Not paying with cash

https://rubenerd.com/not-paying-with-cash/

by mikece • 11 months ago

84 251 11 months ago

rubenerd.com

bombcar2• 11 months ago

You can pay with "cash" while using cards.

Gets some of the advantages - not all.

hopelite• 11 months ago

Maybe read the post before commenting?

doctoboggan• 11 months ago

How can you replicate the anonymity of cash with a card?

tossit444• 11 months ago

Prepaid debit cards usually do not require identification.

superkuh• 11 months ago

I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to rent canoes, equipment, hotels, etc with corporate cards weren't able to do it. We were lucky our group brought cash.

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.

SchemaLoad• 11 months ago

This seems like the ideal use case for satellite internet like starlink though. Main fiber connection, but a satellite backup. The trend I predict is just more robust redundant connections, not people giving up on cards.

frosted-flakes• 11 months ago

Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough.

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.

traeregan• 11 months ago

I never thought I’d see Ely mentioned on HN.

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.

AnimalMuppet• 11 months ago

I remember the day I took someone on a date, only to run into a state-wide power outage.

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.

hedora• 11 months ago

At the very least, they probably should require all vendors to accept imprints (the old offline compatible paper-based credit card protocol).

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).

cyberax4• 11 months ago

And we had a power/Internet outage here after a heavy snowfall. My local bakery simply wrote down my credit card number and then did a card-not-present transaction later.

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...

Shank10• 11 months ago

One thing I really love that Japan got right was the creation of e-money systems that are anonymous (you can get a Suica for 20,000 yen without any registration information), work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal), and are easily accessible (you can get them at any train station, you can charge them at any ATM or convenience store with cash). In contrast, a debit/credit card usually requires a lot more pain to get onboarded with. The closest thing is probably those silly visa prepaid cards you can buy, but they require a little work to use regularly.

csinode• 11 months ago

work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal)

Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?

andreareina• 11 months ago

It's been in widespread use for a while at this point so in practice probably not. I imagine the authentication keys to present as a card are very tightly controlled and not just anyone can become a provider.

Shank10• 11 months ago

Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?

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.

lmm• 11 months ago

Not really - what's the attack? You could maybe somehow clone a card with a balance on it and spend that balance twice, if you can figure out that a particular terminal is offline (or have a way to take it offline), but how do you turn that into an attack that you can scale enough to cover the fixed costs? You're not getting your own terminal without a contract and due diligence on your company, so you can't really pull off an attack that needs to control both sides.

rtpg3• 11 months ago

My understanding here is that there's less risk of double spends here because of the extreme difficulty of cloning the smartcards involved.

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.

beeflet3• 11 months ago

Not nessisarially because it can take advantage of TEEs in smart cards

raincole• 11 months ago

In Taiwan, there is a similar system called EasyCard. That works offline.

...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.

mappu• 11 months ago

I think a lot of the motivations are AML. Suica has a low maximum balance, that probably restricts the nefarious use cases.

Shank10• 11 months ago

I would personally argue that 20,000 yen is not a low maximum balance for day-to-day purchases like food, because you can recharge so easily.

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.

cosmotic3• 11 months ago

Meanwhile, there's no apparent way to pay for a train using an American android phone (or at least I couldn't figure it out last year). One of the two apps refused to install on non-japanese phones, the other installed but refused to run. Had to pay with cash and it was a huge pain. Half the time I inexplicably had to do a fare adjustment, a hugely embarrassing moment blocking the turnstile, especially considering the culture there.

cosmic_cheese3• 11 months ago

That’s thanks to Android phone manufacturers, which don’t want to pay for a global license for the NFC tech involved. Apple on the other hand does pay for a global license and so iPhones and Apple Watches from anywhere work perfectly with Japanese cash card terminals. I use a digital Suica on my US iPhone during my visits.

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.

Shank10• 11 months ago

There’s not a reasonable solution using global Android phones, but you could obviously just buy a physical IC card and use that, which is what I was suggesting here in the first place.

rtpg3• 11 months ago

In some stations now there are some entry points that use "standard" visa touchless payments that can be used now I think.

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.

trenchpilgrim3• 11 months ago

The trick is to get a Suica card, which as an foreigner you need to do at the airport train station before you leave to the rest of Japan.

https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/welcomesuica/purchase.html

mapt• 11 months ago

Those prepaid visa cards don't actually exist, I think they were killed by AML/KYC. Instead, they appear to be "prepaid visa gift cards" accepted at less than a hundred large chains.

Larrikin• 11 months ago

This is wrong.

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.

m4632• 11 months ago

to me suica seemed limited (for a traveler). you could get one and charge it up with a credit card, but I don't think you could recharge it that way. You could also not get multiple ones.

I believe there is a less limited suica card you can get (not a traveler), but I think you need a japanese address.

