9 ms·

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

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.

seibelj 4y ago
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!
- mistrial9 4y ago
  defend and expand the taxation, fines and supervision -- bingo
Nursie 4y ago
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.
kevincox 4y ago
If you give me the choice between being able to buy a loaf of bread and having my payments private I'm feeding myself ten times out of ten. 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.
- john_the_writer 4y ago
  What if you get arrested because you buy a pride flag? Or if you get killed because you use a service? What if you get arrested because you sold a train ticket to someone who doesn't have enough "social credit" to buy said train ticket?
  - desas 4y ago
    Then your society has bigger problems than how purchases are carried out.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > your society has bigger problems It does not. A psychically deficient society expresses its "illness"¹ in many different ways, all with the same root. (¹Both "evil", original sense, and "malfunction", translated sense. 'Illness' is a good term for this context.)
    - rapnie 4y ago
      And a cashless society helps aggravate these problems.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  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.
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    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.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      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.
      - JetAlone 4y ago
        Out of autonomy, out of food. Out of a job, out of blood. Rising flood raises all ships. The stakes will get higher for all of us. Edit: Besides, the GP's got a slav sounding username. One would be wise not to assume civilization rates in excess of 75%. Strong slavs make bad times. Bad times make strong slavs.
        time0ut 4y ago
        Maybe more Russian sounding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
- tboyd47 4y ago
  I'd feed myself nine times and eat leftovers on the tenth. Privacy isn't the most important thing in the world but it's shortsighted to just throw it out the window. You don't need it 'til you need it. It's okay to be friends with people who can't keep a secret but you need to have at least one friend who can.
  - thisgoesnowhere 4y ago
    This comment is identical to the one you responded to.
    - tboyd47 4y ago
      10/10 != 9/10
      - happyopossum 4y ago
        When giving up privacy, once is roughly equivalent to ‘every time’.
        bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        given the technical capabilities to make it so, which we have.
        tboyd47 4y ago
        If what you said was true, then no one would have any privacy at all. But yet certain people have seemingly perfect privacy, like Satoshi Nakamoto and Jeffrey Epstein's employers. How? I now realize a lot of people on HN are hard liners when it comes to privacy and think there's only absolute privacy and no privacy. I think you all forget that not all information is the same. You can keep private channels open "just in case" while using public ones. You can also enhance your privacy to a degree better than most people with simple, easy-to-do steps. Anyway, the "all or nothing" mindset is detrimental to your cause and makes the average person feel like it's not worth it.
  - 4y ago
- leereeves 4y ago
  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. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/supreme-court-case-no-fly-list.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/supreme-court-case-no-... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/business/china-code-protesters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/business/china-code-prote...
  - thisgoesnowhere 4y ago
    This is such a childish nonsense response to a nuanced well articulated argument.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  It’s insane to make it a choice though. Allow/require cash as an option, and all of these problems go away.
- AinderS 4y ago
  That is precisely my point. The ability to prevent you from buying a loaf of bread will be used for control.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    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.
    - notpushkin 4y ago
      This is exactly why we shouldn't let governments force us to use any currency. We don't have a currency problem, we have a government problem.
- mcv 4y ago
  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.
  - cmroanirgo 4y ago
    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.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      There are anonymous payment services. Just mandate the use of those in the laws.
      - perf1 4y ago
        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.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        > anonymous payment services 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€.
  - 4y ago
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
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.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
How is an electronic record of a transaction any worse then being filmed by multiple cameras as you walked in to buy that bread? In my country, a warrant is required to access both sources of data.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  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.
- dcposch 4y ago
  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?
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    And that is something that I hope Canada has a moral reckoning with, that's absolutely astounding to me. Cash doesn't prevent this entirely though, unless you have all your cash under a mattress.
    - 4y ago
imtringued 4y ago
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.
- brippalcharrid 4y ago
  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.

seibelj 4y ago

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!

mistrial9 4y ago
defend and expand the taxation, fines and supervision -- bingo

Nursie 4y ago

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.

kevincox 4y ago

If you give me the choice between being able to buy a loaf of bread and having my payments private I'm feeding myself ten times out of ten. 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.

john_the_writer 4y ago
What if you get arrested because you buy a pride flag? Or if you get killed because you use a service? What if you get arrested because you sold a train ticket to someone who doesn't have enough "social credit" to buy said train ticket?
- desas 4y ago
  Then your society has bigger problems than how purchases are carried out.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > your society has bigger problems It does not. A psychically deficient society expresses its "illness"¹ in many different ways, all with the same root. (¹Both "evil", original sense, and "malfunction", translated sense. 'Illness' is a good term for this context.)
  - rapnie 4y ago
    And a cashless society helps aggravate these problems.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
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.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  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.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    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.
    - JetAlone 4y ago
      Out of autonomy, out of food. Out of a job, out of blood. Rising flood raises all ships. The stakes will get higher for all of us. Edit: Besides, the GP's got a slav sounding username. One would be wise not to assume civilization rates in excess of 75%. Strong slavs make bad times. Bad times make strong slavs.
      - time0ut 4y ago
        Maybe more Russian sounding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
tboyd47 4y ago
I'd feed myself nine times and eat leftovers on the tenth. Privacy isn't the most important thing in the world but it's shortsighted to just throw it out the window. You don't need it 'til you need it. It's okay to be friends with people who can't keep a secret but you need to have at least one friend who can.
- thisgoesnowhere 4y ago
  This comment is identical to the one you responded to.
  - tboyd47 4y ago
    10/10 != 9/10
    - happyopossum 4y ago
      When giving up privacy, once is roughly equivalent to ‘every time’.
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        given the technical capabilities to make it so, which we have.
      - tboyd47 4y ago
        If what you said was true, then no one would have any privacy at all. But yet certain people have seemingly perfect privacy, like Satoshi Nakamoto and Jeffrey Epstein's employers. How? I now realize a lot of people on HN are hard liners when it comes to privacy and think there's only absolute privacy and no privacy. I think you all forget that not all information is the same. You can keep private channels open "just in case" while using public ones. You can also enhance your privacy to a degree better than most people with simple, easy-to-do steps. Anyway, the "all or nothing" mindset is detrimental to your cause and makes the average person feel like it's not worth it.
- 4y ago
leereeves 4y ago
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. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/supreme-court-case-no-fly-list.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/supreme-court-case-no-... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/business/china-code-protesters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/business/china-code-prote...
- thisgoesnowhere 4y ago
  This is such a childish nonsense response to a nuanced well articulated argument.
happyopossum 4y ago
It’s insane to make it a choice though. Allow/require cash as an option, and all of these problems go away.
AinderS 4y ago
That is precisely my point. The ability to prevent you from buying a loaf of bread will be used for control.
- imtringued 4y ago
  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.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    This is exactly why we shouldn't let governments force us to use any currency. We don't have a currency problem, we have a government problem.
mcv 4y ago
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.
- cmroanirgo 4y ago
  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.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    There are anonymous payment services. Just mandate the use of those in the laws.
    - perf1 4y ago
      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.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > anonymous payment services 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€.
- 4y ago

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

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.

EdwardDiego 4y ago

How is an electronic record of a transaction any worse then being filmed by multiple cameras as you walked in to buy that bread? In my country, a warrant is required to access both sources of data.

zdragnar 4y ago
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.
dcposch 4y ago
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?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  And that is something that I hope Canada has a moral reckoning with, that's absolutely astounding to me. Cash doesn't prevent this entirely though, unless you have all your cash under a mattress.
  - 4y ago

imtringued 4y ago

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.

brippalcharrid 4y ago
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.