I'm no Luddite by any means, but on this topic I side with those who consider physical cash transaction a civil rights issue.
I suppose people in some EU countries, for example, which have mostly (?) transitioned to a cashless society don't mind what a massive invasion of privacy it is.
On the other hand, I do understand the advantages, the convenience, and perhaps the inevitability of going cashless. Already most of our financial transactions are being tracked and circulated ("peddled") in countless ways, as are our online activity, phone conversations, real-time location.. At this rate, future humans will look back at our concept of "privacy" and not comprehend what it means.
I don't think it's just a privacy issue. We've seen companies like Facebook, Twitter, Chase, and even Mastercard cut off groups they consider undesirable.
For social media, it's irritating but the ability to stop you from collecting or spending "your" money is terrifying because it could be applied by policy or accident and the result is the same. No one should have that power.
And what if a business gets cut off? Or the local internet/cell tower system goes down for 24 hours? I have a local grocers near me where the card scanning machine sometimes breaks. The centralised cashless system is great when it works but it has a lot of complicated parts that require time and specialist knowledge to fix.
It would be royally foolish to phase out cash for small transactions. The option needs to be there.
Card payments, including contactless payments, can be done offline. However the card has to be configured by the bank to allow this, which I guess some do not.
It's a very specific notion of "done" - you can record an offline authorization event; so the customer-visible part is done, but the actual payment is not.
The merchant is not going to have any access to that money whatsoever until/unless connectivity is restored. They can't pay their suppliers or employees with that money while they're offline.
It's pretty much the digital equivalent of scribbling "Bob authorised to pay me $12.34" on a notebook that you're going to bring to the bank afterwards.
Even if the transaction is online, you don't see the money in your bank account straight away. It takes a few days for card payments to settle, and usually the payment processor will have a predefined schedule as to when you get paid. The context of my comment was on the payment terminal being offline for a day or two.
Emphasis on "can". The system at the point of sale that processes the card has to support that as well, quite a few of them don't and rely on some sort of centralized infrastructure to function, at least around here in Germany.
I agree, it's about much more than privacy - the right to have transactions (financial and otherwise) without intermediation and ubiquitous surveillance by governments/corporations is a huge moral issue of whether we live in a free society or a human farm. This is the stuff cyberpunk dystopia are made of!
I do agree cashless huge is privacy invasion but also inequality issue.
Anecdote: My local trains have cashless ticket machines inside (machines on bus/trams are still cash/card). Every day I see people suprised and asking someone - "Can you buy a ticket for me with card and I give you 1,5€ in cash?".
I totally agree. It also puts tourists and travelers at a disadvantage, as well as others who do not have a domestic account and rely on exchanging currency or making affiliate bank withdrawals with a debit card.
I have been to several businesses abroad, including gas stations and movie theaters, where international credit cards are not accepted -- ie, their POS device will accept Visa but only if the card is domiciled in the same country.
I view a cashless society as an economy that discriminates against poor people and foreigners.
Trivially, cryptocurrency is less private than credit/debit cards, because every transaction is written to the public log. This is true of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum.
Coin tumblers exist for all these currencies. But these a) cost a small fee, and b) are back to centralization, requiring you to trust the tumbler maintainers not to record the transactions.
ZCash[1] is the only cryptocurrency I know of which attempts to actually be private, but the unpopularity of ZCash relative to Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash/Litecoin/Ethereum shows that most people involved in cryptocurrencies actually don't care about privacy.
And while Bitcoin is written to a public ledger, there is a key difference in that you only see “this address sent money to this address.”
That’s still fairly public and you might not want that. But unlike a bank there is nothing linking those addresses to any individual, no name, address and phone number is associated. Plus you can receive funds to a different address every time, so you don’t have to use the same one for each transaction.
It doesn’t mean it’s not public but just to put it in context.
The main issue with crypto is the confirmation time, but 0-conf is probably acceptable in the same way contactless is for small things.
I'll look into that. At first glance some of the privacy claims seem a bit strange, but I haven't looked at the proofs enough to be sure.
