More appropriate name would be "dystopia" because banning cash will have mostly adverse effects, intruducing nearly-totalitarian control over the citizens being the most important one.
They could say your rating is not high enough, you are now cut off completely. Or they would know all spending so it would be a bit nosey. And then people would not spend on things causing money circulation to slow, but maybe that is offset a bit by ease of swiping a card.
If you are a Canadian citizen who ever used a credit/debit card at a cannabis dispensary (or if you even just invested or worked for a Canadian dispensary), you are now permanently barred from entering the United States. A cashless society is a totalitarian society.
How would the the DHS or another US entity know about payment transactions made on a canadian bank account?
And, I realize that cannabis is not legal at the federal level in the US, but how would lawfully purchasing a cannabis product years ago disqualify you from entering the US?
I don't know about this specific case, but if you used a credit or debit card, it would be processed by Visa or Mastercard, which are both US companies, subject to US laws and regulations. That's how the US entities would know.
Implementation is key here. If a new method can be introduced which offers the same benefits of cash while being digital, open-source and on open hardware, I don't see a huge problem.
Alas, such a solution would probably be extremely hard to create and therefore never will be.
> The basic concept for e-krona is as follows: it would be digital, and have a 1-to-1 conversion with an ordinary krona held in an account at the Riksbank or stored locally, for example on a card or in a mobile phone app.
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
I'd like to know what this available technology is, that can create a digital object that guarantees a 1:1 correspondence to a physical asset, cannot be duplicated or multiple-spent. Has Sweden discovered the un-copy-able bit?
Banks, Visa, PayPal, pretty much most in-game currencies, as long as your maintain control over the data storage and deny access to malicious actors there is no reason why a traditional DB system would not work.
You can get anonymous spending (the benefit of cash) only with a distributed ledger.
A centralized ledger would just be regular debit cards but would bypass the banks/visa/mastercard. It offers the benefit of non-cash (no physical currency) but not the benefits of cash (anonymity).
I hope we can get the benefit of both. My money stored on a card or gadget in my pocket instead of printed, but also chargeable through atms or internet banks so that the spending is anonymous.
Why does there need to be a separate government issued digital currency?
Presumably all of the private accounts that people are currently using are measured in Kr already, and the banks already operate at fractional reserve so the actual paper doesn't exist. As an American, I make about one cash purchase a year, but that doesn't mean that I'm not spending US Dollars.
It seems to me that calling digital money "e-krona" will change exactly nothing but nomenclature.
It changes the value fluctuations. Right now the biggest problem with using crypto as your day to day money is that you cannot trust the money that you put into crypto to stay at the same value over time + transactions are slow.
> Right now the biggest problem with using crypto as your day to day money is that you cannot trust the money that you put into crypto to stay at the same value over time
Existing, non-crypto currencies don’t have that problem, mainly because of inertia: so many people are using it that exchange rates don’t affect ordinary prices denominated in the currency.
When a cryptocurrency has such adoption, the volatility problem will go away too.
It isn't just inertia, there's also decades to centuries of developments in currencies with stability being one of the core goals. There are also plenty of examples of the system failing when current best practices weren't followed, even when adoption has been high.
The authorities behind the most popular crypto currencies today doesn't seem to be aiming for stability as a primary goal. The currencies would not be very meaningful as instruments for speculation if they were, which probably is the reason why stable cryptocurrencies aren't as popular.
Part of the point is that if physical cash were withdrawn then you would _have_ to depend on some private (i.e. non-government) third-party for your financial transactions. (Obviously you could claim that you already are dependent on them, but there's a difference between a de facto and a de iure dependence.)
> The development raises some crucial issues regarding the state’s role in the payment market. For hundreds of years, the public has been offered central bank notes and coins. If cash stops working, it would leave all individuals to rely on the private sector alone to get access to money and payment methods. This would be a historical change without precedence. Norway is seeing a similar trend, and the two central banks are cooperating in this area. In the Eurozone, cash is still used to a high degree. The value of the outstanding amount of cash is equivalent to 10% of the Eurozone GDP, versus the Swedish equivalent of only 1%.
A government system ideally guarantees access to every citizen/entity desiring to possess "cash". A system run by a private entity doesn't have to do so. If you don't agree/fall out of compliance with the terms of service of a private system, you can be banned. The same can be done on a government system, but at least you have the option of court intervention and voting people into/out of office.
> One option is to do nothing, meaning we accept that the general public no longer has access to central bank money. Such a future would imply a changed scope for the public sector. The payment market would have to be regulated and supervised in new ways to meet fulfil the objective to have a safe, efficient and inclusive payment market.
> A second alternative is to issue central bank money in a digital form, as a complement to cash and the money held in bank accounts.
It sounds to me that there needs to be a government version of VISA or MasterCard and legislate that all retailers accept that if they do no accept cash. Then anyone should be entitled to have access to the new payment type as they would have access to cash.
Exactly my point: if you only take the first and much easier step of a centralized ledger then you have done what public transit cards do. They don’t actually charge the tokens onto the cards, instead they just set the balance of the card id to the charged amount in a central database.
The novel and more difficult step would be to charge the actual cryptocurrency tokens to a card, which could then be spent anonymously without contacting a central ledger. Why we “need a cryptocurrency” is because otherwise we have just let the central bank take the role of commercial banks and credit card companies. Perhaps not a bad thing in itself but not the full potential.
There's an alternative to relying on the private sector, which is for cash to be replaced with credit notes. The Irish bank strikes of the early 70s is a nice case study of this happening [1].
I've recently been thinking about a potential solution to the reliance on private institutions in a cashless society. I guess the problem with a "mobile chequebook" or something of the sort is that you are always to some extent dependent on a private service (e.g. phone signal provider).
A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
I agree, but unfortunately I don't believe a society being run by humans would ever implement that. The leaders will not tolerate that kind of loss of control.
It has already been implemented (Bitcoin, Monero etc), and is improving gradually. The control freaks who would not like to tolerate it think they'll be able to tame it, but Bitcoin is like the Hydra - it gets stronger with every unsuccessful attack attempt. It's better for them to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist in order to not bring attention to it. When they eventually lift their heads out of the sand they'll find that the world has moved on without them.
It's not there yet, but eventually Bitcoin will be near enough anonymous and untraceable via the use of the Lightning Network, sidechains, CT and mixing services. There's usually a cost/privacy tradeoff, and people will be able to choose their appropriate level of privacy.
Other cryptos are fully anonymous & untraceable. For example zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to conceal all elements of a transaction (sender, receiver, amount.)
Zcash only uses those for some transactions because the complexity is so high. It also requires connecting to the payment network via an IP address, which isn't really anonymous.
No, Zcash offers the option to always use shielded transactions, if that's what you want. The choice to use a shielded or unshielded transaction rests solely in the hands of the user.
Private transactions are not the default behavior, which makes transaction analysis more feasible than with private-by-default currencies like Monero.
Also, zcash has the trusted setup issue, which requires that you trust the developers were not compromised or did not store data during the setup, or they might be able to print infinite coins without detection if the data were to be recovered. For some, this makes it a non-starter, despite the efficiency of SNARKS over Bulletproofs which Monero now uses.
