of Governors that
| does not coincide with the term of office of the President
| of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the
| dismissal of the Board's members.
|
| The personal information and the information related to the
| operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by
| banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and
| in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
|
| All transactions take place through digitally signed
| messages that travel in encrypted form.
| willmadden wrote:
| Pornhub?
|
| How about the Canadian truckers protest where Canada's handful
| of banks froze their accounts and their gofundme was seized?
|
| How about all of China?
|
| There's no way government can be trusted. We would need a bill
| of rights applied to our money first to protect us and have a
| check and balance. We already need this!
| johncessna wrote:
| Or Russia.
| willmadden wrote:
| Or the US. Look at Operation Chokepoint or all of the
| people locked out of payment processors for wrong think.
| It's a theme that seems to transcend national boundaries
| that is accelerating. It's even on this forum. I just had a
| mod threaten me for making a snide but perfectly G-rated
| comment about NPR. It's not good!
| pessimizer wrote:
| Look what happened to Wikileaks and Assange. I think that was
| the test that began the slippery slope.
|
| edit:
|
| _Wikileaks to sue Visa, Mastercard over "financial blockade"_
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-to-sue-visa-mastercar...
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| And this was one of the key hopes that I had for bitcoin.
| ledgerdev wrote:
| I also feel strongly we need some sort of semi-local payment
| system that connects merchants, local banks and customers.
| Sending a payment to my local municipality should not involve
| wall street.
| pharmakom wrote:
| not to mention the privacy aspect.
| anony23 wrote:
| Crypto fixes this to some extent, but would require a chain
| that could handle a large volume of small transactions.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| BTC's Lightneing Network solves the scaling issues;
| admittedly work still needs to be done but the infrastructure
| is sound; where it fails is entirely outside of the technical
| sphere.
|
| Admittedly, I was more focused on Kazakhstan's populace
| uprising more than Canada's issues for personal reasons when
| the two occured--I can share why but are entirely moot for
| this argument.
|
| As time went on and Bitcoin was used to bypass this egregious
| example of financial censorship I started to realize that
| this was a milestone: we can solve the technical issues with
| our technology, as we had in Ukraine in 2013/14 during the
| Maidan Revolution and would later do again during the Russian
| invasion of Ukraine in '22. But this is only a part of the
| solution.
|
| What bifurcates it as a _success_ or as a _failure_ is often
| not even the goals it has accomplished but rather sadly it is
| entirely on the Governing body and the narrative the
| population that it governs adopts to said Governments
| actions; in the case Ukraine it was a complete success and
| has led to things like United24 because of it 's immense
| impact in the early days of the war in the case of Canada, an
| incredibly draconian society masking as a liberal democracy
| as seen during COVID, showed its true face.
|
| Many were aghast to see not just how myopic, but how absurd
| the laws they were enforcing were regarding seeing family or
| traveling even within provinces, but stood idly by and
| thought that nobody would resist and it was only a matter of
| time before things went back to 'normal' if they just obeyed
| (and things got extended further and further); it was a
| complete shock to me! I was working on a side-project with
| mainly people from Toronto and it was shocking to see the
| sheer brutality and contempt they had for their own from
| within...
|
| Activism and street demos only work if they derail Society
| from it's normal operations, that is what it's intended goal
| is: to make Society pause and address the internal affairs of
| it's supposed Social Contract. Failing to do so, and let
| 'business as usual' continue while letting them 'vent' is the
| exact ultimatum most authoritarian and despots desire, as
| they can manipulate and shape it to serve it's own end: think
| the '2 minute Hate' illustrated in 1984.
|
| As an early adopter of this tech, who has made most of his
| entire tech career in this space: I think Crypto has no real
| utility if it cannot secure it's own providence: and 99% all
| fail at that, even the best funded (ETH), whereas Bitcoin
| does solve this--when people see energy being _mispsent_ what
| they fail to realize or take into account is the true cost of
| REAL verifiable security with an immutable record (ledger).
|
| They never consider what this is for until things like this
| happen, often far too late, and they seem to undervalue the
| immense need for providence and trust in an ever-growing
| digital World until it directly harms them--most here never
| really ever experiencing this hence the prevailing sentiment
| of 'its all just grifters' not realizing that it is the VC
| and Ivy Leagues who start or hi-jack projects that actually
| do the most grifts.
|
| Sadly, where this technology comes short is to ensure that
| tyrants do not suspend constitutions via decree, threaten
| legal action against legitimate businesses (exchanges), and
| ensures that the serfs/plebs who make Society function have a
| valid legal recourse to dispute and arbitrate these matters.
|
| That's why street demos and activism is a fundamental part of
| being a Citizen in Western Society: minor disruptions to
| daily Life pale in comparison to reverting to the barbarism
| of living under authoritarian and despotic regimes: some of
| us are (un)lucky enough to have living generations who
| survived/lived through this first hand so we have a working
| memory to base our out-views on.
| rahen wrote:
| This is done off-chain with a layer two. Think of Lightning
| or Liquid on top of the BTC blockchain.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Lightning requires an on-chain transaction to create a
| channel, which means that you would need about 75 years,
| trillions of dollars of electricity and the entire
| remaining block reward to set up a channel for everyone
| alive now, assuming no births or deaths. Stop thinking
| about lightning, it's just meant to distract people from
| the actual scaling issues.