> That’s still fairly public and you might not want that. But unlike a bank there is nothing linking those addresses to any individual, no name, address and phone number is associated. Plus you can receive funds to a different address every time, so you don’t have to use the same one for each transaction.
Okay, but trivially this allows you to trace transactions back to institutions (i.e. Coinbase) which are tied into the traditional banking system just like banks--unless you put your coins through a tumbler, coins purchased from an exchange are exactly as private as traditional currency at a bank. Arguably less private, since coin exchanges are under more scrutiny right now than banks.
And unlike banks, if you expose a receiving address for transactions tied to your name, you're exposing every transaction you receive. You're depending on pseudonymity for anonymity, which doesn't work if the only reason you're receiving coins in the first place is a reputation tied to your name. And if a pseudonym can build up enough reputation to receive coins (i.e. Dread Pirate Roberts) then all you have to do to break the anonymity is to tie the pseudonym to the person (we know all the transactions received by Ross Ulbricht because they were received pseudonymously not anonymously, so knowing Dread Pirate Roberts = Ross Ulbricht tells us all the transactions Ross Ulbricht received). In short, pseudonymity is not anonymity.
> The main issue with crypto is the confirmation time, but 0-conf is probably acceptable in the same way contactless is for small things.
There isn't a single "main issue" with crypto--it just has properties, and people only have issues with it if they use crypto for purposes where those properties are unsuitable. If you use Bitcoin for anonymity, your main issue is that Bitcoin isn't anonymous, but that's your main issue, not the main issue with Bitcoin.
I personally have never used cryptocurrency for anything where I cared about waiting for 6 confirmations.
Theoretically Monero would be a possible solution, but only if your sole requirement is anonymity. Heavy emphasis on only if though, since payment systems are much, much more than that requirement (i.e. dispute handling, chargebacks, insurance, fraud identification, etc.).
I don't think there are any crypto implementations today that could compete with existing mainstream systems, which in itself is a statement that opens a can of worms on HN, but maybe someday.
That depends how you look at it. Crypto also has other advantages that payment systems haven't: any arbritary amount from 0.00001 to millions in 1 go, instant (especially advantage for the large numbers, since banks cannot do that), smart contracts etc.
Dispute handling and chargebacks are also very disputable for wire transfers. I have to give my ID to the bank every few years, yet people get scammed with wire transfers all the time and get a "sorry can't do anything about your lost money" from the bank.
> instant (especially advantage for the large numbers, since banks cannot do that)
It's not instant. According to https://www.crypto51.app/ the cost to 51% attack ethereum for 1 hour is $92k. This means it's $2.2 million for one day or 24 hours. Let's say you want to transfer $10 million via ethereum. Then the party who gives you the eth can perform a double spending attack, only pretending to give you the $10 million while getting something else from you in exchange as part of the original deal that takes one day to be transfferred to them. As long as that something else is worth more than $2.2 million, that other party has made a return. The only good remedy is waiting for the double spending cost to exceed the contract volume, but it means that the currency isn't instant any more, or at least is instant for small sums of money only.
What do you mean by "especially advantage for the large numbers, since banks cannot do that" ?
Bitcoin requires a validation cycle or two in order to be certain that your transaction is going to be on the main chain, so it's 10-20 minutes.
For traditional infrastructure, the RTGS (real time gross settlement systems) accessible to banks and large customers handle transactions in seconds. If you're in a treasury department of a company who routinely needs to move large amounts around, doing so nearly instantaneously is absolutely a solved problem.
Punching holes in certain payment methods (like money wires) isn't the same as building a case for crypto.
Also crypto isn't instant. Bitcoin takes 10 minutes if you're lucky, even longer if the network is maxed at 7 transactions a second (comparatively, Visa handles 42,000 transactions a second).
Adoption. If we can buy groceries, get served at a restaurant or by street vendor, pay for utilities/fuel, and receive medical attention while only using Monero, zcash, or cash shuffling financial privacy could be in reach.
None of the things you list are "benefits" if you're an individual. They are only "benefits" to governments because it gives them additional means of controlling the bleating flock.