Don't let that deter you though. Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo salary. He will struggle to get by without the crowds of new adopters.
«Private transactions are not the default behavior»
There is no "default" behavior. The software gives you the choice between shielded and unshielded, and the enduser has to choose. There is no default.
«requires that you trust the developers»
Not really. In the latest Powers of Tau ceremony, there were 87 participants. This group spans more than just the developers. Even if 86 participants were malicious or compromised, as long as there is at least 1 honest participant, the system can be trusted.
«Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo»
Not sure why this is a problem. By comparison, Satoshi "paid himself" (mined) 1M BTC =~ $6 billion dollars. I'm fine with the founders of world-changing cryptocurrencies being handsomely rewarded.
There is no wait time when recipients accept 0-conf transactions (which is always the case in a brick and mortar store, because 99% of the time it's safe enough – there is even smart tools that verify the transaction is sufficiently broadcasted to reduce risk).
Serious q: one of the big arguments against untraceable transactions is organized crime. Yes they're very real.
But what if untraceable transactions were limited to small amounts and slow rates, such that you could personally provide for your family but not run an enterprise? (basically that's what physical cash attempts, and as long as the denominations are kept low, it sort of works)
You can ask the questions about whether it should or should not enable crime, but the question is useless, because it doesn't address whether it can or cannot enable crime. When you ask this question, you come to the conclusion that it can enable crime.
So then you might argue that if it can enable crime, we must do something about it. Admirable ideas, but you then need to ask the question, can we do anything about it? When you ask this, you come to the conclusion that you can't do anything about it. Bitcoin happened. Nobody is in control. It does not care about your opinion.
So the real question we should be asking, is, if Bitcoin can enable crime, and we are unable to prevent the use of Bitcoin, how must our law enforcement adapt to this new world? Then we can stop wasting resources on hopelessly trying to adapt the world to suit law enforcement.
You're fooling yourself if you believe nothing can be done about Bitcoin. If the powers that be want it dead they'll outlaw it, and that's effectively game over for any kind of common transaction system. The reason it hasn't so far is because there are too many rich and powerful speculators involved, but those winds could change in a hurry so I wouldn't get too cocky.
Yeah this is wrong. Bitcoin is everywhere, not just in the US, and there's no way in hell going to be a worldwide coordinated crackdown. And as long as people are running nodes, Bitcoin isn't going anywhere.
Bitcoin is borderless. Lets say for example, a government decides to ban all bitcoin/fiat exchanges in their jurisdiction, what will people who want to obtain Bitcoin do? Answer: They will obtain Bitcoin either directly (on the black market, as payment for labour or services), or they will obtain it overseas, where said government has no jurisdiction. In both of these cases, if hidden from the government in question, this is actively harmful to the government because it becomes assets which the government has no ability to levy taxes on.
Another problem is that governments which attempt to restrict bitcoin usage will suffer the economic and brain drain which will occur as people move themselves, their businesses and their money overseas to somewhere more friendly to Bitcoin, whose economies will prosper as a result. Also aided by having a stronger monetary base which can't be devalued by central bankers.
Governments don't want to say "we're going to make Bitcoin legal," because they don't yet know how to deal with collecting tax in a world of Bitcoin use. They also don't want to just say "we're going to make it illegal," because they would be doing so at their own peril.
Good luck enforcing any prohbition anyway. We've seen how prohibition of alcohol played out in the 1920s. We also know that many drugs, despite being illegal for many decades, are easily obtainable anywhere there is a demand for them, and largely at the loss of the governments banning them, who could've been collecting taxes all along on drugs sold.
The main reason cannabis is becoming legal in many places now is because it is hugely profitable, and governments want their slice of the pie.
All this idealism remains to be proven. If Bitcoin can cross the chasm to be a de-facto transaction method then it might have enough leverage to force governments to capitulate, but we are still very very far from that point, so you shouldn't treat it as a foregone conclusion.
I grew up in Brazil during hyper inflation, and I have Argentinian friends now, so I understand what it means to obtain currency overseas or on a black market, and I can assure you it's a huge hassle and not something people want to do unless their local fiat currency has major problems. If governments with strong currencies start moving against bitcoin, transaction volume will decrease, investors will lose confidence, and the value will crash out. This doesn't require a coordinated effort, it just requires a handful of major countries to start seeing things a certain way.
> I agree, but unfortunately I don't believe a society being run by humans would ever implement that
This was already implemented for hundreds of years. It is called "paying with cash".
Sure, there are some minor edge cases, like dollar serial numbers that are sometimes tracked to catch bank robbers or whatever, but cash is mostly anonymous and untraceable.
We have known how to do untraceable* transactions [0] since 1982. There has now been thirty years of cryptographic research building on these results. The reason it hasn't happened is not because we can't do it but because governments resist the additional privacy protections.
* - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides in practice, but certainly a massive privacy improvement over credit cards.
In theory cash provides less privacy than ecash since stores could record the serial numbers on cash. However in practice they don't and thus cash in practice provides quite a bit of privacy.
In theory what could be done is (not saying anyone does this):
1. When you get cash from an ATM or Bank they record the serial numbers of the cash they gave you and attach it to your identity.
2. When you spend those funds at a store they record what you bought and the serial numbers of the cash you paid with and the serial numbers of the bills you received as change.
The government could then build a graph of spends attached to your identity. With high probability they could trace how you spent that money. One problem they would run into is if you gave or received cash from a friend. However while this might cause the tracing procedure to make some errors, it would also allow it to, in some cases, infer which of your friends you exchange cash with.
In any realistic scenario the government would also be intersecting this graph of spends with additional information such as license plate readers, RFID data from public transit, facial recognition,cell tower geolocation, etc... Serial number tracing would be just one data source.
Probably your best bet for privacy here would be pay people begging for money to swap bills with you e.g. exchanging a twenty dollar bill for a ten dollar bill.
And you might be leery of criticizing any of these entities lest they withdraw your ability to do any of these things. That's a serious chilling effect.
Its a fear that shows up in a common interpretation of Revelation 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. This is one of the verses in the Bible that tends to drive a lot of the hatred for national ids and removal of cash in the US.
Granted, but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits. Those people are right to fear national ID and cashlessness; their fear being from Revelations, doesn't necessarily make them religious nutjobs (of the sort whose fears we regularly and usefully ignore).
(Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)
For an example without religious polarization, you can look at Nostradamus' ramblings
They are completely useless until misattributed in hindsight, until further reattributed in hindsight to something slightly more coincidentally relevant. 500 years of this so far.
Truthfully, my original point was that this was a worry of people before technology made it quite a bit easier to govern. I am unaware of any Nostradamus that talks about restrictions of commerce, nor am I talking about the nature of prophecy of Revelations other than restrictions on commerce seemed to be important enough in the ancient mind to specifically call out.
> Granted, but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock
> Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits.
Most of our culture and philosophy comes from pre-scientific texts. Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.
> (Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)
A small number, while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.
> I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock
Their choice, and I'm sure it must be good for their pretty little stained-glass filter that they keep in-place between their eyes and reality.
> Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.
All the more reason to oppose the general centralization and empowerment of authority, on principle, not just on the topic of this HN article.
> A small number
No doubt, and I feel that my phrasing conveyed that appropriately: "some Christians".