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| You can fit more than one operation in a transaction.
|
| The paper from 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publica
| tion/320247611_Scalable_...
|
| The general idea is called channel factories.
| arcticbull wrote:
| So how many years do you think it'll take to onboard
| people? And how many dollars?
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| Back of the napkin math:
|
| - 8 billion people
|
| - 96% reduction in block space over the naive approach,
| per the paper. (EDIT: the signature aggregation being
| referred to is Schnorr signatures, and it's become
| reality since the paper was published)
|
| - 7 transactions per second, 86400 seconds per day, 365
| days per year
|
| 8000000000*(1-0.96)/7/86400/365 = 1.45 years
|
| Current transaction fees are $3. Assuming that stays
| constant, every group of 20 users would need to come up
| with $3 between them.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Are you assuming the chain does nothing else at the time?
| And that fees wouldn't explode the second people actually
| tried to use it, and block space would dry up? Seems like
| using only the free portion of block space would allow
| you to arrive at a more realistic conclusion. Blocks seem
| to be going out pretty full thanks to ordinals.
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| I expect lightning adoption (to the extent it happens) to
| take place over decades, not just 1.45 years, so there's
| plenty of buffer already.
|
| In the past, fees have at times been both lower than
| today and higher than today. That will be true in the
| future too. Satoshi Dice didn't ruin bitcoin in 2013, and
| neither will ordinals in 2023.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Visa alone processes 100,000,000 transactions per day. All of
| them with "purchase protection". ie, there's reversibility
| for fraud via charge-backs, etc. We live in the real world
| where people make mistakes and need some help to fix it. This
| is why "crypto", as it is, will _never_ be a reasonable
| alternative.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Maybe, but it's good to have multiple options.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'll take this opportunity to advocate for 'payment network
| neutrality' - given their importance in the economy, I agree
| payment processors should be required to process all lawful
| transactions, by law. We should require this of any national
| payments processor in the US at the federal level - or state,
| I'm looking at you, CA and NY.
| 542458 wrote:
| I understand the pitch here, but different industries (and
| organizations within industries) pose dramatically different
| fraud risks. There are "anything flies" payment processors
| today, but the fee premium you pay is massive due to the
| risks involved. For example, CCBill specializes in high-risk
| transactions and will handle anything legal, but the fees can
| be as high as 14.5%!
| syngrog66 wrote:
| "lawful" is doing a lot of work there
|
| "lawful" is the rub
|
| not all laws equal and not all nations are democracies, or
| equally moral or enlightened
|
| I do agree we should have less "meta-crimes".
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I personally feel if the business is legal, then CC issuers
| should have to process it. If they want to be the top 3 or 4
| gate keepers, they absolutely need to be completely neutral
| as long as the payment is legal.
| MBCook wrote:
| While I understand that, how do you square that with one
| category of business causing _way_ more chargebacks than
| average?
|
| Do they just have to eat it? Or can they charge higher fees
| to those merchants? If the latter they could quickly use
| that to discriminate. $100/tx fee would kill most any
| normal business.
|
| Perhaps the problem is the government doesn't provide a
| non-cash lowest common denominator, so people are basically
| forced to use Visa/MC?
| [deleted]
| powera wrote:
| Any proposal that requires companies to ignore signs of fraud
| is Dead-On-Arrival.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I literally said 'lawful' transactions. Fraud is not
| lawful.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's a cop-out, fraudsters don't announce themselves so
| naturally retail businesses look for proxy markers from
| which to draw inferences. There's an entire money-
| laundering industry that aims to handle this issue for
| organized criminals. If you don't engage with this fact
| than you're just handwaving away the problem, undermining
| any pro-cash advocacy you engage in.
| nateabele wrote:
| The real cop-out is that HSBC and friends launder more
| money for terrorists and human traffickers on a bad day
| than your typical local racket does in a year, and they
| only ever receive a token fine and slap on the wrist.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Also true, but not germane to this discussion.
| [deleted]
| fineIllregister wrote:
| Then it wouldn't have protected Pornhub. The payment
| processors pulled out due to CSAM, revenge porn, and
| copyright infringement, none of which are legal.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Are you saying that's a bad thing?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I literally said 'lawful' transactions. Fraud is not
| lawful.
|
| The problem is, it's almost all _allegedly_ fraud.
|
| No one has the time or money to prosecute all of the
| attempted fraud in the system.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Same exact process as now, except you have a guaranteed
| right to appeal.
