<story><title>In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously</title><url>https://thehub.ca/2022-02-22/howard-anglin-in-our-cashless-society-we-need-to-take-digital-jail-seriously/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>&amp;gt; Incorrect, the battle is partly won...&lt;p&gt;Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can&amp;#x27;t force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; dominant in the future. It&amp;#x27;s just too convenient.&lt;p&gt;So let&amp;#x27;s figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. &amp;quot;Everyone decides to use cash again&amp;quot; just isn&amp;#x27;t going to happen.</text></item><item><author>walterbell</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC &amp;amp; SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.&lt;p&gt;However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China&amp;#x27;s CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors.&lt;p&gt;The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn&amp;#x27;t work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while &amp;quot;digital due process&amp;quot; is slowly constructed.&lt;p&gt;Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street.  If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;usa.kinokuniya.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;usa.kinokuniya.com&lt;/a&gt;), it&amp;#x27;s a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews.  The online-offline playing field is now less tilted.&lt;p&gt;Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators.&lt;p&gt;The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;lt;there&amp;#x27;s always a bigger shark.jpg&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item><item><author>jakobdabo</author><text>&amp;gt; The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.&lt;p&gt;No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it&amp;#x27;s hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It&amp;#x27;s not okay to take or freeze somebody&amp;#x27;s money&amp;#x2F;property without any court decision.&lt;p&gt;Edit: some of the answers assume that I&amp;#x27;m against cash or that by saying &amp;quot;battle is lost&amp;quot; I mean cash is gone; My point of &amp;quot;cashless winning&amp;quot; is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don&amp;#x27;t hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it&amp;#x27;s frozen?</text></item><item><author>throwaway22032</author><text>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.&lt;p&gt;In the medium to long term it&amp;#x27;s simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily &amp;quot;turn off&amp;quot; thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused.&lt;p&gt;Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can&amp;#x27;t give it to them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system.&lt;p&gt;But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don&amp;#x27;t take the cowardly way out and pretend that you&amp;#x27;ve just flipped a database key and it&amp;#x27;s not really a big deal.&lt;p&gt;By the same token, if you tell me there&amp;#x27;s been a murder on my street I&amp;#x27;ll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I&amp;#x27;ll tell you where to shove it. That&amp;#x27;s what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why.&lt;p&gt;Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mortenjorck</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It&amp;#x27;s just too convenient.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins.&lt;p&gt;The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. You literally wave your wrist over a point-of-sale terminal and confirm on the screen. Once this experience is cloned and brought downmarket by a combination of Android, Fitbit, and no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon, very few will go back even to pulling out credit cards, much less enduring the complications of cash.&lt;p&gt;We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. Cash, for better or worse, is on the way out.</text></comment>
<story><title>In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously</title><url>https://thehub.ca/2022-02-22/howard-anglin-in-our-cashless-society-we-need-to-take-digital-jail-seriously/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>&amp;gt; Incorrect, the battle is partly won...&lt;p&gt;Not in the slightest. You can mandate that people accept cash, but you can&amp;#x27;t force people to pay with it. The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; dominant in the future. It&amp;#x27;s just too convenient.&lt;p&gt;So let&amp;#x27;s figure out what kind of benign future we actually can build. &amp;quot;Everyone decides to use cash again&amp;quot; just isn&amp;#x27;t going to happen.</text></item><item><author>walterbell</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incorrect, the battle is partly won in several U.S. cities (including NYC &amp;amp; SF) which passed laws to mandate acceptance of cash.&lt;p&gt;However, cash-acceptance laws were mostly motivated by the unbanked, who are now being used to justify the introduction of nation-state CBDCs. China&amp;#x27;s CBDC is two-tier and preserves retail bank competition. People close to the current admin have proposed a 1-tier CBDC that would eliminate retail banks from payment processing, perhaps relegating them to fintech data processors.&lt;p&gt;The long-term answer is both: encourage bearer currency (cash, precious metals, zero-knowledge crypto) to anchor one edge of the Overton window with an existence proof of freedom from surveillance and kill switches, AND impose regulation on digital systems to enforce constitutional rights. 99% cashless doesn&amp;#x27;t work for tyranny, because there are escape valves. We can and must defend those exceptions, while &amp;quot;digital due process&amp;quot; is slowly constructed.&lt;p&gt;Remember when e-commerce was not subject to sales tax? For more than a decade, the playing field was not level. Today, large websites are almost unusable for buying popular items at risk of counterfeiting, and there is little online price advantage over Main Street.  If you have access to a local branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;usa.kinokuniya.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;usa.kinokuniya.com&lt;/a&gt;), it&amp;#x27;s a joyful 3D curated experience vs. the chore of navigating an online bookshop with questionable reviews.  The online-offline playing field is now less tilted.&lt;p&gt;Today, cashless proponents are free-riding on digital data streams whose originators lack the infrastructure for licensing or negotiation. Competition for those data streams (which feed into AI for economic advantage) is coming from {nation,city,multi}-state regulators, corporate payment networks {Apple,Amazon,Google}Pay and DRM infrastructure for data originators.&lt;p&gt;The free data ride in cashless systems, like sales tax holidays, is coming to an end.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;lt;there&amp;#x27;s always a bigger shark.jpg&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item><item><author>jakobdabo</author><text>&amp;gt; The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.&lt;p&gt;No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it&amp;#x27;s hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It&amp;#x27;s not okay to take or freeze somebody&amp;#x27;s money&amp;#x2F;property without any court decision.&lt;p&gt;Edit: some of the answers assume that I&amp;#x27;m against cash or that by saying &amp;quot;battle is lost&amp;quot; I mean cash is gone; My point of &amp;quot;cashless winning&amp;quot; is that most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless forms of paying, both online and offline, and they don&amp;#x27;t hoard bills under their beds; even when using ATM to get some cash, you are still using the cashless system to do that (your card and your bank account); so how are you going to do that if it&amp;#x27;s frozen?</text></item><item><author>throwaway22032</author><text>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.&lt;p&gt;In the medium to long term it&amp;#x27;s simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily &amp;quot;turn off&amp;quot; thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused.&lt;p&gt;Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisely what these people want and is exactly why we can&amp;#x27;t give it to them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take inconvenience over slavery any day of the week.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t some sort of anarcho-libertarian paradise opinion, I have no issue with there being a well functioning justice system.&lt;p&gt;But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things, don&amp;#x27;t take the cowardly way out and pretend that you&amp;#x27;ve just flipped a database key and it&amp;#x27;s not really a big deal.&lt;p&gt;By the same token, if you tell me there&amp;#x27;s been a murder on my street I&amp;#x27;ll give you the CCTV footage of my door cam. If you ask me for a backdoor, I&amp;#x27;ll tell you where to shove it. That&amp;#x27;s what being a member of a free society is, that seemingly minor distinction is one of the most important things we have and better minds than mine have sought to elaborate on why.&lt;p&gt;Even a child is able to understand that force is still force regardless of whether it involves the direct visible physical kind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walterbell</author><text>We don&amp;#x27;t need &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot; to use cash for &amp;quot;everything&amp;quot;, just some people to use cash for some transactions.&lt;p&gt;It is legal in most jurisdictions to give discounts when paying with cash.  That is enough motivation to use cash for larger purchases, since it saves costs for both the merchant and the customer. The only loser is the now-redundant payment processor.</text></comment>