> while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.
No doubt of that either; as we all know, Christianity is very diverse in the precise natures of its adherents' fantasies; be they Revelations-enhanced or otherwise. It's still all fantasy, though, which, I suppose, is what really matters in the end.
But, my point here in all of this, is that some of the things their Bible says, do happen to be inherently wise, when extracted from the original context. The "Mark of the Beast", I daresay, is one of them. And like any piece of the Bible that is actually of-use, its wisdom is best put into our own words and then the Biblical association discarded lest it cause weakness.
* * * * *
While I do focus on Christianity specifically, since that is the immediate topic, I should make it clear that I do not discriminate:
Religion sucks. All of it. And I pity those who need it, and those who only think they need it.
If you've going to display your disdain for sky fairies on HN, best to pick on a small religion, unpopular with HN readers. Bahá'í perhaps, which preaches mutual love and the inherent value of all religion, yet its adherents are mercilessly persecuted by co-religionists.
Just because a particular brand of sky-fairy is popular, does not make it any better; on the contrary, the damage that a religion does is correlated positively with the number of its adherents.
To be sure, but the religionists will retaliate, thinking 'you have personally offended me, and punishing you is God's Work'. But if you disparage belief systems they disagree with they will tend to ignore you. And yet, the people who can understand your message will understand it applies to all religions.
Perhaps, attack the beliefs of the Noodlers and their belief that wearing the Holy Collander protects against credit card fraud.
A local, sandwich shop charges $6.66 for a specific sub after tax if you don't get the full meal. Owner or corporate office probably never thought about it. The locals regularly change the amount, often subtracting, because so many people don't want to pay that specific number. I always try to do some dark, comedy routine the second I see it if it's a new employee in case they're superstitious. At least one looked like the apocalypse was happening before I said, "Nah, I'm just messing with you." The coworkers always get a laugh out of those.
Outside that, I've heard mark of the beast from so many people about so many things over the decades that I'm sure it factors into a lot of political decisions where popular vote counts. The wording is kind of catch-all given mark is so ambiguous, it mentions a name, and it has a number. A person can project it on anything.
You can look at how people treat numbers in general. The story of 13 (Triskaidekaphobia) and 4 (Tetraphobia) are pretty interesting. We like to watch the odometer roll over and make words on calculators.
I still wish we had all followed the Yuki (base 8), it would have made computing so much easier.
That's how services work though, you can't really be self sufficient unless you're a hunter gatherer. And even then you still need to be strong enough to kill the other tribes who are contesting with you for land. Imagine going to Mars and the very air you breathe is owned by your government. For me that's not an argument against going to mars, that's an argument for working harder to build a stronger, more trustworthy society.
This is a false comparison. Physical cash, in your possession, cannot be frozen or revoked unless those entities stop accepting government fiat currency. It has nothing to do with being self-sufficient.
At this point in time I'm at much higher risk of my electronic money being stolen than my cash, and if someone steals my cash I know about it instantly.
They can't skim my cash, can't MITM my cash transactions, they can't accept payment and then not deliver (more fraud than theft, but still) because the cash and the object being purchased are both right there.
I think the point is even with cash in your wallet it is already a society where you have to obtain permission from unknown people to "obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation" because all of these things are delivered to you after many rounds of market exchanges which require clearing houses, escrows, the Fed, SWIFT, etc. Society has been essentially cashless for ages.
Unless the entity you're transacting with is also interested in operating in a completely cash-based economy, they will need to deposit your cash with a private bank and enter into the electronic money market. They will then worry about the source of your money by profiling you in case the risk accrues to them. Stores already do this if you pay for something with a large amount of cash and stand out as a target. That's my point that society is already essentially cashless. You're only talking about the margins of exchanges on the last hop that may be conducted in cash. Within one hop of conventional transactions it's almost certainly electronic. So I'm not sure that's a real distinction.
You are talking about an edge case which just isn't true.
It is entirely possible to live your entire life, paying with only cash, in the United States. The hardest part would likely be paying rent, but even that isn't unheard up to pay with using cash.
Society is not cashless. The edge cases you are talking about rarely ever come up. If it is possible to only pay with cash, then the last hop is all that matters for you as an individual.
I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction? The only reason I can think of would be false positive on fraud detection or system error or the such, all problems with the medium, not with centralization/permissions.
> "what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction?"
Paypal cite the following reasons that they may freeze or suspend an account (at their sole discretion):
- You’ve received an abnormally large amount of money in your account that is way above your average
- Someone has filed a complaint to Paypal about your business
- A series of chargebacks have been placed against your account
- Your website has questionable content
- You are in violation of Paypal’s use policy. For example if you sell drugs or anything illegal, you may get banned
- Your account information is not up to date or your account is not fully verified
- Someone has logged into your Paypal account from a strange location.
- Your credit score is low or something with your background history makes you a higher risk customer
- They have detected fraudulent activity on your account.
Some of these are reasonable. Some of them are highly questionable. Some of them are outrageously open to abuse.
> WikiLeaks' founder accused two members of Congress of pressuring MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) to block payments to his group after it published thousands of confidential messages about U.S. diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> Julian Assange charged Tuesday that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Peter King from New York influenced the moves by both companies in December 2010 to halt the payments.
> Assange, speaking to reporters from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he claimed asylum in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault, said the blockade had eliminated 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue and cost the group roughly $50 million in donations.
Of course, it could be argued that we don't have a competitive payments market. But then your proposition wouldn't reflect the real world.
The payment processor makes pennies from your business. If doing business with you ever costs them more than pennies - if it costs them dollars, or hundreds of dollars, or thousands of dollars, or more - they're going to drop you.
> I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction?
This happens all of the time to lots of people.
The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies.
If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.
And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.
It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.
> It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.
It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.
The problem is when the payment companys are so big and so few, that 1 or 2 companies can basically shutdown an entire business themself (by removing their ability to be paid).
The solution is to use anti monopoly laws to break them up.
I don't think that companies should be forced to do something. What I instead want is for there to be enough competition in the market, such that no matter how terrible your views, there exists at least 1 one who will work with you.
And if there isn't enough competition in a market, then that's a problem.
There doesn't need to be a rationale or incentive. It's electronics combined with software. At some point it will shut off or break down, probably at a time most inopportune.
You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level.
That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
And the black market is a key safety valve for a fully-functioning capitalist economy (like it or not).
Hell, even the USSR had paper cash in circulation allowing some privacy and trade between individuals.
Having solely account-based money under complete regulatory control amounts to a huge increase in what is practical to put under political control. It could drastically increase the incentives to ban and regulate trade in anything of interest to special interests. E.g. the pharmaceutical industry could finally get rid of herbal medicine.
If the government wants to "unperson" someone, cash or no cash or electronic money, they will just come and collect you.
You having pieces of plastic/paper and/or metal trinkets in your pocket plays will not save you from this.
I understand the apparent privacy angle, but if you analyze it further, cash won't help in the presence of a malicious system. If the government cares enough about you to stop you from using e-cash/credit cards to buy or sell, they will also care enough to not let you roam free.
> That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
«that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time»
Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.
You'd have to transmit it before the client can double-spend, yes, but my point is that it's not necessary for the owner of the coins to have an internet connection.