| novok wrote:
| And your effectively at the same spot again
| arcticbull wrote:
| How so? Currently if your transaction isn't permitted
| there's nothing you can do. Networks aren't required to
| process any transaction they don't want to process, or
| any kind of transaction they don't want to process.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I would go further and remove the "lawful" from that. If you
| pay me $50 it shouldn't matter to the payment processor
| whether I gave you a painting or a blow job in return.
| smilespray wrote:
| That went from lawful to mouthful pretty quickly.
| hgsgm wrote:
| How would you handle chargeback claims? Should all users of
| the system share in the fraud risk?
| jaxrtech wrote:
| I never can tell if chargebacks are truly a feature or a
| bug.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Same way it's handled now, you charge a higher processing
| fee proportional to the chargeback risk in the industry.
| My only argument is that networks shouldn't be able to
| capriciously deny transactions that are legal, even if I
| disagree with them. I don't believe in the 2nd amendment,
| but to the extent it is lawful to buy a gun, you should
| be able to buy it with your Visa card, imo, and a lot of
| payment acquirers do not permit it. Similarly, legal
| drugs.
| nickff wrote:
| The reason the networks started denying service to
| firearms dealers is that the (Obama-era) Department of
| Justice pressured them to. They also went after
| pornography and marijuana dealers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| arcticbull wrote:
| I don't disagree! I'm saying that by law that should not
| be an option.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| OK, the processing fee for PornHub and gun stores is now
| 237%. What are you going to do about it?
| scythe wrote:
| You can cap the effective margin with even a very
| generous limit -- say, processing fees no more than 3x
| the cost of servicing chargebacks -- and mostly eliminate
| the concern about "quietly banning" businesses via
| processing fees.
|
| But the thing is that there isn't much incentive to do
| this kind of skulduggery, because the companies are only
| protecting themselves from lawsuits and protests when
| they ban businesses, but imposing high processing fees
| would probably not satisfy the would-be tyrants who were
| trying to force these "bans".
| arcticbull wrote:
| No idea where you got "237%" but no, of course, the rule
| I have in mind would require charging fees proportional
| to the risk. This is well-worn ground. And if somehow the
| risk is double what the charge is (?!) then that's the
| risk. They'll have to step up their customer validation
| at PornHub.
| lazide wrote:
| The poster was noting there is historic precedent for
| parties to charge punitive fees to the point it's defacto
| banned for things they don't like. It would be
| challenging to stop without mandating some explicit
| formula too, which can be gamed.
| ianai wrote:
| Someone charging back an illicit activity shouldn't want
| it exposed to any inquisitive process-so don't.
|
| Ie make it legal for the provider to report it, perhaps
| anonymously.
| [deleted]
| theturtletalks wrote:
| It's a clever setup. Using laws like the Anti-Money
| Laundering rules, the government nudges credit card
| companies to avoid high-risk businesses. These companies
| can then turn away any business without explaining why, all
| in the name of "security through obscurity."
|
| But when you think about it, this setup skips past
| important legal protections like due process and the
| presumption of innocence. It's like the government has
| quietly asked Visa and Mastercard to play judge and jury.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Which is extra interesting now, because fintrac and US
| treasury lately had to address issues of derisking (
| banks choosing the easy way out from the burden of
| explaining every instance SAR and UTR was not filed ).
| Breaking point was coming for a while with crypto being
| an interesting symptom of the issue, but clearly things
| did not get bad enough yet.
| er4hn wrote:
| patio11 covers this a bit in a series of blog posts in
| his newsletter:
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-
| and-....
|
| Quoting a relevant paragraph from the AML post above:
| Much like KYC, AML policies are recursive stochastic
| management of crime. The state deputizes financial
| institutions to, in effect, change the physics of money.
| In particular, it wants them to situationally repudiate
| the fungibility of money. (Fungibility is the property
| that $1 is $1 and, moreover, that you are utterly
| indifferent between particular dollars.) They are not
| required to catch every criminal moving money (that would
| not be a positive result!)
| [deleted]
| elzbardico wrote:
| That's my biggest issue with this state of affairs. I am
| not a libertarian preaching unrestricted Laissez-Faire.
| But I do think that having your access to a payment
| system blocked should only happen as a result of a legal
| procedure with ample defense rights and based on laws
| voted by a parliament.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| On the other end you have crypto.
|
| Unfettered electronic currency has not shined a light on
| honest arbiters
| [deleted]
| colinsane wrote:
| if the payment processor knew the transaction was for a
| contract killing but processed it anyway, would they not be
| facilitating a crime ("aiding and abetting")? are you
| saying we should specifically exempt payment processors
| from being held responsible for crimes that the rest of us
| -- or any other business -- could be found guilty of when
| performing the same functions?
|
| or are you suggesting something more broad: that in the
| chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a crime,
| only the "last" party should ever be held responsible? e.g.
