[lioeters]

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.

[caseysoftware]

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.

[roenxi]

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.

[fyfy18]

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.

[PeterisP]

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.

[fyfy18]

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.

[tastroder]

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.

[lioeters]

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!

[dzhiurgis]

The real problem here is lack of accountability and consumer protection from these companies not the funds themselves...

[chewz]

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?".

[totalZero]

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.

[_the_inflator]

Privacy: crypto to the rescue.

[kerkeslager]

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.

[1] https://z.cash/

[topranks]

Monero is a fairly popular privacy coin too.

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.

[kerkeslager]

> Monero is a fairly popular privacy coin too.

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.

[a012]

How exactly the crypto could rescue?

[bduerst]

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.

[guelo]

As if the store that can't be bothered to accept cash is going to accept some hard to use fringe coin.

[koonsolo]

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.

[est31]

> 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.

[koonsolo]

Your whole argument falls to pieces when Proof Of Stake is used instead of Proof Of Work. Plenty of high TPS crypto's use POS.

https://blog.qtum.org/how-proof-of-stake-renders-a-51-attack...

[PeterisP]

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.

[koonsolo]

> is absolutely a solved problem

I'm going to sell my car on Sunday to another private person. I will hand over the documents and keys, while he instantly wire transfers me 20k.

Now all of a sudden it's not a solved problem anymore is it?

And Bitcoin, please, that's old tech. There are way more advanced cryptocurrencies now that have high TPS and < 10 sec validation.

[bduerst]

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).

[topranks]

While that’s correct that is also just an artificial limit put on it by the Bitcoin core devs, who somehow think it is desirable.

Many other coins have the capability to support orders of magnitude more transactions per second and have been successfully demonstrated to do so.

In theory, with 10GB blocks or so, it could scale to Visa-levels although I’m not sure anyone has tested at that scale.

[topranks]

The problem being discussed is replacing cash.

Cash does not provide dispute handling, chargebacks or any of those other things either.

[CameronNemo]

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.

[dymk]

None of which support chargebacks, fraud prevention, anti money laundering, or the other benefits to a centralized reversible money system.

[ur-whale]

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.

[kerkeslager]

Really, fraud prevention and chargebacks benefit the government and not individuals?

If you have your debit card stolen and someone spends $10K of your money, you (an individual!) get that money back.

I'm very much pro-cryptocurrency, but I don't think it does anyone any favors to pretend there are no benefits to traditional banking.

[CameronNemo]

I would imagine these (anti) features could be implemented by signing transactions with government recognized private keys.

[koonsolo]

I'm from Belgium, which has one of the highest income taxes in the world. Why do you put "anti money laundering" as a benefit?

[reallydontask]

Not OP

Most people would agree that not allowing criminals to enjoy the spoils of their crime is a good thing.

If you think that your taxes are too high, and would like to be a law abiding citizen, you've got options:

ballot box (you might need your own party)

move to a different country

[bduerst]

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.

[bartkappenburg]

Just like cash.

[bduerst]

Cash's physical nature makes transactions with parties less anonymous, meaning there are other routes of remediation (i.e. small claims court, etc.)

[jkepler]

Since cash and open/decentralized crypto are bearer instruments.