You can receive incoming blocks on the Bitcoin network via satellite, radio etc. I doubt a government would be able to keep up the whack-a-mole game against many activists who can set up mobile block relays.
You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.
The article says clearly that they are trying to figure out a stored value card. If they do, the only chilling part is if the means of exchanging it was somehow unobtainable.
It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.
A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.
The article doesn't even mention privacy or permissions. I see no reason to think either of those are being considered at all here. I mean, how would a state-issued stored-value card function without being traceable and revokable?
>> main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc.
Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
«Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys»
It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world, are the ones who control the hashrate, who own the mining hardware, and who choose which pool to use. That is, if a pool were to use the hashrate maliciously, users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
>> users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.
Another misconception. Changing mining pool is done by changing a single parameter in the mining software. It is as easy as it sounds. There is no need to "move hardware".
It is not true that "most" mining hardware is located in China. There is a good portion of it over there for sure, but because of the secrecy around most miners, we don't know how much exactly. It's certainly not ">90%".
Every single article that makes similar claims mistakenly assumes that for example it the AntPool Chinese pool represents 20% of the hashrate, then it means this hardware is located in China. This is patently false. AntPool is one of the most popular pools for various reasons (reliability, availability, flexibility, branding), so they are used by many users worldwide. They even have stratum endpoints in the US for their North American users. Only a fraction of the AntPool hashrate comes from hardware physically located in China.
On the other hand, all the major central authorities have asserted that they do have the right to censor how the residents of their jurisdiction spend money, so they consider that any payment system that's truly censorship resistant and anonymous must be prevented from interacting with the wider economy unless it surrenders these properties.
I.e. the requirement to report all large cash transactions and prevent anonymity in such deals; the 'know your customer' requirement for cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. Even if your "money" is censorship resistant, transacting with a legitimate business can't be, since all legitimate businesses can be (and are) required to censor certain transactions; and if a particular "kind of money" makes it impossible to distinguish them, then it may well be that these businesses will (or will have to) simply censor the whole "kind of money".
Want to share about my experience about the "permission" part.
I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.
Anti-fraud may been the reason on that day, but who knows what will be the reason tomorrow (eg Capital Controls as it happened in Greece). The main point is that I still had to get permission. It's kind of like when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to go outside the house unless I informed my parents, which was like getting permission implicitly.
When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.
For me, it’s always been cheapest to use an ATM at my destination, and let my bank do the currency conversion instead of using the rate offered by the ATM. My bank charges me something like max(5€, 1%), which is usually substantially cheaper than all the other options. I think this is more or less the same (or cheaper) for all German banks.
Almost all UK banks charge 2.75% above the visa/mc wholesale rate for overseas transactions. Plus they usually charge 1%-1.5% for overseas ATM transactions.
This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
In my experience, informing the bank of travel makes no difference. They block regardless even when I inform and even for foreign charges that appear with regular frequency.
Like the peer comment, my experience is that informing about travel may or may not work and I’ve had really random rejections. These days I travel with backup cards including from totally different bank and network.
Anti-fraud is done for the bank's benefit, with little incentive to prevent false positives. In my own experience, 100% of my blocked transactions have been false over the last few years (since I moved out of the US, where fraud is more rampant). It's extremely annoying - it's my money, but I can't use it because the bank is being overly conservative.
100% of fraudulent transactions have gone through silently on my card. Despite the fact that many times my bank has sent me an SMS querying whether something was kosher. Doubly perplexing because they were OS hotel and airline charges, I had a stream of local transactions (fuel, supermarket), I very rarely pay hotels directly, and the bank makes it easy to tell them you are going OS.
After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.
Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.
That whole "inform your bank thing" is no longer a thing, at least here. We went to Namibia/Zimbabwe last year and I tried to give them a heads up to not have my cc blocked. The hotline person said there is nothing they can do. If the software blocks it, it blocks it. No way for them to prevent that.
Pretty much. I travel with multiple cards from different banks. Recent trip where I notified the banks ahead of time I'd be travelling. Results as follows:
Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.
Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.
Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.
I was at a gas station in Grand Forks, ND in the middle of winter at 2AM fueling up. I had traveled this route and stopped at this gas station at about the same time of night multiple times when I was going from ND to MN and back. The card (Citibank Visa) had a large open credit line, but it somehow got rejected because (and I quote) "they installed new software"[1]. This was a bit before I had a cellphone and luckily I had taken my Dad's advice and always kept cash hidden in the car. They promised it wouldn't happen again, and I remembered to make sure I had an emergency stash of cash in the car. I have no clue what I would have done if I had to only use that card.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
I remember as a kid how much money my parents would have to carry while on holiday, banks were closed and ATMs rare and often empty, shops in the country often wouldn't take cheques. Credit cards resulted in really slow vendor payment (remember paper credit card chunk clunk? those numbers are raised for a reason) and caused cash flow issues.
Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.
I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.
Its interesting the total difference in how people deal with commerce going from the 70's to today. I remember the get check, deposit check, write checks and maybe go get money from the bank cycle. Heck, even if you had a credit card quite a lot of places wouldn't take it (not to mention the carbon paper).
People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.
I remember that too; my grandfather used to go on business trips to NYC, and after adjusting for inflation the amount he carried was almost 5000 USD. Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.
> Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.
... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets coughcough I mean "bolster their budgets."
It's tragic that the unbanked (unable to get credit, often paid in cash, just don't have bank accounts) are the ones most likely stop be stopped by police and subject to unjust forfeiture. (With the exception of the Amish.)
I was able to help out some family members who coincidentally where in same store during a EFT outage. I keep about $200 cash on me just in case. I was able to cover some necessities for them which they paid back next day when systems were back online. Nudged them a bit about not relying 100% on the plastic, esp after banks close.
That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:
I was traveling in the middle of nowhere once, and planned to arrive at a particular gas station before they closed (at 10PM). I was delayed and was low on gas when I pulled into the only gas station for miles around.
It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.
So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.
For sure, the credit card at the pump has been an amazing convenience for rural areas. I do love the ability, but it is a pain when the credit card company’s software doesn’t feel you need that convenience.
It doesn't have to be like this though. One of my banks has an interface in the mobile app where I can unlock different continents for purchases and withdrawals for a set amount of time.
Yep, I've had that happen to me every time I travelled back to Berlin when I was living in London. Every single time my Barclay's card would refuse to work.
So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.
If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution, yet had some recourse for fraudulent transactions, didn't require downloading hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain, processed more than a handful of transactions globally per ten minutes, and where you didn't lose all your money if you accidentally deleted the wrong file or your hard drive broke or got lost.
For some of the other things, best practices prevent much of that. I could imagine a common practice where base layer transactions to open a channel use a joint account that requires X of Y signatures, where X-n keys are yours, and the remainder being a friend or actual intermediary business which only facilitates avoiding user error. After the channels are open it having no say in how things are transmitted. I also imagine this being seamless. Each element of a computer's boot sequence were all major stepping stones at one point, and now computers don't even show you the list of things its doing anymore. I see this technology going that way once UX designers figure out how to get paid in this space.
Lightning is available now. The 18 months meme was regarding when it wasn't.
