Not using cash means someone gets a cut of a processing fee. Every time, with almost no exceptions.
I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper.
You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the business, the consumer ultimately pays for it in higher prices. Heck, people pay transaction fees on payments they make the to government because the government won’t take cash.
Do we really need to make not paying invisible fees in everything illegal? Seems crazy.
There were already costs. There were always costs and risks associated with cash handling: armored trucks doing cash collection, risks of money in tills being lost. If it really were a lot cheaper you wouldn’t see businesses clamouring to go cashless.
That’s not to say I think cash should go the way of the dodo, but I don’t think there’s that much difference paying g4s to collect your money vs Mastercard.
IMO the benefits of cash are on the consumer, not the business.
Yes there are costs to handling cash. And they are vastly higher than the cost of handling bits. A 3% fee to write some bits to a database is insane. A 3% fee to pay all the people who need to handle the currency in a cash transaction is probably not covering costs.
I work in a bank and cash handling is a major headache in terms of internal control, logistics, reconciliation and AML. It's a large extra cost.
It is much cheaper for the bank and customers to use cards, but where I live the banks own a payment network that does not involve visa and mastercard so the cost is much lower and there is no rent seeking so card use have no fees.
We also have an app for sending "cash" for free to friends, family and businesses that under the hood are just instant bank payments between the accounts.
I do not think so. Otherwise the British government would not have needed to outlaw charging customers more for card transactions to encourage the move away from cash.
I would argue that cash maybe a little better than cashless because fees are tied to physical problem of moving cash around where as cashless fees are just one board meeting from changing ten fold.
These are even higher for digital, all the associated software development, audits, etc. That processing fee is on top of this, and is easily variable.
Haha, Americans with their 2-4% transaction tax, it’s so funny.
No seriously, when I first moved to the Netherlands I was wondering what kind of backwards country wouldn’t let me use a credit card at the grocery store. And that’s when I learned about how crazy it is that credit cards and even American debit cards have such needlessly high transaction fees.
I use an Visa tied to an American bank every day for groceries in NL. I only have ever had issues using a card at a very small record store, I just make sure to carry 100eur in cash just in case. I do have more issues online when something only takes iDEAL though.
> I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper.
You’re pretending as if there weren’t any costs associated with handling cash. There’s almost always a handling fee if you want to put the cash into an account, which you will need to do if you want to pay people that are somewhere else than you are. If you have larger quantities of cash, you’ll also have to pay for safe transportation of the funds. If you make an honest comparison
I’m not. Visa and Mastercard collected $138 billion in service fees in 2021. They are among the most profitable companies in the world. You’re pretending that cash handling is a binary. You need a blend. For example, after extensive testing we are not going to send wire transfers exclusively in gold bricks. Though the loss weighs heavy on me.
But you should be very careful in eliminating cash.
I assume cash handling fees are made up by banks who want more transaction fees. That’s not a real thing in my experience. I many times have gotten a discount for cash. I have not shopped a few places because they don’t accept cash. But I have yet to be charged a cash fee by any of the banks I use.
And they have insane surveillance data on their customers from doing so. Data that is used for all kinds of unintended purposes.
Cash is also one of the last strongholds left to maintain anonymity and keep purchasing information truly private without handing heaps of data to the corporations that make a buck off your receipts—or worse, to hackers, in the case of a data breach.
To say nothing of the unbanked… which is a massive issue.
If that’s the future you want, we don’t see eye-to-eye. You are giving up a LOT more than you realize.
Citation needed. I've been depositing cash for years, with multiple banks, and nobody has ever charged a "handling fee".
> safe transportation of the funds
Yes, a lot of people have this irrational reaction to carrying large amounts of cash, as if your unremarkable Toyota miraculously sports a giant "BRINKS" logo every time you carry cash, attracting the attention of would-be criminals everywhere. I assume you believe that thieves and pickpockets are regularly carrying millimeter-wave scanners to see what's in your pockets, briefcases, backpacks, etc?
Exchanging value between two economical entities using pieces of paper seems crazy when you have better ways.
Try to explain buying with cash in 200 years to someone who never seen it.
What if I need to pay just a little, do I tear a bit of the paper?
No, you can't tear. If your piece of paper is worth too much then the seller gives you other pieces of paper worth less.
Can I throw out the rest of paper after I'm done buying?
Not unless you want to lose a piece of your value.
What if I don't have enough pieces of paper on me?
Then you can't buy.
So I should just carry all my worth in pieces of paper on me at all times?
That's a bad idea because when you loose this paper or it gets stolen or destroyed you no longer own their value.
Where do I get the paper from? Your employer can five it to you every month or week and you hold it in your home. Alternatively employer transfers the value to the bank normal way and when you need paper the bank can dispense it to you through various devices or service points.
