[openthc]

In USA (for example) if we were cashless then then millions of tax dollars collected by state governments from cannabis sales would not have happened.

This is because 100% of the electronic payment players currently block it; and they block it because the federal government blocks it.

The only path to legalized cannabis there would have been at the federal level; it would have blocked 20+ states with their experiments.

[ufmace]

This aspect of things really ought to scare everyone a lot more. All of the enormous mega-corporations involved in card processing are so heavily regulated and so dependent on the Federal Government, that it doesn't even take actual laws to make them do things. Just get a couple of regulators in place to vaguely hint that they might have a hard time at their next compliance review if they don't ban thing X that we don't like today, and boom, it's gone. Only a few companies can even afford to operate in this space, so that's all it takes to effectively ban something from the whole financial market.

[taeric]

Right, but my argument is that that blocking is the problem? And you'd be silly to think that any of the other concerns aren't still there for cash buyers. Hell, many of the pot shops are now scanning your ID.

I should note that the only path to legalized cannabis is still, strictly speaking, at the federal level. It is a federally illegal thing. To pretend otherwise is a dangerous risk a lot of places are willing to take.

[ghaff]

That's actually not true.

It may have been at first. But, in my state, you can pay by debit card these days, albeit for a small surcharge.

[openthc]

100% of of these folks doing card-type payments are playing cat and mouse (I know because I'm very involved in this industry). Some don't tell their up-stream processors what they are doing. Others are constantly shifting their processing through various gateways. None of it currently runs on the credit-rails. But all the debit-rail processing is happening in a dark-grey area. One of these debit-rail providers has like four banking parterships per state they "work" in -- so when they strike out on one, they can move to another. You can observe that in the retail store when they say "oh, EBT isn't working today".

And more importantly, in 2014 when the regulated cannabis industry started -- electronic only would have blocked it -- or created an additional huge hurdle. It's taken eight years to get to this crap-tastick hack of workarounds and outright lies.