A lot of people in this thread are missing the main problem that people have. Yes, cash can be inconvenient, but by eliminating cash entirely you are putting 100% of all wealth into the power of banks. Those without a bank account will be left behind and FORCED to open one.
This gives banks and governments immense control and power over literally all the money you own. Given said power, they will abuse it for their own profit. It's not a question of "IF they abuse it" it is a GUARANTEED. They WILL abuse this power. If you deny this fact, you are living in a fantasy. Give people power, and it will be used, 100% of the time, and not to your benefit.
See, for a recent example in a supposedly free first world country, Canada. Even people who donated to the truckers before the crackdown got targeted in the bank account freezes.
Just like with any bulk data collection and surveillance technology, it is only a question of how soon it will be abused.
Because once you donate money, you have given it away, and it's gone. If you're expecting something in return you are trying to make a purchase, not a donation.
Punishment would involve having something further taken away. If they jailed people for donating, that would be punishment.
> Because once you donate money, you have given it away, and it's gone.
Presumably to the entity you intended to donate to, no? I would argue that determining where your money goes is a right.. If I intercepted all of your future charitable donations for my own purposes you would be understandably upset.
Ha ha, so easy to refute. Is it unethical for the government to stop me from say, donating to a terrorist organisation? It's still "charity", right? ;)
donation are purchases -- you are buying capital for the fund of your choice.
if it turned out a charity you donated to was funneling money somewhere, they would be effectively stealing from you, as the thing you were purchasing was never given.
> On February 17, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a press conference that financial institutions have started freezing accounts and canceling credit cards in accordance with the Emergencies Act, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked earlier this week.
> The powers granted by the act would allow banks to target the accounts of people who have donated to crowdfunding platforms, like the fundraising campaigns on GoFundMe and GiveSendGo, that have fueled the ongoing protests, but Freeland said she would not give "specifics of whose accounts are being frozen."
They can lock anything for any amount and not give any details. Supposedly they have unlocked some, but there's no way of knowing who and why not for others. Typical petrostate behavior.
I'm sure if this happened to people who'd just sent a donation at least one of them would have come forward by now and we'd have some evidence instead of the handwaving "what if" in this article and your comment.
>“Just to be clear, a financial contribution either through a crowdsourced platform or directly, could result in their bank account being frozen?” Lawrence asked.
You're wrong TomSwirly, they did, and unless you're Canadian familiar with the situation (I assume you're not), you should really be more careful about untruths. In your case I assume it comes from a place of ignorance, not malice, but it's tough to be certain.
>Seriously?! How did they justify donating to the truckers as something to be punished? That sounds almost like a police state to me.
So imagine Trudeau's point of view. The Canadian media smeared the protest as nazis, racists, white supremacists, who were going to Ottawa to overthrow the government. Indie and international media clearly disproved this, but Trudeau never saw this. Joel Lightbound, one of Trudeau's top allies saw this.
So imagine you are Trudeau. You believe that a bunch of nazis are looking to overthrow the government. You absolutely declare a national emergency and send the police to arrest them. You also seize the bank accounts of those who are involved in the military occupation of the capital.
The problem? The canadian media was lying quite extensively. This was a legitimate protest of regular canadians who are good people.
CBC is literally state-funded media, and Trudea literally lives in Ottawa. In no world does he have an excuse to be blind, and even in some sliver of hope where he honestly didn't know, why didn't he make a public apology?
I don't think you can excuse this by blaming the media - shouldn't it be the government's responsibility to make sure they have the correct information before making use of emergency powers?
>I don't think you can excuse this by blaming the media - shouldn't it be the government's responsibility to make sure they have the correct information before making use of emergency powers?
I never intended to excuse anything. The media is bought and paid for by the government. This is the state propaganda who called the protest a bunch of nazis.
Worse yet... Joel Lightbound is a liberal quebec MP. He made the huge mistake of going to the protest and talk to them and he was astounded by how misrepresented the protest was by Canadian media. Over a week before the emergency was declared he said exactly what should happen. Stop the inflammatory messaging calling them all nazis, they are not nazis. Give us a roadmap to when our rights will be restored.
That would have solved the entire problem long before anything went down. Today, not only did everything that the protest was protesting still remains without a roadmap, they have added new restrictions to our rights.
absolute FUD and lies. They wanted policy change. Telling your government to use its powers is not revolution. They wanted to "overthrow" the government in the same sense that protestors to legalize gay marriage want to overthrow the government.
You misunderstand the Canadian political system. A senator or MP is free to act according to their own desire; they are political actors elected or appointed expressly for that.
The Governor General is Canada's representative of the Queen. They are not a politician. Literal centuries of British and Canadian jurisprudence have defined the Governor General to have no ability to act without the advice of their Prime Minister. As an unelected representative of the Monarch, if they act without the advice of the Prime Minister, that's a tyrant overthrowing the elected government. England cut off the head of the last monarch to act against the will of the House.
I will openly admit that I have limited knowledgeable of the role of the Governor General in Canadian constitution and legal history.
I still think that characterizing the memorandum of understanding as treason is a misunderstanding of both what a MoU is and the contents of this specific MoU.
First, a MoU is a declaration of intent and a commitment to take an action - Not a legislative bill.
This MoU was addressed to both the Senate and the Governor General.
It doesn't specify how the parties will achieve their their commitment. It is up to the parties to determine if there is a lawful way to meet their commitments before making them.
Senators in Canada have the ability to introduce bills, which can be approved via the traditional pathway.
It also doesn't say anything about removal of the PM.
I fail to see the distinctions drawn. What makes it UN democratic to ask your government to make change through lawful process? It's not like the policies were put in place by public referendum.
How can something be a terrorist plot to overthrow the government, but not treason?
I dont know this website. Article written March 10th well after the fact and just hosts a very clearly one sided view of this. Jody thomas? I dont know wtf this is about.
Let me explain in much better detail about what you're trying to get at.
There was a website named 'canada unity' who put together a MOU in which called on the governor general to inform Trudeau that he has to return our charter rights. In a way you can read it as saying the governor general is overthrowing the government by effectively dissolving Trudeau's government.
This poorly put together was run by JAMES BAUDER and his wife. They were never even for a second one of the protest leaders.
Yet the canadian media portrayed this website as THE protest leaders. Used this MOU as justification of calling on the governor general to overthrow the government's sovereignty. This is how they are claiming the protest was overthrowing the government.
Tamara Lich was the key organizer. Involvement in several previous protests. She represented the protest in negotiations with the mayor of ottawa. She represented the protest in court over the honking situation.
Chris Barber had Jordan Peterson's audience.
Pat King is an actor on the otherhand. His acting played the canadian media's bias against themselves so badly.
What exactly was the crime the protest was committing. Parking violations really.
The only problem that anyone can explain about this peaceful protest is ParKing violations.
Yet here we are, everyone is a nazis, confederates, racists. Pat King offered the canadian media every prejudice, every biased hate thing he could think of. He got into the limelight because they ate up everything he said. He gave them everything they ever wanted on a golden platter.
For multiple elections conservatives have run on the plan to defund these lying canadian media. They got played big time.
Flipside, we're now a month later and pat king is still in jail. Original charge was just 'counseling mischief' but the new charges are 'counseling a felony that wasnt committed."
Absurd vague fake charges to crush a peaceful protest.
We were not discussing whether the protest was peaceful or not; we are discussing whether or not self-evident leaders of the movement wanted a coup.
You can personnally cry and cry that they were not leaders of the movement, but never has Tamara Lich publically denounced James Bauder, or denied her desire to overthrow the government. She never went on record denouncing his involvement in any leadership position. Letting someone in a protest you supposedely organize run around and demand the overthrow of the government is a thing that happens all the time; it's common. Whenever that person has the limelight on them, you vigorously denounce them and deny any sort of leadership on their part. Failure to do so means you agree.
Ultimately, this whole convoy was dangerously inept. That's a thing. You can be so clueless, so reckless that you're a danger to others.
>We were not discussing whether the protest was peaceful or not;
Excellent, you cede that they were peaceful and therefore their charter rights were violated.
>we are discussing whether or not self-evident leaders of the movement wanted a coup.
They didn't. The Media doesnt get to pick who the leaders are neither.
>You can personnally cry and cry that they were not leaders of the movement, but never has Tamara Lich publically denounced James Bauder, or denied her desire to overthrow the government.
I provided CBC who clearly never listed James Bauder as a protest leader. Never did Tamara Lich ever call for overthrow of the government. You want to think the media gets to choose some random protester, say he is leader and then use them?
> She never went on record denouncing his involvement in any leadership position.
She doesnt need to. That's a ridiculous requirement.
>Letting someone in a protest you supposedely organize run around and demand the overthrow of the government is a thing that happens all the time; it's common.
Perfect! In future... the media gets to pick who the leader of all protests are. Not the protest itself. Did you meet John Smith the ecoterrorist who wishes to destroy Canada? Every future protest = illegal now.
>Whenever that person has the limelight on them, you vigorously denounce them and deny any sort of leadership on their part. Failure to do so means you agree.
Great, going forward all left-wing protests will have John Smith the ecoterrorist speaking for them.
>Ultimately, this whole convoy was dangerously inept. That's a thing. You can be so clueless, so reckless that you're a danger to others.
How dare they so recklessly exercise their right to protest!
Your whole house of cards rest on the idea that I have to agree that James Bauder was never a leader of the movement. When James Bauder said he was a leader of the movement. When many news outlet identified him as a leader of the movement. When many protesters identified him as a leader of the movement. And Tamara Lich never denounced him or any of his formal requests to the Governor General.
Reality doesn't care about your feelings about James Bauder.
>Your whole house of cards rest on the idea that I have to agree that James Bauder was never a leader of the movement.
Does it matter if you agree or disagree with this? I provided a cbc link that listed the leaders. Bauder was not among them. Why do you think the CBC didn't even list bauder?
In fact, im just doing a search right now... there's no articles on cbc at all listing bauder as anything at all. Which is in fact impossible because I recall reading about bauder, the mou, and how they plan to overthrow the government on the cbc amongst others. It would seem the CBC quietly deleted those articles.
>When James Bauder said he was a leader of the movement.
Did you know I am the leader of BLM?
>hen many news outlet identified him as a leader of the movement. When many protesters identified him as a leader of the movement. And Tamara Lich never denounced him or any of his formal requests to the Governor General.
Why indeed has BLM never denounced me, John Smith the ecoterrorist. Is it by chance Bauder and I were just never a leader. That media smears were ignored by the real leadership?
Politically unaligned media don't get to pick the leaders of a protest.
>Reality doesn't care about your feelings about James Bauder.
I know why you cling to Bauder so much when clearly he's not a real entity. Without this tremendously weak point... you literally have nothing else to say the protest were 'overthrowing the government'. Without this tenuous at best point, how do you ever justify a national emergency.
Ultimately it doesnt even matter. They were parked outfront parliament for weeks and never quite got around to insurrection. The entire narrative that they were trying to overthrow the government is without merit. Reality is on my side.
Financing terrorists - and these "truckers" were nothing else, which led to the declaration of the emergency state, a legally defined mechanism! - will lead to issues no matter if it's al-quaeda or y'all-quaeda.
The donors should be happy all they got was a temporary freeze on their bank accounts. Had it been Islamist terror they had donated to, the accounts would have been terminated and criminal charges levied.
I am curious if you generally feel comfortable with the government being able to retroactively define something as "terrorism" when it does not conform with your general political views. Personally I think this is a terrible idea whether or not I agree with the people being targeted.
>I am curious if you generally feel comfortable with the government being able to retroactively define something as "terrorism" when it does not conform with your general political views. Personally I think this is a terrible idea whether or not I agree with the people being targeted.
There's a hilarious video from our parliament.
Andrew Scheer(former conservative leader, former opposition leader) was talking.
Elizabeth May(former green party leader) got up and started accusing him of 'dogwhistles to nazis' blah blah.
Andrew Scheer stands up with the biggest smile.
He points out Elizabeth May has been arrested and convicted of an illegal blockade while being green party leader. That the precedent set will mean that the green party donaters will have their bank accounts seized as well as her own.
The irony, it's only matter of time that conservatives take government back and very well can do this now.
On twitter a ton of greenpeace and antifa people freaked out at this new precedent.
"What if I donate to greenpeace. Some point later they have a protest that goes sideways. My bank account gets seized?"
It sounds the argument being made here is that this was a dangerous precedent being made that can be abused by political parties against their political opponents. This seems to be presented by you with apparent glee as a conservative vs green party/greenpeace/"antifa" or liberal issue. What you'll actually find is that broader society is just intolerant of the economic duress and disruptions caused by such protests.
Up to a quarter of Canadian-US trade was going through that area, and real people were suffering due to the trucker blockade. These economic disruptions had secondary effects that impact the lingering impacts of the pandemic and exacerbated supply chain issues.
There is not a whit of moral equivalency between climate change protests and some truckers afraid of a needle.
>It sounds the argument being made here is that this was a dangerous precedent being made that can be abused by political parties against their political opponents.
Because it was the current government abusing the act to use against their political opponents. Do you agree or disagee with this?
>This seems to be presented by you with apparent glee as a conservative vs green party/greenpeace/"antifa" or liberal issue.
If Canada is a free country and we do have fair and free elections. Inevitably the conservatives form government again. Andrew Scheer almost was prime minister.
I guess the glee comes from the above question. If you disagree and that the current government did not abuse the act to crush a peaceful protest. I will immediately agree with you and accept the precedent that this future conservative government gets to crush all dissenting political protests.
The glee you detect isn't glee. I very much disagree with this precedent. The government should NEVER be able to stop a peaceful protest. The glee is how absolutely tyrannical Trudeau acted.
>What you'll actually find is that broader society is just intolerant of the economic duress and disruptions caused by such protests.
Well first of all, this 'broader society' needs citation. The only people who suggest the majority of canadians agree with the use of the emergency act are the same media who called the protests a bunch of nazis. I dont accept state propaganda as facts sorry.
Also what economic duress and disruption? By the government's own admission in their required justification of the emergency act there was no blockades. The emergency act was used entirely and solely as part of the Ottawa protest. Blocking a few blocks in front of parliament. There is no economic duress here at all.
>Up to a quarter of Canadian-US trade was going through that area, and real people were suffering due to the trucker blockade. These economic disruptions had secondary effects that impact the lingering impacts of the pandemic and exacerbated supply chain issues.
1/4 of usa trade goes through downtown ottawa for no damned reason? Can you prove that in any way please?
Or do you mean the detroit bridge blockade? Not only was there 1 lane open, the detroit tunnel was completely unblockaded. Sarnia's bluewater bridge was not blockaded. Niagara falls, not blockaded. And cherry on top... the ambassador bridge dissolved BEFORE they even mentioned talking about the emergency act.
No, I dont expect you are trying to use a non-existent blockade as justification for national emergency. The only place the emergency act was used was in ottawa. Surely you are arguing 1/4 of usa trades has to drive in front of parliament?
>There is not a whit of moral equivalency between climate change protests and some truckers afraid of a needle.
If you say so. I do believe I get to decide upon my own moral decisions.
Here's really what's happened. Trudeau was misinformed greatly by the canadian media. He crushed the legitimate protest because he misunderstood why the canadian media called for the denazification of the protest. Trudeau absolutely acted tyrannically and has not fixed the situation.
The precedent is set, conservatives do NOT have the right to protest right now. All of the original reasons for the original protest still stand AND they've added new vaccine mandates making the reason for protesting to increase.
Without the right to peaceful protest.. it means other protest will now be required.
If conservatives want to lead an armed insurrection in Canada over "vaccine mandates" (reactionaries are so good at controlling the discourse with the words they force) they should go for it. Something tells me the consequence will be larger than not being able to swipe your plastic at the gas station.
Funny it took white people getting their bank accounts frozen for there to be noise that the government has too much power and wields it against citizens with impunity. Wonder how Trudeau's government treats the First Nations? Oh that's right, running oil pipelines through their land.
Only a certain demographic has had freedom of protest in Canada. Have you ever been water cannoned for defending your home and the groundwater of your community? But sure, conservatives are the new precedent about not being able to protest. No demographic has been harmed in Canada as deeply or egregiously as the conservatives who live underground now and trade in scrip
>If conservatives want to lead an armed insurrection in Canada over "vaccine mandates" (reactionaries are so good at controlling the discourse with the words they force) they should go for it. Something tells me the consequence will be larger than not being able to swipe your plastic at the gas station.
If you analyze protests lately like the 'mostly peaceful' burning riots of BLM etc. Which as a quick aside, BLM is fully justified in their protest.Police brutality and clear systemic racism is objectively true.
Compare that to the over the top peaceful protest in Ottawa. Which was intentionally that way. The protest policed itself to not give the media this. The media has been smearing conservatives for so long.
But more importantly, and clearly you went right to armed insurrection. Who said this was an insurrection. Notice also how January 6 went from insurrection to less than a riot. It's not even a riot, it's just an 'attack' now. Trudeau urgently wanted it to turn into an insurrection... the false allegation and propaganda was that the protest was looking to overthrow the government. Which isn't true at all. They sat outside in -20c on the road and NEVER insurrected or even tried to overthrow anything.
This just goes to prove how wrong all of this still is. Conservatives still do not have the right to protest.
>Funny it took white people getting their bank accounts frozen for there to be noise that the government has too much power and wields it against citizens with impunity. Wonder how Trudeau's government treats the First Nations? Oh that's right, running oil pipelines through their land.
>Only a certain demographic has had freedom of protest in Canada.
Why do you think Trudeau hates racial minorities so much? Vaccine mandates disproportionately harm racial minorities especially black and indigenous canadians.
>Have you ever been water cannoned for defending your home and the groundwater of your community? But sure, conservatives are the new precedent about not being able to protest. No demographic has been harmed in Canada as deeply or egregiously as the conservatives who live underground now and trade in scrip
It almost reads like you read conservative = white people. How very incorrect.
> “I would be remiss if I didn’t start by recognising the news coming from India about the protest by farmers. The situation is concerning. We are all very worried about family and friends. We know that’s a reality for many of you. Let me remind you, Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue. We’ve reached out through multiple means to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns. This is a moment for all of us to pull together,” Trudeau had said in November 2021.
Those were in fact not peaceful
> 1 journalist killed. One person lynched for alleged desecration. Over 1,500 telecom tower sites damaged by protestors (as of 28 Dec). Government buses and 30 police vehicles damaged on Republic Day.
Race plays a role in vaccination. Black and Indigenous Canadians are only around 50% vaccinated. Indian/Punjabis are somewhere around 70%. An awful lot of truckers are Indian. Especially from Quebec.
One of the original key issues that sparked this protest is the action by Trudeau to ban unvaccinated truckers and put them out of a job. This disproportionately harmed racial minorities including Indians.
The comparison or hypocrisy is that he supported the indian farmers but called the punjabi truckers a bunch of racists. It blows my mind.
Canadian truckers were > 90% vaccinated at the time of the "Trucker" Tantrum. There were very few Southeast Asians in evidence among the tantrum throwers.
They were majority white (mostly because the Southeast Asian truckers in Canada are mostly vaccinated and were quite busy because the people throwing the tantrum weren’t actually working because they refused to get vaccinated).
This is whataboutery. At the very least the truckers were an extremely unpleasant and potentially dangerous nuisance for everyone in the vicinity.
At worst were literally attempting regime change. They were also largely funded by the US far right, which has obvious links to Russia. In fact Russian propoganda was encouraging similar actions in the US and the EU.
So of course they were defunded.
It's always amusing to see libertarians complaining that a government shoots first - financially in this case, and only after a long delay - and asks questions later, when they're typically the people claiming loudly that far more extreme forms of violence are always legitimate in personal self-defence.