| anyone can sell weapons to anybody, only the person who
| pulls the trigger should be legally responsible? in this
| case presumably it's legal to hire a contract killer, the
| only illegal part is the killing itself, and a skilled
| contractor could probably shift that final act onto the
| victim as well.
| FateOfNations wrote:
| If they _knew_ the payment was for a contract killing,
| they should be picking up the phone and calling law
| enforcement.
|
| This isn't even about individual transactions. The
| situation here is more like them saying, "your business
| has characteristics in common with the kind of a business
| that might facilitate a contract killing and we're lazy
| so we just aren't going to do any business with you at
| all".
| jevgeni wrote:
| The knots HN ties itself into bashing "EU regulations",
| but then easily deciding to impose arbitrary regulations
| on payment companies is a sight to behold.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _if the payment processor knew the transaction was for
| a contract killing but processed it anyway_
|
| If the payment processor knows what your contract is for,
| it should have an obligation to report it to you. If the
| payment processor knew the transaction was for contract
| killing then it should have an obligation to report it to
| the authorities.
|
| > _are you suggesting something more broad: that in the
| chain of cause and effect that eventually effects a
| crime, only the "last" party should ever be held
| responsible?_
|
| No, I think that some parties between the "first" and
| "last" should be indemnifiable because they provide
| neutral services that everyone relies on for legal
| purposes. Without proof that a contract between two
| parties is illegal, it should be permitted.
|
| Do you have any idea how many employers have
| unenforceable clauses in their contracts? If you think
| that payment processors should be held liable for
| criminal contracts then perhaps we should hold payment
| processors and banks liable for criminal contracts of
| _all_ employers.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This ignores all the justifications that the other
| commenters have laid out.
|
| You are not "aiding and abetting" by handling the money.
| There's already a well-established body of law outlining
| who is and is not culpable for a crime. We don't need to
| debate it from first principles here.
| jevgeni wrote:
| Remind the rest of the class please.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| If a telephone company knowingly serviced a contract
| killer, they would be fine.
|
| Same with postal service, etc.
| samtho wrote:
| Aiding and abetting (or accessory, more generally) has
| legal criteria that must be met fully:
|
| 1. The accused party must be aware of the perpetrator's
| intent to commit a crime
|
| 2. The accused then took action to help or encourage the
| perpetrator in carrying out their intent
|
| If both are not met, the accused person cannot be held
| criminally liable. I'm sure each of us have met a single
| one of these requirements in isolation. For example, if
| you watch a crime happen, you likely met #1 and if you
| helped out a random stranger and the help you rendered
| later assisted them when committing a crime, you met #2.
|
| We as a society agree that just the act of solicitation
| for murder is crime, one that is totally separate from a
| murder charge. It is also a crime to sell a weapon if you
| are not licensed to do so in some jurisdictions.
|
| A lot of legal theory revolves around the concept of
| "mens rea" (which itself has four levels: intent,
| knowledge, recklessness, and negligence), and "actus rea"
| which is the subsequent action as a result of the
| accused's state of mind. Entities that act as a common
| carrier are shielded from this because their position in
| any transaction precludes any knowledge of the specific
| details of what they are facilitating.
| wwweston wrote:
| Would you feel differently for someone hired to break into
| your home and retrieve valuables or information? Or perhaps
| hired to perform a hit on the life of someone you care
| about?
|
| Transactional sex might not be something you want people
| drawing lines around with financial regulation, but usually
| people have a line.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Nope.
|
| There are other mechanisms to target illegal actions,
| such as sending the police to arrest the person. Those
| actions are guarded by due process and the right to
| trial.
|
| Using the financial system to target people is not.
| tchaffee wrote:
| So you would willingly, knowingly, and personally process
| a transaction to kill someone? Not your problem, let the
| police discover it?
| zhfliz wrote:
| if you know about/suspect it you report it.
|
| how do you know with 100% certainty/due process that this
| is indeed the case and it's not just your ML algorithm
| going crazy?
|
| people can also pay with physical money if they desire to
| do so.
| tchaffee wrote:
| What I asked is specific: if you know the money is for a
| hit job will you still accept the business and take your
| fee or is there a moral line you personally won't cross?
| Yes, it's the job of the police to investigate but do you
| want the freedom to not engage in business that you
| consider evil?
| zhfliz wrote:
| at best you suspect it, you don't know it unless you're
| on the sending or receiving side of the transaction.
|
| it shouldn't be my decision whether i want to allow the
| transaction, even if i wouldn't want to allow it. i'm not
| in a position to perform due legal process to determine
| whether you're indeed being paid for a hit job.
|
| the provider should be in a neutral position.
| tchaffee wrote:
| I asked a specific question and you refuse to answer it
| because your entire premise is based on not being able to
| know if someone is engaging in unethical behavior. That's
| premise is seriously flawed.