If you want to perpetuate that criticism, you'll need up to date arguments: Lightning is cumbersome to use and impractical because of the requirement to run a personal full node to connect to AND your device running the payment channel needs to always ben online for the duration of the payment channel. "Watchtowers" solve both of these issues, and they have not proliferated yet.
Yes, this isn't about what you need right now, use cash or a financial network using intermediaries. We are operating on different time frames and most forward thinking things we are talking about are on that time frame. Nobody in this movement is perturbed by your astute observation that it isn't available right now, nobody is saying "well pack it up boys, stale2002 can't be accommodated, shows over"
The problem in Bitcoin today are the same problem that have existed for years.
That problem being that there are too many people focused on esoteric solutions, like watchtowers, 2nd layers, and even 3rd layers, that only developers care about. And not enough people talking to customers or merchants, and building things that make Bitcoin work as an actual currency.
Seeing as the whole point of this stuff is to work as a currency, it seems like this should be important.
It is a rare few companies, such as BitPay, that are building things like point of sale devices that actually make it possible for consumers to buy things from merchants.
Bitpay's solution will always have poor UX for merchants while these protocol layer things are not available.
Bitpay's solution would have been okay while 0-conf transactions were not replaceable on BTC. But this had capacity limitations that lightning won't.
What you are saying would have merit, if thats what was happening on these particular topics. Wallets are totally not built for customers, but thats not one of the things you highlighted.
> without going through a financial institution, yet had some recourse for fraudulent transactions
a contradiction right there. Security/freedom is a trade-off, and bitcoin has traded away some security for some freedom. Some people like that freedom, but some don't.
Yeah, it's a contradiction; I didn't mean to say that all the things I listed are possible. Not wanting to download hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain is also a contradiction; the only solution I know of is to use a light wallet, and then you're suddenly relying on someone else's service instead of just relying on the decentralized network.
That's presumably not what a central bank concerned about access to central bank cash has in mind. I had to chuckle about this part of the article:
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
Not to be pedantic but a person can in return also revoke their obligation to abide by these rules (like paying for food at the cashier or board a train without a ticket) at any time. So essentially there always exists a choice to not play by the rules if the regulators of this cashless society decide to cut you out
Except that eventually a growing number of participants will start to barter where they can, and then someone will come up with the idea of a issuing some liquid token to facilitate things when bartering is not possible.
I am native or Sweden and I hate, from the bottom of my heart, having to use my bank card for visits to restaurants, stores, etc. It is better when staying staying away from Stockholm, Göteborg, & Malmö.
Furthermore, a society that relies on digital payments is a society that would collapse with a week long blackout. A couple targeted power plant attacks would be enough to completely destroy the economy. That's terrifying.
Whar happens in case of war, when data centers are destroyed or just access to internet is limited?
Can you imagine massive desire to switch back to cash/gold/stones?
As a resident of Sweden, i can only say that this is the future for all western countries. Life is just better without cash. We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center. Your phone is enough to get you through the day. The govt is still run by the people for the people here, so most people aren't worried about totalitarianism. Most beggars now have signs with their phone number to swish them cash - because nobody has cash to give them (the other form of begging is collecting plastic bottles and cans with deposits).
No. It isn't worth it. Life isn't better, but privacy non-existent and society is ridiculously fragile from outtakes (this isn't even factoring in that the systems could be actively attacked).
Yes it is the future, but we will be much worse for it.
Hmm, keep $200-600 of quickly depreciating assets whose creation is a sin against our children’s enviroment when I can have five crisp linen Benjamins at home?
You know I already have a spare phone at home. Cost me nothing technically since when I upgraded I just kept it instead of throwing it out.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Y'all bitch it's ridiculous (and I ain't saying it's right or that I agree with the premise of having to do it in the first place), I'm just saying thats what people will do faced with the situation.
Which is a significantly bigger investment. An extra phone is a permanent loss of the money that went into buying it, it requires maintenance (of a sort) and needs to be replaced on a regular basis since the payment apps will presumably continue to require relatively recent operating systems. It also requires a dedicated SIM card with associated cost.
As a bonus, phones sometimes explode and set fire to things - when they're not busy getting hacked :)
I'd estimate dead battery and network signal problems occur two orders of magnitude more often than people losing their wallet.
Even for rarer problems like phone software freezing up, touch sensor going awry, phone memory full but can't clean it (a bug but still), and losing network access because someone didn't pay the phone bill or it's pay-as-you-go and can't afford the top-up quantum - I think I've seen all of those more often than I've seen people lose all their cash.
And then there's the cost of replacement. If you urgently have to get a new phone to replace a broken, lost or stolen one, to pay for necessities - many people don't have enough short-term funds to cover it, nor access to credit.
Some of these can be addressed, but we've a long way to go.
Plus, I’m privileged, but I’m really not more than mildly annoyed if I loose my wallet with $50-$100.
The way I see it some person will have the opportunity to do the right thing and turn it in, or I like to imagine that a homeless will have a great a day.
The only thing that bothers me is my information in my wallet, which I will pay far more than $100 to keep safe.
I have $200 in a variety of denominations in my glove box.
I have $2 000 cash at home.
Once I’m home I can write myself a cheque, and with my passport, easily withdrawal more money at any bank (or grocery store).
Also, if a natural disaster happens (earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane, Norsemen with iPhones disembark on our shores) I don’t have to rely on any network to buy something. I just pay cash, or write a cheque.
Cash is very robust. (Booze, cigarettes and gold more so, but that’s another story)
I don't. Perhaps mostly as I live in a different country.
I do have a £5 or 20 note as an emergency money in my bag and £20-40 in some drawers at home. E.g. to buy lunch if I come across a food stall that doesn't accept card payments. Rarer and rarer is it needed in the UK, and when I lived in Norway it was months between each time I needed cash.
I do however have spare debit/credit cards at home and my bag as well in case I lose my wallet. (I have never actually lost a wallet, but have left it in my coat/trousers at home etc)
With more and more stores (especially in Scandinavia as the OP details) no longer accept cash, and have not accepted cheques for decades, I am not sure your solution is a long-term solution.
A society that stops accepting cash is fragile - it relies on sophisticated networks few people understand that required a lot of maintenance.
Physical money is literally prehistoric - quite robust.
And consider:
In EU, just a few years ago, the Greek citizenry realized that “their” money was being held hostage in EU negotiations.[1] The Greeks were forbidden from withdrawing their funds (or using them for that matter)
Mind you, the Greek govt debt is the govt debt, not their personal debt.
Your country, not 30 years ago, was brought to its financial knees single handeldly by Soros (the man who broke the Bank of England). [2]
Now, facing Brexit and the potential poop storm it may end up being, you’re OK having 20 quid in your pocket?
I grew up in a third world country. For me, this naïveté is real privilege! [3]
[1] this is what power is willing to do to defend finance
[2] the UK is hardly immune.
[3] sorry for the word naive, but it really seems that way to anyone who lived through a country colapse.
The staff in the local branch of our bank know who we are without asking (no, this isn't because we're particularly good customers, just regulars)
I can just go up to the counter and ask to withdraw some of my money and (against my signature) they'll hand it over. No ID required, really handy if you've mislaid your wallet.