Just as with Jan 6, most of these people should have been jailed and those from the US should have been banned from entering Canada again.
Never mind the political angle, the nuisance and intimidation were more than enough to justify that.
I agree that the truckers were super disruptive. I’m glad some punitive action was taken.
But freezing the bank accounts of people who donated to them without due process is beyond the pail. Given that cash is mostly dead as a result of covid, banking needs to be considered a basic right. It shouldn’t be able to be revoked simply because the government doesn’t like what you do with your money.
Claim made not in evidence. Legally frozen were the recipient accounts. Yes, contributors could have had their accounts frozen, but no evidence that the government ordered such an action on any donor.
You sound severely self-centric and antisocial. Protests are a movement, and the noise they make are the extended arm that you are to grab and hop onto.
>It's always amusing to see libertarians complaining that a government shoots first - financially in this case, and only after a long delay - and asks questions later, when they're typically the people claiming loudly that far more extreme forms of violence are always legitimate in personal self-defence.
do you regularly see libertarians advocating for shooting the friends & family of an attacker, in your own words, "after a long delay"? this is a very poor comparison.
> Even people who donated to the truckers before the crackdown got targeted in the bank account freezes.
[citation needed]
The Emergencies Act,[1] explicitly written to be compatible with the Charter, does not allow for retroactive actions [2]. There was a lot of initial confusion, and so whatever story you may have heard (and is stuck in your head), you may wish to go back and double-check to see if there were any corrections.
I see you are a throwaway account and unlikely to respond.
One cannot deny that the emergency act was used this way. The RCMP confirmed(https://blockade.rcmp.ca/news-nouvelles/ncr-rcn211130-s-d-en...) that this happened and denied being the ones who did it. Implying either the government went around them OR the banks took this action upon themselves with gigantic liability issues.
>The Emergencies Act,[1] explicitly written to be compatible with the Charter, does not allow for retroactive actions [2].
That's a very good point, but incorrect. The emergency act is EXPECTED to trample on charter rights. In an actual emergency it's entirely expected that police will go over the line.
What exactly was the emergency act used for? Not a single blockade existed. It was used entirely for the protest in Ottawa. Their goal is to remove the illegally parked semi trucks.
If this was used in such a way that charter rights were not trampled on. The police would have gone in, towed the trucks and left the protesters who were lawfully protesting.
That's not at all what happened. They came in and removed the entire lawful protest, not just some illegally parked trucks. The emergency act was used to crush a legitimate protest.
So what happens next? Section 46 of the emergency act is next. The people damaged by the protest, be it having gotten pepper sprayed or your right to protest being removed. You get compensation. The crown is about to pay huge $ to these protesters.
> I see you are a throwaway account and unlikely to respond.
Created on January 1 (01/01), 2017. It's kind of become less throwaway over time. :)
Also: your username is in green, which means (IIRC) it is less than two weeks old. One of us has a higher probability of being a throwaway.
> One cannot deny that the emergency act was used this way.
Your link says nothing to confirm that it was an ex post facto action.
> That's a very good point, but incorrect. The emergency act is EXPECTED to trample on charter rights. In an actual emergency it's entirely expected that police will go over the line.
The Emergencies Act itself says it is subject to the Charter:
> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;
> That's not at all what happened. They came in and removed the entire lawful protest, not just some illegally parked trucks. The emergency act was used to crush a legitimate protest.
It was not a blockade or protest that got removed: once they started living there it became an occupation.
Further, threats of use of violence are not part of legal protests:
> (a) the continuing blockades by both persons and motor vehicles that is occurring at various locations throughout Canada and the continuing threats to oppose measures to remove the blockades, including by force, which blockades are being carried on in conjunction with activities that are directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property, including critical infrastructure, for the purpose of achieving a political or ideological objective within Canada,
To safely remove the trucks from the street, nobody needs to be around the workers doing the towing. It's basic health and safety. Police repeatedly asked people to leave. Many refused, many complied. Would you have prefered the police run over the protesters with their own trucks?
Police have an additional power to asking politely. They can arrest people. It is the appropriate response if someone continues to break a law but is non-violent.
Why should anyone be denied access to banking? In our modern world, banking is about as essential as food. Would you deny someone food because of their political beliefs?
I might personally deny them food, but I do not think the government should have the power to stop another consenting person to give or sell food to some based on their political belief.
The charter also allows itself to be overridden so that's a bit disingenuous. If the charter says that you can ignore it in a lot of cases if needed, then it's very easy for any law to be compatible with it
Not knowing anything about the Vision Times, a quick search:
> Vision Times is one of the news organizations that Falun Gong's founder Li Hongzhi refers to as "our media".[1] The newspaper's president is the spokesperson for the Falun Dafa Association in New York, and is chair of another Falun Gong group called Quit the CCP.[1] In 2021, The Atlantic called Vision Times a "doppelgänger site" of The Epoch Times.[5]
I saw this reported here in the UK. I believe it was also mentioned in a recent Unherd article about the dangerous implications of this misuse of powers, but I’m sure you are capable of using a search engine.
I was asking because American right wing news has frequently lied about what was happening here in Canada. To my knowledge there hasn’t been a single report of a frozen bank account over a donation except for some debunked tweet by a Canadian conservative politician.
The canadian government declared an emergency under the emergencies act. The act enables the government to make any orders or regulations, so there is no need to go through the court.
If you're claiming that a government is abusing its power because it froze some funds, and it turns out it was done according to law, then the accusation is unsubstantiated. Maybe it was abusing its power, but we haven't been shown any evidence. And the burden of proof is on you to show that it was an abuse of power.
The government used emergency powers designed to be used in case of war for dealing with peaceful protesters. The previous act was only used during WW1, WW2, and during the October Crisis by Trudeau's alleged father, which is also the reason the powers were watered down.
> Freeland said she would not give "specifics of whose accounts are being frozen."
Freeland did say that they would be freezing the donators as well in the original videos.
The more egregious comment was by David Lamenti. He's a lawyer and law professor. He knows the law. His comments are not a gaffe and not out of context or anything. This is not him pulling the wrong insult out of his bag. He spoke clearly and he meant every little bit of the comment.
That is a pretty high bar for abuse you have there. Emergency acts are typically meant for governments to react quickly to unprecedented situations where not all eventualities can be forseen and covered by laws. This means that they are grant very broad powers that considered unacceptable under normal conditions and thus any use of those powers is potential abuse. What is abuse and what dis not allowed are two entirely different things.
>If you're claiming that a government is abusing its power because it froze some funds, and it turns out it was done according to law, then the accusation is unsubstantiated. Maybe it was abusing its power, but we haven't been shown any evidence. And the burden of proof is on you to show that it was an abuse of power.
This is kind of the argument that Gerald Butts made. That technically parliament approved this misuse of power. In a way you are right. Here's the problem.
The Canadian media represented the protest as a bunch of nazis and maga military occupying ottawa and loooking to over throw the government.
The NYTimes thought it was the best story ever. They put boots on the ground and said... wait we don't really agree with the goal of the protest but it's a legitimate protest. That using force to end the protest would be wrong. That in a democracy protests are going to be annoying but these must be left to exist.
They are right. There can never be an exception to the charter right of peaceful protest. Right now, what the conservatives in Canada have been told is that they do not have the right to protest. They will simply declare another national emergency, seize bank accounts, and arrest them on 'mischief' charges.
So now what happens? The conservatives cant peacefully protest... media is smearing them to propaganda levels.
You can still do roaming protests where you keep moving making stopping the protest difficult to do. I suspect these kinds of protests will get tiresome.
Eventually you just say, ok, peaceful isn't allowed. Other than peaceful is our new option.
Yes, it's perfectly legal and done according to law.
There are some oversights. Under the Emergencies Act, the Parliament and the Senate get to confirm the use of the act. What surprised people were the fact that the action of voting down the use of the act will trigger an election, and parties didn't want an election. [1]
>Are you sure this is abuse? My guess is a judge ordered the accounts to be frozen.
That's kind of the problem. No judge was ever involved. The emergency act was deployed by Trudeau, they seized bank accounts and arrested legitimate peaceful protesters. Tyrannically crushing a legitimate protest just because ~70 semi trucks were illegally parked in ottawa.
Shutting down a protest because it completely shut down a major city center and harassed locals for weeks seems like a totally legitimate use of government power to me. They also blocked a major bridge border crossing and attempted to block other border crossings. That makes them less of a protest and more a rebellion. I can’t think of a single country in the world which would allow an absolutely tiny minority to shut down border crossings for extended periods of time. Preventing trade to that extent is arguably a form of violence; using horns in residential areas late at night is definitely violent.
Also “crushing” a protest usually involves lots more violence then was employed. Tiananmen Square was crushed (literally), US civil rights protests were crushed with firehouses and dogs, etc. The actions of the Canadian government seem anodyne to any government I’ve heard described as “crushing” a protest.
>Shutting down a protest because it completely shut down a major city center
It did not do this at all. When I zoom in on Ottawa and ignore gatineau. I would assert the city center is say UofOttwa to the east side, if not all the way to the rideau. Maybe kowloon market, china town, little italy, centretown west is the west side. With a southern spot of maybe the 417 highway?
What did the protest block? You'll have to zoom it significant more. It blocked what wellington and queen for 2 blocks? It did absolutely nothing to 90% of the city centre.
To suggest a protest at parliament hill is 'completely shutting down the major city center' is absurd.
> harassed locals for weeks seems like a totally legitimate use of government power to me.
Ok, fine, so we set the precedent that you agree with. You're fine with future governments crushing legitimate protests under the same misrepresentations as well? Afterall, how much conservative protests are there? Pretty rare. We're going to be crushing left-wing protest for the most part.
>They also blocked a major bridge border crossing and attempted to block other border crossings.
Did they? Which bridge in Ottawa did they block? Or do you mean ambassador bridge which is a related but unconnected protest. This blockade ended before the emergency act was ever implemented. We are talking about Trudeau crushing a legitimate protest in ottawa. The emergency act was used for ONLY ottawa, took them days to even do anything.
>That makes them less of a protest and more a rebellion.
A rebellion! Oh wow. A peaceful protest in front of parliament with bouncy castles and hottub is a rebellion. I guess they just never quite got around to the rebelling part...
I honestly didnt even see the canadian media label them a rebellion. Sure even doug ford called them a military occupation. But rebellion!
>I can’t think of a single country in the world which would allow an absolutely tiny minority to shut down border crossings for extended periods of time.
People linked Trudeau being in favour of the extremely violent hong kong riots and the only marginally violent farmer protests in india. Yet he refused to even talk to them once. Couldnt even send a staffer to go talk to the protest once.
I would hope ANY government would be forced to talk to a protest at least once before declaring national emergency and crushing them with force.
>Preventing trade to that extent is arguably a form of violence; using horns in residential areas late at night is definitely violent.
Oh wow, we are even redefining what violence is. Why are you doing this? There's a clear reason. The protesters have the right to 'peaceful protest'. You are required to redefine 'violence' in order to invalidate their charter rights. I see what you are doing.
You are even redefining what a residential area is. For the record... you have to go about 4 blocks or more away from the protest to get to the first residential building. Where they were parked is not residential at all. Census data is public. The protest was never 'harassing residents'. At most they were 'harassing counter protesters' which is what it is.
>Also “crushing” a protest usually involves lots more violence then was employed.
Now you're redefining crushing?
>The actions of the Canadian government seem anodyne to any government I’ve heard described as “crushing” a protest.
Crushing means 'to subdue completely' or 'oppress grievously'. Well the day before they gave the emergency act back. There was not a single protester in ottawa and parliament hill. They subdued the protest completely. AKA they crushed a peaceful protest.
There's a reason why Bill Maher called Trudeau Hitler right before he crushed a peaceful protest. After he tyrannically crushed the protest and made protesting illegal for conservatives. Bill Maher seems to be saying that Trudeau = Hitler.
Here in India government has come up with a few policies that helps a lot in this regard. Firstly we have UPI that allows for instant bank account to bank account transfers. Most banks give 20-30 free UPI transactions per month. In addition, government came up with a rule to have 0 transaction fees on low value transactions on cards. In addition to this, government has also been promoting a alternative to visa/mastercard with the rupay network. I think more countries need to look into these.
Here in India cash use is still very popular and mostly used for tax avoidance and to avoid surveillance by the government agencies.
The UK (when part of the EU) limited the fees Visa and MasterCard can charge — 0.2% of the transaction for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards.
Electronic transfers (made by website, telephone, app, in the branch etc) between bank accounts are also free for consumers, although I don't think there's any rule requiring this.
According to the article, that isn't the main problem that people have:
"Overall, 23 million people said that using cash made them feel more in control of their finances. Two-thirds were concerned about fraud when making payments and 57pc were concerned about privacy."
The rest of the article, if I'm reading it right, makes it clear that "in control" is meant in the sense of "to be on top of it", rather than a distrust of banks or the government.
Here in the Netherlands, the government has been pushing back against cashless for more or less this reason - that it grinds the poor who are most likely to be unbanked.
One of their papers on the subject basically accepted that a lot of the poorest Dutch residents are using cash in the underground economy, and advised that tampering with it would cause a lot of hardship.
It is clearly a problem, although, I am afraid, you've been forced to have a bank account in most western countries for a while now. Removing cash is part of that process but it's not the beginning. That boat a sail a while ago.
What we need is more competition in the banking sectors. And I am not talking about more private for-profits banks. We need:
1. Public own banks. A bank as a public service. Indeed, governments will have more control on it but if you are a citizen of another country, this becomes less of a problem. You could be depositing your money into the Public Bank of Canada for example. A bank as a public service might have nefarious interests too but at least they would be different from a private for-profit bank.
2. We need private non profit banks. Banks run as an NGO. And on this, we could help by providing open source banking software. Rigorously tested and hardened.
>you've been forced to have a bank account in most western countries for a while now.
You have, many haven't. There's plenty of people who pay their rent in cash and work in a business that pays them in cash (strippers, some farm laborers, etc). Surviving in the US with cash only would take away a lot of options for many people but at the same time, it's completely possible.
IMO we need more ways to bypass banks, including the central bank, not more of them.
3. Most of all, we need banks owned by their customers, i.e. banks in whose interest it is not to build huge bureaucracies to skim off maximum rent from transactions, but just enough to keep the business running.
Exactly. I'd like to take this to its logical extreme, and have me be 100% owner of my own bank. I will hold notes printed by the treasury and open something in my pocket to withdraw from my account when it is time to pay.
The risk of being the sole owner of your bank is fairly obvious, though. I'd want multiple owners for central limit theorem reasons. How would you work around extreme variability in demands if you are the sole owner?
Also, how would you earn interest on your money if not by lending it out to others, who would then also be customers of your bank and hence owners?
It sounds to me like what you describe is either
(a) not really a bank in the sense that we mean when we talk about banks, or
(b) not a logical extension of collective ownership but rather that you want a traditional capitalist bank except where you are the owner instead of someone else.
>(b) not a logical extension of collective ownership but rather that you want a traditional capitalist bank except where you are the owner instead of someone else.
Collectivism taken to the most localized extreme is individualism. This is a collective of one.
>(a) not really a bank in the sense that we mean when we talk about banks, or
You can ask these questions about any bank; the mere fact this bank is owned by the sole depositor doesn't change what a bank is.
>I'd want multiple owners for central limit theorem reasons. How would you work around extreme variability in demands if you are the sole owner?
The sole depositor is also the sole owner. It's a collective ownership of depositing customers, not those who owe the bank money.
But in the end I'm just exemplifying what the logic extreme of your suggestion ends in, which actually happens to be a system I approve of. You keep treasury notes in your wallet, lend them if you like, and pull them out whenever you'd like to 'withdraw' them from your demand account. There's no fancy rubber stamp or business license to back it up, but it meets the definition of a bank (which is roughly an institution that accepts demand deposits and possibly loans them out).
I see. I think our difference is that I consider the people who (possibly) loan money also customers of the bank, hence owners, if the bank is collectively owned.
I think of loans as a critical part of the bank business because otherwise it's just a glorified safe.
Banks already massively abuse this power, and in any case the UK and US have laws that allow seizure of cash and other assets in criminal cases.
So do private corporations like Ebay, which have a history of closing private accounts for random reasons.
But for context, this is a scare story without any real substance in the UK's premier far-right paper for rich kooks. The Telegraph is notorious as a non-reputable source, and I would be very surprised if there any serious moves to ban cash in the UK - or the US - any time soon.
As mentionned in the article, some people use cash because they struggle with budgetting. They may get a specified amount of money from the ATM each week in their wallet and get an immediate visual clue of where they at in any moment. Using cash actually make you see the money going out. It is much more tangible than just numbers to a lot of us.
We could probably think of other options, like having rechargeable money card with some kind of visual bar indicator showing the amount of money left but that is not there yet.
Also as much as I like using my cards and phones for payments, they are really bad for privacy. All you payments get stored in a database waiting to be dumped, stolen and leaked. And it is not a matter of if but rather of when.
No, you don't have a lot of choice. UK banks have many restrictions about who can open an account. Just by queuing in a branch I've seen immigrants being rejected because they don't have a job yet.
If you still think about banks re-loaning bank deposits you're living in another century. Fractional reserve banking hasn't been a thing since (at least) the 1960s.
Depositing money isn't giving money to a bank. It's exchanging money for highly liquid debt and receiving interest in return. Giving money to a bank is a relationship where the bank pays you.
Also, the government already forces you to have auto insurance. This doesn't really seem any better or worse.
Merely having a bank account can in some instance trigger FATCA report, depending on where you open it. This opens up further intrusions to your privacy. I do not know if any foreign nations have an analogue of this.
It can also be difficult to open without an address or with certain history, even if you are a citizen or legal resident.
Bank accounts for homeless people can be done, in Britain probably after 'encouragement' from the government (do this your way or we'll force you to do it our way...).
That is true. But has issues with diverging interests. The interests of government bureaucrats who see like a state are not at all necessarily in line with my own.
I think it's in their interest since they're using crypto as an "investment" rather than a means to exchange goods and services. Moreover, it's probably hard to envision as an issue as long as it works to their advantage and concentrated amongst a few in a form of digital currency.
Then again, I rarely hear anyone discuss the benefits of inflation (I didn't say hyperinflation).
"This damn inflation is making my mortgage payments significantly less than my payments from 10 year ago!" said Nobody
I'm far from an economist myself... but there is relevant debt beyond individuals' debt. There is national, foreign, state and city, etc... an argument could be made that some of this debt is even exported abroad.
Inflation, might not make goods and services cheaper, but it can have an effect that can be used to one's advantage.
I've already mentioned mortgages, but it might be the same with many other loans and services. Assuming interest rates are low enough (if not zero), then deferring the whole payment means that you retain money to work for you, as well as take advantage of the effects of inflation on the overall financed amount as long as the period is long enough.
Locking in service rates (grandfathered) can work to your advantage as well, depending on the service agreements of course.
I'd say there are a lot of people with bad debt, but often times that comes as a result of hardship, or just bad financial decisions and life choices.
Those that have no debt are probably not going through financial hardships, but should probably start accruing manageable debt to avail from the effects of inflation, retain more money so that it can work for them, and build credit history to become more debt-worthy.
Saving money is just losing money due to inflation and lost potential. It's a difficult one bc we all know we should keep a certain amount of money just in case, and putting it somewhere where it's working for you but still liquid if needed is quite difficult. If times get hard and you need to liquidate your investments, chances are that you will be losing a lot bc when times are hard, investments are down.
Saving money is really quit discourage, and there are some pretty compelling reasons why this is a good thing. Money that is saved is usually money that is out of circulation. As a result, it's not doing any "work" and fewer goods and services are purchased and economies slow as a result.