|
| The problem you're trying solve is caused by lack of
| competition and near monopoly players. The fix isn't to
| force those businesses to ignore ethics. The fix is
| hugely increasing the competition.
| zhfliz wrote:
| even though not explicitly, i have already answered your
| question.
|
| you should pass the transaction, as you should be in a
| neutral position.
|
| edit: to clarify, payment providers/processors nowadays
| are a core utility function in our society. imo this is
| not something you can consider a regular private
| business.
| tchaffee wrote:
| My basic human freedoms should include the right to not
| do business with a hate group for example. You want folks
| to give up that freedom because you got the problem wrong
| and you're applying the wrong fix.
| zhfliz wrote:
| you're free to decide who to do business with if you're
| not providing a core utility service.
|
| would you like to no longer receive water or electricity
| at your home because your utility companies don't like
| you, despite (being willing to) paying the bills like any
| other citizen?
| tchaffee wrote:
| Due to limited infrastructure resourcess, water and
| utility companies are a near monopoly which is why they
| need these types of regulations. There is no physical
| limitations to the number of possible payment processors
| so the actual fix is more competition and more companies.
| No need for neutrality regulations when you have
| thousands of companies competing.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's a bit of bullshit because these payment providers
| accept transactions for the government which consistently
| kills people at the local, state, and federal level every
| day.
|
| If you "know" the money is for a hit job, you contact the
| FBI or local police and they can mobilize protective
| services and arrest forces.
| tchaffee wrote:
| I'm not claiming payment processors are moral. I'm asking
| if the freedom to refuse unethical business should be
| your right. I was responding to the position of a parent
| comment that processors should accept even illegal
| transactions.
|
| Of course you contact the police in the situation I
| described. Do you accept the payment though or do you
| refuse the transaction? You keep avoiding a specific yes
| or no question.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Last time I checked both Visa and Mastercard have no
| problems being used to buy cigarettes or alcohol.
|
| I'd bet that orders of magnitude more people die because
| of cancer caused by cigarettes and in episodes of
| domestic violence or traffic accidents caused by alcohol
| abuse than the number of people assassinated by hit
| killers hired online and paid with credit cards.
| tchaffee wrote:
| I never claimed the near monopoly of current processors
| is moral. My claim is easy: we have the right to conduct
| a business according to our ethics.
| kortilla wrote:
| If you have evidence that a murder is about to occur, you
| report it to the fucking police. You don't just remove
| yourself from the pipeline and hope it doesn't happen.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Do you accept the payment and profit or can you refuse
| the transaction? A parent comment claimed we must process
| all transactions, legal or not.
| tchaffee wrote:
| And if it's for human trafficking? Payment processors are
| made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of
| drawing a moral line they won't cross. The real problem as
| I see it is that payment processing is a near monopoly.
| Better competition and smaller players would almost
| guarantee that every transaction except the most egregious
| would have a willing payment processor. Diversity is so
| often the best answer over a one size fits all rule.
| cortesoft wrote:
| If you know it is for human trafficking, why would you
| cut off the payment instead of arresting the people?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Because you can't arrest people that are out of the
| jurisdiction. It's much easier to find the victims than
| the perpetrators.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Where did I say instead? You should do both.
| lazide wrote:
| Because arresting people requires evidence and due
| process, which is work.
| jlawson wrote:
| It's not just work, it's accountability. That's what
| they're trying to avoid.
| neves wrote:
| If there's no evidence or due process, then you don't
| know.
| lazide wrote:
| Won't know what?
| codehalo wrote:
| You don't know if the money was used for trafficking. Are
| you reading what you are writing?
| lazide wrote:
| Are you reading what you are writing? People can (and do)
| know things without having enough evidence to stand up in
| court. It's how 99% of everything works, frankly.
|
| Banks right now are denying transactions because they
| 'know' it's fraud, based on ML models and probability and
| no other evidence.
|
| If you require someone to not 'know' something until they
| have enough evidence they could prove it in court, they
| won't be able to function. Even investigators don't have
| to meet that bar.
| kortilla wrote:
| If you don't have evidence or due process, then you don't
| know it's for human trafficking.
| lazide wrote:
| And yet, people know things all the time without evidence
| and due process.
| darkerside wrote:
| It's odd to me that the way to combat this is to freeze
| money. Yes, money is the lifeblood, but that means you
| can also follow the money to the source. Wouldn't you
| want to do that instead of freezing it and killing the
| lead?
| tchaffee wrote:
| Depends on the case. If you already know who belongs to a
| terrorist organization then maybe stopping the money and
| limiting the ability to terrorize would be a higher
| priority.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Well, it looks like a lot of this is designed to make the
| job of law enforcement easier because politicians that
| seem "tough" on crime have better election prospects.
| Freezing the money is far more dramatic and provides nice
| numbers for said politician's re-election campaign.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card
| processors
|
| And the government. In Canada the government suspended the
| constitution (because that's a thing over there?) because of
| some peaceful, free-speech protected, protests in the capital
| and started arbitrary freezing protester's bank accounts. Of
| course, without any due process (remember, constitutional
| rights were suspended!).