Are any of those devices handheld?
Unfortunately no.
What if my house get burned down or robbed?
Then you lose all the value associated with all the papers kept there.
Exchanging value between two economic entities using primitive card numbers seems crazy when you have better ways.
Try to explain buying with a credit card online 200 years ago to someone who has never seen it.
You type in about 23 digits (16-digit card number, 4-digit expiry month, 3-digit verification code) to make a payment.
But these digits only change every few years as you renew your credit card. So many parties will learn of your digits and you won't know who leaked them.
The merchant on the other end can take out any amount of money from your account; it's pull-based, not push-based.
The merchant on the other end can trap you in a recurring subscription without your knowledge or make it very hard to cancel.
People have credit limits in the thousands of dollars, and in any single transaction you are liable to lose that much money. Meanwhile, you can't lose more than the hundreds of dollars of cash in your wallet.
You can call your card issuer to dispute charges, but now you're at the mercy of an intermediary.
The intermediary skims about 2~4% of every transaction, for the luxury of being able to spend your own money.
You can't process certain types of transactions in an offline environment, such as debit cards during a power outage or on an airplane (though Wi-Fi is slowly becoming more common).
I don't think OP was arguing to completely get rid of all wired transactions. And for all the points you made you still missed OPs major gripe, paying a third party for every single transaction you make. Wanna give your children pocket money? bank gets a cut...doesn't seem right tbh
Banks sometimes charge fees to make cash withdrawals from ATMs, even ATMs belonging to the same bank that holds your account (true at least in my personal case, outside the US).
If you are paid via direct deposit, you're financially incentivized to stay cashless. The direct cost of spending via debit/credit card (if one doesn't carry a balance) is zero, compared to the cost of withdrawing cash.
If you want to inventivize salaried professionals to pay with cash, try outlawing fees on ATM withdrawals first.
There are now systems that are far cheaper than credit cards or debit cards. In the US it's called: FedNow. The system enables direct bank transfers in real-time, almost for free.
The reality is most business prefer the 3% fee because the cost of Cash processing is higher when you factor in Bank Fees, Security, Accounting, Theft, and other factors.
I pay a fixed monthly fee for my bank that comes with full access to the interbank payment system. Every business on my country does the same for the other side, and we get unlimited transactions with no marginal cost.
Anyway, as somebody else said, a 3% fee on transactions is just ridiculous. If you get any bit of competition, transaction-value based fees tend to be on the order of 0.5%.
It definitely matters who it is charged to. In almost all cases, it's just rolled into the overall price of the item, which means you pay it whether you use cash or not. It would be very interesting to see if prices for card were 3% higher across the board, if people would still use them as much. I honestly have no idea.
Using debased money (does the paper in the note have any value?) is already submitting to paying seignorage to the issuing authority. There's not escaping it unless you sit on the top of that food chain.
maybe we should start thinking of payment infrastructure as a core public service if we move away from cash? Just like there is an official entity that can "print" cash, we should start doing the same with digital payments (I believe the EU is doing somethig similar). That way you don't have a duopoly taking a cut of every transaction.
Governments should be running their own digital counterparts to cash, but they need to add the anonymity of this cash into the constitution. Otherwise the security apparatus is going to ruin it for everyone.
I have never seen a place with extra fees for cash. However I know many small shops that give discounts for cash or only take cash for small purchases.
There are two fallacies I frequently feel the need to debunk in this
discussion.
- Cash is anonymous
- Cash is an "old" or "low" technology.
When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the
police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and
shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in
stores, ATMs and vending machines.
Modern cash is high technology. Look at a UK or European note
already. Holograms, nano-technology, advanced materials
science... It's well past the point of being worth forging, and it is
likely that future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable
passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of
purely digital cash, such as time-out, store variable value, and be
more traceable.
The function cash really performs is a resilience buffer for person to
person transactions that works independently of electrical power and
Internet. Smart people at the top are never going to let that slide,
because it would be national security suicide and practically inviting
civil unrest.
Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay, but it may not have all the
properties we think it has and defend it for.
>When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines.
Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime". Your buying something is not logged anywhere, for example.
> Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for
99% of uses that don't involve "major crime".
Exactly. Almost all cash transactions remain anonymous because
there's no criminal investigation involved.
Most people are honest and just going about their business with friends
and family.
That's how it should be.
A cost bar for tracing is a desirable feature for non-authoritarian
societies.
Digital currency mediated by bank apps, active cards, smartphones or
whatever, makes for "convenience" but also zero cost to spy on people
who are not criminals. And that's a problem.