While I do not foresee this being adopted in the US I won't put it past lobbyists to try. Maybe they are already trying? I personally would never go for this. Cash in my pocket can't be "disabled" individually. In fact I am seeing a transition to targeted risks in many places. Amazon destroying small local stores facilitating the ability to disable someone's purchasing capabilities or limiting what one person may buy. As a side note, porch pirates are becoming a real nuisance for local authorities. Network connected cars can be remotely tracked, disabled or bricked. Smart homes that can monitor an individual. Smart phones tracking individuals.
I don't think I could fully embrace the Amish way of life but I suspect my local community mostly farmers and ranchers could implement a barter system if we had to. Some of this already exists. We could be self sufficient for things like food, basic repairs, transportation via horses. I am personally not opposed to giving up some luxuries like internet and online shopping if it came to that. I realize some people born into these things perceive them as absolutely mandatory but I did just fine without them for a big part of my life. In the last several months I have not needed to travel more than 16 miles from home. I suppose I could stock up on e-bike parts and solar panels then fall back to horses. Come to think of it, we could build a local warehouse business that stocks up on things not made locally then sell them locally using cash or maybe even implementing a Craigslist-Style barter system over Lo-Rad.
Am I alone on HN in thinking this way? I know I am not alone in my local community, but I am curious how many on HN have thought about this.
>While I do not foresee this being adopted in the US I won't put it past lobbyists to try.
it will. and it would only take a few years of concentrated brainwash from the telescreens for the people who will oppose that to be branded as the enemy.
and unlike the few other principal things powers that be want to take away from us - privacy, freedom of expression, gun ownership, there is no right to bear cash, so they can take it away anytime.
In the US it will be more of an "economic"-oriented change. I already encounter businesses once in a while that don't take cash, and rely entirely on a payment processor like Stripe or even Venmo. It's not a matter of evil vs. not-evil, it's a matter of "this is what was cheapest/easiest for us and why do you care anyway?"
In some U.S. cities, there are local laws requiring acceptance of cash by all businesses.
Outside tech bubbles, people are using more cash, not less. The Federal Reserve reports that U.S. currency in circulation has been steadily rising for decades, including the recent smartphone decade: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR
My "why do you care" was rhetorical/sarcastic. It was meant to be analogous to "what do you have to hide?" in the context of privacy discussions. Part of how these things get adopted is that people engage in "outsider-shaming" of the people who resist.
> Bills mandating cash acceptance have faced intensive lobbying from the credit card industry as well as more tech-focused retailers. The passage of the New Jersey legislation exemplifies such forces at work. The bill's sponsor specifically criticized a recent Visa initiative that rewarded 50 businesses with $10,000 each for making their operations cashless.
American cash is hoarded abroad, so I don't think that's very informative.
For the UK [1] (graph on page 2) shows the number of cash transactions made per year. There's a continual decline since 2012: "Since 2017 cash use had been declining by around 15% each year, so 2020 represented an acceleration of this decline ... Nevertheless, cash remained the second most frequently used payment method in the UK in 2020, being used for just under a fifth of the total number of payments made"
"At the same time there were 1.2 million consumers who mainly used cash, choosing this payment method when doing their day-to-day shopping (although the majority still use other payment methods to pay their regular bills). It should be noted that while these people prefer to use cash when paying for things, they are not necessarily unwilling or unable to use other methods of payment. The majority of them have a debit card"
[2] is the same for the USA (page 6). It shows similar cash use as the UK (1 in 5 transactions), plus credit cards used instead of debit cards.
For a much more cashless society, see Denmark [3]. Roughly a third of people don't carry any cash, and half carry less than 100kr ($15).
"There are differences in the use of cash between the youngest and the oldest Danes, but the tendency to move away from cash is seen in all age groups. In particular, senior citizens’ use of cash has declined in recent years: Among the 70 to 79-year-olds, 40 per cent of payments were made in cash in 2017. This figure was almost halved to 22 per cent in 2019.
"By comparison, the share of cash payments in physical trade fell from 9 per cent to 4 per cent among the 15 to 29-year-olds. Young people thus opt out of paying with cash in stores, but it is a change in behaviour among the oldest citizens which has been driving developments since 2017."
(Denmark has a national law requiring staffed businesses to accept cash, with some exceptions.)
> though you wouldn't know it from the ubiquitous swiveling iPads at your local coffee shop, cash is the most frequent method of payment in the US – more frequent than electronic, credit, debit, or check payments.
“A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” - Frederick Douglass, 1867.
It's still true. Yes, all three are dangerous and open to abuse, but they - with the right protections in place - will provide better outcomes than the alternatives.
If Douglass could've conceived of a world without cash then perhaps he would've mentioned a fourth.
Don’t play the pronoun game, it makes the conversation hard to follow and reply to. Which one of the four things - privacy, freedom of expression, gun ownership, or right to bear cash - are you finding jarring?
In my community the folks here have a ratio of firearms to people of about 20:1. Many of them save their brass/steel and reload their own ammo. Most here carry concealed and are not required to have a permit. Same goes for some neighboring states. Permits are only required if traveling into a state that does not honor permit-less carry based on state ID.
As a funny side note this is only place I have lived where it is normal to see people get out of their vehicle with hunting/assault rifles at the gas station sorting/shifting their gear and nobody bats an eye. My bank has a fundraiser poster on the door for a rifle giveaway prize.
I wouldn't go for it either but this will pushed to the masses as something good and necessary, and most will simply go along with it. For the individual, losing cash and going "digital everything" means losing privacy, autonomy and sovereignty.
So,what happens when the following get ahold of your data:
Health insurance companies start buying your purchasing info and decide to up your premiums due to the amount of alcohol you buy, fast food you purchase, or your grocery shopping habits? Do you eat too much red meat, too many carbs, not enough greens? Is your sugar intake put you at a higher risk for diabetes? How may cigars/cigarettes are you smoking? What about marijuana use, or over the counter drugs?
Home owners insurance:
What if your shopping data shows risky patterns or behaviors - do you or spouse buy too many candles, is your home at a greater risk for fire hazard?
Law Enforcement:
How much ammo do you purchase? Are you frequently buying guns? Are you an active shooter risk? Are you spending too much at strip clubs? Are you spending too much money in high risk neighborhoods?
Obviously these are all just examples, but don't think for a second that they don't already have most of this data, and can brainstorm many other use cases for it, honestly we are just living on borrow time at the moment before it gets unbearable.
Then you vote to ban insurance discrimination on certain kinds of data. In California, for example, employers are forbidden to ask or use data on candidate salaries in their hiring process. In the US, health insurance companies are forbidden from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions.
A huge amount of middle and upper class people already voluntarily use cashless methods to spend & earn money. A huge amount of businesses are basically online-only and don't really support cash payments. Visa & Mastercard etc already engage in data sharing. Cash is just too inconvenient and will slowly recede over time, if you want to avoid discriminatory outcomes then advocate for legislation directly.
It might be inconvenient for some things (e.g., online purchases, buying houses or cars), but buying something at the store has worked very well for centuries; it's quick and easy. People on HN can't figure out cash?
> Whatever is going on, it's not about convenience.
Why not? I’ve worked in jobs in my life where I dealt with cash, had to count a register down to the last coin, check receipts, do cash runs to a bank and give the correct change. I even received cash tips.
I choose not to use cash because it would require me to go out of my way to an ATM and use it, then keep track of the amount of cash I have on me and make subsequent trips to the ATM as necessary. I could, and I used to do that, but it’s not something I did because I enjoyed my trips to the ATM. I did it so I could get a medium of exchange for my daily necessities, and now I don’t do that.
You don't usually have to make an extra "trip to the ATM" to get cash, you can combine it with shopping or other errands. In Germany many supermarket chains now even have a "withdraw cash for free when you pay with your card" service, which is very convenient. And "keeping track of the amount of cash you have" is simply looking into your wallet when buying something and seeing that you only have one or two small-ish bills left in there.
I agree though that cash handling is more of a hassle for the ones accepting cash than for the ones paying with it, and that's probably one of the drivers in getting rid of it...
We have that here too, it’s called cash back, and it doesn’t make cash more appealing.
I pay for almost all of my expenses with a credit card though, which does not give me the option to withdraw cash, so yes I would have to go out of my way still. It does however give me 5% back at the grocery store in points redeemable for cash at the end of the statement period, so for every $100 I’m spending I’m getting $5 back at the end of the month. Neat for things I was going to buy anyway, like food.
This also has the added benefit of never having to give out my debit card # to anyone. I would much rather deal with CC fraud than debit card fraud.
You also have to carry a large wallet capable of carrying cash. The last decade maybe longer I’ve used a small front pocket wallet that only holds cards. It’s more comfortable, and harder to steal.
I quit carrying a wallet several years ago and have never looked back. I just carry my driver's license, debit/credit card, and any cash I have in a pocket. It works well for me.
That works in Germany but not in the US. Euro bills are easy to distinguish by color and size and start at 5. With dollars you have a stack of greenish paper, many of which are $1 bills. Manageable, but definitely more inconvenient than Euros.
These threads on HN always trend the same way unfortunately :( Someone living in a market that has largely lived through the transition from cash to cashless commenting on how much more convenient it is to not have to carry cash around. People who’ve not lived that experience telling them they’re wrong.
I’m with you. Australia had been on this trajectory for a while and it accelerated in the early days of the pandemic. It’s incredibly convenient to _never_ have to plan ahead with how much cash I need to have, how much I need to withdrawal from the bank/while at the supermarket, if I need to make a special trip to either because I’m short for whatever my plans are later. I can leave my house with just my iPhone or Garmin watch and I know I’m covered for whatever my plans are. Even if that ends up being an evening of unexpected plans. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve needed to have cash on me at this point.
People that haven’t experienced it seem unconvinced. Those that have don’t need convincing.
> I’ve worked in jobs in my life where I dealt with cash, had to count a register down to the last coin, check receipts, do cash runs to a bank and give the correct change. I even received cash tips.
I'm talking about customers, not merchants. It's interesting how enthusiastically some on HN push cashlessness, as if they have some vested interest. Why is it so important.
> it would require me to go out of my way to an ATM
Or stop when you pass one for a couple minutes. Which saves some time paying credit card bills and dealing with fraud alerts, etc.
> I'm talking about customers, not merchants. It's interesting how enthusiastically some on HN push cashlessness, as if they have some vested interest. Why is it so important.
It’s not important to me, but I did take exception to your rhetoric:
1. That people on HN can’t figure out cash.
2. That it can’t just be about convenience. (This also just sounds conspiratorial.)
I have no vested interest in telling people not to use cash because I don’t spend my time telling people not to use cash. I no longer work in jobs where I have to handle it either, but what you have up there is an explanation as to why one person out in meatspace would just go cashless, and I don’t think I’m the exception here.
Apple Pay (and it’s related services) is just such a massive QoL improvement for those who choose to adopt it that for most that try it (I know at least one person that doesn’t like it), it does not take much convincing. I recently had the strange experience of my own mother thanking me for setting her phone up to use Apple Pay for her cards when previously she was against it (doesn’t trust new technology, thinks it’s spying on her, probably wouldn’t have the phone if I didn’t buy it and put her on my plan).
My experience mirrors yours. It's interesting to me that the details you give about being very familiar with cash handling seem to just get ignored.
At one point in my life I would regularly have two or three hundred dollars in cash on my person at all times, would pay rent in cash, repeated things like 'cash is king'. Now, I haven't touched cash consistently in years. I tap a card to pay for things. It is much more convenient, no coins, no worries that I've exposed money on my person to some one who will act on that knowledge.
I dunno. Feels like an electric kettle. I didn't forget how to boil water on the stove but pressing a button is more convenient and now I cannot forget to turn a heating element off.
In the last decade in the UK my family have lost their wallets/purses twice and credit card fraud once. I got my credit card fraud taken care off but was out of pocket for the cash in wallet/purse.
Win for cashless. (I’m not anti-cash but I certainly favour using cashless options wherever possible. Safer, plus you get loyalty points and in the UK there is no cash discount price so if you aren’t getting loyalty points on your card you are throwing money away / paying a premium for the privacy of cash)
When I used cash to buy something at the store, I have to take out my wallet, count the appropriate amount of cash, wait for the cashier to give back any change, confirm I got the right amount back.
If I use a credit card, I just insert a piece of plastic into a slot, and we're done. It's more convenient.
Negative side effects of using cash also include having to carry a bulging wallet when I'm constantly trying to minimize the stuff I have to carry.
Side effects of using credit card is that all my transactions are tracked, but the side effect of that side effect is that I know exactly what I'm spending where. And no, I'd rather not do a manual bookkeeping routine, which is what I'd have to do if I used cash.
Yes, there is the side effect that third party entities might also know what my transactions are, but I simply don't care. Maybe there is some far off scenario in the future where it can be used against me, but I view worrying about that remote possibility as premature optimization. I have far greater things to worry about.
I understand the benefits of using cash even if I don't find those benefits valuable for myself personally. But I don't understand how someone can find using cash more convenient than swiping a credit card.
> When I used cash to buy something at the store, I have to take out my wallet, count the appropriate amount of cash, wait for the cashier to give back any change, confirm I got the right amount back.
> If I use a credit card, I just insert a piece of plastic into a slot, and we're done. It's more convenient.
You're comparing the worst-case of cash to best-case of a credit card.
For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when:
- The chip/card reader fails?
- The network connection is down?
- There's a power outage?
It's not just inconvenient; in some cases, the transaction is impossible.
Let's extend this to monthly time lost over a day or a month. Here's what I lose with credit cards strictly from a convenience perspective and with common edge and use cases:
- For daily budgeting, I have to mentally keep of my credit card transactions; or go into an app. That's time wasted.
- I have to review each purchase on a daily and monthly basis, to make sure I'm not hit with fraudulent charges. It's not enough to get notified by SMS or app.
- We have to consolidate our monthly expenses, to make sure we're not going over our monthly budget.
- If there's a fraudulent charge, I now have to contact the credit card and dispute the charges.
- If the credit card helpfully decides to up the limit, I have to cheerfully tell them to decrease it; in order to minimize the damage.
In the case of a stolen wallet with cash, what I lose is what I withdrew. There's a very simple and hard ceiling to the loss.
There is one group for which cashless is far more convenient: Big-company merchants and businesses.
> For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?
I use cards for 99% of my payments. For me, this simply hasn't been an issue in actual reality. In fact, I've had far more issues getting cash into and out of the handful of ATMs in my area that work with my credit union.
I keep about $100 in each car and $1000 in my house in case I find I desperately need cash. The car money comes in handy sometimes if there's a cash discount for gas or I drive someplace and realize I've forgotten my wallet.
Why would a gas station offer discount for cash for any reason other than to avoid it going through the books and hence avoid obligations like paying tax or their staff a proper wage?
Card payment processors charge the merchant some premium. Usually their contract with the merchant prevents passing the fee along to the customer. A cash discount could be a way to get more customers to pay in cash, which avoids the credit card company's cut. This is probably violating the terms of the merchant/card company contract, but I dunno, hard to resent the merchant here given the power imbalance between them and the card processors.
How would using cash would be an effective way of denying the gas station's staff a proper wage? I suspect most gas station staff is hourly, rather than... I dunno, tipped or commission.
Cash could certainly be a way of avoiding some taxes.
A lot of places do this, whether it is "allowed" or not. But my understanding is that after much push and pull between merchants and processors, most processors do allow it.
The gas stations would have never had any credit card uptake without it and people have to buy gas and are extremely price sensitive so would have continued shopping at cash only gas stations.
Unlike say a clothing store where the convenience of credit overcomes the price sensitivity, you can defer the purchase and the merchant has higher margins.
For a cash transaction is it even possible if the store does not have matching change on hand?
That is actually a common annoyance here in Germany, where bakeries will complain or even refuse a sale if you try to pay with a "too large" bill, e.g. 20 for 4.50.
>For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?
In the power outage situation, the merchant won't be able to handle any transactions and they may not be able to legally open their doors even if they could. I don't think I've ever encountered the other two scenarios ever. I would imagine that CC payment systems have resiliency for a network failure and most businesses have at least two card/chip reader terminals for transactions.
I've been reading through this thread and trying to figure out what the disconnect between you and everyone else, I think it's probably your poor experience with chip readers. I had the same deal, it was frustrating, and not as convenient as cash. It made me resistant to the tap system because I felt I really did not need more faulty bullshit. Now for whatever reason I have a card that has a chip and the tap, and crucially, most of the places have systems where the tap consistently works (except one that is faulty and uses the chip read and reminds me how little I liked that). It's like always having exact change but faster.
Anyway, not trying to change your mind (pay with checks and bottle caps for all I care), but you seemed suspicious in some of your responses and I thought it might be helpful to share that perspective. I would also be suspicious if it sounded like people were recommending something that I personally knew to be a consistent frustration.
I bought from a computer store during a localized power outage about 15 years ago (not the great blackout of 2003). I paid cash, the clerk hand-wrote a receipt on a pre-printed form, and presumably they kept a second copy of the receipt to input electronically when the power eventually came back.
So I’ve worked retail during a power outage, granted it was roughly 15 years ago, at a Blockbuster. We used a pen and paper list of transactions (literally a cash register) along with necessary info (membership number, movie purchased or rented) and entered them by hand when power came back.
> For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?
Imprint machines still exist, and maybe half of my cards still have raised numbers. If all else fails, the merchant may be willing to write down name, phone number, and amount and either ask the customer to come by later to make it right (and call if not) or write the card number down to run the charge later and call to confirm, etc. There's ways to get network redundancy and power redundancy, if it's of value to the merchant.
Sometimes the merchant doesn't have the right change for cash (or would prefer not to take a large bill), or may not be able to open the register if power is unavailable (usually there's a key, but it might not be onsite).
You don't need to review charges on a daily basis, monthly is sufficent to keep your rights (at least in the US)
There's also such a thing as offline transactions, for when the internet is down. As I understand it, most POS terminals do support that.
Power outages are indeed an issue, especially when the business is in a small town or rural community with a flakier power grid.
Where I work, when the power is out, we rely on cash or writing down the customer's name and amount they owe, and add that to their account when the power's back.
I already mentioned this in the following if you read the rest:
> In the case of a stolen wallet with cash, what I lose is what I withdrew. There's a very simple and hard ceiling to the loss.
I was responding to the very narrow use-case of already being at the register and starting to pay, in order to keep the objections relevant.
As you widen the scope to all the negative possibilities and edge-cases, credit cards and electronic payment has more negatives; and I say this as someone who almost exclusively does transactions with credit cards because it's indeed convenient 99% of the time.
But that 1% is what can get a person in real trouble, if they find themselves cashless.
> For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?
yep. for all three, they write down your cc number
When I use cash to pay my mechanic for something quick, they give me a discount and round to the nearest $10.
If I use a credit card, we have to go for a walk to the back office and wait for an old and creaky point-of-sale machine to navigate a slow network connection.
A fairer comparison with swiping a credit card would be if you used the wallet like a credit card: just give it to the cashier, let them take out what is required and give it back to you.
> When I used cash to buy something at the store, I have to take out my wallet, count the appropriate amount of cash, wait for the cashier to give back any change, confirm I got the right amount back.
If I use a credit card, I just insert a piece of plastic into a slot, and we're done. It's more convenient.
> If I use a credit card, I just insert a piece of plastic into a slot, and we're done. It's more convenient.
Where do you keep your credit card, in your hand at all times? How long does the cash exchange take? Moments, in my experience.
> there is the side effect that third party entities might also know what my transactions are, but I simply don't care.
What if they use it to control your society and oppress other people?
> Where do you keep your credit card, in your hand at all times? How long does the cash exchange take? Moments, in my experience.
