Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm 463
MrSeb writes "There's been a lot of noise about Sweden becoming a cashless economy, and the potential repercussions that it might cause, most notably the (apparent) annihilation of privacy. Really, though, I think this is a load of hot air. Physical money might be on the way out, but that doesn't mean the end of anonymous, untraceable cash — it'll just become digital. If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing. What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash? We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money. No longer would handling money require expensive cash registers, safes, and secure collections; your smartphone could be your point of sale. It won't be easy to get governments to pass digital cash into law, though, not with big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency. Here's hoping Sweden makes the right choice when the referendum to retire physical money finally rolls around."
Secure = Traceable (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's secure, it's traceable, otherwise you can duplicate it.
answer depends on true reason to becom "cashless" (Score:1, Insightful)
1. Fiscal - not fully compatible with notion of anonymous cash
2. "Police State" - contradicts anonymous cash
3. safe on cost of paper money circulation - surely compatible
4. creating digital cash in order to fight SOME (maybe US) Govt. on pos 1 and 2 - very likely
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine giving your neighborhood dealer $200 digital cash for some drugs then the cops catch him with your money, traceable to you, on his iphone. Not good.
Once again: DO. NOT. WANT. (Score:5, Insightful)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
Re:Traceable Currency and Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds more like Revelations 13:17
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe its just me, but your logic of using an illegal situation to justify why a digital economy shouldn't exist seems like a bad argument.
who the fuck approved this post comment as a story (Score:1, Insightful)
FTA:
When was the last time you used an ATM, anyway?
yesterday. i had to stand in line to use it too. bullshit fucking provocative speculation go fuck yourself til you die. let's pick apart another fallacy in TFA:
...this means that every move you make will be recorded in a huge database. Your bank will know where you get coffee in the morning, the route you take to work, and if there’s a vending machine at your office it might even know where you work. Likewise, your bank will know that you like to buy things on Amazon while you’re at work, that you enjoy watching X-rated movies when you’re on the road, and that you always leave it until the last moment to buy your wife a birthday present.... .... Well, get this, every credit card company, bank, and sizable corporation already tracks your transactions.
unless you pay with cash, then they don't. they even point this out right after telling you that all your usual cash transactions are somehow being tracked. fucking retards. die in a fire. "your bank will know that you like to buy things on Amazon.." -- they already do!! HOW THE FUCK DO YOU BUY ANYTHING ON AMAZON WITH CASH??? i wish i could choke this writer out and kick his astonished dog.
i also take offense to TFA's writer who puts out this little reality distortion field:
At this point it’s commonplace for self-respecting libertarians to leap up and decry the awful, privacy annihilation that I’ve just described. How could you live in a world where the Rockefellers can track your every move?! they cry.
the joke here is that libertarian = crazy, get-off-my-lawn tinfoil hat wearing cranks. a little straw man goes a long way. the writer wants you to feel like you're a crank if you believe your privacy is being threatened further than it already is, and he wants you to feel that it's ok simply because it already is being violated. what an asshole. fuck anyone who perpetuates this bullshit. by that logic it's ok to put arsenic in the drinking water, we already put fluoride in it! fuck you!
Ok, a few reasons why it's not really a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the obvious: How do you pay someone who doesn't have the means to register your payment? Private to private money deals will become virtually impossible unless both parties have some kind of electronic device on them permanently. And it may be unbelievable to some, but there are still people who refuse to carry a smart phone around. How do I lend my buddy 10 bucks if he has no means to receive them?
Then, the criminal. Untraceable, yeah, sure, tell someone who believes you. Criminals will not use it. Instead, they will keep the cash in circulation. And why shouldn't they? The very first thing I will do as soon as it becomes a fact that this goes through is to go to the bank and withdraw as much money as I can in the lowest possible bills available. Trust me, this money will become more and more valuable as time goes by, as it is used for back alley deals and as it gets out of circulation because of busts and people returning it to their account. ANY currency that you can only spend but not collect becomes more valuable over time, as long as there are people who give it value. And that stuff WILL be valuable, and if not, I can always still hand it back to the bank and deposit it. The alternative being, of course, that some foreign currency suddenly becomes the street bill. For reference, see Cuba. You want something aside of the state-approved crap? You better have greenbacks with you.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it. Now on the other hand, try to open an account if you're homeless. Try it. I dare you. How the heck do you think these people will ever get back on their feet? Because then your excuse "if he really wanted, he could" doesn't work anymore. He CANNOT anymore.
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you realize that tons are things of illegal that shouldn't be.
Re:and how are you going to buy one? (Score:4, Insightful)
The user could pay someone else to buy the card at a small premium.
So when the drug dealer's money is confiscated and traced back to someone, it will be someone who you paid to buy it for you, and since there is no physical money anymore, that person will be able to provide your info to the cops. Or he'll go to jail.
Care to debate which option your local prepaid VISA card reseller who doesn't want to go to jail and doesn't give a damn about you will pick?
It doesn't matter who you buy the card from, they'll have your information because you can't pay them untracably. Even if you could barter all the money you need with them, they'll have your info.
