Not Paying with Cash
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The author discusses their preference for using cards over cash, sparking a debate about the pros and cons of cashless transactions, with commenters weighing in on issues of convenience, privacy, and financial tracking.
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Gets some of the advantages - not all.
Or if you shop regularly at a given store, reloadable gift cards are a decent substitute.
But cash isn’t terribly scary.
A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA.
Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.
The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
It’d better if the government just mandated the eCash system in the back half of Applied Cryptography (which is similar to the Japanese system discussed elsewhere in this thread).
Contactless cards can also do offline transactions, without any Internet connectivity. We support that in our app via https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/co...
We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.
http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago.
I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.
Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?
So to execute the double spend you would have to find an authorized card provider, convince them to load and sign your double spend-capable program onto the smartcard (with their signature!), and then be found out within a week when reconciliation is off.
So doing a double spend will be found out, and not only will you be on a bunch of cameras doing the thing, whoever made your card will also have been compromised.
I think that in practice the "eventual" reconciliation is fairly quick nowadays. Just that the offline spend can happen quickly, and then the packet gets sent over the wire maybe a minute later rather than before the spend is approved.
This is definitely the case, and it's also "relatively instant" in the happy path. There are cases like vending machines, or during system outages where the reconciliation happens much later, but those instances are definitely becoming rarer!
...And as you expect it is vulnerable to double spend attacks. Hilariously the vulnerability was revealed in 2014 and nothing has been done to mitigate it. Yes, you can double spend in Taiwan today if you don't mind risking jail time.
From my (rudimentary) understanding of CAP, there is no prefect solution to this. I wonder how Japan handles it.
Much easier than double spending would be to use a student or other reduced fare card.
FeliCa uses mutual authentication with eventual bookkeeping and sync. I believe that there are some theoretical attacks on older cards but the terminals are regularly synchronized and get a ban list. In-practice, you’ll also be reported to the police, probably.
Before Suica (and a bit concurrently), JNR and later JR issued "orange cards" that included both high value formats and lower value formats. The "high value" cards were 5,000 yen and 10,000 yen respectively, so the new maximum is 2x the previous "high value" orange cards that they abolished.
The real win with e-money is not getting change, in my opinion. Carrying 20,000 yen in cash is easy when it's 2x 10,000 notes, but when it's a mix including coins, it's a pain.
Carry a coinpurse. I use an old faux-suede Samsung camera pouch.[1] Plus it's fun when someone is running an errand for you, like getting you a snack from the konbini across the street, and you plop your coinpurse on the desk with a thud, then pour out a handful of 500-yen coins and say "this should cover it", like a feudal lord.
[1] kinda like this: https://www.amazon.ie/DFVmobile-Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-Closur...
Dumping some coins out of my coinpurse is far superior analog, low-tech Access Control to my money.
Supposedly Pixels have the requisite hardware, but Google software locks the functionality to Japan. Some have been able to hack their Pixels to force it on but from what I’ve gathered it’s flaky when you do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai
I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.
https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/welcomesuica/purchase.html
If you go down the "add a pasmo/suica on your phone" then you get into licensing issues with the other cabal (credit card issuers): you need to use an Amex to charge it via Apple Pay (IIRC Visa is now supported, but when I tried it last week my card was declined, so... YMMV).
Same experience with reloading on the physical machines. It’s quite amusing
The only real differences between the Welcome Suica and a regular one are the 500 yen deposit (Welcome Suica doesn't require a deposit) and the limited validity (Welcome Suica automatically expires after about a month).
Your android phone likely doesn't have the right NFC tech that iPhones have (google Felica, it's a separate NFC standard used basically only in Japan. Apple builds it into all of their iPhones, most android phones outside of Japan do not). It's mostly just a case of divergent tech, along with Apple being willing to spend money to avoid SKU differentiation/support people traveling in Japan.