I realise this one can't really scale (!) but it is definitely a nice feature.
You don't have all your paper money in your wallet with you all the time, right?
If I lose my wallet now I can go to my house and I have money to eat. If I lose my phone (or my wallet with card in a cashless society) I'm in a bigger problem in the short term
Transactions to businesses are done with cards. Transactions between individuals are done with phones. A few businesses use the phone transfers but one doesn’t use that to buy food. It’s typically done with debit cards like most other places. If my card is lost I actually don’t have any spare cash at home or similar - although it is recommended to keep some.
We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center.
That has never been necessary in Sweden, or (AFAIK) most other places. I have never known anyone outside of the US who carries cash for the express purpose of tipping. To the extent that tipping even exists in Sweden, it's usually just done by rounding up whatever is owed.
Naivete is abundant... Guess what happens to your ability to do anything if whatever the ID that is used to identify you is marked as invalid or even better deceased?
And what happens if you wish to opt out of relying on a phone? The consequences of total and utter dependency on a technology you don't control and which is ripe for exploit are horrifying. If it ever comes to that, it's no different than having an embedded microchip under your scalp.
Thanks, but I'll bear the minor inconveniences of cash, where applicable, for the freedom such transactions still offer in this ever-digitized, tracking society.
If you've ever been on the bad side of banks you'll dread this a lot. I merely had my credit card stolen but getting a replacement was surprisingly time-consuming and I'm glad I could still eat and travel until then.
If you get on the bad side of the banks, it's much worse. You can't get a bank account at all, or you can't keep the accounts you have.
If you had credit (overdraft or credit card), it is taken away exactly at the moment you need to use it and you're put into unauthorised debt. If that happens you may not get credit from anywhere else. Where I live, even high-interest payday loans will likely be declined at that point.
If you run out of funds, you're probably going to incur compound charges as bills continue to try to be drawn.
In a cashless world run through bank accounts, at that point your friends can't lend you a little something to help with immediate necessities like food. Anything they send is instantly absorbed by charges and/or cancelling unauthorised debt (which was authorised when you incurred it - remember you're on the bad side of banks and they took away existing credit arrangements).
So you can't buy that food, and your friends can't even give/lend you a little money to help - you'll need friends who will directly feed you.
If it lasts for long, you can't rent somewhere to live, and you can't get paid for decent work. (These two things are already bad - where I live a poor credit rating means rental agencies will decline a tenancy or ask for 6 or 12 months rent (and 1-2 months deposit), and people who can't get bank accounts can't take jobs that only pay wages to an account. The two are linked and it's tough to get out of.)
Don't get on the bad side of banks in a cashless, banks-only society.
Even if you believe that, allowing private for-profit businesses (banks, credit card companies) to skim a percentage off of every single monetary transaction to line the pockets of their shareholders is utterly grotesque. It amounts to a mandatory tax, except none of the tax is going to the benefit of the taxed.
At a minimum, a reasonable cashless society would require monetary transactions to be done at zero profit and with strong regulation requiring financial institutions to minimize the cost to the seller and buyer.
In practice, similar fees are attached to businesses that move their cash to their bank account. Many companies (including public ones - many buses don't accept cash anymore) actively stop accepting cash because it increases the risk of getting robbed, and that is an increasing pressure as fewer and fewer handle cash.
When I moved from the bay area to Germany, I suddenly had to actively manage the cash in my wallet and intentionally bring coins -- coins, people! -- with me around town. Felt like taking a step backwards in time, really annoying.
If you use the "wrong" bill denominations or don't have the right coins, cashiers can get irked at you too. It's so backwards compared to not having to think about it.
As someone who lives in Germany I find this surprising. Yes, people expect you to have bills of the right size. But coins? Never encountered that.
Cashless is more convenient. But given how fundamental money is in our society, I would never be fine with a centralized system that controls all payments. That is simply too much power in one place. I know HN is more about startup-hackers than FOSS-hackers, but I am pretty sure everyone here understands that this is a dangerous development.
> Yes, sometimes cashiers ask if I have certain coins to make giving change easier.
You would have encountered the identical behavior in the bay area if you'd paid for things in cash. That's not because the cashier expects you to have the coins; it's an extra effort on their part to make things more convenient for you.
As a Swede living abroad it felt like travelling back in time 20 years when I moved. Suddenly my pockets were filled with metal again and notes that had to somewhat match up to what I was spending. I assume OP feel the same way every time he goes abroad.
As long as you are fine with companies tracking every place you go (via GPS), everything you purchase, everything you view on line, and everybody you know. Then sure, the phone can replace cash.
Often I do not want any record that I have purchased something, I will stick with cash. Thanks.
People in the Nordic countries have a different expectation of privacy. Just search for the plethora of papers in economics and finance that use "Swedish/Danish/Finnish data". While anonymized, you can get a look at spending and investment of the whole population. After you move to a new place, you get a personalized onslaught of mail welcoming you the neighbourhood. Everything you do is connected to the personnummer (social security number), including loyalty cards in shops.
It is the future, but there are at the same time a lot of unsolved problems involved. Tourists not being able to pay unless they happen to have a VISA card is one, old people not understanding technology another. And the dependence on the private sector for cash that the article refers to is also a real problem.
But I do agree with the premise that it is progress in action, it just isn't the case that we are moving towards a steady state but the end goal is still constantly evolving.
This article is just fear-mongering and speculation. No facts are given to support the title, and the proposed solutions to the problem (which is never established) are vague to the point of meaninglessness.
> Swedish legislation makes it possible for retailers, restaurants and other companies to refuse to accept cash, for instance by putting up a sign at the entrance or by the till.
Yes. It started as a curiosity and now this signs are everywhere.
> By connecting a bank account in any bank with a mobile phone number, Swish has become a popular way to share a restaurant bill
Yes. And to gather money for a friend's birthday or anything else.
> Why Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
I see the potential risks of this situation. But the article does not bother to bring an analysis of them.
One thing is already happening. The oldest part of the population have a hard time adapting to this situation. It's easier to take a bus and pay in cash than to have to buy an e-ticket in your phone.
I would prefer to see such analysis than this e-krona nonsense.
"The oldest part of the population have a hard time adapting to this situation"
Also immigrants, non-Swedes and vulnerable people in society have a hard time. But the white people find the cashless society works well for them I suppose.
>>But the white people find the cashless society works well for them I suppose
That's an extremely odd comment to make. What does being white have anything to do with this? There's loads of white immigrants in Sweden, they suffer from this exactly the same as everyone else.
The comment is probably sarcastically referring to white privilege. So the wealthy people who this works for (have money, a bank account, aren't living on the street, not a visitor or an immigrant) in Sweden are the equivalent of 'white privileged people' in the us, even though I don't think of Sweden as a racist state (but I don't know much about that there).
To explain a little more, in the US, you are far less likely to be charged with a crime, shot, etc if you are a white person vs a black person in the same situation. This is highly controversial, with many people denying it and wanting to argue against this idea, but the easy evidence is like this: Did you ever get stopped in a car by the cops and asked get out while they frisked you, looked for trouble, etc? Never happened to me in half a century of life, but it's happened to even a black us senator multiple times.