Money laundering is typically tied illegal behavior, things such as tax evasion, extortion, trafficking, etc. Having the means to deal with money laundering helps inhibit the illegal activity tied to it.
Assuming that you're an average Belgian, the effect of money laundering is that you pay taxes while the criminals don't, so the money that your government could and would have spent in things that benefit you gets stolen instead.
Less money laundering would mean that you could either get more gov't services or lower taxes.
The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously. I think if you get to the root of the issue, most governments would prefer to track every transaction to ensure compliance with tax, money laundering, [insert whatever regulation].
However I think the state already has an absurd amount of power and the citizens need every tool possible to prevent governments from hurting them. Anonymous transactions, such as those using cash but also using new technologies like privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, are essential to keeping the state from becoming a panopticon. You can already see the inevitable outcome of all-powerful government with the ridiculous situation in Hong Kong and the social credit system in China.
It’s not just anonymity. To get a credit/debit card you need to agree to some TOS, probably binding arbitration, and are at the mercy of the bank deciding whether or not they want to cancel your account.
That would be my problem with cashless, the idea that people could be cut off entirely from the system and have no way to transact. Until the government / central bank will issue everyone a irrevocable bank account with the right to transact for free indefinitely getting rid of cash has bigger issues than just privacy implications.
The solution to that particular problem would be to make it a legal right to have a bank account. It doesn't have to have all the extras, just an account that stores your money, and a card you can use for accessing your money.
In France, if I am mot mistaken, you can legally have an account at the Banque de France.
People go there when they got kicked from regular banks, like after having signed checks without having the money.
Banque de France has become an heuristic for landlords to reject candidates, so having a right for bank account might not be enough.
You are thinking about the "droit au compte" (right to a bank account) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_au_compte but I think there may be some confusion. People exercise their "droit au compte" by making a request the Banque de France, but they do not have an account there: Banque de France designates some regular commercial bank which is then legally obliged to provide them with an account. The French Wikipedia page says that, in practice, this is usually La Banque postale: it's a pretty normal bank that I don't think anyone discriminates against.
I remember when my wife first moved to this country, it was extremely difficult for her to open a current account, I thought that the basic accounts would solve those problems and probably do.
They clearly don't solve all problems.
It is a bit odd though that this is the case as surely allowing people to use the accounts allow for the transactions to be traced, rather than the anonymity of cash.
Quite possibly there are good reasons, for the bank but on 5 hours of sleep so I can't come up with any :)
In England many landlords would rent to someone who provides the entire 6 months + deposit or 1 year + deposit in advance in cash, if there was an explanation.
That is an extremely sweeping requirement that also embeds a lot of assumptions into the legal system that are not sensible. We've seen something similar before when South Korean banks [0] managed to lock themselves in to the dawn of the software industry and have spent more than a decade looking like idiots.
This whole situation is happening because cash is very flexible and we innovated away from it when it became a bad idea. At any stage over the next few decades the basic nature of the playing field could change and this 'right to have a bank account' could totally stomp out innovation.
Not to mention; if at any point now or in the future a loophole slips in to the legislative process consumers could get roasted.
This is a poor solution to a non-problem. Just let people transact in cash.
Banks have been around for hundreds of years. All I'm proposing is that there is a legal right for people to hold a bank account of some form, where they are able to put their money so they don't have all their life savings in cash under the bed. I'm not suggesting that we ban cash at all, just that people have a right to securely store their money and the option to use cashless transactions if they choose.
Being legally required to hold a bank account use cashless transactions is just as much of a violation of one's rights as being barred from opening a bank account and being forced to use cash for all transactions. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It's not about allowing people to transact in cash, but allowing them alternative choices, all of which should be legal.
If you can't hold a bank account (because the banks have decided you're not allowed one for whatever reason), you need to use cash for everything. This means you always have a relatively large amount of cash on you. Not only are you now at greater risk of burglary or robbery, the consequences of being a victim are now even greater. You also can't put money in a savings account, or pay for things online.
I've had my house burgled and had large amounts of cash stolen from me before. There was nothing the police could do. Even if they caught the burglar, the money wasn't coming back to me. It was a significant hit to my personal finances at the time.