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| Yep, and hat tip to the government for a job well done.
| There's a right and a wrong way to protest, they were given
| time to choose to do it right. Now that the threat is over
| and dispersed they're welcome to come back and protest
| peacefully. For an end to the vaccine mandates, that ended
| already. Silly sausages.
|
| For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the
| constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights for a period
| of time. [1]
|
| You _may_ be thinking of the 'notwithstanding clause' but
| that's totally different.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > the threat
|
| You can see here how wrong and violent these protests were.
| The bouncy castle and hot tub were a danger to society!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74pbbhCZng
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hzfwaSVIvoA
| arcticbull wrote:
| Do you live in Canada, have family in Ottawa, or are you
| just consuming right-wing content in the US?
|
| They loaded up the capital area with 3,200L of fuel and
| started bringing in propane tanks. You think that
| wouldn't be considered a threat in front of the White
| House? Especially since the fortified compound around the
| White House is significantly further from the roadway
| than the comparatively unguarded Parliament is from
| Wellington St.
|
| With respect, I suggest you stick to commenting on the
| US, or at least things you have some specific knowledge
| of.
|
| Maybe read some contemporaneous news coverage. From
| _Ottawa_ where it was happening.
|
| > Mayor Jim Watson declared a state of emergency Sunday
| after a dystopian weekend of carnival-like scenes,
| heightened lawlessness, growing tensions between
| protesters and residents, and relentless noise, diesel
| fumes and fireworks.
|
| The fact you think the situation was limited to 'bouncy
| castles and hot tubs' is pretty telling of how little you
| know about what you're discussing.
|
| You know the invocation of the Act was supported by
| multiple political parties at the Federal level and
| Provincial Premiers of all parties?
|
| [1] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/mayor-
| declares-eme...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > There's a right and a wrong way to protest
|
| Looks more like there's a right and a wrong _cause_ to
| protest.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Not at all, there have been numerous peaceful protests
| from these silly sausages since. They still meet up,
| protesting things that no longer exist, from time to
| time. You can find occasional news coverage of it. It
| really was the _how_. No need to make things up. There 's
| plenty of real things to be upset about.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the
| constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights for a
| period of time. [1]
|
| Uhm, I dislike this weird defensiveness of newspeak. Does
| it suspend _some_ rights available under normal
| circumstances? If yes, then it effectively suspends the
| constitution? Why does it feel like Simpsons nailed it so
| hard when Lisa proposed temporary refund adjustments and
| people cheered thrice out of sheer misunderstanding of the
| language used.
|
| And all that before we get to the part whether giving
| government power to pinky swear give all that power back
| when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale
| comparable to Patriot Act.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The Emergencies Act and how it's applied are governed by
| the Charter. It's a function of government as defined
| under the Charter. It's not a suspension thereof. It's
| moving into a different mode of operation, sure, but the
| it's still all a defined function of that system.
|
| As [1] states:
|
| > Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to
| the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill
| of Rights, and must have regard to the International
| Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
|
| In re:
|
| > And all that before we get to the part whether giving
| government power to pinky swear give all that power back
| when invoked is kinda playing with fire on the scale
| comparable to Patriot Act.
|
| Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or
| functions. In fact, once the emergency is over they're
| required by law to hold an inquiry on whether the action
| was justified in the first place.
|
| Further, the invocation can be rolled back by the House
| of Commons, the Senate or the Governor General - or
| honestly probably the King (albeit risking a
| constitutional crisis) - at any time, and all the
| temporary laws expire.
|
| This particular invocation was carried out under
| _minority_ government meaning the invocation had to have
| the support of multiple political parties too, and risked
| calling an election. It also had the support of the
| Provincial Premiers of all political stripes.
|
| It's nothing like the Patriot Act.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << The Emergencies Act and how it's applied are governed
| by the Charter.
|
| What you conveniently leave out is that government in its
| infinite wisdom can simply decide it does not apply under
| exceptions[1] in section 1 of the charter. Shocking.
| Government left itself an out. What is more annoying that
| people defend it as it is not what it actually is.
|
| Now compare it to what the act was intended for ( some
| sort of senior politician kidnapping ) and what it was
| used for in peace time ( forcibly dismantling a protest
| ).
|
| I guess what I am saying is that it can be governed by
| Charter all it wants, but at the end of the day it is,
| apparently, governed by what ruling party considers a
| crisis.
|
| << Absolutely not how the Emergencies act is written or
| functions.
|
| How it is written can be open to interpretation and it
| functions the way politics does ( expediency of the
| moment squared ). I am not really writing anything
| groundbreaking here.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Righ
| ts_and...