In my ultraslim card wallet, where other than my driver's license, it is the only occupant. Meanwhile my wife, who loves carrying/using cash, has a wallet that is enormous. She carries a purse, so it is less of an issue for her.
Plus these days, especially when I'm not driving, I find myself not even carrying that wallet - just my phone, via which I can pay via Apple Pay. Doesn't cover every single payment scenario, but it does cover enough - and increasingly, more.
> What if they use it to control your society and oppress other people?
See my comment earlier about premature optimization. Maybe I'd feel different if I lived in China or some other authoritarian country, but as it stands today in the United States, I am not worried about this at all, nor in the foreseeable future.
> Meanwhile my wife, who loves carrying/using cash, has a wallet that is enormous.
Why the need for hyperbole? Plenty of people have used cash for generations without enormous wallets; there just isn't that much volume to some cash. It's not that hard to use.
>> What if they use it to control your society and oppress other people?
> as it stands today in the United States, I am not worried about this at all, nor in the foreseeable future.
There might be more going on in the US than you think. Look at what happens to immigrants, Muslims (esp. during the GWOT), people who challenge government authority, political opposition, etc. The prior president actively solicted intelligence on political opposition and repeatedly threatened to jail them. Today, here's an article I just read:
I’m over 50. I can figure out cash. But I hate cash. I hate carrying it around. I hate having to go to an ATM to get more. I hate counting cash and getting change. I hate that there isn’t a digital record of what I purchased and when. I’ve avoided using cash for more years than I can remember. Bring on the cashless society.
> Whatever is going on, it's not about convenience.
I feel like using the phase "figure out" and then saying it's not about convenience is directly contradictory. I can't think of any way where handing someone my plastic index card, swiping it through a machine, and returning it is ever less convenient than shuffling through cash, counting it, handing It over, having the other person count it, calculate change, count change, and hand over various paper bills and coins that I don't want to be carrying.
But it's just not that hard to use cash, no matter how long you make the sentence. I've asked a few people: what interest do people have in pushing so hard against it? Does everyone here work for Stripe?
Cards have existed long before stripe. Convenience isn't about "hard" vs "not hard". It's "more convenient" vs "less convenient". And as I just laid out, the only scenario I can think that cash is more convenient is when power/internet is not available.
I carry some cash, but the only times I ever use it is for tipping and vending machines.
It is absolutely convenience. It is most of the reason people continue to willingly hand over their privacy and autonomy.
And, the key bit is ensuring it's a short term equation, so people don't evaluate the long term risk or implications.
People just never consider that they might be in a future situation where their convenience choices could be used against them in a troubling way. And they just plain don't care (as evident in the comments here) about those it impacts negatively now
A large portion of the folks I know in their 20s in NYC don't even carry cash anymore unless there's a specific need for it on a given day (taking a class that's taught by an individual who takes cash, for example). Why worry about a bunch of pieces of paper or round metal discs when everything is a tap of your watch or phone away? I don't even use my metrocard anymore since the subway started using tap to pay.
I’m not an expert in this area and this is based mostly upon memory. But I’m of an age where I remember the introduction of ATMs into my communities. Cash used to be cheaper, even if you took it out of a different bank’s machine. Nowadays, I pay more than $5 on any withdrawal from a machine that isn’t affiliated with my bank. I live in a small city with around 200,000 people. I’m only aware of seven machines in my city that are affiliated with my bank.
So, if I decide to get cash, I have to decide in advance. Or I’m at risk of paying 5% to get my own $100 out of my bank. Or, I can pay with a card for $0 for unlimited transactions.
When I look at that cost attached to cash, I’m reminded of research about how spending digital doesn’t impact people the same way as spending cash. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, do you think this might be a marketing campaign?
Obviously I don’t know, but if I knew people spent more on cards than with cash, and if consumer debt made me rich, I’d do everything I could to convince people to use cards.
Edit - I think this is the first time I’ve ever gone on a “when I was young, things were cheaper and better” rant. Aging beats the alternative but that’s the only good thing about it. :)
> Nowadays, I pay more than $5 on any withdrawal from a machine that isn’t affiliated with my bank.
That's borderline criminal. Look for a better bank, there's no reason to be hit with such fees.
I have accounts at four banks and none of them charge me fees for getting cash out of a different banks ATM. The ATM will show a default message that it is charging a fee, but it never actually gets charged.
I believe there is some limit to how many withdrawals a month they'll do for free, but I've never reached it (and I mostly use cash for privacy).
Hey friend! Thanks for writing such a friendly, helpful reply.
You’re 100% right that I need a new bank. I spent more than an hour on the phone this morning with them and by the end, cryptocurrency was looking pretty good…
I’m going to do an experiment and actually take cash out of some different banks’ machines then check my account and see how much I actually paid. That’s a neat idea - if I don’t actually get charged the fees, that completely changes the game.
> I’m at risk of paying 5% to get my own $100 out of my bank. Or, I can pay with a card for $0 for unlimited transactions.
But isn't that actually pretty comparable? You don't see the few percent extra you're paying with the credit card because it gets hidden in the price. It's probably not all that different than what you're paying to get cash from an out-of-network ATM (I just get cash back at POS).
To be fair, usually the cash buyer also gets screwed into paying for the convenience of everyone else using credit cards. For a while that was actually written into the merchant agreement, to favor credit card usage and ensure hefty profits for Visa & MC.
I agree with what you’re saying but just wanted to interject with a weird bit of Canadianism. I’ve never found a good way to describe this to non Canadians so if this doesn’t make sense, it’s me.
(This is very pedantic.)
When I pay with a card, I actually have a couple of options. We use the terms ‘debit’ and ‘credit’. I can pull out a credit card and pay for something with someone else’s money. Or pull out a debit card and pay with my own. Debit comes directly out of my bank account and they’re physically different cards, with different chips, PIN numbers etc.
The experiences are identical for me, but dramatically different for poor merchants. The cards are almost identical, but if I use my credit card the merchant gets toasted. If I use my debit card, they’re only lightly browned.
So, long story short but you’re right. It’s the same. I don’t notice because merchants have to pass on the cost.
This analysis ignores the cost to the merchant of handling cash.
I don't know how high it is. I've seen various numbers thrown around but it's hard to tell what's accurate and what's not. What is clear, however, is that the cost is non-zero.
I can give you a bit of data that is roughly thirty years old. When I was a youngster, I had a job at Subway. I was freakishly nerdy and good at math, so I ended up doing cash most of my shifts. If it went well, it took me twenty minutes. Most of my coworkers spent double that time.
If we split the difference (30 minutes) and factor in my big hourly wage ($7 an hour), it’s at around $3.50 a business day per location. That’s not huge money, but still works out to close to $1,300 a year for one location. Multiple that by a few million and it’s a serious cost.
Thanks for the insight! I imagine there must be other costs, such as secure storage and transportation of cash? Also a bank might impose handling fees? (The latter in particular is pure guesswork on my part.)
How is paying $14.53 at the register "quick and easy" with cash?
Do you just shove a $20 to the cashier and go "keep the change"? Or do you start to dig around for that elusive 5c coin from the bottom of your wallet?
In not-US I can just shove my watch/phone/card at the reader and it's done. Exact change, no fuss.
Cash sucks. I pretty much stopped using it in the late 2000s. Then, I moved to NYC in 2010, and at that time, it was common for places to be cash only or add surcharges to card payments. I had to re-adapt to cash-based living, and I was not a fan. Finding a bank that did ATM fee refunds helped a lot, but it was still much more of a pain than simply using plastic.
Change is inconvenient, yes. Both for the store (keeping a stock of coins etc.) and for customers. Even more so in the US, which optimizes for pre-tax 9.99, so 10+whatever after tax.
Also "cashback" on credit cards but rarely discount for cash (I have only seen that at restaurants).
I trust the physical impossibility of tracking cash over the hypothetical enforcement of legislation any day.
Why risk it?
How many employers have used data on candidate salaries in violation of the law in California? How would we ever know?
There are many benefits of using cash: it's very secure, as long as I'm sensible. It's anonymous. It costs those that I do business with less to maintain (Visa charges 2%. 2 percent! of revenue!). People who I tip like me more because I tip in cash. Businesses I do business with like me more because I give them cash. Not to mention, I can do business with anyone I want if I deal with cash -- not so with electronic services.
Look to the case of Germany for why cash is so important.
I'm not too worried. I live in California, and our regulators would block most of what you suggest. They already do for insurance -- they block insurance companies from a lot of data that they consider discriminatory.
The moment a politician was affected by this data collection in a negative way, it would probably become illegal.
Hell, it's illegally nationally to share someone's video rental history because a politician got screwed out of being a Supreme Court justice when their video rental history was released.
Your purchase history is being sold to companies outside California jurisdiction. Aside from video rentals, all of your consumer data is fair game for middlemen to peddle amongst themselves and build a profile about you. They lobby to keep it that way.
I don't think cash is the answer to these issues, unless you are ONLY using cash.
The way you're describing it is a system which is specifically geared to looking at individual purchases rather than more general behavior, which is how I suspect the models these companies use now, and will use in the future work.
There is so much data about us in the world (unless you actively try to hide your behavior, which also leaves a different kind of fingerprint) that the behaviors you describe, or risk you present, is discoverable through other means.
But looking at each of the examples you give
* Health Insurance - uuhhh.... well, I don't live in America, the rest of the developed world has pretty much got this figured out. But..where you live, how much you make, how often you change jobs, all these kinds of metrics feed into the rudimentary understanding of health. Also, don't health insurance companies ask if you smoke?
* Home Insurance - I think the above applies to all insurance. If you buy more candles, are you really more of a risk? Or if you have other risky behaviors? Candles could definitely be a false positive. It doesn't matter if I have thousands of candles, a careless person with 1 candle could be more dangerous.
* Law Enforcement - I think this one shows the flaw in your thinking. If I'm buying "too much ammo", is that because I'm using so much at a shooting range? Doesn't an a risky shooter (like someone about to pull of a mass shooting...again...an American thing...the rest of the world have figured this part out...) only use like 100 more bullets in their shooting? How much time is that at a shooting range.
So yes, these are just examples, and like you said, most of this data is already available without having your purchase information.
Now, I'm also cautious about where my purchase info goes, or as cautious as I can be, but this is the world we live in. I don't think we can put the genie back into the bottle, but I think it's important we don't just burry our heads in the sand and not understand how much information is available about us.
> Health insurance companies start buying your purchasing info and decide to up your premiums due to the amount of alcohol you buy …
I always find this argument funny because you’re mad that insurance companies are more accurately pricing your risk. Like isn’t as insurance company with perfect information the ideal? Would you be happy if an insurance company saw your yoga class, Soylent, and no bills from bars or smoke shops and charged you way less?
Like how dare these evil corporations charge me accurately for my activities that negatively affect my health that I have been up to now paying less than my real risk profile would afford.
An insurance company with perfect information would actually be useless. The point of insurance is to spread risk; perfect information means no spreading of risk.
There is no mechanism, since the passage of the affordable care act, for health insurers to raise premiums on individuals. Plans have a set price, which is the same for everyone within a specific jurisdiction.
As odd as it sounds. The ones that seek safety and protection from authority would actually enjoy your suggestion and actively.
If you ask why, they'll say it's for the 'greater good' . They actually want it to happen. As it forms a new social hierarchy of obidence which may, one day, outrank the social hiarchy of evil capitalism.
In fact, they'll go as far as discrediting and attacking you for even suggesting what you said. As that's against the greater good (saving environment, war efforts, meat is bad, etc) and ironically, attacking demonstrates true obedience.
You definitely can be persecuted and put on watch list. You could be visited to ensure your compliance. You can be intimidated and coerced. And the US government sure as heck has a long record of such tactics.
I don’t think I touch any cash at all, but I think society is better when the option is there and used. Also some people have a hard time getting a bank account etc.
Well from what I just read in the article this isn’t a government effort or lobbyist-led so much as a progressing collective decision made by members of UK society.
Personally I don’t deal with cash anymore, and not because I would refuse to accept it, but because I just use Apple Pay or card instead and it makes it easier to manage my finances. Even the physical cards are barely used anymore, I have an Apple leather wallet that can hold three cards on the back of my phone but I only carry two: my license and the CC I use to dine out.
Too late. The list of places that do not accept cash is growing. It's a common restriction at food trucks for example. Maintaining a Square reader is just so much easier than a cash box and a trip to the bank, plus the security concerns.
It's too bad. I actually prefer cash. But I understand where merchants are coming from.
The list of places I'm willing to solicit is shrinking, since I only do business with people who accept cash as an option, even if I don't happen to be paying with cash at the time.
Merchants are free to make their choices, as are consumers. The problems really start when the government steps in and removes your freedom at the point of a gun.
> While I do not foresee this being adopted in the US I won't put it past lobbyists to try.
The article isn’t actually talking about a government policy FWIW. It’s basically falling demand for ATMs and bank branches leading to less of them. Less bank branches means some stores don’t want cash because it’s more of a hassle when there isn’t a bank branch around the corner.
There definitely are reasons for governments to want less cash and to force people to have more easily controlled money. But that’s not what this is talking about, it’s just people having less access to cash because of businesses taking decisions with government not being involved at all in those decisions.
>I don't think I could fully embrace the Amish way of life but I suspect my local community mostly farmers and ranchers could implement a barter system if we had to.
Funny thing, bartering is still subject to taxes from the IRS[0]
bartering income, that's funny I always perceived bartering as an equal trade of no net difference. But that may be a perceptual thing, the value to the individual is equal but perhaps not on the open market of whatever the corresponding price tag differences are on the two goods?
>Both parties must report as income the value of the goods and services received in the exchange. [0]
My understanding of it is the good/service you receive is considered income at the fair market value, regardless of what you traded for it. I suppose if you gave a good/service away to "purchase" something as a business expense, you could deduct the value of your good/service on your taxes. But IANACPA
These things are precisely defined in accounting terms though. Whatever you bartered away had a cost basis, and whatever you got in exchange has a fair market value. The difference is income.
I'm actually surprised no one has mentioned crypto as an alternative. This is one of the (very) few use cases where it might make sense if implemented properly.
The article is about the accessibility of digital money, particularly for the elderly. Not the privacy and sovereignty aspects that are most important to crypto enthusiasts. Crypto would be a humongous step back in accessibility.
Yeah, I get that. But I don't think people are actually reading the article and in the push for their concerns--which are relatively ideological and theoretical--they risk railroading the millions of people who are struggling with the digital transition. The crypto world loves to concern troll about the unbanked, yet can't seem to hold an article's worth of space for people suffering consequences of tech trends right now.
Not alone, thanks for the nice post. Recently my area was very flooded, all govt resources were diverted to the larger population areas including our local volunteer firefighters etc. to an extent that they even locked their doors and were uncontactable. People remember that it was the same “last time” as well. The bigger the problem the more we’re on our own. Food, logistics, shelter, welfare checks, clean up was all handled by people stepping up. No power or phone or internet for 5 days. We’re putting together plans for all that you say but also for ad hoc radio coverage. It’s worth mentioning that there’s a nontrivial amount of 5g causes vaccine people or whatever other ‘evil’ group and other social outcasts as you should expect from being in the middle of nowhere but it didn’t matter except that some welfare checks were done at the front gate haha
It was interesting in that people wanted to help but didn’t know how but once centralised organisation stepped up, say, someone with 10 lasagnes could drop them off and have them distributed. Or say a restaurant 70kms away can just rock up with 100 meals.
It feels good to be able to apply job skills on the fly in a real way to help real people, excuse me for thinking that though.
>Recently my area was very flooded, all govt resources were diverted to the larger population areas including our local volunteer firefighters etc. to an extent that they even locked their doors and were uncontactable.
Fraser Valley?
That episode made me realize just how little we can depend on the government in a real disaster. If a little bit of rain generates such a clusterfuck, what will the Big One do to us?
It would be smart for me to neither confirm nor deny but I will say no.
The way I see it the government has its own concerns and they may not align with mine. Can’t necessarily be angry that they’d want to maximise helped people. Not telling us and locking the doors though not so good. The other side of that is events like US disaster Katrina where there is too many people and too much paperwork that people become helpless wards of the state. That’s what makes a disaster a disaster, a failure of normal expectations? How would an individual even begin to feed 100000 people you know? There’s a certain helpless at scale.
The army did eventually show up, “the government” eventually got the power and phones up again etc. the sun did eventually appear again.
A skilled individual can produce excess, that excess can be shared with others, zooming out, family then community then state then country. But as we zoom out we have to rely on abstractions and quantisations. At the level I’m talking about though it was possible to say “if you’re on this map your one of us, the rest doesn’t matter” we could then ignore the rest. Much like the government ignored us?
What I’m trying to get across is a certain inspiration from being abandoned by government, big one or little one, show a little passion and violently execute an average plan!
Marcus Aurelius says something about being self reliant so that you can help society, not so that you can show off but so that you’re not a burden but that’s beyond my pay grade.
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done so with a smile on his face he got to it.
> As a side note, porch pirates are becoming a real nuisance for local authorities.
Wonder how every other country manages to get by... oh wait, our postal services don't just leave parcels to be stolen and our mailboxes unlocked.
Porch pirates only exist because some parts of the US still operate on the assumption of "community trust" like the early colonists, the early Internet with BGP, SMTP or the phone networks with SS7 and caller ID. Everyone else grew up, time for parcel delivery to follow.
Barter systems are unstable and tend to exist under threat of violence and/or social distance between trading parties.
Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else’s throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever. True, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consider each other strangers, but they’re usually people who might as well be strangers—that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility or trust, or the desire to develop ongoing relations. The Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, for instance, are famous for their open-handed hospitality. Barter is what you do with those to whom you are not bound by ties of hospitality (or kinship, or much of anything else)
Eh, I reckon it'd default to debt systems. Jeb gives Jed a sack of potatoes, Jed owes Jeb. That's far more consequential and desirable at a highly localized scale. Lots of social dynamics to breed in civility, credibility and ultimately give rise to a more cohesive community. This shit where we narrate some fair and precise value is... Surprisingly nebulous...
The more frequent solution is to adopt some sort of credit system. When much of Europe “reverted to barter” after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then again after the Carolingian Empire likewise fell apart, this seems to be what happened. People continued keeping accounts in the old imperial currency, even if they were no longer using coins.
Just in the space of a single month earlier this year, we saw two extraordinary things happen:
1. The executive branch of a major Western democracy unilaterally invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of political dissidents.
2. Two American credit card companies unilaterally and without warning revoked all service to an entire country.
In a cashless system, your money does not belong to you. It belongs to authorities and institutions that do not care about you. Whether or not you can buy groceries can change in an instant, regardless of whether or not you personally deserve it. You might be trying to get your family out of a country that’s made itself an international pariah—you may even condemn your government’s actions—but that doesn’t mean your card is going to work when you try and buy a meal for your family at the train station.
I don't understand the logic behind this line of reasoning - Based on the sentiment and 2 reasons above, you should have pulled all your money out of a bank so you can control your cash.
So have you? or why haven't you?
> In a cashless system, your money does not belong to you.
This doesn't work in reality because most people don't hold the majority of their money in cash form. You're already 95-99% cashless.
To me the above arguments are a better reasoning for crypto-currencies and their actual use instead of pure trade instead of fear of becoming 'cashless'.
> Based on the sentiment and 2 reasons above, you should have pulled all your money out of a bank so you can control your cash.
> So have you? or why haven't you?
Not parent but share the sentiment. I have not. I don't see the conflict. Someone who's e.g. very pro freedom of speech might not personally worry about getting censored, but may be worried what happens if those on the edges get censored. It's the same here. Most have no immediate personal worry, and that's perfectly compatible with having an opinion about how the government should regulate monetary instruments.