Bank accounts and cashless transactions aren't just a way for the government to keep tabs on the population, they're also a form of security for the general population.
This circles back to the anonymity issue though.. what level of authentication is required to obtain said card? Can I stand there and blatantly collect 20 cards under different names? How does the bank know I'm not a terrorist which they are legally bound not to transact with?
I suppose if they're just freely distributed from a vending machine, it just becomes plastic bills of arbitrary denomination.
"Not everyone has those" seems probably a USA-related perspective as people not having ID is a problem there; but in many places in Europe it's normal to assume that everyone does have a valid ID; you're required to get one when you become an adult, you're required to report if it gets lost/stolen so that it gets blocked and replaced. You don't have to have that ID with you, but not having a passport or ID card at all is a misdemeanor. Even homeless drug addicts generally have them because it's necessary for various things e.g. social services.
If someone needs banking services (or, really, any services from anyone) but don't have a proper gov't ID document then would be considered normal to require that the very first thing they'd need to do is to get/replace that ID. And if you have that, then that's all you need for basic banking services.
You are not required to have such a thing in at least some states in Europe. Example in [0] (in german). UK also does not require you to have a passport or other id.
Getting such a thing requires a bank account or at least cash. How do you get cash if you don't have an ID? You can't get a bank account, so you can't collect unemployment benefits.
No, the solution to this problem is to take money entirely out of the hands of government, who have proved time and again over the span of millennia to be incapable of managing the money supply as well as using it towards nefarious ends (political control, wars, etc...)
Yes, because when the management of the money supply is put into private hands, that has worked so well. Company scrips [1] were great for the people.
You haven't actually proposed a solution. Who should control the supply of money? Private companies? Because they have an even worse track record to governments.
But if you abandon cash, people would themselves find an alternative means of bartering. A means of which the government would not be in control. Even if only a miniscule of transactions are done with cash, surely the government would like to remain in control of said transactions, and thus would not be so quick to abandon it?
You wouldn't have to go as far as bartering. I didn't see anything in the article about banning other currencies. People would just adopt the next most stable/integrated currency, like USD.
Which would still put the local government out of the loop. When you have a currency crisis like Zimbabwe did, it kind of make sense, they would eventually abandon their own and allow foreign ones instead. But it was not without deep reluctance, considering that most transactions in Zimbabwe is completely out of its control.
Of course, we are not talking about hyperinflation in Austria. Something that forced Zimbabwe to take a momentous decision. Why would the US Federal Reserve consider the interest of Austrians - in this fantasy scenario where they go cashless, and people start using USD - when valuing their currency?
I mean, if cash transactions are in different currency than that of your local jurisdiction, then - for a lot of people - it would start to make sense to simply keep their bank accounts in the same currency (and private banks would surely offer this). This could have an effect on people who doesn't use cash at all, since they would at times deal with people who do sometimes. And then having their money in that foreign currency too is an advantage.
Of course, I am only speculating. Since we have no experience with what happens if a society abandons cash, it will be hard to tell what the broader effects of that will be. Could be a total loss of monetary control for the government, or merely an inconvenience for foreign tourists.
It is universal on Sweden, from younger than that. And here most shops don't take cash at all anymore. TBH if I had a shop in Stockholm I wouldn't take cash either. Even public transport doesn't take cash.
On the other hand everybody here has a bank account for free, and free instant transactions between individuals.
> The question is whether someone has a legal right to conduct a monetary transaction anonymously.
Well, a big argument for cash is that it allows you to do illegal transactions as well, and that this is extremely important, because who decides what is illegal and not? Making all illegal transactions impossible is a great way to stop civil disobedience, to stop dissenting movements, to stop anything the current regime simply doesn't like.
But those are the things driving our society forward.
That's kind of an amusing line of thinking, that the government has an obligation to make doing illegal things as easy as possible, because sometimes doing the illegal thing is morally permissible. How far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole? For example, the existence of a police force makes it harder to break the law, should we disband the police to make engaging in civil disobedience easier?
Government is us, the people. It's not some mythical entity separate from the society it exists in.