So maybe it is here. Or there. I'm not sure where you're standing :)
You fell for a simple fallecy. The line isn't that cash is used in a major crime. It's that someone in power wants someone in prison.
1. You might not be involved in a major crime but you might be a suspect. Lots of innocent suspects get convicted.
2. You might be a whistleblower. Lots of whistleblowers get framed.
Etc.
"If I've done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide" didn't work out well for Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.
A lot of the reason many of us want privacy preserved is to prevent a similar path here. Totalitarian governments don't always pop up overnight on a revolution; they often creep up on you.
The creeping process is also often:
1. We'll track X with major checks on privacy; it will only be used for terrorism and child abuse investigations and held in a secure vault
2. We're just doing a better job of sharing / using data we already collect
Neither off those is objectionable, but together, you end up in a distopia.
Cash is anonymous, by and large. That’s a fact, not a fallacy. I’ve never in my life seen any shops track serial numbers of cash transactions, nor associate them with me. I’m skeptical that anyone does it, but I welcome any evidence of this dubious claim that you’d like to provide. Having your face capture by a camera does not track the bills you used, nor the items you purchased. You’re spinning a mostly false tale.
E-money on the other hand tracks everything you buy, what you buy, when you buy, what you paid, where you bought it, and that information is used to construct a valuable profile of your purchasing habits. That profile is used for advertising. But it could also be used to deny insurance claims. Should be illegal, but I knew someone who worked for a credit card company that informed me they were thinking about how to do this legally.
E-money is tracked on everyone for everything by default, and cash does non of this. It’s insanely expensive for the police to try to trace cash, and they can only do it for one criminal at a time. They do not, and cannot, track everyone’s cash.
Spending profiles captured via e-money tracking are captured by private corporations and they are offered for sale. Any criminal cash tracking by police is used solely for capturing criminal and is otherwise not available to anyone else.
> Modern cash is high technology
Again, who’s even arguing? This is a straw man, the context is digital money. There was no debate about how much technology is used for printing bills.
> Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay
So you say? I’m not going to argue or pretend to make predictions, but one thing we know for absolute sure is that there is a downward trend of cash transactions globally.
You're making an argument which is a variant of "if I'm not doing anything wrong, then I have nothing to hide." Privacy is a worthwhile value in and of itself, not least of which because different people have different notions of what "wrong" is and their conception of "wrong" changes over the course of their life.
An example list of completely legal transactions which you might not want someone in your life knowing about:
a) You don't want your spouse to know that you bought some beers / fast food / pornographic magazines / cigarettes / other vice
b) You don't want your employer to know that you saw a therapist / oncologist / family planning services
c) You don't want your parents to know that you bought contraception
d) You don't want your car insurance provider to know that you purchased a repair from a mechanic (i.e. you don't want your rates increased).
Making payments in cash is making a decision for them not to be entered in some database which may be hacked and sold for profit to someone who values their interests more than your privacy.
With respect, you're reading too much intent into my words. I am
vehemently pro-privacy. In fact I seriously consider over-intrusive
authoritarianism to be a mental health disorder and have read somewhat
into the works of Adorno etc [0,1] (cue a dozen responses bemoaning
how everything done at Berkeley in the 1960s is now-debunked leftist
rubbish)
Part of that is helping people to have a realistic but not paranoid
view of technological society. My work also means I help people who
have serious crimes or security issues to solve, and have legitimate
investigatory needs.
I think privacy violations are not rooted in economic greed, but in
unboundaried, controlling impulses that get encoded into technology.
Hope I am responding respectfully and appropriately, sorry if I got
you wrong. BTW, in a safe way (ie not online) take one of those
"authoritarian personality tests". It will shock you how much we have
hidden in ourselves just ready to be provoked by demagogues or
disinformation.
What the police and other authorities 'can do' is a world away from what they 'actually do', in 99% of cases.
You could be unlucky if your crime passes a certain threshold or affects someone with power but, most of the time, it will not be investigated with the resources of the state.
Exactly the feature desirable to everyone in society. Including the
police.
I had a funny conversation with some LE types the other day (in the
context of something we call "fly-tipping") about how, in theory,
everyone who litters could be brought to book because they leave their
fingerprints all over stuff.
Nobody in forensics is ever going to do that unless it's a very
serious case. Nobody wants to be compelled to investigate some bs
crime just because its possible. Make things too convenient and
you've got China.
You mix things up. Most of the tech you describe is about making sure that bank note is not fake. The tracking part is ad-hoc and shoddy, works only in dense urban settings, closed systems like banking or a big supermarket. Cash usage itself is anonymous.
>>When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines.
Go to bank, take out 100's, to small mom and pop get change... problem solved.