Despite the efforts of the Republicans to destroy the USA, I can’t seriously see this kind of thing happening. Russia on the other hand, since the war started I’ve read a number of articles by Russians saying they weren’t too surprised by what happened to them.
Point 1 happened in Canada not the US. Also, It was not republicans who invoked this power but Canadian leftists. Trudeau invoked emergency powers to quash dissidents in Montreal (?) because he did not agree with their protests.
Incredible how the western world has turned a blind eye to this event because the ‘right’ people were targeted.
It was Ottawa, and Trudeau used all same rhetoric Putin is using now, calling them Nazis[1], denying the leaders bail[2], charged with mischief, and pushing propaganda thru state media.
Like the story of truckers attempting to burn down an apartment building[3], that turned out to be completely false, but used to prove violence and justify the emergencies act.
I really like cash for a few things. For instance local buying and selling. It's so much more convenient to just hand someone a $20 and walk away with the item than to spend the 5 mins dallying on venmo trying to look up their handle, with terrible cell service, and hope you don't misclick on a total stranger who won't return your money if its missent. When I'm selling I prefer cash in hand too. I don't want to find myself in some elaborate scam using these electronic transfer apps.
Cash also helps with tipping. If I hand a waiter cash, I know it goes to them. If I write a tip as a line item on the check, who knows how management is skimming that pool.
Then there is the security aspect. Credit card info can be leaked or scammed many ways. Meanwhile, with a cash payment our relationship is severed the minute I leave the establishment. There is no opportunity for you to collect my info, or for a hacker to steal my info through you, or to take any more money from me than the finite amount I already gave you.
Plus there is the human aspect too. Many people beg for cash, but also many small business owners cannot afford to work over the table. I'm talking things like food vendors in trucks or simply on tables on the sidewalk. I love me some al pastor, and I know that should these businesses have to go from grey market to white market they wouldn't nearly be so viable. Cash makes these sorts of businesses possible and provides a lot of opportunities for plenty of people that for many reasons, do not currently use electronic means.
> spend the 5 mins dallying on venmo trying to look up their handle, with terrible cell service, and hope you don't misclick on a total stranger who won't return your money if its missent.
I think all your other points are valid but this one is odd to me; it just seems like bad Venmo UI. I've never used Venmo and I live in East Asia where most systems use QR codes to identify the vendor. The chances of sending money to the wrong account is slim to nil and it takes less than a minute. I'm currently sat in a cafe where I can see 5 QR codes lined up on the counter for different apps.
Venmo also has QR codes. I have never entered someone's handle manually when in the situation described above. The person opens up their code, you scan it. Takes like 5 seconds.
Venmo also allows using QR codes quite easily (tap "Scan" on the home screen and then scan a code or tap "Venmo me" to show your code), but for some reason many users don't seem to know that and end up trying to look people up by their username instead. I think it's because QR codes really never caught on in the US.
QR codes are clumsy and inconvenient, moving to NFC was the right move for the states and most of the developed world. However, Starbucks uses QR codes for its app if you pay in store (but you can mobile order and not pay in store at all, so I rarely bother).
China built its cashless system using QR codes, since it doesn't require any additional hardware beyond a smartphone and the clumsiness is just another thing you get used to over there.
I could be misremembering since I lived in China a long time ago, but I feel like QR codes were wildly popular in Asia long before digital payments became really popular. So it probably made sense on several fronts to adopt them for payments as well (everyone already used them anyway, they're effectively free, etc.) rather than build a new system.
I didn't think they were especially popular until they were used for mobile payments. I'm not really sure about other countries in east Asia, they tend to grow completely different ecosystems from China.
Yes, that’s why the Chinese chose the technology. Whereas America was already used to POS’s everywhere, and square makes relatively affordable receiver NFC POS hardware for phones.
Venmo UI used to be a lot more serviceable, but they recently updated the app to add crypto speculation to it, and I have no idea where things are in the redesigned layout. Even then, the requirements are that I need cell service at least, and data service even where I live in a county of 10 million people can be quite spotty. Not to mention I still don't have an unlimited plan and am sometimes throttled before my billing cycle resets.
Granted we’re on a startup forum and most of us develop services:
> It's so much more convenient to just hand someone a $20 and walk away with the item than to spend the 5 mins dallying on venmo trying to look up their handle
Wouldn’t this be solved at the matching level ? You probably found that person online, checked the photos and description and decided to make the transaction. If there is a “complete the purchase“ button you just click, there would be no thumbling in Venmo. And this is exactly my experience with local marketplace sites.
> If I hand a waiter cash, I know it goes to them.
It might be different where you live, but they can be requested by contract to add it to a pool. The same way when you pay your meal you hand the waiter cash but it doesn’t go to them.
> Credit card info can be leaked or scammed many ways. Meanwhile, with a cash payment our relationship is severed the minute I leave the establishment.
Wait, have you ever been scammed by paying by card in an offline setting ? Or have the transaction replayed or reused ? How would it work ?
> I know that should these businesses have to go from grey market to white market they wouldn't nearly be so viable.
This is I think the most prevalent point. Going forward I’d only see prepaid offline system to cover this, and we’re not there yet on the user to user money exchange side (it currently only works in a centralized setting as far as I know)
Another issue with Venmo is the possibility of shady buyers using stolen credit cards. So a week later, the transaction is reversed and you're out $300 and the item you just sold. As a seller, I'd rather just take cash. The new IRS $600 reporting limit for 2022 is also a joke.
The focus on Venmo is because you are in the US I guess ?
The credit card reversal part is solved by 3D Secure 2.0, where the barrier to get a transaction reversed is way higher (the issuing bank has the responsibility to validate it comes from the customer). I don't know how fast it's adopted outside of the EU, but we're far from the days where you just passed operations with a stolen number and a valid CVC.
You cannot just throw technology at a human problem and expect it to be solved. Scams will always exist as long as there is someone to be scammed. No amount of technology can "solve" this problem.
We're talking here about a case that was introduced by technology (wide possibility to emit chargebacks) and is fixed by technology (severely limit chargeback potential).
> Wouldn’t this be solved at the matching level ? You probably found that person online
Believe it or not, lots of transaction happen without finding someone online - maybe most, for most of the world. I think most of my transactions are offline.
> they [waitstaff] can be requested by contract to add it [the tip] to a pool
I don't think restaurants follow laws that closely.
The discussion is on digital vs cash transactions. If we're setting the stage in Ethiopia for instance, I think there isn't much to argue, realistically you won't be buying your coffee with prepaid digital wallets either way.
IMO I prefer seeing things in hand before buying them usually. I have gone to see things that looked great online and walked away from the sale when I saw the flaws in person, so unless I am truly desperate I wouldn't want to buy something before I can see it especially when its used. I've never heard of the tipping contract thing in the U.S., but even still if I give them straight cash that gives the waiter an opportunity to put some in their pocket and the rest into that pool. I've never been scammed personally, but there was a time when credit card skimmers were bad at my college campus/city back when I went. I at least wiggle card readers as hard as I can now at gas stations and ATMs. Plus these days with all your card info being printed on one side of the credit card, it would only take one person behind you in line to snap a quick photo and they have all the info they need suddenly to make purchases.
>> Credit card info can be leaked or scammed many ways. Meanwhile, with a cash payment our relationship is severed the minute I leave the establishment.
> Wait, have you ever been scammed by paying by card in an offline setting ? Or have the transaction replayed or reused ? How would it work ?
I know a couple people who've been hit by credit card skimmers. It is harder with chip-and-pin but people doing frauds are pretty clever.
More important than privacy issues, is the issue of control.
Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen. If all your money and payment ability is digital and controlled by a central authority, your ability to transact can be turned off with the flip of a switch. And in the complex world we live in, that can literally mean that your ability to keep eating can be digitally switched off at almost no cost to your attacker. Is that something that can be continued? Maybe not, but the attacker could drag out the issue in a bureaucratic and legal mess for long enough for you to fall into homelessness and despair if they're motivated enough to destroy you.
Cash has the nice property that it enables permissionless economic transaction. We can exchange cash peer to peer without anyone's explicit or implicit consent. And being private is also nice because it gives the people you transact with some protection from potentially aiding some kind of blacklisted individual. I wonder if people like Harriet Tubman and the people that aided her would have been able to do what they did if their money could have been turned off due to their illegal actions helping slaves escape.
Permissionless and peer to peer cash is a critical feature of a free society that we should be very fearful of losing.
> Your credit cards can be turned off and bank accounts frozen.
This is a key point that needs to be emphasized.
For everyone posting about not using cash, consider the thought experiment of how your day/week/month will go if all your non-cash payment mechanisms are shut down.
As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over. The majority of us already kept all our wealth in digital form. I continued to use 100% cash day to day many years after all my colleagues had switched to contactless (only switched when I got Monzo around 2017/2018). But I wasn't walking around with a wad of cash and I didn't keep my salary in a vault at home. It was in a current account and I took out at the very most £100 at a time. If someone had shut down all my non-cash payment mechanisms and froze my account I'd still only have enough money for a week.
I understand and emphasise with some of the concerns raised about a cashless society and the effects it has on a minority of disenfranchised people. And I 100% agree that we need regulations in place. But let's not pretend our reliance on payment networks is in anyway new, it's just more obvious than it used to be.
The thing is, even if you don't save and hold lots of physical cash to maintain your needs, if you ever did get your digital money turned off, you could still work with your employer or friends to get cash and buy things.
In a cashless society, that option is completely off the table, and you will be forced to rely on the goodwill of others to buy things for you, and hope they don't also get turned off by sin of aiding you.
> As someone noted above we were already a 90-95% cashless society before contactless payments took over.
That's not what the term cashless society is usually used to convey though. If you really wanted, you could've been operating largely cashless ever since credit cards became widely accepted (1970s?). But even today (at least in the USA) you can still withdraw your whole paycheck in cash and pay everything that way, if you wanted to. So we're fortunately not a cashless society at all.
I also strongly agree with these two posts. Yet this appears to be a Northern European phenomena because I see large areas like Asia, with large population numbers, do it. Whatever the opinion, it is not going away. I used cash to buy groceries today.
It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.
> It's only a matter of time before no grocery store will accept cash. The young will prefer the convenience of digital payments and won't care enough about the slippery slope to do otherwise.
People trying to push an agenda (not you) love to create a sense of inevitability. Don't believe it.
Lots of people have no access to digital payments, and objectively, how are they more convenient than cash? Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?
> Do they save time? Seriously, add up the time: what is the net gain or loss? Is cash hard to use?
Yes. I get paid on my account like everybody else in this country and then I can immediately use it at any merchant in the country by using a credit card. No need to run to ATMs (where are they even and if it is not my banks I get charged extra), no need to figure out change etc.
I don't even carry a wallet anymore because I can just pay with my phone, so no need for a physical card.
A lot of us young people live far enough down the slippery slope that it doesn't seem like a practical concern. I wouldn't find it remotely tolerable to be cut off from online payments - no Steam, no Netflix, no Amazon? So rather than making sure there are good cash-only options, I want to make sure everyone has the right and ability to perform credit card payments or some kind of similar electronic transaction. (This is where a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasm comes from, and while I'm a skeptic in general I wholeheartedly endorse this motivation.)
I agree that we definitely need some harsh policy enacted to enshrine transact-ability as an inalienable right.
I personally see cryptocurrency as something akin to second amendment rights. You hold and support it as a citizen's check and balance to make government abuse of people harder to implement.
No, but if you did find yourself in that situation, you could still request cash from your employer, friends, or family, without obviously implicating them in aiding you. Or you could do odd jobs or beg on the streets for the cash you need to survive.
If you're digitally blacklisted, and can't send or receive money, then the only option you have is hope that someone in your life is willing to risk helping you directly by buying you things with no guarantee you'll ever be able to pay them back.
My point was that I still need to rely on a bank to get new cash, and that bank still operates in digital ways, ... there is no point in just looking at the way you pay in a shop.
Like you are not really better of in the long term just because you have some cash in your wallet. You would need to keep all your money as cash, to have a systematic advantage.
In some U.S. cities, there's a legal requirement for every business to accept cash. One fast food place said they were only accepting cards because the manager had left and taken the cash drawer with them (not trusting the employees to handle cash?). After being reminded of the local law, which they knew, they found a couple of workarounds.
In the entire US there is also the (sometimes misunderstood) "legal tender" doctrine. By law US currency is "legal tender" for settling any debt.
This means cash cannot be refused for a service/product that has already been provided. Businesses are still free to be picky (eg, no cash, or no coins, or no $100 bills, etc) if they haven't actually provided the service yet.
So for example at a cashless counter serve restaurant that requires me to pay before getting my food, they can indeed refuse to take cash.
But at a place that gives you your food first and then the bill, they have to accept cash. They have no legal recourse if you give them cash and they don't want it.
Yeah, erm. I think you might need to revise your understanding.
Three things for you to contemplate:
1) Credit/debit cards are not "legal tender", a card transaction is not an exchange of "legal tender" and yet it is a perfectly valid means of payment.
2) "legal tender" relates to payments on or to the order of the government (i.e. taxes, fines etc.). The government is the only entity that is required to accept your cash as tender to pay the debt. Private businesses and private individuals can decide of their own free will as to whether or not they wish to accept cash.
3) The *ONLY* time "legal tender" applies to private transactions is if someone sues you for non-payment and you pay *INTO COURT* the value of the debt in cash (the "INTO COURT" bit being the important bit, i.e. it brings us back to (2) you are paying on the order of the court, a public-sector body, which is required to accept "legal tender").
It says right on the face of all US paper money that it’s legal tender for all debts, public and private. So I think your explanation requires an authoritative source that agrees with you, like a government website.
As I said. Its valid for private debts IF you decide to let it get to a point where you are forced to pay it INTO COURT. Otherwise the business is free to do what they like.
I'm confused now, if I eat at a restaurant and they bring me the bill - is that not a private debt? Yes a transaction is happening, but since I am not able to give back the food in the condition I received it the restaurant's part of the transaction is completed this means I am in debt to them until I complete my part. Sorry for the insane level of specificity here but we are on the internet and on HN so...
So I offer up the money and they say hey we only take cards here and I say well I only give cash. Your theory is what - I would be arrested, it would go to court and the court would say pay the debt at which point I can pay in cash and the restaurant can't do anything about it because at that point it is a debt and not before?
Also, cops don't have to arrest you on the restaurant's say so, the cops I know would be all take the damn cash and don't bother me.
So to reiterate the parent poster's point:
If you eat at a restaurant and then they bring you the check, they have to accept the money because that is a private debt and money is legal tender for all private debts.
If they take your order and say pay with a credit card please then they are free to do so, if you do not have a card you don't eat.
There is of course the edge case where the business makes quite clear you need to pay with a card to eat there (probably by having prominent signs saying so) and then they ask you to pay after eating and you say I only pay with cash, in which case yes I think the cops might agree to arrest you and in which case it will have to go all the way to court to get to where you can pay with cash.
And then there is the even edgier case where you say oh, damn, somebody stole my credit card but I have cash here. You think the restaurant is really going to call the police and the police are really going to arrest the person?
In short if a restaurant gives you food and you eat it they better have a way to accept cash or to accept returns of an unsanitary nature.
> in which case yes I think the cops might agree to arrest you and in which case it will have to go all the way to court to get to where you can pay with cash.
Wow. I think a lot of the people commenting in this thread don't have any familiarity with cops or service workers, like at all, if they honestly think cops will be called or that said cops will start making arrests. Nobody will call cops over this and if they did, the cops would laugh or be annoyed or just tell the clerk to just take the cash so the cops can move on to a more pressing service call. Just put yourself in their shoes and this will be obvious.
> I'm confused now, if I eat at a restaurant and they bring me the bill - is that not a private debt?
Its simple.
You chose to enter that restaurant, nobody forced you to go there.
That restaurant is perfectly entitled to set its own conditions that apply to its service to you (within reason, of course).
Hence that restaurant is perfectly entitled to say on its menu or signage or website or orally "sure we'll feed you, but we don't take cash, only cards".
If you don't like that condition, you are free to get up and leave before ordering. Just like you are free to get up before ordering if you don't like the menu, the prices or that noisy kid on the next-door table.
If you proceed to order and eat, then you have entered into a 'contract'.
The restaurant has offered you an alternative means of payment which you have accepted by proceeding to eat. Card payment was made a condition of contract.
You're probably right about card payment being a condition of the contract, but a contract has to be enforced by a court: the police, if they turned up, would shrug their shoulders and say it's a civil dispute. In the somewhat unlikely event of an English court being willing to accept the case and take it seriously, I would guess it would probably order that the diner pay the bill (which they could now do in cash because it is now a debt and I'm assuming traditional legal tender rules still apply), and that the restaurant pay the (probably much larger) court costs because, seeing as the diner had already offered to pay the bill in cash, the restaurant is clearly to blame for the matter coming to court and everyone's time getting wasted. The restaurant might also have to pay the diner's legal costs, if there were any, if the diner made a good impression of not having deliberately caused trouble.
I suspect most places would just not bother calling the cops (or maybe call them with the expectation that you won't stick around to be arrested), eat the loss, and ask you not to return in the future. They might not have the ability to get that money from you, but person-who-wants-to-pay-cash isn't a protected class, so the 'private property, you aren't welcome' option would probably be their go-to.
> Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve Banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all U.S. money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.
IANAL. This law establishes a default position in case no prior arrangement for a medium of exchange had been agreed to or requested in a contract or such a medium of transaction could not be reasonably accommodated. Legal tender doctrine is not a universal edict applied to every transaction.
> This law establishes a default position in case no prior arrangement for a medium of exchange had been agreed to or requested in a contract or such a medium of transaction could not be reasonably accommodated.
Yes. I think this is ultimately the crux of the matter, i.e. the moment that reasonable alternative(s) have been offered then the whole "cash is legal tender" thing (basically) goes out the window.
There was an interesting ruling in Europe[1] in relation to Euro cash where it was even ruled that European government bodies are not obliged to accept cash. The ruling basically said exactly what @Dracopheonix pointed out:
"Limitations on payments in notes and coins, established by Member States for public reasons, are not incompatible with the status of legal tender of euro banknotes and coins, provided that other lawful means for the settlement of monetary debts are available"
Provided a contract or agreement doesn't stipulate otherwise.
A way to think about this is that while the constitution recognizes freedom of speech, signing an NDA results in the exchanges of one's right to disclose certain information in exchange for the privileges and benefits of employment.
What about bankruptcy courts? Repossession? Liquidation auctions? The seizure of assets as compensation for debts incurred is not in and of itself unreasonable or particularly atypical, even when the option of cash exists. Although, depending on legislation and jurisdiction, there may be prescribed limits (e.g. homestead exemptions and limited liability)
With all that said, none of what you've stated proves that the law requires all debts to be accepted in cash in every case regardless of circumstances. What you've offered so far is an asserted reading of the text without any arguments backing up the claim.
I’ve visited the page you linked before, but it doesn’t say anything about court proceedings being required. It just says payment for a debt. Isn’t a debt created once a provider performs a service and then requests payment?
Wow, do you honestly believe that? What planet do you live on where clerks and waiters FLIP OUT AND CALL THE POLICE over the mild inconvenience of being offered cash to pay the bill?
From experience here on planet earth they will be mildly annoyed and sigh and move on.
I'm the opposite: if some place only takes cash, I don't shop there because I haven't carried cash around for more than a half a decade now. I'm already very annoyed when I have to whip out my credit card from the case behind my phone because they don't take Apple Pay/NFC from my watch.