How far are you willing to go the other way? If the police knew where every single citizen was 100% of the time, crime rates would plummet! Super easy, fit everyone with a gps anklet, and make it punishable with jailtime for anyone who tampers with them or removes them. Tadaa!
It's a balance between fascism and liberty, between control and freedom. Removing cash moves that balance too far in the wrong direction, which is why we should oppose it, if we want a free society.
But illegal transactions would still be possible without cash (people pay for drugs on Venmo all the time), just trickier and with a higher likelihood of getting caught. By your logic a cashless society would still be acceptable.
It's the turn-key fascism that's worrying. People buy drugs with Venmo because they're fucking stupid, and because banks and governments don't crack down on it. But they could.
Wikileaks ran into trouble when all the major credit card companies decided to deny payments to them.
Cash ensures that all transactions are allowed, anonymous, and untraceable, no matter the nature of the transaction, no matter society's morals, and no matter who's currently in charge of government.
Better to build strong privacy by default into the one crypto with an 11-year track record for withstanding all attacks against it's network: Bitcoin. Of course, since consensus changes are really hard, and to preserve the 21 million coin hard limit, I suspect strong privacy will necessarily be built on layer 2 technologies like the Lightning Network. What's needed, and what Austrians (by citizenship or economic theory) want, is digital cash with real privacy.
There's a consensus in Bitcoin that the main next step towards better privacy is using Schnorr signature, but in the last few years there were multiple security issues found in the Schnorr signature based multisig protocol (MuSig).
After each improvement the devs prove the security of the protocol and present it in a cryptography conference, asking for peer reviews, that's why it's moving so slowly (which is great).
How is it ridiculous? I can't think of any government, except maybe Canada, that would just allow a part of their country to secede, especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country).
Parent poster's comment unnecessarily villianizes Beijing's stance to the HK situation, but this comment is no better, and is flamewar-baiting.
> just allow a part of their country to secede
Organized HK protestors have a list of five demands and none of them involve secession. The only demand that involves a constitutional-level change is the demand for universal suffrage in HK to the HK government. They are not asking for any expansion of the powers of the HK govt.
> especially if the movement to do so was explicitly backed and funded by a foreign power (in the case of HK, the same foreign power that used to occupy that part of the country).
It is news to me that the UK govt. is expressing support for the aims of the movement beyond emphasizing their generic right to protest. Do you have a source?
The real benefit to get rid of cash would be to allow properly negative interest rates.[1] At the same time I fully agree with the privacy worries on going cashless.
So, what we really need are anonymous physical tokens whose value can change over time. Easy solution is to just tale the current bills and say that after one year, unless deposited to bank before that, are worth only 90% of the face value. But with current technological capabilities, and if someone would actually be interested, we should be able to come up with way better solutions. Solutions that actually make it easier to pay with these anonymous tokens than current cash.
[1] I know. This is far from intuitive to accept. It took me literally months to accept that negative rates make any sense after the first negative yields popped up. To help you understand, let's say I have a fresh apple and you want to have an apple today. In the textbook case I am willing to give it to you today, if you give me tomorrow two apples, because I prefer also to have an apple today compared to having ot tomorrow. This is fine, but what about me having a big basket of apples about to rot, and willing to have also some apples in the winter? There is no law of nature saying that there should be someone willing to give me more apples next winter if I give them to him today. In this case it is easy to see that a negative interest should apply to lending of apples. And it should be economics 101 to understand that artificially limiting prices will often cause welfare losses.
oh. I always had trouble imagining a mainstream use case for cryptocurrency. Apparently, the use case that it'll finally find is providing infrastructure for negative interest rates set by central banks.
That was to illustrate that it is possible that people prefer consumption in the future. To your question why to make money rot has many answers.
But the easiest one is that if you belong to those who believe that central banks actually have a useful role in managing the economy, then why restrict artificially the main tools central banks have in their disposal, i.e. interest rates?
The difference between nonnegative and negative interest rates is "the central bank is not allowed to steal from me" vs. "the central bank is allowed to steal from me". That distinction is not an artificial restriction.