Shank10• 11 months ago

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.

WillDaSilva• 11 months ago

I was able to get a Pasmo card as an alternative to Suica, and it was rechargable with cash. I also did the same with an Icoca card. I didn't need a Japanese address in either case. I just bought the cards from machines at a couple of the larger metro stations. They could be reloaded with cash at any metro station.

lisbbb3• 11 months ago

But Japanese people largely still use cash, don't they?

trenchpilgrim3• 11 months ago

This isn't as true as it used to be. Mobile pay and IC-type cards have risen in popularity, and if you have a credit card, it's accepted in many places.

lofties• 11 months ago

This is no longer true. With the advance of "cashless" systems that were heavily pushed and promoted by the government, cash payments have dropped significantly![0] Cashless payments now sit near 50%, up from 16% 10 years ago.

[0]https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2025/0331_001.html

Gathering66782• 11 months ago

From my experience, apart from small restaurants and yatais (basically food carts), as well as local buses in small towns, you could get by using a credit card / Suica perfectly fine.

ekianjo3• 11 months ago

Suica is far from being accepted everywhere. in Japan cash is your best bet.

wakawaka28• 11 months ago

Keep in mind that "anonymous" money systems are not untrackable. You need to have killer OpSec to actually have an anonymous digital wallet even if it is technically possible. I'd rather not deal with that extreme discipline. Cash does the job just fine, at least for in-person transactions.

kshahkshah• 11 months ago

The big benefit is tipping in cash. Buys a lot of good will… and free drinks

arealaccount2• 11 months ago

And in the flip side not being pressured to tip on things you wouldn’t normally tip for via toast machine

cosmic_cheese3• 11 months ago

The paragraph about the inconvenience of cash resonates with me. It’s a pain to manage and easy to lose or get stolen. At least if I drop my wallet full of cards, in a couple of calls any fraudulent transactions will be voided and the cards turned useless, but stolen cash is just gone.

That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.

dlcarrier11• 11 months ago

I've never had physical cash get stolen, but multiple times I've had to get new credit card numbers, because mine was revealed in a data breach. Even if I had been robbed, the cash I have on hand is a fraction of a percent of either my credit limit or bank account balance.

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.

al_borland7• 11 months ago

Not only data breaches, but people skimming or copying the card. I went to a restaurant a while ago and some random employee decided to grab our bill to “help out”, not our waitress. I was splitting the bill with someone else and both our cards had fraudulent charges in the following days. I still find it crazy that we let waitstaff walk away with our cards in the US.

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.

gedy• 11 months ago

I buy any fast food with cash. I don't need a helpful Insurance company data mining my habits.

marssaxman2• 11 months ago

I got irritated with the profusion of "no cash accepted" signs a few years back and started making a point of always carrying cash, to use whenever practical. I don't take it to an extreme, but I also don't want to live in a world where every transaction is trackable and all commerce is regulated by Visa, Mastercard, Apple, or Google.

rolph2• 11 months ago

i think anyone seeing very many piles of merchandise abandoned at checkout would be wise to review such decisions. it would definately be a failure to consider area demographic

bruce5112• 11 months ago

Yes, I'm sure it varies by area.

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".

lvspiff• 11 months ago

In right there with you. I live in a small town and so whenever spending money at a local small business I try as much as possible to use cash. The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip". It's difficult for them to keep good change though as people who do spend cash are either $20 or $100 bills which for a few $5-10 items consumes the small bills pretty fast. But in a no sales tax state so makes giving change easier (no coins)

doubled112• 11 months ago

It's difficult for them to keep good change

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.

gruez• 11 months ago

The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip".

Because tax evasion? Otherwise credit card interchange rates are nowhere that high, typically 3%.

bluGill5• 11 months ago

The shopkeeps who are also the owners are so appreciative as it's essentially a 5-7% "tip

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.

__MatrixMan__2• 11 months ago

I have similar concerns, but I think it's the payment conglomerates you have to worry about. Visa knows how much you spent, Fiserv knows what you bought.

lmz2• 11 months ago

Sometimes Visa also knows what you buy: https://www.marqeta.com/blog/data-details-what-is-level-1-2-...

account427• 11 months ago

It's not just Fiserv, there are often others involved as well. Even the merchant gets more data as they now have a fairly good way to identify you and correlate transactions.

ekianjo3• 11 months ago

profusion of "no cash accepted" signs

How this is even legal baffles me

schaefer• 11 months ago

As I understand it, the argument is: cash is valid payment for all debts public or private. But a sale isn’t a debt. The business that refuses your cash sale is refusing your business at the time of sale.

kevin_thibedeau2• 11 months ago

NYC outlawed cashless operations after it started to become popular and the marginalized were increasingly locked out of everyday commerce. Hopefully it catches on in the rest of the US.

r0m4n02• 11 months ago

I think this writer focuses on the buyer side but on the merchant side, there are similar tradeoffs. People (employees, robbers etc) steal cash and it adds work to close out registers at the end of your day. Having no cash in your store solves those problems.