Where do you run into places that only take cash so often? Where I am even the guys selling street papers have Venmo as an option (they hate it since they don't get the money in a usable form as easily that way, but they'll gladly use it).
"Your DeKalb's Farmers Market", one of the two largest/most popular farmers market stores in metro Atlanta has never accepted credit cards. They do accept debit cards, so it's not quite cash only, but they take a very hard line one the issue of credit cards, having vowed to never accept them. Doesn't seem to have hurt business any as the most common complaint about the place is that it's too crowded.
I know of a few Chinese bakeries or other Asian bakeries that only take cash (and my wife wants to buy something there). Also, amusement coin ops at the mall for my kid.
In many countries it's illegal for shops to either not accept cards or to charge more for card payments (even though they do cost more, more than 5% of the transaction cost in some cases). I think this measure of hiding away the real cost of card transactions was the main driver for increased usage in earlier years.
Interchange fees are capped at 0.2% debit, 0.3% credit. Somewhat higher (~1.2%) for business cards. These caps do not apply to cards issued outside the EEA, nor do they apply to three-party networks such as Amex.
Despite that this displeases the networks, businesses are allowed to elect to only accept a subset of card categories (i.e. they may decide they accept Debit Mastercard only, not Mastercard Credit or business cards). That said, honor all card rules _within_ a given category have been found enforcible (including that e.g. a merchant can't decide they accept Visa Debit, Debit Mastercard and Mastercard Credit but not Visa Credit - Visa are allowed to say "If you accept Visa Debit and Mastercard Credit, you must also accept Visa Credit")
Processors/Terminal providers will add their own margin on top of these, of course (interchange fees are entirely remitted to the card isssuer)
Pre-pandemic it was still very common in the UK, despite having an extremely high uptake of contactless payments for years. It was mostly takeaways and small businesses like butchers etc. It was changing before the pandemic but I still instinctively ask "Do you take card?" before ordering at a takeaway.
If you think about it, cash is a pretty amazing technology hack: All that meaning and power are embedded in a piece of paper that works securely, easily, anonymously, instantly.
> tracking
Though I wonder: The serial numbers on US cash look quite machine-readable. It seems like banks could trace the bills you take from the cash machine and the bills the restaurant deposits, and connect dots - not perfectly, but form a pretty good idea, especially using patterns over time.
Canada's freezing of the funds of people breaking the law and blockading border crossings?
So terrible. I don't see that as suppression of speech though.
(As I said elsewhere - take note that there is no evidence that any donors had their accounts frozen. One person was reported by a local politician to have had her accounts frozen, but when a list of donors was leaked later, no matching name was found, and no other information about that case has been shown. AFAICT, and I've looked, there is no decent evidence that any donors had their accounts frozen. It's just a right wing talking point.
The donated funds were frozen, temporarily, while the border blockage and other illegal protest activities were cleared up. But donors? Nope. )
This is repulsive, especially in a world where we're seeing authoritarians use all sorts of bullshit, made up excuses to arbitrarily punish people.
No - the government does (should) not have the authority in any normal democracy to arbitrarily freeze the finances of those who have not committed any crimes, especially those that have not been proven in court or whereupon there isn't any threat of impending violence.
The situation is obviously politicized, as there are perennially 'protest' activities in every nation which may technically 'criminal'.
The are innumerable protests and related activities in Canada related such things as block Oil pipelines from being built, Aboriginal blockades etc..
In Portland, Oregon, several city blocks were taken over by violent force - with a militia of self-appointed 'soldiers' brandishing weapons, prevent police and emergency services in.
Were their finances blocked? Were the supporting charities blocked? Did those donating to the charities have their assets frozen - no in all cases.
The justice system of most governments have ample power to enforce basic laws, as exemplified by the police response at the border in Alberta and Ontario, and should not be partial to the 'types of protesters' they chose to pursue let alone pursue extra constitutional measures.
That extra judicial measures were taken in Canada is a stain on Democracy and definitely an indication that the government can't be trusted with basic civil liberties specifically with respect to the issue of the transfer of money.
The last thing we need is more oversight over basic finances. If the police, acting independently of any politicians impetus, get a warrant from a judge to intervene in something or the other - they can do that, and it's why those mechanisms exist in the first place.
I'm just going to say again - I can find no good evidence donors had accounts blocked, just a lot of noise about it. What was definitely blocked was access to the funds that had been donated, being used to support the activities of the protestors.
I find that with Parliamentary oversight, I have no issue with this at all, and calling it a stain on democracy is entirely disproportionate, especially considering the actions we see in other countries.
I went into a London pub a couple of weeks ago, and after my pint was pulled and I held up a £10 note the barman told me the pub was cashless. "Oh, OK" I said and started to walk away, "Wait a minute, I'll take the cash and pay with my card if that's OK?" which was fine by me.
Interesting, I'm the opposite. I'll pay with card when possible, and if it's cash only, I'll offer to Venmo or I'm leaving. I put a lot of value in being able to track my own spending, and that itself is worth more than the potential issues of using a card.
Paying with cash doesn't preclude tracking your spending in any way. It might be less convenient to have to make a memo to yourself, but that is another issue. Having electronic-only precludes anonymity, unless some robust/secure/stable form of crytocurrency appears.
> Around 10 million people, or one in five adults, would struggle to manage in a society without cash, a report from the Royal Society of Arts commissioned by cash machine network Link found.
A study commissioned by a cash machine operator finds people really need cash machines.
I really want to know what their interest is here... high-arts certainly don't depend on cash-tips the way that seedier types of artistic expression do...
Here are the first two sentence from their Wikipedia article[1]:
>The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), also known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.
>Founded in 1754 by William Shipley as the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, it was granted a Royal Charter in 1847, and the right to use the term "Royal" in its name by King Edward VII in 1908
So they have a focus beyond the arts and the "royal" in their name seems to purely be a historical quirk of the British Monarchy and not any real connection to the government. It sounds mostly like a think tank that would put out exactly this type of report.
Artists are more likely to deal with cash because a lot of the way they operate is way more similar to (or often, idenitical to) the local handyman or emergency plumber or marketstall holder than the concept of 'artist' pushed on us through the media (although that isn't necessarily a myth, just very much not the norm and a sort of absolutely minute spin-off of the whole industry).
They also do a lot of negotiating and haggling. Art as a business can get quite complicated financially even at low levels of income so we end up back at the whole thing about how at a basic level budgetting is easy if you physically have the money in front of you
I'm a fan of some, but it's a subjective thing, isn't it? Don't you think that maybe perhaps some of the "auction prices" and "appraisals" are a bit more "objective"? Can nobody on this website think outside the box?
> A study commissioned by a cash machine operator finds people really need cash machines.
The more people on our side, the better? I mean surely you don't want to solely be beholden to a piece of plastic that can at any time be disabled, either intentionally, or because of an electrical or internet outage.
My comment was poking fun at an obvious conflict of interest which harms the credibility of any claims made. It's an article written around a questionable study. Credit to them for stating that right at the very top I guess.
To answer your question though, I think cash still has a place. I value my privacy and wouldn't like cash to lose all utility. With that said, I do appreciate the convenience of being able to pay for more or less everything from my phone. It used to be frustrating when you'd run out of change to pay for parking, or had to stop at a cash machine to pay for a taxi. The only time I can think of over the past few months that I've actually used cash was for a particular takeaway that doesn't accept cards.
What you're suggesting is quite dangerous. You shouldn't accept any source just because it agrees with your opinion. If its a poor source, it should be disregarded. Don't fall for confirmation bias.
Other reasons to keep cash.
1. Self discipline. Plastic (debit or credit) lets you spend more than you should. Cash doesn't.
2. Privacy. Do you really want every transaction to be observed by the Government? "We think you are spending too much on alcohol. Reduce it and increase spending on greens by at least £5 a week". Don't think it will happen? Remember Nudgers gotta nudge. Also I wonder just how big the black economy is.
3. Where do you keep the rainy day fund? I don't think anyone is developing an electronic mattress.
> Plastic (debit or credit) lets you spend more than you should.
I think this differs from person to person. Cash for me requires more self-discipline, because I don't automatically get a log of where the money has gone and so in some ways it just disappears without me having an idea where
(Sure, my bank statement can't tell me what I bought at a given shop, but knowing I spent €X at a shop is a good memory jog)
1. That's suggesting you don't have any self discipline in reality... 2. Yeah why not, I withdrew cash to pay three months rent once, I had to fill out a huge anti money laundering form saying what the PURPOSE of my cash withdrawal was in writing. 3. In the electronic account named rainy day fund, thats automatically populated from my income monthly, because I do lack self discipline...
> 1. Self discipline. Plastic (debit or credit) lets you spend more than you should. Cash doesn't.
Never understood this idea. If you have a wad of cash and you're bad at tracking your spending, don't you just go through all of the cash and are doubly fucked?
> Privacy. Do you really want every transaction to be observed by the Government? "We think you are spending too much on alcohol. Reduce it and increase spending on greens by at least £5 a week". Don't think it will happen?
Don't you have real present-day problems to worry about, like the Tories destroying the NHS?
> 3. Where do you keep the rainy day fund? I don't think anyone is developing an electronic mattress.
In bank accounts. Do UK banks not have insurance? In the USA you seriously do not want to leave large amounts cash lying around where it can be untraceably stolen, consumed by fire, or otherwise lost to acts of nature or humans.
>> 1. Self discipline. Plastic (debit or credit) lets you spend more than you should. Cash doesn't.
> Never understood this idea. If you have a wad of cash and you're bad at tracking your spending, don't you just go through all of the cash and are doubly fucked?
A wad of cash is tangible in a way that a number in an account is not. If the wad is thick, you're in good shape. If the wad is thin, it's time to slow down your spending. And when the wad is gone, you're forced to stop even if you didn't want to.
re: 1. With cash, the worst case is that you spend all your money. With a CC, the worst case is that you spend all your money AND max out your CC limit. So instead of having a net worth of $0 (until your next paycheck), you have a net worth of -$10,000. Then every month your debt grows by $200 due to interest.
Odd example - Britain has a huge alcohol abuse problem and staging interventions on alcoholics who are spiraling the plughole is probably the most politically acceptable application of financial surveillance one could think of.
One issue with doing this is that blocking gambling is usually done by the merchant classification. Betting shops are easy to categorise and identify from their merchant category.
Alcohol can be bought from a supermarket, or corner shop, or off-licence. Other than dedicated off-licences, the merchant classification wouldn't be enough to let you block gambling transactions.
To do this effectively, you'd need support in the EMV spec to allow the card to tell the terminal it is unable to pay for goods in a given "category", and have a standardized list of goods categories, and let the POS system send a list of categories to the card before it tries to authorize the transaction.
Otherwise I don't see how you could "delve into" the purchase deeper than seeing it's in a supermarket, and not knowing if it's for alcohol or other items.
Not a Brit, but I would be against going fully cashless in my country if that means that foreign entities like Visa or Mastercard would tax every transaction done.
I’m against going cashless for anonymity. Hypothetically let’s say I buy some weed and it’s not yet legal. I don’t want to incriminate myself or provide data for parallel construction
It is if you are arguing that current laws are unjust. Marajuana would have not been legalized were it’s sale not been able to be eliminated. The war on drugs would have continued.
"It is if you are arguing that current laws are unjust. "
Heyzeus, I'm wary that people could reasonably be making this kind of argument.
In an authoritarian nightmare, sure.
But in most places, that's the deal with the law, it's not a perfect fit.
If you allow people to define it as they think it should be, it's not going to work.
There's is a 100% chance that someone in your neighbourhood thinks he should be able to keep machine guns and more advanced weapons for whatever reasons. And probably some who think that if you are on their property for whatever reason, they can use 'lethal force'.
Etc..
That's why we don't get to say "I want to use crypto for the criminal things that I don't think should be criminal!"
Obviously proportionality applies, but still.
I'm wary of government oversight, but it's best if we as citizens try to be a bit responsible with the systems we have at our disposal.
That said, I'm not sure someone having a bit of weed should freak anyone out (i.e. proportionality).
> There's is a 100% chance that someone in your neighbourhood thinks he should be able to keep machine guns and more advanced weapons for whatever reasons. And probably some who think that if you are on their property for whatever reason, they can use 'lethal force'.
Both are common beliefs where I am and I happen to agree with them.
I don’t think this is a fair example, it negatively characterizes legal hypotheticals.
Buying a firearm or alcohol isn't illegal but you may well not want your credit card processor and all the third parties they share your data with to know about those purchases.
There are businesses that are fully legal in a jurisdiction but the entire banking and credit card infrastructure refuses to touch them. If cash is eliminated then how do such businesses exist?
The answer to this is to band together and fix the governments. I understand that this is not libertarian orthodoxy, but libertarian orthodoxy got us into this mess.
Hardly, people not listening to the warning of libertarians got us into this mess.
Libertarians have been very accurate to the consequences of government largess, and at every turn people ignore the results of government programs doubling down claiming that not enough money was spent, or not enough power was ceased, or a loop hole was really the problem
No libertarianism did not cause this mess, far far far from it
> Around 10 million people, or one in five adults, would struggle to manage in a society without cash, a report from the Royal Society of Arts commissioned by cash machine network Link found.
At least they didn't bury who was paying for the study.
Going completely cashless is troubling for many reasons. I almost never have cash that I can give to beggers and buskers now (the later sometimes have little tap to pay machines).
Given that there are plenty of people that are unbanked, it's going to be problematic to be 100%.
These are not insurmountable problems, but you have to bake in solutions. Rights to have accounts even if you don't have a fixed address (etc).
I'm not sure how/if Brexit has changed that in UK, but in EU there is indeed a legal right to have a basic bank account for everyone - a bank can't refuse opening a basic bank account just because they're e.g. homeless or a convict or whatever - and there has been a push for quite some time to reduce the number of "unbanked" people. From what I see locally, the very very poor people such as permanently unemployed rural alcoholics "living off the land" all do have bank accounts as that's the way they're getting state support payments.
Banks are required to deny bank accounts to people who are disqualified from banking, and also deny them from being added as signatories on shared accounts.
This is why cashless in the UK would be more harmful than in countries where everyone is allowed banking as a right. In the UK, access to banking is a government-controlled privilege, even though most people take it for granted and think that everyone can have it.
The home office's checks there were quietly discontinued a short while after they were rolled out - a short while after the Windrush scandal broke. Regardless, identifying bank accounts possessed by illegal immigrants is probably a use case about as legitimate as anything about controlling immigration is.
(I tend to think the home office is terrible and inhumane and that in general immigration policies are terrible and inhumane, but the above is in the context of those)
Regardless, there is no such thing as people "disqualified from banking". The CMA9 banks (who are required to offer basic bank accounts) have fairly limited leeway to decline accounts to someone (though having defrauded that particular bank is one valid reason why)
Similar checks are already normal in the EU; national identity card systems, a population registry etc already prevent non-residents from opening bank accounts.
Just search "open bank account Germany" or similar, and you'll see you need proof of residence.
The checks tend to be done once by the government, rather than 10 times by 10 private businesses.
A penniless local citizen who is homeless (thus no residence address) has the right to a basic bank account and no issues with that - all the searches for "open bank account Germany" are obviously intended (just because it's in English and not German) for the special case of immigrants who don't necessarily have a right to live, work and bank there. The above discussion was about unbanked Britons - that's an entirely different discussion, the conditions, arguments and legal issues of poor/marginalized/homeless/addicted/etc people are completely different than the same aspects for immigrants without proper immigration documents, mixing both these groups together makes for a muddied conversation that can't come to any conclusion since what applies to one may be entirely opposite for the other.
If you go into London now, so many homeless people have those card readers as people are just using their cards or mobile pay. Definitely see the change after the pandemic where they advertised cash in supermarkets to be the spreader of the virus.
In Brazil, with a huge informal economy, you can now find all sorts of small street vendors with a card reader. Also the government has successfully rolled out Pix less than 2yrs ago, with now 50% of the population as registered users. Pix is the smartphone payment protocol which has basically nuked cash transactions countrywide, or at least where mobile networks work.
So, at least in Brazil, card readers are already on the way out for informal workers, and even some SMBs, and Pix with its QR codes and phone numbers are in.
This process has started in Puerto Rico, too. People still mostly use cash, but almost every vendor these days has ATH-Movil, a phone-based payment system through your bank.
Can confirm. Beggars and small street paddlers in China all just have their WeChat Pay QR code printed and laminated or you can scan their phone. Hell, summer of 2018 when I was in Hong Kong there was an American tourist(? granted, he did look like one) that was begging with his QR code printed so he could "fly back home".
> the later sometimes have little tap to pay machines
Its interesting how these have started to crop up more and more recently as cash has declined, for instance my local Gurdwara (Sikh temple) which traditionally takes donations in cash has a little card machine you tap on as you go in.
I wonder if when we get to a point where homeless people get them too, if people will trust them enough to do carded donations.
In Sweden they sometimes do it with a phone, as you can Swish to pay directly to phone numbers. I'm not sure how they register with a bank and their ID though, maybe it's not theirs or they share it.
Nevertheless, they really shouldn't exist. There should be enough housing and emergency provision to help people in emergencies, and they need to crack down hard on the foreigners that come and use it as a way of sending money back - e.g. https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/20/gang-of-beggars-pictured-gett...
Why do you think experience of Romanian immigrants in Australia would be relevant to the experience of people with Romanian beggars in the UK? The UK for years was a part of the EU and thus allowed unlimited, no-questions-asked immigration from Romania: the literal opposite of immigration policy in Australia.
I said nothing about Romanian immigrants, rather that homelessness was a real problem. The parent comment was choosing to suggest that all beggars were fake and that you "shouldn't encourage them".
They were using a rather poor metro.co.uk article as the only justification for that statement.
Homelessness is a real problem everywhere. That most of my experience comes from Australia does not make it less relevant. I've spent enough time in the UK to know if anything Australia is better about homelessness.
My citations spoke to the percentage of people that were abusing the welfare system. Something closely related to the perception that people are bad actors. It happens but it's a tiny percentage.
If you have a study about the number of Romanian gangs that are begging, then by all means share.
I don't think welfare is all that tightly related to begging, though.
As for numbers, the best I can find is a claim by UK police that the group of people arrested for begging was overwhelmingly not homeless. Not the most helpful stat, but it's something.
If that's at all approaching the overall rate of beggars, then even if a ton are legitimate, it would mean "homelessness is a real problem" isn't super relevant. And that if you want to help homeless people there would be better places to put your money.
Your comment was a non-sequitur: the person you were replying to mentioned Romanian beggars in the context of cash in the UK, but you were so pleased to have a chance to be insulted on the behalf of other people, you started talking about homeless people in Australia: something that has nothing to do with the point being made.
The comment doesn't mention metro.co.uk at all, so I don't know where you got that from, but if you think an article is poor you need to explain why.
Dylan16707 has already explained why you're just wrong about this case. The guy whose comment is now flagged and dead is correct about what's happened in the UK, and this is well known there so the fact that you think you know the country well may be wrong: many beggars on the street aren't "normal" beggars who are there for the reasons you'd expect. As he says, the overwhelming majority are not homeless.
The HN community struggles very badly when people post non-progressive facts, this is clearly one of them. If you're someone who flagged and killed the above comment about Romanian beggars, shame on you.
He replied to MY top level comment. I said nothing about being in the UK. I replied to a reply.
The article was about cashless transition in UK, however many places are now similar and HN is a global forum.
I saw the metro.co.uk comment in one of his other responses. But for the sake of completeness it has a bunch of photos of people with a Romanian number plates car arriving and begging, and 'allegely' not being disabled.
It's not a good citation. For so many reasons. It's anecdotal, none of the people were arrested or even talked to.
I replied with pieces of my experience, which I agreed are only tangentially related, precisely because I have less experience (though not none) in the UK.
