According to the article, the main problem of a financial police state where you cannot so much as buy a loaf of bread without permission and surveillance from the payment system, is that not everyone is included.
But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
Look, I switched to completely contactless payment through my phone since Covid, and it's so convenient I'm not going back. And it's hard for me to imagine people who don't have access to a bank account or smartphone, but those people do exist, and they may eventually become unable to buy a loaf of bread, and that's a problem.
Due to government tactics, a lot of australians are now deliberately using cash a) for the privacy b) as a statement against orwellian mechanisms.
I find it really sad when people are blaise about something that once gone, can't be put back. A social credit system, & everyone talking about it as an inevitable thing, have already bought into the propaganda.
I find it inevitable that with sentiments like that, that i'll be forced to live in a car & eventually the gutter & arrested regularly because of my nuisance factor. All because of the convenience.
Is this meant as a joke? Because almost the whole world is working on outlawing or "regulating" these and they aren't even anonymous most of the time. Not being controlled and centralized is threatening enough.
Could you please expand? In this area, the only ones available I found have a surcharge of ~5..10% (you buy a 100€ card through 105€..110€). Note: I am not certain of the amount, it has been a while since I used one.
And in Europe electronic payments cannot by law be anonymous over 150€.
>But that's the point: people will not be able to buy a loaf of bread if they don't meet with the system's approval.
...
Seriously, your argument is that privacy violations will cause people to starve? not the fact that there is a currency monopoly and you can't issue your own currency and start your own regional economy from scratch if the currency is concentrated in the hands of rich people and hence cannot be used and you must constantly borrow new money into the system which eventually gets saved by the rich forcing you to go to the bank and ask them permission over and over again? The dystopia you are imagining is already there. The only thing you're losing is privacy which is solved by GNU Taler.
That is not that they're arguing at all, they are arguing that those who are locked out of the system by the government or banks or corporations will be starved by a cashless system.
They would either be locked out by not having a bank account or device to participate in the system with, or by having their accounts suspended.
Local alternative currency systems[0] have existed for a long time in many cities. They're small and fringe, but they exist. Amsterdam, for example, has NOPPES[1]. But these systems are not threatened by electronic payment systems.
That's not a real choice because governments will abuse it. If you don't have private, permissionless payments, you face the risk that the government will stop you from buying bread.
Don't believe it? Here are some other programs governments have abused: The US put people on the no fly list for refusing to become FBI informants [1]. Canada froze bank accounts of protestors. China abused their COVID tracking app to stop protests. [2]
It's important to remember past government abuses so we don't give them more tools for future abuses.
If you give me the choice between a government that tries to force me to cede my autonomy and my privacy in order to buy a loaf of bread or go hungry, I'm sharpening my pitchfork and lighting my torch ten times out of ten.
Governments don't even have to get involved, we are heading in the direction fo functional cashlessness by the influence of corporations and the market alone. Hope you like incinerating fat cats to doom music, my friend.
but you missed a crucial part -- the post says "pitchforks" but is made by a ninety-nine percent civilized person with manners and education, who is unlikely to actually do the physical act mentioned -- but in the modern day, will Very Likely remember this topic at voting time. Take-no-prisoners politics means that the losing candidate, really actually loses and is therefore out of a job right now. So these are high stakes for political types and they do know it.
Sadly most American politicians on both sides of the aisle would probably vote for cashless right now, but, not all of them... and things do change.
Though I don't think that would help. Let's say we go cashless some day, then people get oppressed and manage to put together an uprising. Will the result be the return of cash, or just putting another despot in charge? So many times it's the latter. Perhaps the only real answer is smashing the datacentres, like modern-day luddites..
You must be really naive if you think that isn't the case already.
Imagine a bitcoin standard where the rich own all the Bitcoin and governments force you to use Bitcoin. The rich have no reason to lend you Bitcoin for free, you don't need the Bitcoin, you need the loaf of bread and you are willing to trade your time for that loaf of bread but since the middleman Bitcoin was inserted, you are forced to borrow in the hope that you can pay the money back. Nobody lends out money for free, you are going to have to pay interest. The best part is that you are going to default as the interest payments end up in the wallet of the rich guy you just borrowed money from, due to the magic of compound interest he is going to lend his money out again. This means your debt is unpayable because interest payments must recirculate in the economy and somehow end up with you again but in this case they are just being lent out again. The only thing you can do is outcompete some other guy and take the money he borrowed into the economy to pay your own debt. Since someone is going to lose this competition there are going to be destitute and poor people in your society. The only known way out of this mess that is commonly practiced is to force the economy to grow faster which degrades the environment and results in ever inequality. The obvious solution and actually working solution is to make liquidity have a cost so that withholding money from the economy is impossible over the long term.
Money is power and control for those who have it and their power extends beyond what they can buy with it, it also extends to those who don't have it.
If you want total financial control over people, you sure want it over the whole population, and not just those who already have too much to lose to actually protest or do something against the government.
Since the "two missed meals" that are between today and a revolution are most probable for the poor, skipping them would be bad for the overlords.
It does seem to be a more clear and present danger to health and wellbeing for a chunk of society than the usual HN paranoia about loss of some imagined supreme personal autonomy and the government stopping you from buying what you want.
It's an exceptionally flexible and convenient method of control.
Earlier this year, donors to the truck convey protest in Canada had their bank accounts frozen. This wasn't a targeted list of "these 37 people have broken a law"--rather, it was a broad mandate to freeze accounts assocated with the protests, operationalized a bit differently by each bank.
In a society where most businesses don't take cash anymore, this turnkey coercive capability becomes more airtight.
The frog will boil slowly. A few years ago, all US payment processors blocked donations to Wikileaks, after they reported on war crimes in Iraq. Today, most people still think of digital money in the same way as physical cash; in reality, every transaction is a request for permission, with fraud heuristics and blocklists that might say yes or no.
Soon, a guy gets DUI, loses the ability to buy alcohol for six months--who would oppose that? Over time, the scope and frequency of financial deplatforminig will expand. Twitter does one-week suspensions for violating their terms of service. Why not your credit card?
Few stores keep video recordings indefinitely. A fair number don't even bother with recording at all, they just make sure cameras are visible to act as a deterrent.
Financial transaction records at banks might as well be forever, though.
One of those is far more powerful than the other, and far more dangerous if it gets leaked to malicious actors.
There are anonynous digital payment services. It is very difficult to surveil your loaf of bread transaction history if it isn't recorded and the customer is unknown.
One of the key selling-points of Central Bank Digital Currencies for governments is that they will be able to provide extensive insights into citizens' behavior (how demand and consumption patterns change according to various factors) as well as a variety of levers that they will be able to use adjust that behavior in subtle and opaque ways. I'm not sure how much parallel privacy-focused systems will be tolerated under such future regimes.
Shoplift? No big deal. Have the theoretical potential to avoid even 1 penny in taxes? The only option is a financial panopticon that tracks the flow of all money!
I'm not saying that privacy isn't important but I don't think it is the main problem compared to people being unable to use currency.