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Forcing Cashless
This article will be strangely related to something I had experienced just recently. And quite frankly somewhat related to the Moria's Race project. I will talk about means, or in this particular case, a mean, that governments sometimes use to push people into doing what the governments like people to do.
In the country where I live ( Israel ) there is a stupid privacy hazard, ridiculous law, that I didn't feel myself until recently and therefor didn't care about much until recently. It says that there is a limit on how much money can be spent at once in cash. The law in question was there from 2019. And it did shook the people at little bit then, but not enough to not pass. It put the limit at 11 thousand Israeli shekels.
11 thousand is what I would call a reasonably large number, nobody actually gonna be stupid enough to carry around in cash. And making a purchase this large probably will best to be written down to your name, so to avoid other people claiming the item in question theirs later. Basically, if you buy a car or a house, or anything above 10 or 11 thousand shekels. You probably want a legal documents saying that it's yours anyway. But even then it was a bit weird that a law like this would exist. Even though I could find some probable justifications for it.
Last month they changed the law a bit. They reduced the limit to 6 thousand. This one I felt personally. A story about this is in the Moria's Race section:
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I swear that this section is relevant. To make live-streams... The ones that will start in two days on this channel. It will be 12th of September 18:30 ( 6:30 PM ) Israeli time. Make a calculation yourself. Why would I know where you live?
Anyway ... to make live-streams about making animation I need a computer that can handle both the OBS software and the intended animation files that I want to animate with. My laptop on which I was writing articles until now... this article is written on a new computer ...was not capable of such a task. More than that. It was not capable of even opening one of the largest files in the project ( the City of Dune Town, which has all of the roads, road signs, buildings, light fixtures, trees, bushes, water and a very complex ground shader. )
Basically I needed to buy a better, faster, nicer, real computer. And so I did. I'm writing this article on it. But there was a problem. I wanted to buy it in cash. This was something I intended to do all this time. Unfortunately the computer turned out to be more expensive than 6 thousand shekels. Not by a lot. But it was enough to not enable me to buy it in cash.
The story goes like this: I go to the store with cash only. I don't have no bank account, no credit card, only cash. I selected with the cashier the parts that I want to be in the computer. He is happy to sell me a large sale. We are about to close the deal but there is a problem. I have only cash and it turned out to be just about 6 and half thousand shekels. I thought, when I came there, that the limit was 11 thousand. Which it was until very recently. They, being somebody that sells expensive items, know about the change of the law. And I don't know about it yet. I give them the money in cash and they refuse to take it. They offer me to go and open a bank account.
In the end we settled on removing one item from the sale, making the whole thing less then 6 thousand. And I cannot buy anything again from them. At least not at that day. And they are not sure for how long I cannot buy from them.
The item we removed was the CPU of the computer. So I bought the computer with all the parts except the CPU. I go home and put it down, going to sleep sadly.
In the morning I bought the CPU in a different place and finally assembled the computer.
The computer is assembled and working. I ended up putting a different operating system. I did technically install pure Debian on it. But it way too pure. It was so basic of a system it didn't even have a way to talk to the internet. I went with Pop!_OS for now. The version without the proprietary Nvidia bullshit. I bought an AMD GPU.
Turned out that the HIP rendering system in blender is only supported via the proprietary version of the AMD drivers. There are workarounds that people managed to do to make it work without installing this bullshit driver. I will maybe attempt a few of those workarounds. But quite frankly the CPU rendering is more than enough for this show. The file with trees and road-sings and everything ( which didn't even open on the laptop ) renders in 40 seconds on this machine with CPU only rendering. So I'm happy. I will crank the samples ( quality ) a bit probably to make it render for at least a few minutes a frame. I don't mind waiting.
There are a few problems, though. It heats up quite significantly. For now I opened the case to let more air though. I didn't feel any slowdowns yet. Also I have put a fan to blow air though it. Seems fine. But I should not forget that I live in a tropical country and that I don't have a working AC at home. Though the summer is already over. And it will get only colder from now for another half a year or so.
Another minor issue is that I forgot to buy a webcam. I will perhaps buy it on 11th. If I forget, we will not have a face cam for the first stream. LOL.
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Reasons why they probably do those cash limits.
Anything has a reason. And even something like this - an attempt to invade privacy more - has a reason to it. Perhaps even one that I might agree with.
It seems like the talking point for them was to try to stop corruption. In all countries there is at least some corruption happening. There is no country where the is no corruption at all. And many countries are desperate to be the first one that cracks the code on how to stop it.
Corruption, for those of you who don't know, is when a person of power, for example a mayor of a city, or a president, or captain of a police department, or a judge, gets a present of value ( usually money ) from people that want to abuse this individual's powers for one reason or another. For example, mafia may pay the police captain to not notice the activities of the mafia. It's kind of self-evident that corruption is not good. Especially if we want to protect the freedoms of people in what seems to be a free country, from people who want to abuse them, like mafia.
The idea here is that if any purchase of any item that is significantly expensive that it might induce happy enough feeling, that a person might do something against the morals of their position, will be recorded with their name, by making a bank transfer ( or paying with a credit card ) that this person will less likely to buy this item, and therefor will see less value in the money offered to him in the first place.
Basically if the mafia offers the captain, say, one million shekels, with which he may buy, say, a new car. If he needs to do a bank transfer for this purchase, the mafia either cannot pay him in cash, since he will need the money in the bank to buy the car. And it will set off some alarms. Or he will have to put the cash into the bank himself, which will set off the same alarms. And he will be caught on corruption. So he either needs to spend little bits of the money, for a very long time. Which is not something people want to do when they except such gifts. Or he has the choice to not except the gift. Basically the cash limit limits how many people actually are willing to except the money from the mafia.