| arcticbull wrote:
| > I guess what I am saying is that it can be governed by
| Charter all it wants, but at the end of the day it is,
| apparently, governed by what ruling party considers a
| crisis.
|
| Minority government, meaning multiple federal parties, in
| addition to all the provincial premiers. So basically,
| every elected official - plus the unelected official, the
| Governor General. It's why we elect them - and have them,
| respectively.
|
| Literally everyone had to sign off on this. If you think
| they're malicious then we have much bigger problems
| because frankly, they could find much easier ways to harm
| you than this.
|
| And again, it can be ended by basically anyone and
| immediately rolled back.
|
| I'm not yet convinced.
|
| But we can agree to disagree.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I disagree overall, but I appreciate your replies. I
| agree that I could have made my point better.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Nah you're good, I like talking to people I disagree
| with. I like it when folks change my mind. And for what
| it's worth, your argument was compelling.
|
| Sorry if I came across prickly, lol, I was typing faster
| than thinking.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > ( some sort of senior politician kidnapping ) and what
| it was used for in peace time ( forcibly dismantling a
| protest ).
|
| The state media and government tried to pin mailbox
| bombings and an instance of kidnapping to this group
| called the FLQ until an RCMP agent was caught literally
| red-handed (with severe burns and a torn off finger)
| planting bombs in a mailbox to pin it on the "FLQ"! [0]
| The feds then confessed to more than 400 illegal search
| and seizures, criminal trespass, breaking and entering
| and arson incidents and the bomb planter admitted he "had
| done much worse for the feds" (all of these incidents
| that were used to invoke the constitution's suspension!).
|
| Who was prime minister during that time? You guessed it,
| Justin Trudeau's father. What a coincidence.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_i
| nvolvin...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > In fact, once the emergency is over they're required by
| law to hold an inquiry on whether the action was
| justified in the first place.
|
| So the government will investigate... the government. Do
| they at least wait for an administration change? Worked
| out beautifully for police departments...
|
| > the Senate or the Governor General - or honestly
| probably the King (albeit risking a constitutional
| crisis) - at any time, and all the temporary laws expire.
|
| Are any of those actually elected or are these just
| positions nominated by ... the same government who
| declared the suspension of rights?
| arcticbull wrote:
| > So the government will investigate... the government.
| Do they at least wait for an administration change?
| Worked out beautifully for police departments...
|
| You know the government is currently a minority
| government, meaning that they require the support of at
| least one other party to remain in power and an election
| can be called at any time. Canada's has elections every
| like 18 months on average under minority government.
|
| Any impropriety in the process would have almost
| certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate
| election.
|
| The person who found the government was justified in its
| use of the Emergencies Act [1] was Paul Rouleau [2] a
| justice of the Court of Appeals of Ontario.
|
| The senators are appointed by various leaders and are, at
| least in theory, not aligned with any political party and
| given lifetime appointments. The House of Commons is
| elected and comprised of various parties. The King is
| obviously a hereditary role and lives in England, not
| beholden to any one person in Canada really, but instead
| to all Canadians. Obviously the King is neither nominated
| nor elected. And the Governor General is also pretty
| unaligned as the King's representative to Canada.
|
| So no, you're wrong, oversight comes from all over the
| political spectrum and all kinds of affiliations.
|
| Are you applying an American lens? The political system
| in Canada is quite different, and this is starting to
| feel like a high school Canadian civics class.
|
| [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/four-highlights-
| emergencies...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rouleau
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Any impropriety in the process would have almost
| certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate
| election.
|
| Didn't they just have an election that resulted in the
| minority government? Meaning all parties knew their
| chances of overthrowing the current admin were slim.
|
| > Paul Rouleau
|
| Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and
| found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal
| administration!
|
| > The senators are appointed by various leaders and are,
| at least in theory, not aligned with any political party
| and given lifetime appointments.
|
| By who? Who nominates those people?
|
| > And the Governor General is also pretty unaligned.
|
| And nominated by?
|
| > The King is obviously a hereditary role and lives in
| England
|
| So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can
| have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and
| found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal
| administration!
|
| This was a public inquiry that was participated in by
| members of all major parties.
|
| > By who? Who nominates those people?
|
| The leader of the party in power at the time, which
| historically alternates between Liberals and
| Conservatives. In lifetime appointments. You can learn
| more about the Senate here. [1]
|
| > Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and
| found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal
| administration!
|
| A Liberal _minority_ that can be dissolved at any time.
| An important point you keep ignoring.
|
| > And nominated by?
|
| The PM. Not beholden to the PM - and they aren't re-
| appointed after 4 years. Of course, the PM can't remove
| them. An exit from this post can only occur through death
| or incapacitation, resignation, or if removed by the
| King.
|
| > So weird to read that a foreign, non-elected person can
| have such a big impact. Feels completely alien.
|
| Again completely wrong, lol.
