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.
lvspiff · 3m 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)
rolph · 53m 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
bruce511 · 45s 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".
Shank · 1h 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.
cosmotic · 1h 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_cheese · 1h 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.
seabass-labrax · 5m ago
Why should they pay for a licence? Once a technology reaches such ubiquity, there's a strong case for it being part of the technical infrastructure of that society. To me, that means that governments have a responsibility to ensure that the technology is widely available, and arbitrarily locking it behind commercial licences does not help achieve that. To the extent that patents and licensing provide an incentive to develop such technology, it's beholden on governments to foot the R&D bill in some other way.
trenchpilgrim · 8m 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.
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.
Shank · 52m 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.
csinode · 1h ago
> work offline (you don't need network at-payment, nor does the terminal)
Surely this is massively vulnerable to double spend attacks?
rtpg · 46m 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.
Shank · 44m ago
> 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!
beeflet · 42m ago
Or you can extract the secrets from a smartcard using a variety of side-channels. But the juice is rarely worth the squeeze.
rtpg · 37m ago
Maybe you can, but I had the impression that it would be quite difficult given physically unclonable function-y stuff. Handwave-y and I have no clue if Suica-style payments use it but that was my impression.
Shank · 53m 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.
andreareina · 1h 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.
beeflet · 43m ago
Not nessisarially because it can take advantage of TEEs in smart cards
lmm · 51m 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.
lisbbb · 16m ago
But Japanese people largely still use cash, don't they?
lofties · 7m 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.
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.
mappu · 1h ago
I think a lot of the motivations are AML. Suica has a low maximum balance, that probably restricts the nefarious use cases.
Shank · 45m 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.
mapt · 59m 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 · 12m 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.
m463 · 42m 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.
Shank · 37m 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.
m463 · 29m ago
the vending machine card was the red one, right?
I though there was a (blue?) one that japanese citizens could get, sent to their address.
lisbbb · 16m 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.
dlcarrier · 8m ago
My banks ATM defaults to $100 bills, and it takes a bunch of taps to get only $20 bills.
cosmic_cheese · 1h 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.
spankalee · 46m 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_one · 27m 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.
lisbbb · 14m ago
Most rewards systems have brutally diluted their points, same as airline "miles."
dlcarrier · 7m 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 · 2m 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.
aleph_minus_one · 46m 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.
petermcneeley · 11m ago
No worries, just be careful which protests you attend.
rubatuga · 18m ago
Great for bargaining and getting cash discounts. Have extra coins? Tips are appreciated.
supportengineer · 38m 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
dlcarrier · 3m ago
What do you mean by "for free"? Would you be paying for your travels in full, the next month?
etbebl · 9m 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?
superkuh · 1h 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.
traeregan · 1h 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.
SchemaLoad · 1h 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.
AnimalMuppet · 45m 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.
gedy · 1h ago
I buy any fast food with cash. I don't need a helpful Insurance company data mining my habits.
cyberax · 16m 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.
kshahkshah · 1h ago
The big benefit is tipping in cash. Buys a lot of good will… and free drinks
No comments yet
bombcar · 1h ago
You can pay with "cash" while using cards.
Gets some of the advantages - not all.
doctoboggan · 1h ago
How can you replicate the anonymity of cash with a card?
tossit444 · 1h ago
Prepaid debit cards usually do not require identification.
hopelite · 1h ago
Maybe read the post before commenting?
throwaway22032 · 1h 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.
beeflet · 30m 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.
theamk · 47m 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.
throwaway22032 · 14m 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.
brettp · 1h 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.
rolph · 57m ago
where is that market ? thats exactly my prefered method of commerce.
ausssssie · 50m 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.
neilv · 35m 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
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".
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://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/welcomesuica/purchase.html
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.
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!
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.
[0]https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2025/0331_001.html
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.
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.
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.
That’s not to discount its upsides but its downsides shouldn’t be handwaived away either.
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.
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.
1. Put all of your purchases on the travel rewards card
2. Pay it off in full every month, no exceptions
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.
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
Gets some of the advantages - not all.
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.
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.
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.
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.