Further it is highly unlikely that if some bill I got out of ATM finds it way to a crime scene or something that they will be proof of anything a defense lawyer would shoot that down in about 2 secs
>> It's well past the point of being worth forging
Not really.
>>future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash
Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price
point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets
made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to
incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost
"intelligent cash".
For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored,
decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and
using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to
plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw
tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key
set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.
It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable
portable artifacts to transfer value.
> anonymous ... you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash
That is not the point. The point is in the contract - e.g., that you are not accepting to untick a "do not track" flag. That circumvention is always possible is not what matters there.
Cash is very easily tumbled or made anonymous. It’s as simple as going to a casino, buying a large number of chips and then cashing those chips out again.
> Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked
lmfao what. Unless someone is committing large scale crimes involving bands, no one is tracking some small bills between private citizens, some stores, more citizens, et al.
For the vast majority of people, cash is anonymous. No advertising company or government is obtaining tracking data on your purchase of an apple and a cup of coffee with cash.
> [On] 23rd August 1994, the chaotic music duo and performance artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1m of notes behind a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. They are not alone in attempting to reduce money’s power…
They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so.
Agreed because it's a very human docu. It's more about the human experiences of burning 1mil rather than prompting the act - which remains very controversial.
By what, 0.00001%? I think the quoted sentence is obviously talking about the symbolic power of money – and burning a million pounds certainly has a lot of that.
You might argue they distributed the money amongst all existing money-havers, with each getting a microscopic share in proportion to how much money they already have. In that case it's a donation primarily to the rich.
But it's also no different than if they stuck it under a mattress for 10 years, at least until the 10 years is up. So that's also sort of a donation primarily to the rich.
Of course when the 10 years is up and they spend money, more of it will wind up in rich people's accounts than in anyone else's, if not immediately then eventually (otherwise they wouldn't stay rich.)
The Bank of England destroys between 10-30 billion pounds worth of notes per year (no longer fit for circulation). Sterling has other issuing banks too beyond BoE. I don’t think it’s possible to measure 1m notes going absent by any observable metric.
Even if it were possible, the purchasing power wouldn’t change - you coffee shop wouldn’t reduce their prices but they might adjust staffing levels in an extreme case (not remotely likely to happen with £1mm diff in circulation)
"The Bank of England destroys between 10-30 billion pounds worth of notes per year (no longer fit for circulation)."
The difference is that when BoE destroys notes they are accounted for by either the issuing of new notes and or crediting their withdrawal with a bank-entry credit thus the money in circulation does not change.
Burning notes willy nilly effectively reduces the amount of currency in circulation because the central bank thinks the money still in circulation and doesn't replace it. This is why in many countries defacing or destroying the currency is unlawful.
Correct, it's the rarety of all others bank notes that is increased, increasing purchasing power is only one consequence possible but not the only one.
By the way, being hard to measure doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And there are plenty of things easy to measure that are meaningless
It was their entire remaining royalty earnings. They also deleted their back catalogue so they couldn't earn any more. I remember having to buy Japanese imports when I wanted CD copies of the White Room and Chill Out as a teenager. It was only a couple of years ago when they finally reissued any of their work.
The ability to shutdown any persons the government doesn't like using any growing list of $Excuses is worrying.
Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade.
Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it.
That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems become centralised either through standards or legislation. It will be easy to track someones habits or location globally.
The government has always been able to shut you down. If they wanted to, they would pull you aside with no recourse and the police would execute civil forfeiture (see also: steal) against anything on your person, car or home. Cash makes this worse.
Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (and I mean PURELY) someone somewhere will know when and how you're spending your money.
If you want to deal with privacy concerns then it needs to be codified in law. And that involves dealing with the entire chain, not just point of sale and not just thinking cash will save you.
There's a qualitative difference between the government being able to freeze the accounts of every person whose phone was detected at a protest, and the government having to send agents out to physically find each of those people, search them and their property, and seize their cash. The first is cheap and easy for the government to do on a large scale, and difficult for the protesters to block. The second is far more expensive for the government, and the protesters have more options to fight back—run, hide the cash, etc. Not to mention it will probably drum up sympathy for the oppressed.
And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.
There are things that are justified to exist whose sole purpose is keeping things in-check. If any of your aforementioned tools gets abused by the authorities we can still fall back to using cash. If you take away the fallback alternative, then abuse is much more difficult to keep in check. This is called Game Theory.
just like security it's a spectrum and not a 0 or 1. I could live on cash right now if I wanted to, so it isn't 90%. If the government stops issue it and issues debit cards only or allows banks to do it then that becomes impossible. The government could always come to your house and disappear you or trump up some charges and throw you in prison indefinitely, even in the USA, so that's not really an argument
The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence.
Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong".
Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.
> Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions
Which country is it? In many jurisdictions cash transactions are already illegal above certain threshold. It might be that you won't have too many places to go.
Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash.
Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
I once had this discussion with an economics person and pointed out that if my country moves to a card-only society, then I would move to using USD notes instead.
I'm sure I won't be the only one accepting USD notes as payment.
So really either all countries go card only or people just move to other currencies, at least for certain transactions.
Cash transactions over $10k have to be reported to the IRS. You'd have to provide ID and TIN. If that weren't the case, criminals wouldn't have had problems with money laundering.
The other day, I paid cash at the local Chinese-American place, and the owner said "thank you for using cash, it helps small businesses", which took me by surprise. So I asked how much card processors charge, and she went on a bit of a rant, listing processing fees for everything from regular debit cards* charging 3-4% to rewards credit cards being around 7% to special international or world credit cards charging something like 17%. And most of them have a very narrow window to correct or void the transaction. With such rent-seeking behavior by banks, I very much understand wanting to keep cash around.
* Debit cards charged as debit, by entering a PIN. Some terminals allow you to "bypass PIN" and/or automatically charge debit cards as credit. I don't know, it's shady.
I wish more businesses would (could?) give cash discounts. It's the answer to the convenience and rewards offered by credit cards. If I can save as much or more by paying in cash as I can by paying by card, then I have a great motivation to start carrying cash around!
We have some small traders in the UK who insist on a minimum spend for accepting cards because of the fees levied.
It doesn't really make any business sense although I appreciate the sentiment behind it.
What part of the world? In the US at least this experience would only apply to a business owner that was getting absolutely fleeced by their processor.
I think the ongoing banking crisis in Lebanon (similarly in Egypt and maybe elsewhere too) where there are restrictions on people's access to their deposits or making international transactions should be on everyone's mind when talking about eliminating cash.
The downside of going cashless aren't hypothetical or as far-fetched as people think. The whole society can be put on hold overnight. We can see this happening in front of us.
Using whatever payment method for convenience in itself is fine. But, eliminating cash as medium, without providing a better alternative, one that can still work in disasters where power or network is down, is wild.
What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits? Unless you are saying people should not bank at all and keep cash under the mattress?
> What difference does the elimination of paper money at POS make to ability to access electronic deposits?
The difference it makes is that now you only have one way to access your savings. Any failures, technical issues, outage, etc. and you're out of luck to say the least.
The principle is that you shouldn't rely on a single system ever. If you're eager to go that way be my guest. I was using a real life scenario of how that turned out bad for people.
I don't care about paper vs electronic. I care about relying on a single point of failure.
The issues with physical currency are almost entirely self-inflicted. Governments should retire the smallest denominations and introduce larger coins/bills. In the US, all of the coins are worth so little that the only practical coin is the rare half-dollar. Retire all of those worthless coins, require transactions be rounded to the nearest half-dollar or dollar, and issues with physical currency for the user will go away.
Now of course, the government won’t do this as they want physical currency to be inconvenient so they can track you and deny you access to your own money when they find it convenient. We’re in an era of growing authoritarianism. Hopefully we survive this one.
I would argue the root cause of this phenomenon is inflation and the first step we should take is to make the dollar a stable unit of measure not to consciously allow its value to fall.
Deflation is worse than inflation, and it's hard to hit a single number, so central banks aim for low, stable inflation. 1-2% inflation isn't very perceptible vs 0 but avoids deflation.
This is a really good point. And one of the reasons I hardly ever use cash is having to deal with so much annoying change. If you eliminate most change… cash becomes not a big deal
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I’m not down to have rent seeking companies taking a slice of my hard earned money just so I don’t have to manage a few pieces of paper.
You’re generally paying 3-4 percent of every transaction now, as that’s pretty standard for debit cards on businesses, and it doesn’t matter if it’s charged to the card holder or the business, the consumer ultimately pays for it in higher prices. Heck, people pay transaction fees on payments they make the to government because the government won’t take cash.
Do we really need to make not paying invisible fees in everything illegal? Seems crazy.
That’s not to say I think cash should go the way of the dodo, but I don’t think there’s that much difference paying g4s to collect your money vs Mastercard.
IMO the benefits of cash are on the consumer, not the business.
It is much cheaper for the bank and customers to use cards, but where I live the banks own a payment network that does not involve visa and mastercard so the cost is much lower and there is no rent seeking so card use have no fees.
We also have an app for sending "cash" for free to friends, family and businesses that under the hood are just instant bank payments between the accounts.
No seriously, when I first moved to the Netherlands I was wondering what kind of backwards country wouldn’t let me use a credit card at the grocery store. And that’s when I learned about how crazy it is that credit cards and even American debit cards have such needlessly high transaction fees.
