alt Hacker News> The major far-right fundamentalist opposition party has built its unprecedented success on a narrative of low government trust, and has been gaining ground in both polls and elections for years and years now.
And yet, that is very far from the majority.
> If you include the wrong words in the transaction description, your account will almost certainly be cancelled.
That isn’t true. If you put "murder contract + 2kg heroin" in the description, at most a bank clerk will call to ask you to avoid that. The description is reviewed to detect fraud, and protects a lot of people from illicit transactions. We have that for the same reason we have KYC regulations; you may disagree with it, but it protects a lot of people, right now. If you need to obfuscate the description, you’re free to use an encrypted string or a numeric reference without any trouble.
> Any data we collect will probably be misused at some point in the future. Why take a risk with German institutions if we don't have to?
There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example. There also is fraud potential actively being used for sure. Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen. Still, even Germans could benefit from questioning our ways from time to time.
> And yet, that is very far from the majority.
Remember that our parent said, "Many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government." You denied that, and I suggested that the turnout for the AfD might be a useful proxy for institutional distrust. I don't know how the reference to majorities fits here or what argument it is intended to support. Presumably, there are also people in other parties who distrust public institutions, right? Why are we talking about majorities now?
I argued that the SEPA system has several flaws, one of which is the lack of privacy surrounding transaction descriptions. This can have consequences far more serious than receiving a call from a bank. While banks do check flagged transactions, if a certain number of criteria are met, they will definitely escalate your transaction to the authorities. This is a legal requirement, by the way — it's not specific to any particular bank. This can be mitigated almost entirely by using cash.
As you did not answer my question about why to gamble on institutional consistency, I wonder: Would you actively argue in favour of greater surveillance of the payment sector?
This would align with your seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion to manually encrypt transaction descriptions. Payment privacy can only foster democratic resilience if it is enabled by default. It's like saying an instant messaging app doesn't need end-to-end encryption for personal communication because users can encrypt the text by hand.
> There are valid arguments against widespread cash usage; money handling is one of the top expenses in retail, for example.
Liberty is not usually defined in monetary terms. For instance, regular elections are costly. We still do not eliminate them for economic benefit. Similarly, I think the idea of removing the option of payment privacy to reduce transaction costs is cynical, or very radical.
> Yet, I don’t hear anyone working on completely abolishing cash, which is just not going to happen.
I don't know why intention would be relevant here. The use of cash has been declining in Germany (and the EU) for quite some time now. This basic fact is not new or disputed by anyone in this field. To deny the decline of cash as a proportion of overall payments would be counterfactual.
Problems arising from reduced cash usage, such as the vulnerability of civil society and the reduced resilience of democratic institutions, occur regardless of whether someone is actively working to abolish cash payments.