The visa gift cards work pretty much everywhere, unless they are specifically disabled by the establishment. They do show as a gift card but all the POS systems are perfectly capable of splitting the payment now. I've only seen them disabled at small restaurants that have dealt with scam charge backs and sites like Raise that deal in gift cards and gift card scams as part of their business.
Usually they simply aren't worth it because of the activation fee. It's always more than the highest paying credit card cash back. However sometimes stores, run sales where they waive the activation fee, but there's always a limit.
I believe there is a less limited suica card you can get (not a traveler), but I think you need a japanese address.
You don’t need a Japanese address. Simply visit any Suica vending machine, change the language to English, and purchase anonymous Suica.
There are various preloaded options you can purchase, but typically you cannot recharge e-money via cash.
I though there was a (blue?) one that japanese citizens could get, sent to their address.
No, there are no citizen specific IC cards unless you want extremely esoteric ones, like for senior citizens or children. All of the major nationwide mutual use transportation IC cards are freely available at the stations their operators carry. That's anything in the red box on this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suica#/media/File:ICCard_Conne....
[0]https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2025/0331_001.html
The online, ad infested phone-app-only, less accessible "cashless" systems like paypay.
Even today the only place you can buy food with your pasmo/suica card is at the convenience store. Why is that?
That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.
I'm only near a few dozen people per day at most, and the chances of one of them trying to rob me are near zero, and the most they could get is a fraction of what they could access through a stolen card number. Meanwhile, there's constant attempts for data breaches at payment processors and those they work with, so my chances of being harmed by a data breach are much higher than by a robbery.
Also, you are paying insurance premiums for those voided transactions. Vendors are chanrged around 3% for card transactions, and they pass that on to the customer, although some only pass it to their card customers, with a surcharge for card transaction.
One of my cards is very thick and metal. I found that one had fraud on it at a much higher rate than any of the plastic cards I’ve had. It was heavy to the point that it would get comments from about 40% of the people I handed it to. I can only theorize, but my guess is that card signaled a higher value and was more likely to draw the attention of someone who may care to go on a spending spree.
While I can report the issues and get a refund and a new card, it was always a real hassle. Since I stopped carrying that card and use it exclusively online, I don’t think I’ve had a single incident in several years. I used to have it happen about once per quarter.
Visiting Europe, I really like that the transaction is done right in front of you. The pain point is that my card is chip + signature, when everything there is chip + pin. When I last visited London I would stop into the store and went to the self-scan. I had to wait for the attendant to print out a physical receipt for me to sign, which always took a while. In the US we can sign on the electronic pad. It’s all a formality anyway, since no one checks and everyone just scribbles whatever.
Signing the recipe is a useless security theatre. That's why it's not done in Europe.
Now that I think about, I wonder if this signature business is a result of our restaurant norms. Since the waiter takes the card, runs it, and then brings back a bill to sign. If they switch to a PIN, every restaurant would be forced to upgrade to handheld devices, or have the customer pay up front on the way out. A worthwhile change imo, but I can see lobbyists fighting to avoid it.
I remember as a teen reading some stories about how cashiers wouldn't accept cards that didn't have a signature on the back and made people sign it right there in the store, apparently not at all understanding the purpose of it.
Now that we sign electronic pads, it’s even worse. There is no record of the signature on the back of the card to compare to, no one looks at it, and most of the pads are sensitive enough to sign properly. It’s a really expensive rubber stamp.
Because my card has been skimmed twice. The first time we were 100% it was a major retailer who was insisting my wife needed to swipe the card for a particular discount, but the second time the only in-person use we could remember was at a service station where we inserted the card to pay and pretty much the whole card goes in the slot.
You can read the magstripe from as little as about 1/3rd of the strip...though it's also possible someone is just embedding a scanner element to optically grab numbers nowadays, the tech is certainly cheap enough.
The trouble is it's really hard to reliably demagnetize a credit card, and the magstripe-less card rollout is being done incredibly slowly.