You’re pretending as if there weren’t any costs associated with handling cash. There’s almost always a handling fee if you want to put the cash into an account, which you will need to do if you want to pay people that are somewhere else than you are. If you have larger quantities of cash, you’ll also have to pay for safe transportation of the funds. If you make an honest comparison
But you should be very careful in eliminating cash.
I assume cash handling fees are made up by banks who want more transaction fees. That’s not a real thing in my experience. I many times have gotten a discount for cash. I have not shopped a few places because they don’t accept cash. But I have yet to be charged a cash fee by any of the banks I use.
And they have insane surveillance data on their customers from doing so. Data that is used for all kinds of unintended purposes.
Cash is also one of the last strongholds left to maintain anonymity and keep purchasing information truly private without handing heaps of data to the corporations that make a buck off your receipts—or worse, to hackers, in the case of a data breach.
To say nothing of the unbanked… which is a massive issue.
If that’s the future you want, we don’t see eye-to-eye. You are giving up a LOT more than you realize.
Citation needed. I've been depositing cash for years, with multiple banks, and nobody has ever charged a "handling fee".
> safe transportation of the funds
Yes, a lot of people have this irrational reaction to carrying large amounts of cash, as if your unremarkable Toyota miraculously sports a giant "BRINKS" logo every time you carry cash, attracting the attention of would-be criminals everywhere. I assume you believe that thieves and pickpockets are regularly carrying millimeter-wave scanners to see what's in your pockets, briefcases, backpacks, etc?
Try to explain buying with cash in 200 years to someone who never seen it.
What if I need to pay just a little, do I tear a bit of the paper?
No, you can't tear. If your piece of paper is worth too much then the seller gives you other pieces of paper worth less.
Can I throw out the rest of paper after I'm done buying?
Not unless you want to lose a piece of your value.
What if I don't have enough pieces of paper on me?
Then you can't buy.
So I should just carry all my worth in pieces of paper on me at all times?
That's a bad idea because when you loose this paper or it gets stolen or destroyed you no longer own their value.
Where do I get the paper from? Your employer can five it to you every month or week and you hold it in your home. Alternatively employer transfers the value to the bank normal way and when you need paper the bank can dispense it to you through various devices or service points.
Are any of those devices handheld?
Unfortunately no.
What if my house get burned down or robbed?
Then you lose all the value associated with all the papers kept there.
And so on.
Try to explain buying with a credit card online 200 years ago to someone who has never seen it.
You type in about 23 digits (16-digit card number, 4-digit expiry month, 3-digit verification code) to make a payment.
But these digits only change every few years as you renew your credit card. So many parties will learn of your digits and you won't know who leaked them.
The merchant on the other end can take out any amount of money from your account; it's pull-based, not push-based.
The merchant on the other end can trap you in a recurring subscription without your knowledge or make it very hard to cancel.
People have credit limits in the thousands of dollars, and in any single transaction you are liable to lose that much money. Meanwhile, you can't lose more than the hundreds of dollars of cash in your wallet.
You can call your card issuer to dispute charges, but now you're at the mercy of an intermediary.
The intermediary skims about 2~4% of every transaction, for the luxury of being able to spend your own money.
You can't process certain types of transactions in an offline environment, such as debit cards during a power outage or on an airplane (though Wi-Fi is slowly becoming more common).
And you think cash is crazy?
If you are paid via direct deposit, you're financially incentivized to stay cashless. The direct cost of spending via debit/credit card (if one doesn't carry a balance) is zero, compared to the cost of withdrawing cash.
If you want to inventivize salaried professionals to pay with cash, try outlawing fees on ATM withdrawals first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
The support is still very limited, but in India a similar system (UPI) managed to become ubiquitous.
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Have you never done a chargeback on a credit card? With Fednow, UPI etc you can't.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180130005244/en/New...
Anyway, as somebody else said, a 3% fee on transactions is just ridiculous. If you get any bit of competition, transaction-value based fees tend to be on the order of 0.5%.
But you know, our governments are fucking useless, so that ain't happening anytime soon.
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In fact, I have seen some small places ask a 3-4% surcharge for cash payments, because banks don't process cash for free any more.
- Cash is anonymous
- Cash is an "old" or "low" technology.
When a serious crime is committed you might be surprised how much the police can do to trace cash. Serial numbers in and out of ATMs and shops are tracked, and frequently your face is captured by cameras in stores, ATMs and vending machines.
Modern cash is high technology. Look at a UK or European note already. Holograms, nano-technology, advanced materials science... It's well past the point of being worth forging, and it is likely that future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash, such as time-out, store variable value, and be more traceable.