And yes, I understand that "the economy" might want me to spend money now on crap that I would not prefer to buy right now. I just don't agree that that is a valid reason to legalize stealing from me.
I fully agree that it feels wrong and weird that you would give your money to a bank and get less money back later. But if I stop and think a bit further, that feeling starts to feel less and less justified. Here are a couple of reasons:
1. We talk about nominal values, not real purchase power. You should not care what is the number on your bank account but how many apples you can buy it. And with that measure, banks have been "stealing" your purchase power almost always. (Actually I think it is impossible in the long term to have banks pay more than inflation rate)
2. Assuming you save 100 dollars and expect to have 101 dollars in one year's time, central bank can decide to lower the interest rates so that you have less than 101 dollars one year later. Why would central bank "taking" from your 101 to 100 be any less stealing than from 100 to 99?
3. Finally, you agreeing to lend your money to the bank with whatever interest rate bank offers is completely voluntary action from your side. Not only you can choose to consume the money immediately, there are also practically limitless other opportunities to invest (or "invest"...) your money. Corporate debt, real estate, equity, cryptocurrency, gold, commodities etc. Now, of course, you can argue that these other options are somehow less practical or more risky in certain ways, and that society needs to keep your hand and guarantee you a risk-free and practical way to move your consumption decisions over time. And that society needs to make this guarantee to you completely regardless of the welfare cost (unemployment, recessions etc) delivering this guarantee has. At this point, my nose is starting to detect the repulsive smell of socialism, totalitarianism or something like that...
1. As you say yourself, nominal values and purchasing power are different concepts. So why should we treat them the same?
2. If I have a contract saying I will get that extra dollar, I absolutely expect to get it and will take the bank to court if I don't. If I only hope for that, it's different. But in any case, my contract is with my bank, not the central bank.
3. It's not voluntary if cash is effectively useless and I must use a bank.
The rest of your post is just bizarre. Standing up for property rights isn't socialist. I don't think this thread is going anywhere, so I'm out. I hope you have a great day.
One big issue with society that would be completely cashless is that it will essentially grant ability for foreign governments to control people in different countries. There is an on-going case in Finland where Boris Rotenberg (allegedly someone who is in inner circles of Russia's leadership) is in OFAC sanctions list due to Crimea occupation, but he also has Finnish citizenship and he's not in EU's sanctions list. Due to being on OFAC list Finnish banks are refusing to accept payments coming from his Finnish account in fear of US actions (including fines and sanctions against the banks).
If you are not even allowed to do things in cash (and to be honest, it's pretty close to that in Finland already), you would also need to disallow banks from blocking transactions that are not breaking local laws. Otherwise in the worst case you are making it so that foreign governments have power to force people to commit crimes (like being unable to pay taxes since bank refuses to move the money).
Cashless society would be a pain for kids, homeless, people with trash credit history, etc. So either we need to force all banks to give their internet bank access and some sort of debit card to absolutely anybody who just asks that without any fees, or cash must be accepted.
There is a very good presentation on the Case for Electronic Cash by Jerry Brito of the Coin Center non-profit. I highly recommend people watch it to understand why cash is important to preserve an open, liberal society.
I am essentially fully cashless at this point, I don't carry cash in my wallet or anything, but I still think it is incredibly important to have the option to use cash should I choose to. If for some reason I start getting rejected by banks, or dislike the restrictions that they are placing on me, it is a last resort that I can always fall back to. It prevents me from being fully dependent on private parties like banks, which I find valuable, even if I am unlikely to actually use it. I don't think that, as a society, we should be forcing people to hand over their private information to some bank in order to go through everyday life.
> “If for example I go shopping, and it’s recorded exactly how much schnapps I’ve bought, that’s an invasion of my privacy,” he says.
Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash?
> Following a recent EU directive, Austrian banks are phasing out “ATM cards” and renaming them debit cards. And some banks are currently planning to equip the new debit cards with the ability to make payments online, as is common elsewhere.
I'm confused do they mean they are just getting the ability to pay with debit cards at stores in 2019? Or is this just adding the VISA part to debit cards?