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

snypher• 11 months ago

Pretty scummy way to reject the people you rely on to fund your cause.

Do you get paid from this non-profit you run?

marssaxman2• 11 months ago

I understand why people do it; but - there has to be some threshold beyond which you would not be considering this decision, doesn't there? Would you still be considering this if 5% of your members were paying in cash? 10%? There's a point at which it would be clearly worth it to you to accept cash.

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.

Wistar• 11 months ago

I always carry cash. Just tonight, I saw that the local sandwich shop that I frequent put up a NO CASH ACCEPTED sign. I asked why the change and the worker said it is due to employee theft. I asked if the tip jar still accepted cash. “Yes,” he said.

throwaway220323• 11 months ago

Budgeting with the data trail of a card is significantly easier if you have a lot of transactions.

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.

theamk• 11 months ago

We improve our life with technology all the time. Electric lights, refrigerator, AC, washing machine, dishwasher, electric toothbrush...

Nothing "child-like" in trying to make your life better, even in small ways.

throwaway220323• 11 months ago

Sure.

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.

beeflet3• 11 months ago

The necessity of making change is major usability/privacy/fungibility roadblock that shows up in more than just cash. For example, it presents a problem for chaumian e-cash or other private money systems like pre-MLSAG monero.

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.

dlcarrier11• 11 months ago

Most of the places I shop charge a credit card fee that's far more than cashback would get you, so oftan that benefit is moot.

brettp• 11 months ago

Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my wallet the moment my driver licence was available on my phone, the last piece of plastic I was mandated to carry around.

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.

rolph2• 11 months ago

where is that market ? thats exactly my prefered method of commerce.

ausssssie• 11 months ago

Yes everywhere. Car parks. Schools. Cafes. Antique shop in a quaint village. The only cash only places are really just trying to evade tax, or are some 50 year old business refusing to keep up out of stubbornness.

And now we rarely have the "it wont connect lets try again it takes 2 minutes" dance of 10 years ago.

spankalee• 11 months ago

The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards!

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.

aleph_minus_one2• 11 months ago

The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards!

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.

seabass-labrax3• 11 months ago

This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees - is one of the primary motivations behind the development of Wero[1]. For those that haven't come across it yet, it's a new payments system based on 'instant' SEPA wire transfers. It is starting to gain ground now, particularly in Germany and the Benelux. I'm not aware of any smartcard-based implementations yet, though - currently it functions more like WeChat typically does, where you need to authorize the transaction on a smartphone.

[1] https://wero-wallet.eu/

devilbunny• 11 months ago

Credit card financial protections for Americans are one of the most strongly pro-customer sets of laws we have in the US. The rewards are a nice way to get some of your money back, but you really can’t be cleaned out by fraud on actual credit cards (not debit cards using the MC/Visa logo and payment system). “That is an unauthorized charge, please cancel the card” is perfectly acceptable. In theory you are on the hook for the first $50, but in practice almost no bank holds you to that.

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.

JustExAWS6• 11 months ago

That’s because most countries cap merchant fees so credit card companies can’t offer as lucrative awards

lisbbb3• 11 months ago

Most rewards systems have brutally diluted their points, same as airline "miles."

dlcarrier11• 11 months ago

Most of the places I buy from charge an extra 3% for credit card transactions, so rewards cards are just giving your money back, but worse.

zippergz• 11 months ago

Curious what part of the world this is in. I can recall a grand total of three places I've seen in my area do this. It's a tiny minority here.

jaza2• 11 months ago

Various studies have shown that, for the investment needed to "maximise your rewards" (ie time needed to research the different cards on the market / read the fine print of your chosen product / put through payments on a high rewards card; money on signup fees, recurring fees, transaction fees, etc), you'll achieve a much better ROI just investing the equivalent time and money into an index fund.

mercutio2• 11 months ago

Can you point to these studies?

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.

arealaccount2• 11 months ago

Got a link or two?

moduspol• 11 months ago

Perhaps, although there are multiple “2% on everything uncapped” that are pretty easy to get with no annual fee. Set up automatic payments and you’re golden.

Still wouldn’t recommend them for anyone who’s not particularly good with money, but 2% back for almost no effort is a pretty good trade-off. Keeping track of rotating quarterly bonuses? Yeah—-then it’s worth thinking about ROI of your time.

JustExAWS6• 11 months ago

How much time do you really think it takes to subscribe to the RSS feed for “The Points Guy”?

toast0• 11 months ago

Getting a 2% discount on everything doesn't take a lot of time, or cost me anything directly. I did have to call the issuer once to get it changed from 1.5% to 2%, but there was a pretty good ROI on that ten minute phone call.