Newer cards don't have embossed numbers on the front anymore, only on the back, and these days I put electrical tape over them just in case someone is watching cameras. But I can't delete the magstripe and be sure it's gone reliably.
But from a business point if view, cash is super expensive to deal with.
As a side-effect of an acquisition we inherited a small number of customers that paid in cash. Turns out it's expensive to bank that cash, it's a security risk, it's a risk to the person transporting it and so on.
In the general case, if most sales are already by card, the marginal gains of cash transactions are consumed by the cost of dealing with the cash.
I'm not saying stores should be cashless, but it's worth understanding that accepting cash is very much "not free".
I’ve also gotten discounts on large purchases for paying “cash” (check). They effectively deducted the interchange fee from my bill. If cash was so expensive to process, they wouldn’t be doing this.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2017/03/staff-discussion-paper-2...
Fortunately it was little enough that we didn't need a cash-transit vehicle, and it didn't affect our insurance.
Yes, I expect some merchants offer a cash discount, and that can add up for large purchases. But I'd prefer not to be carrying large amounts of cash. (We haven't had checks here for probably 15 years or so.)
We have a very efficient (and cheap) direct deposit system though, so I can pay via my phone straight from my bank app for a very nominal flat fee. So for large transactions that's akin to a cash discount.
You also wanted cash on hand at the time for obvious reasons (all your expenses were in cash) so having it coming in was inherently useful.
Because tax evasion? Otherwise credit card interchange rates are nowhere that high, typically 3%.
Potentially ranging from 4.7% to over 15%, costs include labor for counting change, closing drawers, preparing deposits, security expenses like armored transport, bank fees for cash services, insuring against significant risks of theft and fraud.
In the end: fairly unimportant... except for that perceived "cost".
this is false reasoning on their part. They never have thought about how much cash costs them so it looks like extra money but it really isn't. they need to count the time lost to counting the cash as you pay, then the time to count the money in the till at the end of the shift. Each count above is 2 counts at best the average is closer to 3 because you sometimes get it wrong. There is also theft costs which is generally ignored but a real problem.
credit cards is money right to the computer which is not only fast it makes less mistakes.
Do they? Unless the shop's always serving customers, this may be free time.
You also completely discounted the managers time counting cash in the backroom. That is more than an hours work in my experience, time that could be used for other things.
Many of my cash transactions are approximately as fast as or even faster than card transactions.
That said, while I default to using Apple Pay for basically...everything, I too do not wish to live in a society where large companies get to govern every transaction I make. Or, for that matter, every transaction I make being on a ledger that the government can monitor.
I've felt this struggle from the other side working at a gas station attendant. We were only allowed to have $100 before the till made us dump it.
Can you break this $100 bill? Maybe if you pump another $50 in fuel, unless you want this roll of quarters too.
How this is even legal baffles me
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/Prohibition-of-Cashle...
You can even report establishments for refusing cash by category:
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03302
I run a non profit with membership dues and I have tried to just boot the 3% of our membership that pay w/ check or cash annually (I haven’t convinced the rest of the board so we haven’t done it yet). It takes so much extra time to follow it in real life, receive checks in the mail, and effort to deposit in the bank. It’s just not worth the time
Do you get paid from this non-profit you run?
You got me on the rejection part because there are some benefits the members get (being able to attend social events, newsletters, etc) but if your donation is a net negative on an organization, I just don’t think they should donate at all. They don’t know it’s a net negative though and maybe would donate with an electronic payment but possibly don’t know? I think it’s mostly old people doing things the way they are used to
But TBH I’m not sure if much of this matters other than the ratio. Time is money and if there aren’t enough people utilizing something, it’s just not worth it to continue. If it’s a government org that’s possibly the only thing that needs to accept all forms of payment
All I can do is try to keep that share of cash users up through my own action, and talk about what I am doing to encourage other people to do likewise, in hopes that business owners will continue to see cash as a normal part of their operation worth maintaining, and not as an oddball nuisance.
It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives.
Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.
Nothing "child-like" in trying to make your life better, even in small ways.