Moving past artifcial scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html [archive.org]
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money [youtube.com]
Re:Moving past artifcial scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity
The economy will never be "post-scacity", as there's only so much shoreline property. There will always be desireable stuff that is scarce, and there will always be stuff that is desireable it's scarce - even if it's just the concert T-shirt that shows you listened to that band before it was cool.
including fiat currencies
In practice, the currency in use is simply the most-easily-exchanged commodity. Fiat currencies emerged because, as economies grew, you simply couldn't find enough notes to do business. BitCoins have a very interesting solution to this problem: they are quite limited in quantity, but you can exchange arbitrarily small fractions of one. That might actually work.
It has also been pointed out that a gold-backed currency could work in a modern economy with fractional-reserve lending, as the limited amount of gold (and therefore notes) wouldn't matter very much. I agree, but then what problem are you solving?
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
The American money supply is based on a zero-reserve banking system. Yup, except for demand accounts, banks can lnd out all that they take in. That means the money supply is theorectically infinite, and practically limited only by "friction" - the time it takes for money to circulate. US Dollars really aren't based around "artificial scarcity" any more. What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
giving money to bradley manning defence fund
Was Heinlein right? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't remember which Heinlein novel (maybe Time Enough for Love?) was set in a 'nearly' cashless society. Cash however, was still needed because, as was phrased, it was 'the oil needed for the wheels of commerce'. What Heinlein was implying was that the contribution of black and grey markets can't be ignored, and indeed without them, normal commerce wont work at all.
Re:and how are you going to buy one? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the cards change hands frequently enough, then the tracability of the card becomes as difficult as the tracability of the unique IDs on cash bills.
The reason that the ids of cash bills are essentially untraceable is because almost nobody currently tracks them.
The card data will be tracked by everyone, since everyone who touches it will need to process it as data and the computer will record it automatically. Unless you think people will just accept your word that "this card contains $25" and not run it through their scanner to verify the amount and validity, at which point the record is made.
The various denominations of card would never go through a card swipe machine, except to permanently denude it of its assets prior to its physical destruction.
Wow. So you really do think people will just accept your word that the cash card you hand them contains $25 just because you say so.
That 200$ card can have changed hands physically hundreds of times before then. This is the same problem as cash bills.
Cash bills are easily exchangable like that because there is some measure of trust that the bill is genuine and has not had its value stripped from it by an intermediate owner. There are also people with guns who deal with people who try to produce fake bills, and usually identifying a fake bill takes nothing more than really looking at it.
How do you deal with the person who "denudes" 100 cards that contain $1 and then transfers the contents of one $100 card to all 100 of the blanks? Or doesn't transfer anything to them. You've now got 101 cards that are valued at $100 because the guy who has them says they are $100 cards. He started with $200, he's now trading for $10,100. You can't tell just by looking, it's a piece of plastic with a magstripe on the back or a few gold contacts on the front.
Well, you deal with that by either "swiping" every card when it is used (which gives you tracability) or making cards that have strong visual authentication systems so no swiping, or even any electronic measure, is needed (and thus you have made a one-for-one replacement of "paper cash" with "plastic cash", copying all the problems of paper cash over into your "plastic" system.)
The only reason paper cash is untracable is because most people don't write the numbers down. If everyone has to write all the numbers down, and has to do it electronically because the numbers are only available via electronic means, then you've converted "paper cash" into just as tracable a system as this new "digital cash" will be.
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:3, Insightful)
Some other examples of trade I might argue should be legal:
Prostitution, gambling, second-hand sales, some smuggling (importing movies and games), prostitution, some child pornography (manga), currency trading, copyright protected media, and prostitution.
Others might have more to add, such as:
Weapons, fuel (evading taxes), unlicensed taxis.
I personally wouldn't go for full anarchy in this area though. I feel that human trafficking, and government corruption really ought to be illegal (possibly also some poaching).
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
- Person-Person transactions that are not directly taxed. If you think it should be-- fuck you, my 14 year old kid should be able to mow the neighbor's lawn without the IRS getting a cut.
I disagree, actually. If he's making enough for it to be taxable, then there's no distinction between him and a 19 year old doing the same amount of work. It's not that I think 14 year olds should be tapped for taxes, just that there's no real justification for setting an age limit. What about a 12 year old who runs a highly profitable online store?
And I should be able to pay an allowance the same.
You can, within the limits of the gift tax laws.
- Purchasing anything that I want to remain private -- legality aside.
Yes.
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because the dollar is the only legal tender doesn't make it illegal for people to use tokens and casino chips.
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:4, Insightful)
Which isnt illegal at all, actually.
Care to try again?
Re:Bitcoin is a joke! (Score:5, Insightful)
Failed at what exactly? Neither you nor the article define exactly what it is that it has failed at.
Linux is only 1-2% of desktops after 20 years... is that a failure? Scale isn;t great but look how many linux users there were after 3 years ... https://linuxcounter.net/charts/_stats_number_users_40years.png?1332412189 [linuxcounter.net]
Sure bitcoin is still niche, revolutionary change doesn't happen overnight. Price discovery takes a while and often overshoots. Same with equities, and even indexes. That's all speculation driven. Beneath that there is an economy of sorts - it's small, tiny but thats how things starts.
If/when it gets outlawed, then I think we can start talking about failure. Thought technically it never failed - if anything, outlawing it suggests it was threatening to be a success.
Re:Secure = Traceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? "If you are doing nothing wrong you have noting to hide"?
The power to investigate people is always abused. No exceptions. That is why there must be a balance, a limit to what the police are allowed to do, what the government is allowed to control and know.