I also have a 4% card, which took a good amount of effort, and needs regular attention as the issuer has realized it wasn't a good idea and is changing the deal. Now it has a limit and then falls back to 2%. Probably still worth the effort.

Miles/points seems like a lot of work though. I could see a study showing that's not worth the effort for most people... but I think the thing there is to find a card with points that are valuable for you and then maximize that, so there's not a one size fits all there.

al_borland7• 11 months ago

Remember that the credit card companies wouldn’t offer points if they weren’t profitable. People tend to spend more on a credit card than they do with cash, and it’s not enough to make up with points.

I’m generally a pretty responsible credit user. I pay the whole bill each month and never paid a dime in interest. But I’d be lying if I said I never justified a slightly larger purchase that I would have otherwise made by calculating the “discount” from the points. Doing this just one time on a modestly large purchase can effectively negate all the points you might earn in a given year.

I found even moving to a debit card helped in two ways. One, the point game goes away. But I think more importantly, when spending on a debit card you see the balance go down, so there is an instant and clear impact of the expense. With a credit card the number goes up, and you have to invert it and do the math in your head to feel the expense in the moment, which most people don’t do. And when people look at their bank balance at it hasn’t moved, they think they still have that money to spend. It’s subtle, you might not realize it, but those are the games they play. I’ve probably saved more money from simply spending less, than I would make in points.

I do keep one credit card around that I use for my recurring online payments. These are set it and forget it, so the psychology plays less of a role, as far as I can tell. And I review all the stuff on that recurring list on a regular basis to keep it lean. I have to spend $5k to make $100 in points. Who cares? It’s a lot easier to trim $200 or even $500 out of $5k in terms of spending, if I’m really looking to maximize my savings. Not to mention, the points aren’t cash in your pocket, they are an excuse to spend even more.

Let’s say I have points to get a free flight. Great, now I’m also spending money out of pocket on a hotel, meals, entertainment, etc. That “free” $600 plane ticket actually costs $5k in other expenses, but it’s ok, because we’re earning $100 more in points for spending that $5k.

It’s a trap. It’s subtle, it might feel like a win, but they’re coming at you from several different angles. It’s not just about the people paying interest on their balance. They make about as much on the interchange fees from high volume users as they do from those interest payments. Those points are also a trick to get you to swipe more to boost their interchange fee profits.

JustExAWS6• 11 months ago

Let’s say I have points to get a free flight. Great, now I’m also spending money out of pocket on a hotel, meals, entertainment, etc. That “free” $600 plane ticket actually costs $5k in other expenses, but it’s ok, because we’re earning $100 more in points for spending that $5k.

I just flew to London for free and our hotel was free (the Westminster) on points. Earlier in the year we stayed in a $900 a night hotel free on points in Quepos Costa Rica. We flew there on a Delta companion pass by having a $350 AF Delta credit card that also has a $200 Hotel credit (Delta Business Platinum).

I almost always fly to see my parents free on points (AirFrance 20K points to book Delta flights round trip). Of course I don’t pay for anything when I go home.

But if you are getting most of your points via spending instead of sign up bonuses, you’re doing it wrong (See r/churning). That is unless you do a lot of business travel.

Either way, we travel a lot anyway. Credit card points increase our travel budget.

aleph_minus_one2• 11 months ago

So why do I continue using cards? For the same reason you probably do: convenience.

Quite the opposite: when using some electronic payment method, I better make careful notes of each transaction so that I can detect whether some fraud happened (which happens for basically every method of digital payment). On the other hand, for cash this is much less necessary.

supportengineer• 11 months ago

If you like to travel, you can essentially travel "for free" by simply doing these two things:

1. Put all of your purchases on the travel rewards card

2. Pay it off in full every month, no exceptions

dlcarrier11• 11 months ago

What do you mean by "for free"? Would you be paying for your travels in full, the next month?

crooked-v2• 11 months ago

I think it's a reference to awards miles/points... but that's definitely not "for free", you're paying for it with the 2%-3% markup imposed by the merchant processing companies and at the baseline just getting that same amount back on the other side. With that said, with some careful finagling you can get outsized value out of it, especially for flight or hotel upgrades.

ptero• 11 months ago

He is saying that miles you get for cc purchases allow you to buy free airfare and hotels.

Although you can find cards that give you 1.5-2% back that you can use on travel or anything, as you please.

socalgal23• 11 months ago

I'm not convinced. To get travel reward you effectively have a zero interest savings account for your points. Cash back, you can get that cash immediately (or say once a month) and invest it.

neilv• 11 months ago

Buried. Remember to upvote if you comment.