I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead.
It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.
If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.
If it's possible to do the equivalent of cash, but with some sort of smartcards that exchange some sort of offline zero-knowlege proofs, then that would be preferable over physical cash, because it could eliminate the need for change or marked bills and it would be even more private.
While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.
And now we rarely have the "it wont connect lets try again it takes 2 minutes" dance of 10 years ago.
Credit card processors charge large fees on transactions, which is a huge tax on just about... everything.
You can make a lot of that tax back via rewards. And not every card user has a good rewards-paying card - it's usually the more rich that do - so rewards function as a wealth transfer from the less rich to the more rich.
Very few stores have lower prices for cash, and processors try to ban that via their contracts when they can. If you pay with cash you pay the higher price to cover the credit card fees anyway, so you're just subsidizing the rewards earners. Might as well recoup some of that yourself.
In my observation being that much incentivized by the reward system seems to be a very US-American thing. In Germany, I have never heard anybody seriously talking about that they love the reward system of their credit card. I would claim that at most some (but I think rather few) people in Germany consider some very specific reward that their credit card has as a slight convenience - but nothing more.
[1]: https://wero-wallet.eu/
Money isn't sent to the USA. It is sent to the banks that own your particular credit card. Many of these are certainly in the USA, but your statement makes it sound somehow patriotic/anti-USA to avoid using credit cards.
> Interchange: the fee we pay to the card issuer, i.e. your customers’ banks > Scheme fee: the fees we pay to the schemes, i.e. Visa or Mastercard
> Visa Consumer Debit > Interchange fees 0.1% to 0.2% or 0.02€ > Scheme fees 0.0082€ + 0.11% to 0.312%
Obviously all the large payment card schemes have investors and subsidiary legal entities all around the world, and not all of the card schemes are from the USA. However I think it's fairly clear that at least 1/1000th of total card transactions everywhere in the world ends up flowing into the USA eventually, and that's without accounting for licensing and accreditation fees for the technology underpinning the system, also mainly from the USA.
I'm not surprised that European politicians would like to get hold of that money for domestic purposes by promoting Wero, and no doubt if political/propaganda gains can be made by presenting this as patriotic, at least some will try.
[1]: https://www.barclaycard.co.uk/content/dam/barclaycard/docume...
The consumer essentially can’t be accused of not exercising due caution unless you have ignored at least one bill with fraudulent charges. This is real value, so once you’ve bought into the system, getting the rewards is a major incentive to choose one card over another.
In fact, PayPal binds you to their in-house mediation of fraud claims. I was required to ship $60 worth of merchandise back to the fraudster in China to receive a refund, but the cheapest shipping available to me was $50.
Rewards are nice, but not the primary reason I use a credit card.
Paying businesses you can use EFTPOS which I believe is run by the central bank and has very low fees on debit cards, or the usual credit card networks/Apple Pay/gpay.
There is a local supermarket chain that doesn't accept credit cards at all because they'd have to raise their cash price.
Everyone pays for credit card fees. Not just the people using CCs. Then CC companies pocket those crazy high fees while giving a lil bit back as "rewards".
This is a good example of a system we've normalized in this country which harms most people.
I do tend to shop at low-margin places like WinCo Foods. There's also an auction house I buy big ticket items from. Both charge credit card fees. I've never seen a gas station anywhere in the US not charge extra for credit cards, and most also charge extra for debit cards. The DMV also charges a fee. I don't know if Grocery Outlet charges a fee, but I do shop there too.
Also, pretty much every recurring charge I have, e.g. from T-Mobile, Comcast, and my water supplier and mortgage processor all charge credit card fees, if I use a card instead of ACH transfers.
Anyone who gives a 3% discount for cash will get cash from me, but I already have all my money in index funds. The effort to maximize points is “use this credit card, get the cash back”.
It’s really not that much effort, for rich people with excellent credit. It is of course a hugely regressive system, but that wasn’t the argument you made.
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