Another, far more likely reason for the cash limit, is to make it harder for people who don't pay taxes. In Israel the taxes system is quite broken to begin with. When a person is caught on not paying taxes ( which is usually a false alarm anyway ) their bank account is being frozen until they pay the tax that they forgot to pay. Which is kind of counter intuitive, to be honest. How will the person pay the tax if his account is frozen? Anyway, this is why people prefer to just have cash around. Or even work at illegal jobs where they pay with either cash or a check that doesn't require a bank account to get the cash from.
If there is a barrier of how good you can live when you work such illegal jobs, you far less likely going to work such illegal jobs. Which means you will more likely to double-check everything related to your taxes. Therefor pay the taxes more efficiently.
On the other hand, they might just be worried about the Arabic immigrants. People in here are in constant post-9/11 state. So they are very pro-surveillance at times. I remember when the covid thing started and everybody were getting the first tests I wanted to do one. So I called the number that they advertised ( I had a phone still back then ). They told me that I was not recorded as being in a proximity to a person with covid. Therefor I don't need a test. I asked them, what did it mean. And they answered that the SIM company didn't see my SIM in a close enough range to a SIM of a person with covid. They just outright surveyed the hell out of people at first signs of probable danger. ( By the way, they didn't see my SIM near that person since I was always on an Airplane Mode. I was starting to enlighten myself already by that point. ) It's not even a surprise to me that people in here like surveillance as a kind of pointless attempt to stop Arab immigrants from attempting terror attacks.
The law of Israel is different on the matter of privacy, though. It states quite clearly that privacy is a right. And that things like taking pictures of other people without their consent is not allowed. But people seem to not care much about privacy themselves. Perhaps it's not only in Israel. Perhaps it's a global problem. I don't know.
People who least cared about the whole cash limit thing were those who already pay for everything with a credit card. And those who don't pay, might as well pay with a credit card anyway, because they do not care about their privacy. Therefor it happened. And therefor it happened again. And therefor also, there was no protest against it. Or at least I never heard about one.
Obvious problems with the approach.
Privacy is the main problem. But quite frankly the whole point here is to remove privacy in a way. How would they catch corrupted officials or tax evaders otherwise? Right?... Well, quite frankly there are ways. There was a person ( before that law happened ) that was caught on corruption. How? Well, suddenly, out of nowhere he had a new house. And it was big and fabulous. There was no need to look into who payed for it. It was not something that he with his salary could simply afford. So therefor there was a red flag.
Even now, with this law in place, the mafia could buy the house for the corrupted official. And make him live in it as a kind of payment. There is no money involved in such a case. But there is still corruption.
But perhaps it was not trying to stop the corruption outright, but simply to make it harder. Fair enough. But why like this? Privacy is a right, remember?
Okay let's assume that privacy is not as important. It is. I'm just letting the assumption to happen. When you buy an expensive item you want to have a paper that's proving that the item is yours anyway. Somebody, for example, bought a house. They have papers of the house-ownership. If a different person would live in that house without the consent of those who have the papers. There would be a legal issue. And it's something that's rather nice.
If somebody steals your cup of coffee, you will not feel too terrible. You will just buy another one. It's not a big deal. With a house... It is a big deal. And having a legal mechanism to deal with house-theft is nice. And quite frankly it applies to all of the other expensive items. I mean, in such a case, it's arguable, and therefor assumable that privacy is not as important.
How about that? Instead of limiting cash. Make it so there should be a ownership paper record of the item above certain amount. This would do exactly the same job. But will keep the freedom to pay in cash. Or any other form of payment. For now, with the system that they implemented, they restrict the form of payment, to find out the name. In the text of the law it actually says that it prohibits usage of bank checks that are anonymous. So it's all about knowing the person.
They restrict too much, when they could restrict just a little bit. They seem to be forcing people to go cashless for no reason what so ever. Unless of course, their real agenda is to force people to go cashless. And all of the other reasons were just excuses.
Potential cash-less solution
Under no circumstances I would believe that the government will be happy to let people use Monero or something similar for those kinds of transactions. But there is one system ( which is implemented already in Free Software ) that I would theoretically believe that the government might use. And this system is Taler.
Taler is something similar to VISA or MasterCard. It's a digital, network type protocol for transferring money simply and easily. But it also includes a fair amount of privacy for the person that pays. Not the one that receives.
Basically a person buys from the bank a number of digital signatures. Each denoted as a particular ( often very small ) amount of money. Each has the same monetary value. Each is cryptographically verifiable by the bank that issued it. But non of them have any information about who bought them. In theory they have no value themselves ( unless people will treat them as money ). But you can use them to unlock money transfers from the bank that issued them.
Basically the system will work like that: You buy those tokens. And store the files on your computer. When you buy something, you send copies of those files to that other persons computer. His Taler program will contact the same bank and sell them back. This person's identity will be known. Your will be kept anonymous.
Of course you may think that the bank might record that you bought from them this particular taler token. And might use this data to identify you buying with it later. The developers claim that their cryptography method is sufficient enough to mitigate this issue. Therefor the payer is anonymous. The receiver is the only one who is identified.
In any way we need to protest!!!
I noticed recently an increase of Israeli people in the comment section. How about organizing a protest to save the cash? Somebody has to do this. If normies wont, we must do it ourselves. PLEASE CONTACT ME TO ORGANIZE THIS EVENT!!!
Happy Hacking!!!
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