    124. Not Paying with Cash (rubenerd.com)
         20 points by mikece 1 hour ago | flag | hide | 40 comments

rubatuga• 11 months ago

Great for bargaining and getting cash discounts. Have extra coins? Tips are appreciated.

lisbbb3• 11 months ago

The main problem I have with cash is that we don't have denominations large enough to buy much these days thanks to inflation. The $100 is the new $20, but ATMs won't serve $100s. I buy gas for my car, it's at least $35 right there. Groceries run $80-$120 every trip now. I don't know if revaluation is possible, but we need it.

I'm not worried about dirty cash as compared to every purchase being tracked and all the fees for using services like Venmo or whatever exchange service du jour, and they all apply their petty moralizing. It's not the way forward if you value freedom and privacy.

dlcarrier11• 11 months ago

My banks ATM defaults to $100 bills, and it takes a bunch of taps to get only $20 bills.

ProllyInfamous5• 11 months ago

My local credit union has switched entirely to machined staff, even inside locations (with attendant staff for transaction impossible via ATM).

For some silly reason, the machine stocks only these bills: $5$ $20$ $100$

Why waste an entire cash dispenser on fives when it could instead be handing out fifties (or at least tens)... especially at an ATM!?

I think it's time for a $1000 bill, again. Let's get rid of bills less than $10$ (coins instead); also, get rid of pennies [in progress] and nickels.

Leaving only: dimes*, quarters, halves, dollar [coin], $2 & $5 [coins], $10$ $20$ $50$ $100$ $1000$ [bills]

*I'd suggest nix'ing this one, too, if it were physically larger [but isn't]

I only stock my wallet with $100$ $50$ $10$ $2$ [bills], and immediately get rid of ones ($1$) when possible. I do not have any credit cards.

kevin_thibedeau2• 11 months ago

The problem is you get treated like a criminal when trying to spend $50 and $100 bills despite their significant devaluation in recent decades.

latchkey• 11 months ago

The $100 is the new $20.

Amazing how we skipped right over the $50 bill.

JohnFen2• 11 months ago

ATMs won't serve $100s

In my area, anyway, there are a bunch that do. Not only will they give you $100 bills (by default if you're withdrawing at least that much), but you can also just tell the machine how many of what denomination bills you want the cash in (excluding $1 and $5 bills) and it'll do it.

cyberax4• 11 months ago

I always get a chuckle from people saying you shouldn’t use loyalty cards in grocery stores and the like… when they pay with credit cards!

Stores aren't allowed to use credit cards to track purchases or to link customers to loyalty programs. That's why you need to use a separate loyalty card, or a store-branded credit card.

iwanttocomment2• 11 months ago

Here in the US, it's absolutely allowed.

Walmart, for example, will by default add in-store purchases using a credit card (and no other identifying information) to the purchase history on a Walmart.com account set up with the same credit card.

You can only disable this tracking by going into Account > Settings > Privacy > Data Sharing in your Walmart.com account, where you'll find an option that states "Allow us to automatically add store purchases to your purchase history using credit card."

cyberax4• 11 months ago

That's because you allowed Walmart to do that when you signed for the account. It's buried somewhere in the ToS.

They are not allowed to track you when you don't _have_ an account. With Apple Pay or Android Pay they won't even be able to do that because they get anonymous tokens and not the card number.

petermcneeley• 11 months ago

No worries, just be careful which protests you attend.

etbebl• 11 months ago

How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?

jppope• 11 months ago

I prefer cash, not for the reasons mentioned.

First, cash makes me really think about what I'm buying. It doesn't poke you the same way when you tap a card... which is obviously one of the main reasons they want you do use cards. When I use cash, I am reminded of when I didn't have a lot, which keeps me from spending without thought.

Next, its a hallmark of the middle class to spend money that you don't have. Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance... I do not want to be one of those people. When you use cash, its stupidly easy to know if you have the money or not.

Its also easier to do social activities when you have cash. Need to split a tab, here's the money. I'll buy the next round, heres the cash.

Also, it may just be me but keeping a decent stack of bills is like a little pat on the back for the hard work. Its a reminder that hard work pays off, which I can see when I buy a coffee, or some bread or something.

Reasons why I don't like cash: family members tend to treat my wallet like an ATM.

Lastly, if you want to make some people feel good (e.g. servers, bartenders, etc) tip them with $2 bills

whycome• 11 months ago

$2 bills?? You’re gonna get the occasional one who thinks you’re scamming them.