I suppose the oldest part can get a card like SL has and occasionally load it with cash and then just beep it when entering the bus/train? It is no more difficult a concept than having a library card. They'll certainly get help with the process at the ticket counter.
Is it a real, factual problem that old people cannot somehow pay for their mass transit in the year 2018?
The article failed to give any real detail about what is being proposed. I suspect it would have to be something like Taler[1] where the buyer is anonymous but the seller is not. That allows the collection of sales taxes and allows the government some control over the currency.
No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless?
I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.
Good point. There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later. So better to increase the insurance fee.
For sure such information trading is illegal, but as the government doesn't give a single care, most likely it is true.
>There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later.
Or worse, what if they decide you had too much pub spending/fast food, so you can't get that new organ you need?
I keep my "entertainment" budget (pubs, eating out, etc) in cash for this reason.
This doesn't make much sense - insurance is about sharing risk amoung common entities, so increasing the premiums based on risk on micro-factors isn't really that helpful. You would probably get good enough performance from a couple of basic, easily obtained variables (age, weight, family history), instead of tracking, organizing and figuring out all of these variables.
I've never heard of a street level dealer in the US take anything but cash to my knowledge.
If you do, you're a good dealer and probably an outlier. Also, the further you go up the chain of command the less likely you'd be to run into someone accepting these types of payments as well.
I.e. the middleman might let you Zelle him the money, but he is probably paying with physical currency on your behalf to the actual dealer. The dealer might do the same, but the supplier is being paid with physical currency. The dealer supplier allows it, but his suppliers are accepting cash only. Etc.
Meanwhile you can use BTC to have those same drugs shipped to your door, through an onion based marketplace or whatever, or even the clearnet if you arent buying specifically controlled substances.
The article says circulating cash is 1% of GDP and falling. In the US, it is 8% and rising (with a high of 12% in 1946 and a low of 4% in the early 1980s)
I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer.
I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).
When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.
I'm curious, would your colleagues consider using bitcoin or ethereum as a method of exchange? Could you send them that to pay them back and they could pay on your behalf? If not, why?
edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
I'd say absolutely. I don't know of a bank where I can set up an account completely online through an app, which you can do with cex.io or coinbase. It's gotten harder but generally you create an account and then upload your ID and then can buy very soon afterwards. That makes it tenable in my opinion to ask even the most Luddite of friends to do it before the event and then pay people back that way.
Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea.
If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
Got it, none of your friends or people you know there are using it.
Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no.
It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration.
It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.
To the downvoters: care to say why? I read the entire article, read the comment I'm referring to, and have personal experience that the solution I'm proposing works as I'm describing. I'm left with only that everyone must think my question reeks of crypto currency evangelism, and that's a BAD thing here on HN. Is it something else? My grammar or phrasing?
Im just guessing but replacing something that is used by almost everyone here in sweden with something almost noone uses is a bit counter productive. Just start using cash again would be the easiest solution. Swift payments is mostly used to accept payment easy and costfree between private people at fleamarkets and similar since noone carries cash any more.
Network effects and the "good enough" effect. At some point no one used swish. Then it became useful for some and then it became useful for many. Then it became the "must have" or "should have" for everyone else.
Crypto's could do this. They just aren't set up as easy right now. I'm pointing at bitcoin etc. They are also slow. I can tap my MasterCard contactless card/phone and pay for coffee and the merchant is happy. I've had bitcoin take >30 minutes to transfer. Unacceptably slow.
You're probably right, the downvotes are probably because people are sick of people saying "Crypto is the solution!". IMO he might as well have said "Can you lend me money, I'll pay you back with these chicken eggs, bartering is a valid form to pay for goods and services!", except crypto has hype around it that he'd probably find a taker or two...
It removes the entire second paragraph. It takes about 5mn to do a SEPA bank transfer: open banking client, open transfers, create new transfer, enter destination IBAN, enter amount, optionally set a data & some text, confirm.
That would be of limited value to someone in Sweden, which uses the krona. Automatic currency conversion is one of the advantages of electronic payments over cash.
And then you wait 3 days for the money to actually arrive. I frequently send money between EU countries and the speed of transaction is abysmal unless you want to transfer to be denominated in Euro which means that if you're sending money between two non-euro currencies you're losing money twice.
You can send a sepa transfer out of a non-euro denominated bank account to another non-euro denominated account, but it will get converted to Euro first. That's why I said you get charged twice - once at origin and again at the destination. And you might want to do that if you want the speed of a SEPA transfer - regular inter-bank transfers between different EU countries still take days to process.
IBAN == bank account number with the bank info baked in, although I think for foreign transfers you might still have to provide the bank code separately.
I've never been asked for an address when doing a wire transfer.
From what I've heard banks stopped validating the name field a long time ago and you can enter whatever you want.
Here in NL, the name field recently has gotten even stronger validation. I think this coincided with a system where minor spelling mistakes are corrected by a suggested "Did you mean ...?"
My Finnish bank has always (10+ years) asked for the full recipient address when I've entered a foreign IBAN (even within EU). Just tested that it still does.
I don't think they validate it, though, IIRC I've gotten away with simply putting in "Germany".
Did you use "foreign payment" or just pay as if it were a domestic payment?
I don't remember seeing issues in SEPA area, if I just use the IBAN and pay like any normal payment. If I am specifically doing a "foreign payment" some extra fields need to be filled in. That is how I recall the process, last time was 1 year ago though.
Nice to have a tendency to escalate. Certain things have a tendency to creep along the nice-to-have-|-must-have continuum. IMO, digital money generally does.
It's also free for €-to-€ transfers. I paid for accommodation in Switzerland this summer from the Netherlands, and was glad that the proprietor didn't mind me transferring the deposit in Euros instead of Francs; the cost of sending an amount in Francs to Switzerland is quite high!
That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals.
In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet.
You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet.
It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
The best payment experience I’ve had is cash. I pay for what I need and when I leave the festival I can still use my “credits” hassle free anywhere I like.
Most of the cashless festivals return your unused "credits" pretty quickly after the festival.
The real problem comes when the system breaks down- which I've seen happen at plenty of festivals. At that point if cash isn't an option then commerce simply stops- screwing both vendor and customer alike.
With a delay of their choosing, and a conversion factor for those of us that aren't locals. Cash has frictionless instant settlement, which is very hard to compete with as a centralized payment processor.
Except when they have no change (forcing you to find someone willing to change it or wait for them to do so) or refuse to accept a large bill. I often choose to use cash, but it's really not frictionless.
Festivals I've been to will, say, require deposits of 100 peso increments and then the beers cost 80 pesos. And you can't get your money out.
Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke.
With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the purchasing event so that you lose track of it, like how microtransactions are never priced in actual currency.
Why can’t you load the same amount of money on your bracelet before the festival as the cash you would be carrying?
If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money.
I’ve been to a festival which allowed us to withdraw money freely (I think they had some restrictions such as only 1 free withdrawal after the festival was over, and/or it had to be done within a week or so) but that allowed us to simply load in excess money so we never had to recharge. That worked really well for us.
> If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money.
The ability for poor implementations to exist is itself a strike against the general concept.
I think my problem with this comes down to ‘why the fuck are you bothering me with this?!’. We have perfectly valid working payment systems (cash, debit/credit), and for some reason you’ve decided that your festivals proprietary payment system is better?