There are very similar narratives around begging, immigration, welfare and refugees. Whether it's "they're not real" or "they're not real refugees" or "they're all living the high life and don't really need welfare". It's the same poisonous argument.
In the case of welfare, we know that this is not the case. That only 0.04% (Australia) were actually bad actors.
I will happily provide citations around the other ones, but I'm on mobile at the moment.
Not all beggars are homeless and not all homeless people beg. But suggesting they're all just taking people's money without need (i.e. getting rich) is almost certainly not supported by numbers.
I will happily retract my statement if a valid citation is offered. Dylan16707's citation is better, but as he admits is limited because it is people that were arrested for begging, not the situation of all beggars.
You're still citing stats from Australia, a country that literally puts illegal immigrants on an island, to dispute claims about the UK, a place that for years explicitly allowed unlimited legal immigration from much poorer countries and now has a massive problem with illegal immigrants crossing the channel.
I think you should retract your statement. You've been given multiple forms of evidence here:
1. Evidence from press investigations that includes actual video evidence of it happening, so you can see it with your own eyes.
2. Statistical evidence from government authorities.
The former you reject because, well, I'm not sure actually. You seem to think they actually were disabled but have no evidence. Or that if something is published in the Metro it can't be true, even when the underlying evidence is provided. Not sure.
The latter you're rejecting because, you claim, the set of arrested beggars is not equal to the set of all beggars, but you've given no reason to believe that this would make any difference. It's also an impossible claim to satisfy - literally any source of data about the problem will be based on a sample you could claim theoretically might have bias.
Here's a question: what evidence would you accept that this problem is real and that the UK situation doesn't match your experience in Australia?
Actually it's much worse than that the Australian government puts legitimate refugees on an island. I hate them for it. I digress.
1. Is not a good citation because it's anecdotal. I'm actually sure it probably happens, just like I'm sure that people do dodgy things the world over. What matters in this case is the first reply to my top level comment was asserting that I shouldn't give to beggars AT ALL because it encourages them, and asserting they're all Romanian, etc, etc.
2. Dylan16807 said he found things but didn't actually cite/link them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here are some actual UK citations for you:
> "Homeless charity, Crisis, estimates that over 80 per cent of beggars are homeless."[0]
> “Firstly, Thames Reach’s outreach teams including its London Street Rescue service, who are out and about on the streets of the capital working with London’s homeless 365 days of the year. They estimate that 80 per cent of people begging do so to support a drug habit. [1]
> “Secondly, when the Metropolitan Police did some drug testing of people arrested for begging, the figures indicated that between 70 and 80 per cent tested positive for Class A drugs. [1]
> “In a police crackdown in Birmingham on begging in autumn 2013, every single one of the 40 people arrested failed a drug test.”[1]
Whether you want to take this as evidence you shouldn't give to beggars is up to you, however it directly contradicts the "It's all the Romanians".
Now there absolutely are migrants that come to the UK and then end up in financial trouble (homeless, etc). This study[2] has a few interesting points about legal migrants from Eastern Europe.
> The Fitzpatrick study investigated the specific
experiences of MEH service users who had migrated to
the UK as adults, including ‘A10’ migrants from Central
and Eastern Europe, refugees and asylum seekers
and irregular migrants. Migrants were more likely than
other MEH service users to have slept rough but were
less likely to have stayed in hostels or other temporary
homeless accommodation, or to have applied to a
council as homeless (these findings are likely to relate to
the ineligibility of many migrants for housing or welfare
assistance in the UK).
That they are more likely to be properly homeless because of they're not eligible for some of the services. They lack access to a support network -- something that is associated with a risk of homelessness in most western countries.
> 51% of migrants reported some form of substance misuse, compared with 82% of non-migrants;
> 51% of migrants had engaged in street culture activities of some kind, compared with 74% of non-migrants; and
> 32% of migrants reported at least one form of institutional care experience, compared with 72% of
non-migrants.
They're less likely to abuse substances (but not none). Less likely to do 'street culture' things like begging and prostitution. Less likely to have mental illnesses.
The homelessness monitor: England 2017[3] suggests that the number of migrant to non-migrant rough sleepers is about 50% (it's on page 55ish). But this is still very different from the "they're coming in their cars and sending the money home", as opposed to legal migration and then ending up in trouble (something that has no doubt changed with brexit, but there isn't a more up-to-date version).
In Britain, specifically, one of the issues is that the law says a subset of people are to be denied banking. Banks must check; those people are not allowed to open bank accounts, or be added as users of shared accounts.
That's the UK Hostile Environment "right to bank" policy (orwellian for "no right to bank").
It affects undocumented migrants and asylum seekers of course, but it also anyone whose papers are not in good order, whose visa expires and they don't manage to obtain new paperwork in time (and that event may trigger closure of existing accounts if unlucky), people who've grown up in the UK and only when they turn 18 discover they don't have normal rights, and a surprisingly large amount of government incompetence (notable example Windrush people), and some irrational cruelty against people who have not broken any rules.
In short, banking in the UK is a government-controlled privilege not a right, and the government of the day isn't exactly strong on treating everyone well. But most people take banking for granted and think of it as available to everyone.
Personally I think that access to essential basics such as buying food really needs to be open to everyone, not "subject to status". A cashless society that prohibits by law the means of payment for an underclass of people in it is a cruel society indeed, and pretty much guaranteed to increase modern slavery and abuse. We have enough of that in the UK already.
I am from the Netherlands and studied in the UK for half a year. I asked if I should open a British bank account to save on transaction costs every time I bought something, and to make paying my rent easier. Other students from abroad told me not to bother, because it would take 3 months at least to setup a bank account.
They also said I could probably pay my rent in cash if I asked (the landlord was actually rather pleased when I asked her if I could pay in cash). I ended up paying for everything in cash for half a year, as most places would not accept my debit card. I don't know how expats solve this that need a bank account to receive their salary..
The biggest issue I see with a cashless society is that we stop owning our money.
"Your" money in the bank is just a record in somebody else's database. You do not own the database, you do not have any oversight over how this database is used and your access is limited to their "permissions" list.
There is a very large area between the absolutes of "all your worldly possessions as cash under your mattress" and all your payment ability as numbers in someone elses database which can be cut off any moment.
Personally I'd recommend (and do) keeping enough months of living expenses in cash somewhere convenient.
In the hypothetical situation that me and my wife are locked out of all my bank accounts (multiple in multiple countries) and that somehow my family and friends are unwilling/unable to assist I still have assets I can sell. But sure, if you're planning on/for becoming a fugitive from the law (lessay) then it might make sense to keep cash or something like gold. I'm really not planning or going to worry about that sort of low probability event. I have considered keeping gold but that's more because I like how shiny it is than any real concern.
Do you recall the Hong Kong democracy protests and how they started using cash instead of electronic payments to move around the subway? Now imagine if we didn't have cash.
Laying aside the questionable sources of these claims, I did try and pay for a meal in cash at the weekend and the pub I was in said "Oh no, we don't take cash" and frankly I think that's just unacceptable. Fine yes, 99% of the time I have a card, but on the occasions where I do want to pay in cash I should be able to and it's just crappy service to refuse. It's not like they don't have tills, they just decided it was easier for them not to bother.
Like taking cards, taking cash isn’t free for a business - between the cost to deposit, the need to physically take the cash to the bank, and the need to keep a float.
So there’s going to be a business decision to be made - is it worth the time and effort to take cash if basically nobody wants to use it? It’s easy to see why a business might just not be interested, in the same way they wouldn’t be interested in taking a personal cheque.
Given the general spending patterns in the UK it feels like the only way businesses will continue accepting cash payments in the long term will be if is legally required. There are some decent arguments in favour of doing that, but without a firm requirement to do so it doesn’t seem unacceptable for a business to refuse a payment method that’s pretty unpopular.
But, at least here in Michigan, the cost of taking non-cash payment is enough higher (vs. cash) that many gas stations offer a small discount for paying (for low-margin gasoline) with cash.
It took my manager in food service like a half hour to count like 6 tills. For a gas station its probably even faster. Probably not more than a dozen dollars in labor to count the cash at the end of the day. IDK about how the cash is transported like if businesses are using armored cars or what and what that costs.
I don't know what it is like in the US but the UK banks charge quite a lot to deposit cash (Barclays is 0.9% for example). Also for a small business it's yet another job that the proprietor will need to handle themselves. Then you have the problems with staff dipping into the till, this almost sank the business of someone I know.
Newspapers often publish stories like these off the back of a single source. In this case, it’s “a report from the Royal Society of Arts commissioned by cash machine network Link”.
Not to say it’s not newsworthy or even inaccurate, but it’s worth noting that this is a report commissioned by one of tHe UK’s biggest ATM operators.
Second, there are costs to managing cash, especially when it’s a niche payment method. However, I’ve yet to see a place with human cashiers that doesn’t take cash. The big problem usually is vending machines / supermarket checkout machines whose cash readers have stopped working. Also the rise of “card only” machines, but again, these are placed alongside machines that take cash.
I do agree it’s frustrating though, if you’re faced with machines that won’t take cash.
Unfortunately, unless society starts using cash more (vs cards), this will just keep happening.
Not only is the study commissioned by the ATM network, it’s also published by the Telegraph - so be wary. This paper runs an explicit campaign called the “Keep Cash Campaign”, so you shouldn’t expect to see anything that examines this issue seriously (if that wasn’t already clear from the headline).
That said, paying attention to the needs of unbanked or at-risk people is important and can be overlooked too often.
Hmmm, so given the close affiliation between the Telegraph and the Tory party - do we know why the Telegraph is so pro-cash? What's the political angle on it? We can be certain it's not because of its importance to the disadvantaged.
Low c conservative, not too fond of new technologies or rapid change.
Also classic upper l Liberal tendency towards freedom from tracking, Id cards etc.
In terms of money, limiting cash affects small businesses whose owners tend to vote conservative.
In recent years the Tory party has a larger share of "working people" lower middle class, who also prefer cash, (cash in hand etc) but who won't read the Telegraph.
Basically it's about their voter base.
----
For me, I tend to use cash often for small things from smaller places but in larger amounts for street taxis (good, fast and very easy to get), for street / box charity and church service donations.
At the risk of being reductive, basically “Aging Tory readership thinks all change is bad” and the Telegraph will capitalise on that. That doesn’t mean there can’t be good reasons, only that the source is something to be skeptical of.
It’s similar to their “we should switch back to imperial measurements” campaigning - a sop to a particular kind of conservative UK reader.
I'm interested to read the vast majority of comments being pro-cash with concerns over security or convenience.
I'm not sure where you all live, but as a counterpoint, I live in Australia and I don't use cash hardly at all any more. I don't even use cards, or take my wallet. If I have my phone on me I can charge anything to any of the 4 cards I have in my phone's wallet (also I can bring up my official Medicare card, drivers license, etc. on my phone). So whenever I go out I just grab my phone and keys.
Everywhere accepts this. Whether I'm paying for a coffee or a $2,000 TV, I just unlock my phone and tap it on a payment terminal. It takes literally a second. For larger purchases (over A$200) you have to enter a PIN.
I certainly wouldn't like to go back to carrying notes and coins around - making sure you have enough, handing it over, waiting for change to be organised (and waiting for them to do this with everyone before me).
Pretty much all establishments still take cash but I don't use it, and most of my friends are the same.
Yes that's all fine and good, but finance is at the heart of structured civilization, and we're note quite there yet with respect to open, transparent systems, that have privacy and resiliency.
The INTERAC network in Canada is owned by the banks and it's yet another 99% margin rake on small businesses. It's a game of leverage - the big chains can negotiate a deal, the smaller vendors are out.
The Canadian government just invoked a kind of 'Marshall Law' because protestors were honking horns and not moving. While I'm glad the Police moved them (and should have sooner), the fact is, personal financial bank accounts of individuals not very related to the transactions were shut down by the federal government.
A politicized situation should not allow for the cancellation of the flow of money, that should be strictly an issue of the justice system, and then, proportionately.
The thought that the gov, or a bank, or Amazon could stop me from giving someone $40 for almost whatever reason, is Orwellian.
All of our leaders relish, at least on some level, the opportunity for control - and I'm not being conspiratorial here, I do think that for now things are benign, but it takes the smallest 'problem' for things to go south.
I think we need a system that has privacy, that has no fees, and whereupon individuals cannot be 'de-banked' from the system in any way, i.e where it would take some act of interdictive oversight for the justice system, with a warrant, to get access to, or control some transactions (i.e. major drug bust, bribery, organized crime).
In effect: we need a 'digital cash' that's 'just like cash', meaning that it's open, anonymous, secure, maybe not very useful to transport large quantities, there's no arbitrary means of interdiction etc..
The vast majority of my transactions are done with credit cards. Contactless payment is quick and the points are nice. But when it comes to tipping people (yes, I live in America), shopping at immigrant grocery stores, or dining at mom & pop restaurants, I pay cash because it helps them out. Sure they're underreporting their revenue, but hardly to the degree that Fortune 500 companies are. I just hope my tea leaf salad money isn't being funneled back to Rohingya genocide.
Also, cash is great for those who have trouble budgeting or just barely make enough money. It's not uncommon for folks to take out their allowance for the week and only keep to spending that. A quick glance in the wallet gives you a very tangible and real account balance. Numbers in an app are too abstract.
If there's a time to invoke Chesterton's fence, it's definitely with regards to cash.
Morally and philosophically I agree with you! Cash needs to exist for personal liberties.
But I've been in the states for 7 years now and I can't think of one time I used cash when purchasing anything. Except the few times I picked something up from OfferUp (a palm tree, some other plants).
Recently I encountered this kind of horse shit visiting friends in Santa Monica.
Half the places we went to for food or drinks refused cash, if the federal government isn't going to prohibit this the cities should at least do it. Plenty of people only have access to cash, it's arguably discriminatory which is already illegal in the US for businesses serving the public.
I'm just waiting for a savvy LA attorney to gather together enough homeless people from Skid Row for a class action lawsuit and take this issue to the supreme court on discriminatory grounds.
discrimination isn't illegal, only against specific groups (e.g. race). Discriminating on factors that affect those groups is legal, as long as the intent is not to use it as a proxy for protected group.
You're not wrong, but discrimination in businesses serving the public is a pretty hairy subject.
The protected groups are broad enough and the spirit of the law clearly such that there's a pretty straightforward path to arguing refusing to accept cash at public restaurants/bars is discriminating against minorities which tend to overlap substantially with poverty, or religions that prohibit the use of debt/credit where cash would be perfectly fine.
The fact of the matter is this move towards cashless retail commerce alienates significant numbers of citizens, and those people overlap substantially with the existing protected groups.
If you're going to refuse cash, it should be a private members-only club.
Additionally, I would say this is actually fairly low opposition compared to the popular buy-in in Britian for any other sort of change. People fear everything new, all of the time.
I would guess this is an attempt to quash the drug trade, which requires cash. I'm sure people will find a workaround though. It would restrict many private person-to-person sales, so it would boost retailers quite a bit. Garage sales and the like will be a lot more difficult. Farmer's markets too.
Also it makes it easier to track down people who the police are looking for. That sounds fine until you realize how many false convictions exists and how eager cops are to find, "medium height, medium build, medium skin with a red or blue shirt on."
If I trusted law enforcement / justice system to be accountable and right their wrongs, I'd be more okay with it. They can freeze your assets and make it really hard to get a lawyer and no cash to afford one. Also it would suck during hurricanes and other natural disasters.
Assume the worst before you sign over your privacy. It's just not worth it, I pay taxes, the government can continue to provide cash as a transaction method for citizens.
I'm sure the credit card companies are lobbying to push this through as well. 3% on all transactions forever ain't nothin'.
So what's the benefit of forcing this on people? Why is having a choice between cash or card on any transaction bad?
And before you say "Canada", take note that there is no evidence that such a thing happened. One person was reported by a local politician to have had her accounts frozen, but when a list of donors was leaked later, no matching name was found. AFAICT, and I've looked, there is no decent evidence that any donors had their accounts frozen. It's just a right wing talking point.
The donated funds were frozen, temporarily, while the border blockage and other illegal protest activities were cleared up. But donors? Nope.
Even if I give you your denial, Justin Trudeau's administration did at the very least threaten to do it. If you were living with someone who threatened financial abuse against you, would you not be seriously concerned about them being financially abusive?
But that's more rhetorical. I don't care that much what you think cause I know you'd be downplaying it if it did happen. And whenever it does happen (again?), you'll be out there denying it, carrying water with all the others for the establishment's ability to overreach, shielding them from consequences and making it more likely to happen in the future. You'll do it until such time as it happens to you, and then you'll be confused, and possibly sorry.
"More than 200 bank accounts worth nearly $8 million were frozen when the federal government used emergency powers to end a massive protest occupation of downtown Ottawa."
Those bank accounts belonged to protesting truck owners, not just donors, it’s right there in the article you linked.
The donated funds in the receiving accounts were frozen, temporarily, as part of the effort to end the situation, sure.
But not donor accounts simply for having made the donation, as was implied in the above post.
Your article does say “Some Conservative MPs have said constituents have reported that their bank accounts were frozen after they made donations”, but if you look further into that it seems to have been one MP talking about one constituent, and that doesn’t seem to be verifiable.
One shortcoming that I found recently as I was selling my car is we don’t seem to have a good system for instant payments for large amounts of money.
Having lived in the UK for a while I noticed how bank transfers there seemed to be instant regardless of the amount (just my experience, never did anything over a few thousand).
But I was stuck in the position of either asking for way to much cash that I would be comfortable having to then take into the bank (and probably hard to find a bank that even had that much to withdraw in the first place) or accept a bank cheque which while most people say it’s “as good as cash” I noticed certain banks like NAB have a disclaimer that they can cancel them if they are reported lost or stolen.
I ended up accepting the bank cheque on Friday afternoon, couldn’t deposit it till Monday and then had 3 nervous days of waiting for it to clear.
While PayID and Osko seem to be taking us in the right direction, the limits are still too restrictive for large in person transactions like this.
I sold a car through gumtree here in Aus a few years ago, the buyer sent a bank transfer, I received it, went about my day. Seems very similar to the UK (where I have spent most of my life and still have accounts/make transfers).
As far as I understand bank transfers here are only instant if you are both with the same bank or you use PayID/Osko, which seems to have the caveat of your bank can set their own limit as to maximum transfer size (A quick google shows anywhere from 5k to 30k) and not all banks support this (HSBC don’t).
Of course you could ask the buyer to transfer the money and wait for it to clear before handing over the keys, but that just moves the uncomfortable and stressful situation to the other party (I wouldn’t want to transfer someone money and then have to wait a few days for it to clear before they handed me the keys) and doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue.
Interesting. Looks like NPP was kicked off here a while ago, which seems to offer similar features to Faster Payments in the UK, though it looks like not all banks support it fully (including HSBC https://www.hsbc.com.au/ways-to-bank/online-banking/new-paym...)
Osko is instant but basically all banks will delay large transfers to new accounts. Some banks do this for amounts as low as $1000. Not for a technical reason. Just to give the owner enough time to notice the sms and email in case your account gets breached so you can call customer support to lock everything down.
I’d like to see the option to setup something like a pre-authorised payment. Ideally the same as doing an EFT/Osko/NPP transfer, but the funds are held in a escrow like situation by the bank for a period of time the bank deems “safe”.
Giving the account owners enough time to contact the bank if the payment is unauthorised, but when the waiting period is up you can then choose to release the funds at a time that suits you (eg. for a car sale, when you hand over the keys) or you can choose to can the transaction returning the funds to your account.