> Wouldn't a constitutional change only be limited to paying for gov fines, fees, and taxes with cash?
Nobody knows because there are no real proposals, it's all just a PR stunt. It's vaguely hinted that shops would be forced to keep accepting cash. But the government presumably does not want people to pay their taxes with cash. I don't even think that's possible currently.
I think that's correct. By default when I opened an Austrian bank account I was only issued a Maestro card, which when used does debit my current account balance, it can't be used for online transactions.
I still have a Visa debit card linked to an account elsewhere, but 90% of my online shopping is now paid for with Sofort, a direct bank transfer, or even on credit. E.g. Bergfreund (https://www.bergfreunde.eu/) offers 10 day payment terms for online transactions.
This makes me incredibly happy: there is finally a western European democracy that makes the outlawing of cash a true political issue.
The EU has quietly taken away what I consider to be a fundamental human rights over the past 10 years (the right to buy something without the whole world knowing what that was), and no one noticed.
Did you know you can't buy a car cash in most EU countries?
[EDIT]: This is issue is nowhere on the political radar of most USians because it hasn't come to your shores. But it should, because it's coming.
You can buy a car with cash but you will need extra documents to prove the cash is obtained legally, otherwise you can. Happens all the time actually in my country at least, so I am unsure where is your information coming from. It is less convenient than the bank transfer and takes extra paperwork but possible.
Also of course you can go to used car market or buy from ads from a private individual, most of them will refuse cash tho.
Nothing of it is anonymous of course.
That reads (my rough translation): (1) [The ECB and other central banks emit Euro bank notes.] (2) The bank notes referred to in (1) must be accepted at their full face value without limits, unless the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment.
IANAL, but to me this means like (a) there is already a law in Austria obliging businesses to always accept cash, except that (b) this might be meaningless since a business could always stipulate that "the obligation must be paid using some other means of payment".
As I understand it, the former is implementing some international agreement where EU member states chose to use the EU as the mechanism to implement the agreement. The later seems to be the EU gold plating that (e.g. limiting anonymous electronic payments to €50).
What I find most interesting is how those parties seem to find out what people wants and incorporate it into their agenda. Very different thing is parties building their agendas, usually around authoritarian measures coming from some lobbies and then shoving them down our throats with massive amounts of propaganda.
There is no debate about cashless honestly, it's like debating if raping children should be legal or not, except that without cash you easily get to a society where powerful people rule the world (see Epstein).
Those who argue against cash should be seen with suspicion and removed from their positions of power if they have any. I'd say even jail time should be considered when it comes to anti-cash lobbying, using the same penalty currently used by enslaved but multiplied by the total population.
Sounds absurd? Sounds like too much? It's the only way to keep those tyrannical maniacs in check.
When I pay by card, banks and Visa/Mastercard get a cut of my purchase, which the merchant doesn't get (and I don't think they are allowed to pass on these fees to the consumer). When I pay by cash, the merchant gets 100%. I usually prefer to give my money to a local shop rather than to financial middlemen.
It's not quite 100%, the merchant has costs associated with using cash: The time a cashier has to spend counting the cash register's content, time spent on bank runs to put away earnings/get extra coins for change, some fees associated with it, some amount that gets "lost"...
I remember the cost was less than credit cards take, but not much lower than Girocard payments.
> Every bank is a private company and can choose their customers.
Not really, basic payment accounts are backed by quite a few legislations with pretty strict exceptions (i.e. money laundering or terrorism financing in the EU wide case):
I totally agree with this. Japan is still mostly a cash based society. One of the things I love about it is that I can still rent a car or book a hotel room without a credit card. This keeps people on an even footing. If you are homeless without an address (and therefore a bank account), you can still buy things. If you have poor credit, then you can still pay with cash for anything.
The anonymity of cash is nice, but the lack of discrimination of cash is its real feature.
Nationalized banks with universal service obligations do/did exist. Even for a private bank it's pretty sweet deal though, practically every kid in Australia for the last 50 years got a savings account from ours, even though it was fully privatized 20 years ago many of us still use the same account, they've made some massive profits from that obligation.