It’s crazy that Canada, being so similar to the US, got rid of the 1 and 2 like 30 years ago.

crooked-v2• 11 months ago

It seems to be much less common these days (probably because smartphones make it easier to look things up), but there are assorted news stories about people being accused of counterfeiting or even arrested for trying to pay for things with $2 bills.

homefree3• 11 months ago

I had a funny experience with a French cheese shop in SF for this - I tipped a $2 bill and he called me back in confused thinking it was fake, but was good natured when I showed him it was real.

geoduck14• 11 months ago

Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance

I've heard this statistic a lot, but I haven't seen any recent evidence it is true. I used to work for a bank, and our Credit Card holders would (mostly) pay off their balance every month.

We called them Transactors vs Revolvers. 85% of our CC were Transactors, and some of them would pay down multiple times a month

nunez2• 11 months ago

Lots of people carry a balance. Credit card lenders wouldn't exist or give away insane sign-up bonuses if they didn't.

From NerdWallet [^0]:

A NerdWallet survey conducted by The Harris Poll in conjunction with our annual study in 2023 found that 43% of American adults who use credit cards (and 38% of all American adults) said they have revolving debt. The CFPB, meanwhile, found that at the end of 2022, payments on 48% of general purpose credit card accounts were for less than the full balance, meaning some debt was being revolved

Additionally,

In 2022, credit card issuers “charged off” $37 billion in balances, meaning they determined that those balances weren’t going to be paid.

Total credit card debt in 2024 was ~$626.8 billion with a peak of $42 billion in 2019.

That was from my own cursory research. Here's how GPT-5 did when I asked it about this topic: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b9b95f-0b14-8012-be34-48cb3bd10d.... Taking a cursory look at the sources provided shows that its analysis is mostly correct.

[^0]: https://archive.ph/0AzYa

homefree3• 11 months ago

Yes! It's fun to just order 500 $2 bills and carry some everywhere for tips. I do this all the time, it's an easy way to add a little whimsy into someone's day.

Wozniak famously went further and would order sheets of them uncut (costs more), then pay a shop to perforate them for him so he could peel them off for people (making it look really fake).

He had a funny story about doing this at a casino for a slot machine and getting interrogated by the secret service iirc where he handed the guy a fake ID where he had an eye patch and it said he was a laser operator or something. He played dumb about the bills to look more suspicious instead of explaining the truth.

Hard to tell if it was just a tall tale, but given that it was Woz it was probably mostly real.

JustExAWS6• 11 months ago

You realize that debit cards exists right?

Splitting a tab is a simple matter of asking for separate checks and at the bar, separate tabs.

JumpCrisscross• 11 months ago

cash makes me really think about what I'm buying. It doesn't poke you the same way when you tap a card

This may be generational, but I’m exactly the other way. Cash in my mind is “spent” when it leaves my bank account. Using it afterwards is less like spending money than, say, casino chips.

When I want to be unrestrained in spending, when say on vacation or treating a friend, I’ll take out cash and then spend a mix of cash and card. The card transactions feel real; the cash lets us splurge.

frm882• 11 months ago

I'm like you for mostly the same reasons plus an additional one: pure spite. Supermarkets like Aldi no longer show or print out the return amount of money to your payment. The officially given reason is: staff is faster than the register doing it in their head [0]. Naturally that doesn't mean the customer is just as fast checking the correctness of the amount returned because frankly, who of us is used to this any more. So I make it my choice to stand and keep up the line until I have checked the return-amount. In this way I have had to discuss mistakes made by the cashier twice already this year, causing even more delay.

The real reason is that they want you to use cards, not cash and as far as I can tell, it's working. However, I find this kind of policy hurts people, particularly children, elderly people and disadvantaged.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/aldi-spart-rueckge...

Gathering66782• 11 months ago

I was surprised to know recently that, in France apparently, there are quite a lot of shops that don't accept cash. I thought it was going to be the other way around: shops stipulating "cash only". In my country, there are actually regulations mandating the acceptance of cash (unless it's an unmanned booth or certain vendoring machines, if I remember correctly).

frm882• 11 months ago

You can protest this, since it's illegal: all stores in France must accept cash https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-of-p...

jojobas• 11 months ago

Of all things, rejecting cash because it's a social construct is a bit unexpected.

NoGravitas2• 11 months ago

The linked article "Do you not like money" gives a bit better explanation. It's not just cash, but all kinds of money that are an "odd, and mildly dystopian" social construct.

The Culture has a proverb, "money is a sign of poverty".

singpolyma33• 11 months ago

Cash is honestly the worst. I've boycotted cash only places most of my life and have never carried cash as an adult. It was may e the best we could do in history but it serves no purpose now.

MarcelOlsz• 11 months ago

Privacy.

TheAlchemist2• 11 months ago

One additional feature for paying in cash, is from the business side - a lot of small businesses declare only a part of what's paid in cash, and the rest is kept 'tax free'.

While it breaks the law, I kind of feel sympathetic to it, given how much the law tends to advantage big companies.

gghffguhvc• 11 months ago

Paying tax isn’t a big company vs small company thing. A single company not paying tax isn’t that bad directly but it can be infectious. “They don’t pay neither should I” attitude is a problem.