Wishful thinking I know, given how much of a mess the instant payment system is at the moment. I had an account that supported PayID with Macquarie and tried to transfer money to another PayID account with Up bank and found that because one of the banks (Macquarie iirc) didn’t support whatever underlying payment system Up used (Osko possibly) I wasn’t able to use PayID and had to use regular EFT instead.
The technical limit for the system is GBP 1,000,000, and the lower limit is up to the bank to determine.
If I were selling a car in the UK, I'd ask for a bank transfer (e.g. laptop/mobile) and wait for it to confirm. If I wished to be especially careful, I'd meet the other person at their bank, and provide the cashier my bank details.
Except when, you know, "the eftpos machine isn't working today".. for real though, "cash only" signs are a very common sight outside the Sydney CBD. (can't speak for other cities)
Absolutely! It just sort of seemed to 'happen' here in Australia over the past ~10 years. It's always a bit surprising when this comes up that this isn't the norm elsewhere.
I personally love the convenience, but admittedly I'm not the demographic that this article is talking about.
For those in the US worried about cash "disappearing", see this legislation recently introduced in the House [1]. It specifically counters the problems of crypto-currencies (the excess energy requirements, the transaction processing speed, etc) while providing the same guarantees as physical notes and coins and for settlement of public/private debts.
For those outside the US that are nout (hide-)bound by the US's antiquated banking system, cashless/contactless credit and debit processing has dramatically reduced physical cash usage everywhere.
Physical cash (notes/coins) is likely to mostly die out over this century. The issues raised about anonymity and traceability etc are solvable with appropriate legislation, regulation, and design.
First, there was a mandate for Chip+PIN (not signature) from the various payment networks/processors. The EMV standards for this dramatically reduced fraud and the transfer of risk from the merchant to the network reduced costs.
Second, in many countries (I'm in Australia), interchange fees are regulated and capped, while costs for processing card transactions must be separate and advertised to consumers and also limited.
Third, the introduction of contactless EMV, along with high "floor limits" (AUD200 in Australia's case) means that for the majority of transactions, there is no physical interaction required.
Fourth, most countries not only have the two primary payment networks (ie Visa/MC) but also have a third network, usually sponsored by the local monetary authority and/or local banks, for debit transactions tied to bank accounts (EFTPOS network in Australia).
Fifth, in EU, Australia, and other places, there are now "instant payment" networks, with direct settlement between accounts at the monetary authority's accounts. (New Payments Platform/Osko/PayID in Australia) [2]
I fell in love with NFC (tap to pay) when I visited Australia, and I haven't carried around cash in the states for 5 or so years now (and now I'm not even using my card anymore, just double tap a button on my watch and tap against the card reader). Before coming back to the states I was in China and since I didn't have a Chinese ID card, couldn't use WePay so had to use cash or UnionPay for everything (I hear it is easier for foreigners now).
Any opinions from the crypto crowd? Cash seems like the ultimate libertarian way to go. My cash is physically in my wallet - nobody can touch it or take it. It is indisputably mine. And I know shops, vendors, and pubs will accept it. As soon as I de-materialize the cash into some electronic form, then I become dependent on (1) my phone provider (2) my computer (3) whatever coin exchange is involved (4) whatever method the merchant uses to convert electronic units into national currency so that they can pay their taxes (and probably their suppliers and employees). There are plenty of 100% cash business out there - I think because they like the same liberties which crypto offers...
Speaking for myself, I have high hopes for Bitcoin as a freedom technology. It’s climbing the adoption curve rapidly as a store of value. Hopefully the Lightning network gets it the rest of the way to medium of exchange. Lightning offers the same security and permission-less guarantees as the base blockchain, but adds instant settlement and ultra-low fees.
Digital cash is the goal, right? The problem with cash as we use it is that is a poor store of value because it is not a real commodity, but just a liability of the government. Bitcoin with Lightning could be both.
edit: Britain and the whole world should run from CBDCs at warp 10. That’s a total financial panopticon.
Unfortunately the lightning network re-introduces payment processor middle-men which is unacceptable in my opinion. Yes, anyone can open a channel with a merchant, but it will take at least 2 expensive on-chain transactions (open/close the channel) and it requires you to commit some capital to the channel which you can’t use elsewhere in the meantime.
Payment processors would also have the ability to censor transactions which is antithetical to the core ideals of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. This kind of processor structure would be fine in a cryptocurrency like Monero where the processor would not be able to see the sender address, recipient address, or transction amount. But in Bitcion where all that information is visible it is infeasible to use lightning network and maintain censorship resistance.
Lightning also completely fails in its original design goal which is to allow scaling while preventing node centralization due to expensive hardware requirements. Since a lightning node must maintain open channels with other nodes to operate, and since open channels require commitment of capital, and since the number of open channels required scales directly with number of users and merchants, only the wealthy with the deepest pockets can afford to operate a useful lightning node.
But I do agree that we should avoid CBDCs like the plague.
1. On chain transactions are fairly cheap and have been for a long time. What do you mean by expensive?
2. How can payment processors censor transactions? I don’t think you understand Lightning. It’s onion routed, similar to TOR. Routing nodes only know previous hop and the next hop, which they already have open channels with. They don’t even know if the previous hop was the first, or if the next hop is the last. Why/how could they censor it?
3. An open channel does not lock anything. When you commit funds to a channel, you can use those funds in the Lightning network. It’s not like they’re useless until you close the channel. That’s like saying that putting dollars on a pre-paid card is “committing capital” that you can’t use elsewhere. No, you’re just using an alternative payment method.
4. It doesn’t completely fail. It is somewhat more centralized than the layer 1, but that is to be expected. It’s good enough and private enough to be useful for most things. The blockchain doesn’t go away. You can still use layer 1. You can still use coinjoins or mixers or atomic Monero swaps if you want.
1. I see current fees are around $1.90/txn these days. My bad, it’s been quite some time since I’ve made a Bitcoin transaction. If on-chain transactions are cheap, what motivation does a user have to use lightning?
2. I actually didn’t know it was onion routed, that’s good! There is still the possibility of censorship at the edges though, which could propagate throughout the network via “I won’t open a channel with anyone who opens a channel with X”. Although this issue exists in most federated systems like Mastodon and Matrix. I don’t know a way to solve it other than full anonymity. I’m assuming it’s public knowledge who has an open channel with who.
3. My understanding is that opening a channel locks the funds into that channel. As you said you can still use those funds for lightning transactions, assuming that the other party is well connected and you can route to your destination via them.
4. I do agree that it can be useful for most things while at the same time failing its design goals. The thing I’m extremely wary of is creating a system which handles 99% of use cases perfectly but accidentally degrades the service for the rest. If lightning gets enough adoption that it handles 99% of Bitcoin traffic then I’d expect 2 things to happen. First, a small set of hub lightning nodes would emerge which everyone would route through. These nodes would be subject to KYC/AML laws by governments and would be required to begin censoring transactions in the manner described in #2 by refusing to open a channel with anyone who either is a node that does not comply with KYC/AML, or an individual who has not jumped through enough hoops. Second, anyone who makes an on-chain transaction that is not lightning related is instantly suspicious, like handing someone a brown paper bag full of cash. I think this would be an unfortunate state for Bitcoin to end up in as it would have become the very thing it sought to destroy.
On atomic swaps. I think they’re really great. The only issue is I can’t imagine myself ever converting Monero to Bitcoin for fear of ending up with coins tainted in some way that I’m not sophisticated enough to discover until it’s too late. I don’t have a solution for this.
Finally I want to say that I appreciate your response, as there is more nuance to the lightning network than I initially presented. Admittedly I was a little overzealous with my comment above, but I’m glad we can have a honest discussion about things. Rare on the internet these days!
1. Honestly, you could be right about fees. I don't keep up with them normally. I use the Strike app for buying Bitcoin, which doesn't charge any fees, including on-chain fees. That said, $1 or $2 might or might not be expensive, depending on how you view the role of on-chain transactions. I see on-chain transactions as "I'm using this to buy a house or car, not a cup of coffee."
2. Private channels exist. Most channels are private. Only channels used for routing must be public. So if you're just opening a channel for payments, the only way for a third-party to know would be use to on-chain analytics to maybe catch you. The actual channel wouldn't be broadcast to the Lightning network. Definitely not perfect, this will always be a downside of the transparent ledger.
3. Yup, this is ultimately the real problem with Lightning, which is that it tends to centralize around large connected nodes. Hopefully, payment splitting will resolve some this.
A lot of people worry about tainted coins, but I think regulators will realize that's a losing battle. Eventually the whole network will be tainted coins.
Interesting read! Apparently its concepts were taken over by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler but I've never seen that in use before so idk of it's the dreaded never to be done micropayments thing or not but hey, it's a start, and less dead than mondex.
Cash is good, in fact Bitcoin was originally proposed as “Peer-to-peer digital cash”. Crypto attempts to extend some of the properties of cash to the internet. Unfortunately Bitcoin has kind of failed in this goal at this point and become used more as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange.
You have good points about the physicality of cash and the guarantee that merchants will accept it. Crypto can be carried around physically with a hardware wallet, though it’s still not quite as good as cash in this regard. And that guarantee that cash is accepted comes with legal tender status. You can’t be guaranteed to be able to spend CAD in US for example, but plenty of the world has multiple legal tenders, see Europe.
I like cryptocurrencies, but admittedly they are still pretty clunky to use. Bitcoin has a lot of development momentum behind it, but I don’t see it as the feasible option going forwards due to the scaling shitshow and lack of privacy (no, taproot won’t solve this because you need privacy by default otherwise private transaction default to “suspicious”). Ethereum is great, I really like Vitalik’s leadership and it arguably has even more development momentum than Bitcoin. Unfortunately it also has the scaling and privacy issues like Bitcoin and additionally it seems to be primarily used to create pump and dump scam coins and shit like NFTs which are always going to clog up the base layer. Monero seems to have the most potential to me. It is like Bitcoin but has default privacy and on-chain scaling (we will have to see how that holds up under more adoption) without the dogma.
Honestly, I think the solution to crypto and other e-payment methods being hard to use is for the next government that wants to adopt crypto to go with a PoS crypto. Then they can purchase a reserve, stake it, and issue a series of notes keyed to some portion of that reserve (in other words, if their reserve was split into a billion notes, they would have a billion unique serial numbers).
Citizens could then just use the notes (with counterfeit measures in place) or bring it to the bank to deposit, and (at their discretion) withdraw on-chain. If the citizens want the staking rewards, they'd have to self-custody on-chain, but the nation could implement a system where users/merchants could scan the notes on receipt (which would validate the authenticity, as well as provide information about circulation which would help with anti-counterfeit measures). Upon scanning, you'd then get a kickback from the staking rewards, proportional to the amount and the date of last scan.
Sounds like a nightmare, but it makes it accessible to homeless people, elderly, etc. and it's honestly more private than existing digital payments; scanning would be at your discretion.
Sure but doesn't that essentially ask the government to back the whole thing? In which case, how is that scenario any different than life w/o cryptocurrency (i.e. physical cash + debit cards + credit cards)?
The government is custodying the crypto, sure. But they can't arbitrarily print more. E.g. you can verify that your note is tied to some amount of crypto on the blockchain.
If you want to self-custody, you can. If you want to make payments on-chain, you can.
The cash is just for convenience and making it more accessible to people who might not have phones. Blending custodial solutions as a way to abstract the complexity of actually using crypto away from people, with the actual blockchain they serve as an interface to, lets people choose their approach based on their comfort level.
Bitcoin has already won; Satoshi proved it in the paper. Its pre-existing longer blockchain has more proof-of-work put into it than the competitors, they cannot overtake it because they're backed by the same underlying asset (energy). The demand for mining one squeezes out the market for the other.
I think lightning network is the next closet. You are correct in that you still need internet, but CBDCs will as well.
For lightning you will either need to host your own node, or rely on a third party node.
Lightning offers a high degree of privacy and fungibility, no exchanges needed, and freezing is not possible. ~2 second confirmation, final settlement.
It is backed by the Bitcoin network which is extremely secure, and not very generous with attack surfaces. To doublespend on it an attacker would need to use more hashpower (energy) than what the network is currently being secured by.
As it would require an enormous amount of resources, and since it is nearly impossible to pull off, mostly now attacks are trying to convince the general population to not use it with fear based tactics, general misinformation, and half truths; which should give you a good idea of how valuable it really is over any permissioned digital money.
Then you have to make the decision of how much you're willing to risk in taking out of your "totally safe" under-the-mattress stash each day, and that runs into inconvenience of if too high you lost a lot after a few beers on a Friday night, if too small you can't buy everything you wanted in the spur of the moment.
In an entirely financialized world, control of money is used as a substitute for violence. Demonetization, sanctions, unbanking are increasingly used for behavioral adjustment. People who want to reduce the risk of monetary violence will learn from whatever the chinese and russians have been doing for decades
Also known as the "The Daily Telegraph can quote someone saying "against its will" when its only 20% against it, as long as they also have doubts about it".
What would you consider "the will of the UK" to be on this issue?
What did you consider "the will of the UK" to be at the last election, or over the issue of Brexit? Presumably we need some mechanism to decide the answer to such questions, and a majority is the one we've leaned into for some time.
Democracy is absolutely not about individual anything.
You might want to add individual self-determination and rights to the governing principles of a particular organization, state or nation, but there's nothing about the idea of the people voting (directly or indirectly) on policy that offers any guarantee of any kind of self-determination.
Democracy absolutely can be mob rule, or put differently, mob rule is not inherently not democratic. Whether it is wise or just however, are different questions entirely, and so most democracies in the last few hundred years have supplemented their democratic systems of governance with fundamentally liberal but non-democratic constitutions that limit the scope of majoritarian decision making.
> Democracy is absolutely not about individual anything.
You can write that, but clearly most of the democratic world very strongly disagrees. We can nitpick the literal definitions of the words, but we know that people include self-determination and human rights with democracy.
In next 10-20 years we all will be happily implanting chips with information about banking, tax, health, vote, employment history, criminal history, credit history, social score, DNA records, fingerprint records, driver license, keys to home, car and office, the BIOS of your notebook and phone.
In name of progress (e.g. cars vs horses), whoever does not have an implant will be designated as anti-chipper and will be marginalized, not being able to participate in most of social events, like sport and musical events, driving cars, public transportation, flying, shopping.
Maybe our generation (20-60 olds) will be able to come-by, moving out of big cities and living country side, the new Tick-Tock generation will not be able to understand how the life could be otherwise.
> The public now withdraws around £100m less from cash machines each day compared to before the pandemic
I found this astonishing. I haven’t used cash in so many years that I can’t even remember which decade I last used it. The fact that so many people are still using ATMs astonished me.
I pretty much stopped using cash because of the pandemic. Pretty much every place I shopped refused cash to start with and I never went back. I had the same £60 in my wallet for two years and only used it because the notes are going out of circulation soon.
Having said that I still keep some cash on hand for emergencies.
Just because it’s easy to use contactless doesn’t mean we should lose the privacy that cash gives us. The only people who win from this situation is the governments ability to control at a more granular level.
A cash-only society is also a more expensive one, for everyone: not only individuals are forced u to opening a bank account and owning a card, but the businesses have to pay fees to accept card payments.
I have seen many small businesses go back to cash only at the reopening last year to save money. If we stretch mentally, maybe a seemingly easier, more secure means of payment (cashless) can ruin the web of small shops in our cities...
The move towards cashless was one of the reasons I left Norway 14 years ago. This is matter of such magnitude that it makes sense to vote with your feet.
Interesting .. We just spent a long weekend in a very popular seaside resort in the North and found that many shops were not accepting cash at all (fear of Covid living on plastic banknotes I guess), but many more were only accepting cash due to the exorbitant card fees now being levied by card companies. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out...
Simply, this is an attack to permanently seize economic power and to subdue a society and culture. Words mean nothing to the architects of these plans.
Discussing this at all is like being jumped and when your attacker fails to get you into handcuffs, you try to have a discussion about the pros and cons of being handcuffed.
I don’t advocate being anti-racist on Twitter. I don’t post #blm stories on Instagram.
However, I do use cash in person and refuse to patronize establishments that don’t accept it. I do this specifically to support the underbanked. It’s not much, but it is my way of combatting systemic racism.
> Around 10 million people, or one in five adults, would struggle to manage in a society without cash, a report from the Royal Society of Arts commissioned by cash machine network Link found.
I wish someone could produce a cryptocurrency that actually worked (high throughput, anonymous, distributed account recovery, good ux). Tap-to-pay, but without enslaving the world to the whims of HSBC etc.
This happened in Fiji, a couple of years ago, in terms of public transport. The government made it illegal for bus operators to accept cash as a form of payment.
A cashless society will be a disaster in other ways, too. You think banks are bad now? You dislike fees? If there's no cash, third parties will be able to hike percentages on transfers of all kinds. You could see credit card fees of 10+ percent, which will be passed on to you even if you're not aware of them.
Cash has to exist as an option to keep middlemen honest. Until, that is, we achieve communism... but that's several decades away at a minimum.
People don't sell drugs to help people, they sell them to make easy money. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if drugs didn't destroy the live of so many people, and the lives of those around them. Not all drugs are so bad, and that is reflected in their classification under the Dangerous Drugs Act.
I can only assume that you or anyone you care about hasn't died or destroyed their life due to drug addition?
> I can only assume that you or anyone you care about hasn't died or destroyed their life due to drug addition?
Actually, no, but slight correction: they were killed by the war on drugs, not the drugs. Similarly, I know multiple people who are almost definitely only alive today due to the existence of darknet marketplaces.
Absolutely. Possession shouldn't be a crime; just the intent to supply. The best way to help addicts is to supply them with safe places to go to administer drugs, and provide registered addicts with safe drugs and support for free. It's expensive, but less expensive than wasting resources treating people that are essentially victims, as criminals.
It's important to note that "the war on drugs" is an American concept; not how things are done in the rest of the world. It's almost like they learned nothing from the prohibition!
Most people who use drugs do little harm to themselves or others. And as someone who has sold illegal drugs, I can tell you people sell drugs for many different reasons, not just as some get-rich-quick scheme as your TV-show-level analysis suggests.
Most of the people I have encountered over the years have sold drugs for money, or to feed their own habit. I'm aware that people dealers at the bottom don't make much money; although most of them think they do as they don't often have many better options.
The highest classed drugs (as in class A) have the biggest negative impact on society, and I don't thin that anyone sensible would try to argue that heroin, cocaine or crystal meth are harmless; or beneficial in any way? I can be argued that people should the personal right to take anything they want; and while I agreed with that in principle, people and society have to pick up the pieces. If drugs were available in a regulated way could solve many problems, but it would have to be done in such a way to it doesn't create a industry which profits from peoples addition.
IF only individuals could make the best decisions about their health. The idea of some ideal perfect "logical" consciousness separate from the real world is a myth.
I drink too much, I eat too much. I know this, and understand it's not a good thing long-term, but I still do it.
More addictive substances would likely make that worse. I'm glad some things are made intentionally hard for my lizard brain to get a hold of.
The best choices for a person, definitionally, are those they themselves deem best (whether they carry them out or not). No other person has a higher authority to decide "best" for them.
It's not any second party's place to say. Your actions plainly demonstrate that you find pleasurable choices (overeating, alcohol) better for you than healthy ones. That's fine and good.
Short term pleasure over long term health is a legitimate choice, if you (or anyone else) wishes to make it for your (or their) own body. Not everyone needs to uniformly prioritize quantity of life over quality of life.
Choosing to pay electronically is great, when it's your choice. It's convenient. Eliminating cash is terrible, it means every single transaction is tracked by private and government entities. It's incompatible with freedom.
Also if it wasn't for drug dealers we wouldn't have drugs, and parties would be far less fun.