The function cash really performs is a resilience buffer for person to person transactions that works independently of electrical power and Internet. Smart people at the top are never going to let that slide, because it would be national security suicide and practically inviting civil unrest.
Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay, but it may not have all the properties we think it has and defend it for.
Which is neither here, not there. Cash is effectively anonymous for 99% of uses that don't involve "major crime". Your buying something is not logged anywhere, for example.
Exactly. Almost all cash transactions remain anonymous because there's no criminal investigation involved.
Most people are honest and just going about their business with friends and family.
That's how it should be.
A cost bar for tracing is a desirable feature for non-authoritarian societies.
Digital currency mediated by bank apps, active cards, smartphones or whatever, makes for "convenience" but also zero cost to spy on people who are not criminals. And that's a problem.
So maybe it is here. Or there. I'm not sure where you're standing :)
1. You might not be involved in a major crime but you might be a suspect. Lots of innocent suspects get convicted.
2. You might be a whistleblower. Lots of whistleblowers get framed.
Etc.
"If I've done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide" didn't work out well for Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.
A lot of the reason many of us want privacy preserved is to prevent a similar path here. Totalitarian governments don't always pop up overnight on a revolution; they often creep up on you.
The creeping process is also often:
1. We'll track X with major checks on privacy; it will only be used for terrorism and child abuse investigations and held in a secure vault
2. We're just doing a better job of sharing / using data we already collect
Neither off those is objectionable, but together, you end up in a distopia.
Cash is anonymous, by and large. That’s a fact, not a fallacy. I’ve never in my life seen any shops track serial numbers of cash transactions, nor associate them with me. I’m skeptical that anyone does it, but I welcome any evidence of this dubious claim that you’d like to provide. Having your face capture by a camera does not track the bills you used, nor the items you purchased. You’re spinning a mostly false tale.
E-money on the other hand tracks everything you buy, what you buy, when you buy, what you paid, where you bought it, and that information is used to construct a valuable profile of your purchasing habits. That profile is used for advertising. But it could also be used to deny insurance claims. Should be illegal, but I knew someone who worked for a credit card company that informed me they were thinking about how to do this legally.
E-money is tracked on everyone for everything by default, and cash does non of this. It’s insanely expensive for the police to try to trace cash, and they can only do it for one criminal at a time. They do not, and cannot, track everyone’s cash.
Spending profiles captured via e-money tracking are captured by private corporations and they are offered for sale. Any criminal cash tracking by police is used solely for capturing criminal and is otherwise not available to anyone else.
> Modern cash is high technology
Again, who’s even arguing? This is a straw man, the context is digital money. There was no debate about how much technology is used for printing bills.
> Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay
So you say? I’m not going to argue or pretend to make predictions, but one thing we know for absolute sure is that there is a downward trend of cash transactions globally.
An example list of completely legal transactions which you might not want someone in your life knowing about:
Making payments in cash is making a decision for them not to be entered in some database which may be hacked and sold for profit to someone who values their interests more than your privacy.Part of that is helping people to have a realistic but not paranoid view of technological society. My work also means I help people who have serious crimes or security issues to solve, and have legitimate investigatory needs.
I think privacy violations are not rooted in economic greed, but in unboundaried, controlling impulses that get encoded into technology.
Hope I am responding respectfully and appropriately, sorry if I got you wrong. BTW, in a safe way (ie not online) take one of those "authoritarian personality tests". It will shock you how much we have hidden in ourselves just ready to be provoked by demagogues or disinformation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rethinking-mental-he...
You could be unlucky if your crime passes a certain threshold or affects someone with power but, most of the time, it will not be investigated with the resources of the state.
I had a funny conversation with some LE types the other day (in the context of something we call "fly-tipping") about how, in theory, everyone who litters could be brought to book because they leave their fingerprints all over stuff.
Nobody in forensics is ever going to do that unless it's a very serious case. Nobody wants to be compelled to investigate some bs crime just because its possible. Make things too convenient and you've got China.
Is this true? When I buy something from my local gas station is there a system in place tracking every serial number exchanged on the cash?
Go to bank, take out 100's, to small mom and pop get change... problem solved.
Further it is highly unlikely that if some bill I got out of ATM finds it way to a crime scene or something that they will be proof of anything a defense lawyer would shoot that down in about 2 secs
>> It's well past the point of being worth forging
Not really.
>>future banknotes will use einks, embedded printable passive electronics to do all of the things people hope or fear of purely digital cash
and those should be opposed as well
It doable but not at all trivial.
>It's well past the point of being worth forging
The news seem to indicate plenty of forgers still, e.g.:
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/poss...
>it is likely that future banknotes will use einks
einks are too expensive right now?