TheAlchemist2• 11 months ago

I know, but then you look at effective tax paid by big companies and it makes you wonder.

NoGravitas2• 11 months ago

This is more important for tips. If you pay a tip by card, the tipped worker will have to declare the full value of the tip as income. If you pay by cash, they are supposed to declare the full value of the tip as income, but what's actually reported by the business to the IRS is 15% of sales. Any cash tips over that amount you can probably get away with not reporting.

dartharva• 11 months ago

I started abandoning cash around a decade ago, and have steadily moved to mobile-only payments for the past five years (India has ubiquitous instant bank-to-bank transfers through mobile payment platforms).

Not having to carry your wallet around and make trips to ATMs is rather convenient, but in aggregate, I'll still NOT recommend this. I realize I have ended up spending several times I would have had I stuck to cash. There seems to be a psychological aspect that makes you keep track subconsciously of how much you are spending when you have to physically draw cash. With mobile payments? It's just scan a code and forget about it. I am planning to stop by the end of this year.

FriedPickles• 11 months ago

Contactless Bitcoin lightning payments. Best of both worlds.

seany• 11 months ago

Monero would be ideal

politelemon2• 11 months ago

It would be useful if bitcoin were treated as a currency and not an investment vehicle. It's too late now.

paulgerhardt• 11 months ago

Cash is also—I regret to say—disgusting.

Not true!

For a while I was manufacturing cash and did some research on the hygiene component.

Surprisingly, I learned tap to pay was the most hygienic iff one didn’t use a common terminal for tips or signing.

Coins were the second most hygienic with a germ score of 168RLU . Cash third. Credit fourth, and dead last was shared payment terminals one physically touched (this includes tap to pay if one “answers a couple of questions.”) A separate study found smart watches were dirtier than terminals.

[1] https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is...

[2] https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/

[3] https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-glo...

And amusingly [4] https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-a...

Reports in this space are full of confirmation bias so take the RLU scores with a grain of salt. Likewise some cultures have cleaner methods of dealing with cash than others.

noduerme3• 11 months ago

I'm very sympathetic to both the cash-as-privacy and cash-as-fair-access (for unbanked people, to goods and services) arguments, and I won't support any business that doesn't take cash.

Credit cards are a snare for the chronically indebted, to shake pennies from their pockets to transfer to the wealthy.

However, if you have no debt (which is enough to be considered "wealthy", IMO), you'd be a fool not to use a credit card for most transactions. Because the rewards they hand out are built into the prices paid for everything by people who pay with cash.

In my own case... I got my first credit card at 18, and by the time I was 22 I had racked up $20k in debt. I took drastic action and stopped using cards completely, and lived only on my income from multiple jobs, going without anything I wanted to buy for several years. Beans, rice, pasta, one pair of shoes, three shirts. Until I paid it off. By the time I was 24 I had paid it off waiting tables, driving taxi. Then I cancelled my cards. And so for reasons unrelated to privacy, I had no credit cards for 15 years after that, and only used cash or debit cards.

It was only in my mid thirties that I was put wise to the fact that I was losing 1% to 3% of my average spend by not having a card. So I got the most expensive card I could with the best payback ratio, and have never carried a balance on it at the end of a month. Over the ten years I've had it, it's paid me back somewhere around $30k, all siphoned from the pockets of people who don't pay their debt off.

Is this a vile and rapacious system? Absolutely. Would I be stupid not to take advantage of it after doing my time and learning the hard way? Yeah.

I still pay cash a lot, because I don't need a record of what I'm up to. And I'd support a ban on credit cards which would lead to merchants dropping prices for everyone. But here we are.

limagnolia4• 11 months ago

Most if not all of those rewards are paid for by the interchange that they charge merchants, not the interest they charge customers. Of course, interest and fees are also profitable, but banks are pretty happy if you use the card and pay it off every month.

noduerme3• 11 months ago

Really? I guess I didn't realize that. I always felt a kind of "screw you" joy at paying it off completely every month, like I'm getting away with something lol.

socalgal23• 11 months ago

All the costs, reguardless of where they are accrued, are figured into the prices every one is paying

IAmBroom8• 11 months ago

Because money is fungible, it's meaningless to say "X is paid for by Y not Z", as long as Y and Z are both greater than X.

reorder9695• 11 months ago

Maybe credit cards are different in Europe but I've never seen one with significant benefits really, granted I could be looking at the wrong ones but I have an excellent credit score and presumably could get one. To me a credit card is smth I have so I can put a few transactions though a month and it pays off via direct debit, for the sole purpose of building a credit score for when I do need a loan

IAmBroom8• 11 months ago

Discover pays a noticeable return, as does Amazon's card (which is a legitimate Visa/MC, but you get returns on Amazon purchases).