Privacy is definitely at stake in cash-less electronic transactions, but going cash-less might be the only way to curb corruption in a country like India.
In India, only pathetic (<10-20%) percentage of people pay direct tax, what remains after corrupt bureaucrats take their share is what spent on development of the country.
It's no brainer on why cash transactions is the preferred mode for the corrupt. Cash-less electronic transactions, fool-proof audit backed by tech like blockchain seems like only option left to curb this menace and save the country.
As far as privacy is concerned, due to the loop-hole in the law, any citizen's bank account can be accessed by the authorities at any time; so cash-less transactions isn't going to change much here. Corrupt, don't use the bank accounts to store their stash anyways, at-least within the country.
But India is not ready for cash-less transaction anytime soon, as evident from the demonetisation of 2016 in which promoting cash-less transaction was one of the main arguments.
People will still do illegal/subversive/socially unacceptable things and be paid for them. So a "cashless" society would generate a massive demand for alternative forms of currency. There are already plenty of those, including digital ones, so this might in the long run be disastrous for national currencies. Which would be interesting but also disastrous for a lot of people in the meantime.
This makes me wonder how much fintech is regulated in regards to consumer privacy. You'd thing that with all the care that's being taken to (try to) ensure the safety of people's money, regulators would also consider their privacy.
If a seller is required, by law, to accept cash, what happens to online-only retailers like Amazon? Do they just close up shop and leave? Do they restrict online purchases to people within a reasonable drive of a retail location?
Other than food and drinks, I have not really bought anything using cash in last couple of years. Everything else it seems I have been buying using a debit card, online or offline.
So I am bit a lost on how this protects privacy. Is this only important in context of services such as legal prostitution, drug use etc where having cash transaction will feel safer? If that is the case, I am sure those businesses will continue to operate in cash-ful manner. If there are other use cases, please do share.
As an aside Austria is the first country I came across where the immigration website uses phrase "third country workers"[1], which is mildly disappointing to see.
As a software engineer, I feel all money should be digital and the IRS should be replaced with an algorithm. Fairer and more efficient for all. As a human living in a fallible state, I don't ever want the government to have that kind of power and visibility into my private life.
You vote for the legislators who hire the bureaucrats who define the algorithm that the engineers implement. Which is not much different from how it works now except there's a more manual process involving human judgement at various levels. You don't vote for the auditor working in the IRS.
Why? The algo should obviously be public so if you went to court you'd question the algo or its impl, not the computer. After all, you only want restitution and correction of the issue, not punishment.
Given that, at least in the US, people had to regularly sue corporations that defend the secrecy of their fancy algorithms^W^W Excel sheets as trade secrets... that's not as obvious as you might think.
Why would that be? Health care providers, bail risk assessment software for courts, ... it's not like some public entity like the IRS would be likely to develop much in-house.
What I've come to realize over the past couple years (as my taxes got considerably more complex) is that what's lost with the 'autonomous IRS' is essentially the ability to self-declare your expenditures based on their purpose (albeit with the risk of being audited). The algorithm, which in my interpretation of the suggestion just reads in all your transactional data, would be burdened with some very complex interpretation of supporting documentation. Unless of course it's very simple (e.g. flat tax)
Yeah you'd want a simpler tax system, one that could be done with an algorithm and a list of transactions. But that would be a win anyway. A book on the current tax system is about three times the size as a book on all of the laws of physics.
You statement is a walking contradiction. You want to get rid of cash, yet you want yo replace the IRS by an algorithm? How is that not giving all the power to the government?
That's the point. In an ideal world I want digital money and algorithmic taxes. In the real world where you can't trust your government it would be a mistake.
I suppose people in some EU countries, for example, which have mostly (?) transitioned to a cashless society don't mind what a massive invasion of privacy it is.
On the other hand, I do understand the advantages, the convenience, and perhaps the inevitability of going cashless. Already most of our financial transactions are being tracked and circulated ("peddled") in countless ways, as are our online activity, phone conversations, real-time location.. At this rate, future humans will look back at our concept of "privacy" and not comprehend what it means.