Maybe yes. But track their falling cost and you'll see where the price point intersects with near disposable cost. European transport tickets made of cheap plasticised card only took a couple of years to incorporate RFID - that's already a long way toward low cost "intelligent cash".
For a brief few weeks in the 1980s we had "phone cards" with stored, decrementable value that you could use a few times. Purely passive and using an optical technique to see where pressure had been applied to plastic (which turns milky). In Hungary in the communist era I saw tram tickets using ingenious mathematics (an ephemeral mechanical key set by the driver) and punched paper holes to provide multi-use.
It's amazing what can be done to make cheap or even disposable portable artifacts to transfer value.
Who exactly? Where are these people in power defending physical cash or recommending an alternative monetary medium resilient to grid failure?
I simply said "smart people at the top". I didn't say there were any.
That is not the point. The point is in the contract - e.g., that you are not accepting to untick a "do not track" flag. That circumvention is always possible is not what matters there.
lmfao what. Unless someone is committing large scale crimes involving bands, no one is tracking some small bills between private citizens, some stores, more citizens, et al.
For the vast majority of people, cash is anonymous. No advertising company or government is obtaining tracking data on your purchase of an apple and a cup of coffee with cash.
Dead Comment
They literally increased the purchasing power of each remaining pound by doing so.
But it's also no different than if they stuck it under a mattress for 10 years, at least until the 10 years is up. So that's also sort of a donation primarily to the rich.
Of course when the 10 years is up and they spend money, more of it will wind up in rich people's accounts than in anyone else's, if not immediately then eventually (otherwise they wouldn't stay rich.)
[laughs, in disappearing bitcoin]
Even if it were possible, the purchasing power wouldn’t change - you coffee shop wouldn’t reduce their prices but they might adjust staffing levels in an extreme case (not remotely likely to happen with £1mm diff in circulation)
The difference is that when BoE destroys notes they are accounted for by either the issuing of new notes and or crediting their withdrawal with a bank-entry credit thus the money in circulation does not change.
Burning notes willy nilly effectively reduces the amount of currency in circulation because the central bank thinks the money still in circulation and doesn't replace it. This is why in many countries defacing or destroying the currency is unlawful.
By the way, being hard to measure doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And there are plenty of things easy to measure that are meaningless
But I agree this is likely unmeasurable.
Did they. Notes aren't a limited resource and they can still be considered in the cashflow
If the notes were counterfeit or had otherwise managed to come into existence without being owned by anyone, then no.
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Currency is a freedom to perform transaction and arguably a given right, it's existed since humans learnt trade.
Cash allows anyone to transact without a prerequisite or control. Two parties. Centralised digital currency will change it.
That worry doesn't even include the privacy concerns and as systems become centralised either through standards or legislation. It will be easy to track someones habits or location globally.
Nor does it save you from 90% of transactions you do. Banks will know when you deposit/withdraw money. Stores know the moment you walk in. Unless you deal purely in cash (and I mean PURELY) someone somewhere will know when and how you're spending your money.
If you want to deal with privacy concerns then it needs to be codified in law. And that involves dealing with the entire chain, not just point of sale and not just thinking cash will save you.
And in the end, physically seizing cash & goods only takes away what the protesters have at the time—they can still go earn more cash to transact with, unless they are arrested. Someone whose accounts are frozen, and who is prevented from opening new accounts, and who can't use cash, is running out of options.
Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong".
Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.
Which country is it? In many jurisdictions cash transactions are already illegal above certain threshold. It might be that you won't have too many places to go.
Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
I'm sure I won't be the only one accepting USD notes as payment.
So really either all countries go card only or people just move to other currencies, at least for certain transactions.
* Debit cards charged as debit, by entering a PIN. Some terminals allow you to "bypass PIN" and/or automatically charge debit cards as credit. I don't know, it's shady.
Many gas stations (usually ones serving trucks) have cash discounts for fuel, too.
(US, midwest)
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The downside of going cashless aren't hypothetical or as far-fetched as people think. The whole society can be put on hold overnight. We can see this happening in front of us.
Using whatever payment method for convenience in itself is fine. But, eliminating cash as medium, without providing a better alternative, one that can still work in disasters where power or network is down, is wild.
The difference it makes is that now you only have one way to access your savings. Any failures, technical issues, outage, etc. and you're out of luck to say the least.
The principle is that you shouldn't rely on a single system ever. If you're eager to go that way be my guest. I was using a real life scenario of how that turned out bad for people.
I don't care about paper vs electronic. I care about relying on a single point of failure.
Now of course, the government won’t do this as they want physical currency to be inconvenient so they can track you and deny you access to your own money when they find it convenient. We’re in an era of growing authoritarianism. Hopefully we survive this one.