I pay off monthly, so I win.

noduerme3• 11 months ago

I don't know how it is in Europe, but there are some very competitive offers in the US. The Visa I use pays back 3% on travel and dining, 1% on everything else. In some cases because of how travel points work, you can book travel through the card company and get 5-10% back (if their hotel rates are equivalent, which is sometimes), then use those points in the same fashion at 1.5x redemption rates, effectively giving you 15% back on hotels and 7.5% on flights.

I travel and dine out a lot. All my personal and business expenses go on that one card. I also use it to pay for all the servers and infrastructure for my clients, which they reimburse me for. If I'm out to dinner with friends, I try to use my card and have them send me cash. All this adds up to several thousand dollars a year.

daft_pink• 11 months ago

I really like paying cash at self service restaurants now so I don’t have to deal with their tip screen nonsense.

hackernewsdhsu• 11 months ago

Cash is privacy. Hope all you card-only cucks get taken by the billionaire class, looking to transfer your wealth to them.

newscracker• 11 months ago

I feel there’s very little hope for privacy and freedom if people like the author — who claim to be for privacy and understand the implications of digital payments — choose cards all the time “because it’s convenient”. Convenience and coercion (by the businesses not accepting cash or governments forcing more “cashless”) are what the common person succumbs to.

I’m not saying that everyone should switch to cash for everything all the time. But the more that privileged people switch to digital payments and eschew cash, the more difficult it becomes for those who rely on or want to use cash to do so.

Choosing privacy could mean a little more (or a lot more, depending on one’s views) inconvenience. Hopefully there are still enough people who use cash and keep cash payments alive for longer (which helps many other people who may not be as privileged or as educated as a different crowd).

bob1029• 11 months ago

From a business owner perspective, it can be cheaper to operate a card only business than a cash only business, especially if you intend to do it legally and with a proper bank.

There is no bank on earth that will service a cash heavy (only) business for free. The cost/risk/fees of moving the physical cash around can be worse than what Visa charges.

You could go one step further and think about it from the bank perspective. The cost of physically transacting cash when you could send a packet across the ether to accomplish the same is a wild increase in energy expenditure, etc. Someone had to physically drive to the bank to move the cash. There's no other option. Possibly in a gigantic armored vehicle. Often times multiple times per week. Handling all of this activity is very expensive for all parties involved.

mixmastamyk• 11 months ago

I often did the cash drop for a local restaurant. It certainly wasn’t free, but having a lackey drop a few thousand in a plastic bag into the night slot was affordable. It’s not quite enough money to worry that it might be stolen regularly.

The bank has counting machines and a safe built in the last century as well.

jongjong• 11 months ago

I hate cash and its digital equivalent. I only use it because I am forced to, against my will, because everyone else has been conditioned into thinking that it has value. Fiat money is the root of all evil. Besides the way it systematically steals wealth from the worker class and gives it to the owner class, there is nothing else to say about it.

Many reports have been written about the mechanisms via which the monetary system steals wealth from the working class. I'm tired of linking to them. The conditioning is too strong. Frankly the more this goes on, the more sympathy I feel for the owner class for their contempt for the sheeple. I'm starting to think they are right. People are dumb and evil and should be milked for all they've got.

I mostly feel bad for those of us who can see what's going on and are treated the same as the sheeple.

JohnFen2• 11 months ago

I almost never use my card in everyday transactions anymore. I pay with cash probably 90% of the time. For me, this has been an amazingly good thing that has improved my happiness level. Just being able to avoid seeing those damned tip prompts alone is well worth it.

rchaud• 11 months ago

I don't think touching cash is any more disgusting than opening a door at a public business, holding a rail on a subway or holding the gas nozzle while refilling a car. I find cash to be easier to budget with for discretionary expenses as you can simply see what's left without needing to route expenses through an app.

nunez2• 11 months ago

lol; like dad sneakers, what's old is new again.

I did this back in 2014 or so when I was, ironically, more strapped for cash and needed to debug my budget (thanks, student loans!). i stopped because carrying change is annoying as fuck, losing cash is annoying at best and painful at worst, and tracking cash purchases is actually much harder than purchases made on the card.

instead, i used my debit card for purchases (couldn't spend beyond my means with it) until my income situation improved. i use one credit card exclusively now (and pay it down at the end of the month).

this was before businesses started going card-only post COVID. that's another reason why i wouldn't do this today.

(I built a Go-based expense tracker years ago that turns all bank alerts and receipts into, then, transactions in Expensify and, now, rows in Google Sheets. I'm able to track literally every single card transaction I make as well as reconcile purchases with their receipts. this is impossible with cash.)

Not paying with cash

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