|
| Charles III is King of Canada. You wanted someone with
| oversight who isn't beholden to anyone and suddenly they
| don't count because you don't like it.
|
| I'm done covering grade 10 civics with someone who has
| made up their mind on something they have no
| understanding of. It's playing chess against someone
| playing hopscotch.
|
| Just stick to something you know about, or do some
| research. Stop assuming you know better.
|
| You've made it clear you know basically nothing about the
| subject.
|
| Just take the L and move on.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_of_Canada
| momirlan wrote:
| said Charter which is worth zero, when any judge or
| politician can override it.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I have news for you: if your leadership doesn't care
| about the process they can do literally whatever they
| want. What's written down is just words on a page. The
| whole thing is a construct, including the US
| constitution. The only real defense anyone has is checks,
| balances, various kinds of oversight and electing good
| people who care about doing the right thing. Canada has
| all of the above, generally speaking.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Look at what it did to crypto.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I really couldn't care less about Pornhub and any other digital
| pimps that made money off revenge porn and CSAM for decades.
| I'll never feel sorry for them, its executives are rich and
| without a conscience.
|
| > The small organization that helped bring the porn industry to
| its knees
|
| https://www.godreports.com/2022/12/the-small-organization-th...
|
| > How Pornhub - one of the world's biggest sites - caused
| untold damage and pain
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
|
| > Pornhub sued for allegedly serving "under-age, non-
| consensual" videos
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/pornhub-hosted-r...
|
| > The Children of Pornhub
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
|
| A simpler exemple would be independent new commenters,
| political organizations, or non aligned artists suspended by
| Crowdfunding platforms, Patreon, Paypal or even VISA directly
| because the competition or politicians don't want them to
| exist.
|
| > PayPal shuts accounts of anti-war publications Consortium
| News and MintPress News
|
| https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/04/uofx-m04.html
|
| > Visa & Mastercard Reportedly Refuse Service to David Horowitz
| - Newest Victim of SPLC's Anti-Conservative Purge?
|
| https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/visa-mastercard-reportedly-refu...
|
| > PayPal Partners with Anti-Defamation League to Research
| Financial Pipelines of 'Extremist' Groups
|
| https://www.nationalreview.com/news/paypal-partners-with-ant...
|
| > Why Is PayPal Denying Service to Palestinians?
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/why-paypal-denying-ser...
| jlawson wrote:
| So you want to hurt the people you dislike, and (presumably)
| help the people you like.
|
| That's fine, but please understand that some of us believe
| it's worth having principles. We think it's better for
| society and humanity if people think above the
| dislike=hurt/like=help dichotomy.
| xg15 wrote:
| Businesses are one thing, but what I find truly dystopic about
| the idea of 100% cashless societies is that you could off
| _people_ in the same way.
|
| If today, you lose access to your bank account for whatever
| reason, you still have various options how to purchase
| necessities: If you got some spare cash, you could use that;
| otherwise you could ask a friend to lend you some cash.
|
| In a cashless society, that won't work: Even if the friend
| wants to help you, they have nothing to wire the cash to.
| They'd literally have to buy the individual goods for you.
|
| The only way to fix this would be to get a new temporary bank
| account until the old one is accessible again. But if you got
| banned for whatever reason, chances are the bank will ban the
| new account as well.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 5% of the US population is unbanked. A "cashless" society
| would shut out a massive number of poor, undocumented,
| homeless, etc and make life even more difficult for them. It
| would also cause skyrocketing issues with burglary, mugging,
| etc.
|
| Many porn actors have been blacklisted from the US banking
| system.
|
| Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases over
| censorship laws and regulations and shifted to enforcing
| their morals via the private banking system.
|
| Ever notice that there's no law or regulation requiring banks
| provide even basic checking service to anyone who can
| establish a valid identity?
|
| Going cashless cannot happen unless either the government
| starts providing essential (checking, savings, credit card,
| and home/personal/auto financing) services they are mandated
| to provide to _everyone_ (which will never happen because the
| banking industry would lose a ton of control) or banks must
| be mandated to provide non-lending services to _anyone_ and
| provide lending on an identity-blind basis (ie, only metrics
| may be used, none which identify the type of banking or
| business or employment or spending you do.)
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases
| over censorship laws and regulations and shifted to
| enforcing their morals via the private banking system.
|
| The same thing has happened to conservatives. [1] [2] [3]
|
| It's more of an establishment/anti-establishment phenomenon
| than a left/right phenomenon.
|
| [1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-
| of-purg...
|
| [2] https://www.newsweek.com/pnc-bank-trump-mxm-news-
| account-178...
|
| [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gofundme-freedom-convoy-
| under-i...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I mean it's not like businesses can _refuse_ to take cash as
| payment - it 's legal tender !
|
| (The inconvenient bit is that they are not required to give
| change.)
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It's legal tender for debts. Not payments.
| 3np wrote:
| * * *
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