Have to load money, have to retrieve money, and have zero insight into how much I’ve already spent without even more apps or interfaces.
To add to that: because we all know that both parties know a working money system exists, then the most likely explanation for "why" becomes "because it is profitable for the festival host." The festival goer is tight to be naturally skeptical of sny alternative payment system (smart wristbands, "credit" cards, tickets/tokens).
Even if some transactions have extra friction such as ID checks for age-restricted purchases, the less intrusive solution is color coded "dumb paper" wristbands.
1. It's slow. Obviously it is not slow in the best case when the customer throws in the exact change, but it is _really_ slow in the probably more typical case when the drunkard is at the counter and starts to dig into the pockets and find out if he has enough coins or when the seventh customer in the row wants to pay his ten cent lollipop with a hundred dollar bill and you run out of change.
2. It ties capital to keep sufficient amount of change in all of the booths.
3. It is difficult/expensive to manage securely and safely. You need to figure out how to stop personnel and other people stealing the money. Also your personnel likely feels more safe when they know that nobody can think that hey can come and try to steal money from you because you simply have none.
It's only slow because you are not used to paying with cash. Most payments are done with cash here, and the few people paying with cards cause small but noticeable delays. Counting cash is usually faster than handling a card reader, entering the PIN and whatnot. The odd drunkard or elderly customer is comparable to the odd technical problem, which usually takes longer to resolve.
I think it is also slow because the US does not require prices to be displayed including sales tax. If you pick something that has a marked price of $1, the total price will be somewhere between $1 and $1.10, depending on which state/city you are in, and what category of goods you are buying. Unless you are familiar with the exact tax code of your area, you won't be ready with exact change when paying. Even if you are, it means that you need to manage all the worthless pennies and nickels that result from paying with cash.
1. Just don't accept any bill over €50 (this is common in shops too, no one expects to be paid for groceries or a beer at a festival in €100 bills). Most people are still pretty skilled in handling cash, although this is a declining skill. We've been doing cash transactions for centuries, we're still pretty good at it. The occasional slow-down is more than made up for by not having to charge or top-up your bracelet or what have you (you come prepared to the festival with cash).
2. A negligible amount for a vendor on a festival.
3. Not a problem on a festival. Booths tend to be manned by two persons because of other safety factors anyway, so staff stealing isn't an issue, and any organised criminality on a festival is usually limited to (relatively) low risk, high reward crime: pick-pocketing (smartphones in particular).
Oh, I agree it is a hassle for the merchant, but the fact that they’re making things more difficult for their customers remains the same.
And especially the ‘takes longer’ argument just shifts the time people are waiting to the charging station, or to their own homes, if they’re charging beforehand.
I think it’s fairly easy to make any change handling easy by making everything cost multiples of $1
The trouble with cash is that you cannot really control high-school dropouts to charge $10 for a $2 beer without skimming a bit on the side. Hence this whole "here's some fake money that only works here" BS.
Just do an incorrect inventory. Some venues let workers do inventory and reporting. They are charging for the cup itself and that is how they determine sales. If a stack of cups disappears, there is no reconciliation.
Music venues have some interesting procedures, Alpine valley allows under an oz of weed to be brought in. They have college girls carrying backpacks with 40k in cash. There is an off duty cop directly behind though.
Can you elaborate on that second paragraph? I don't understand how those things are related to each other.
Why do they allow weed to be brought in? Why do they have college girls carrying cash in a backpack? Why so much cash? Why is there an off-duty cop following her around? Isn't an off-duty cop just an ordinary member of the public? If a cop is required shouldn't it be an on-duty cop? If it's somehow a trap to catch drug dealers, how is it meant to work? Why do they limit the amount of weed? And why are they trying to catch drug dealers at all?
Back in HS I worked at an amusement park for a summer. On a busy night, if I closed the booth, I'd be walking out the park's employee exit around 2am, through a somewhat busy and not-very-well-lit public area of the parking lot, and across to the admin offices with 30k+ in a plastic bag. That was not an uncommon amount for most of the non-token booths, and having 16-18 year old kids carrying it out of the park to the admin building was also common, since that was most of the park's work force.
I'd guess the "college girls carrying 40k in cash in a backpack" were employees carrying cash out from whatever business/booth they were running and taking it to their bank or head office or whatnot, and the "off-duty" cop behind them was there acting as a security guard; since that's a somewhat common side gig for cops, and in may places, they're still given all the power and authority an "on duty" cop has.
I don't get the connection to the weed (legal or otherwise, it has never been an interest of mine), but perhaps it explains the other bit.
Sorry the weed bit was unrelated. More of an example of the weird world of a music venue. They basically didn't care if it was for personal use, but they didn't want people that were clearly going to deal. It wasnt in the employee handbook, just kind of an unspoken rule.
As for the second part, off duty cops would moonlight as security guards. And the college girls could blend in. With the large crowds it was a way keep a low profile for making cash pickups from the dozen different beer/food stations. It's pretty smart. You would never think twice.
Killer feature for me is that the same amount of physical mass can hold any amount of value.
Spending some cash sometimes increases the complexity of my pocket considerably, which is fine in practice and all, but just feels wrong to part of my brain.
I have some friends who find that they budget much more successfully when they use only cash... they can see exactly what they have left this week or month.
"Because I lack mental discipline a technology must be bad"
This is an argument in the same vein as any number of self-assured blog posts which do the rounds through HN of "Why I stopped using X" and "Y considered harmful".
Power to your friends maybe, but it's not an argument one way or another over the merits of the system - its an argument about things they do personally to ensure self-discipline.
Youre blaming victims - if system makes it harder for people to be in control this is systems property not peoples - youre making "fundamental attribution error".
They don't think they're victims, they think they found a system that works for them. And they don't think it should be what everyone does. I had no idea that such a simple story would attract such strong reactions.
If your card gets stolen however, you go to the bank, fill out a ton of forms, pay a fee for losing your card. Wait a few days for your new card to be delivered in the mail. And then, finally can you pay again. In the meanwhile, you are forced to pay with... cash! Which nobody accepts, because not having a debit card is socially unacceptable in our society.
Not sure which country you are talking about but the vast majority of people go to an ATM not the bank to get cash. You still need a debit card to get cash from an ATM.
In my country I can withdraw cash from the machine as I pay for shopping at the supermarket. And I'm not saying I withdraw cash then pay. I pay with the card AND the cash I withdrew comes out after the transaction is complete.
I haven't been to a bank for getting cash in 10 years. And as you say, ATMs are where you get cash.
We can do that here in the Mid-South, too. Got a story you might like. The customer, service desk which allows some cash back for free was packed. So, I had to go to register with something to buy. I tried to minimize the cost overall for a $500 withdraw at a company with $100 max per transaction. I hit their self checkout. I did five orders on the machine each with a single grape. Each order was one cent plus $100 cash back. Total transaction cost was five cents.
Self-checkout person was going "what the hell?" on that one. I also heard her talking to others about being hungry from break being delayed. I gave her the grapes after explaining what I was doing. She was happy, too. Probably did it herself at some point haha. Cashiers trip out to this day if I tell them about that whenever someone is buying a candy bar or something to get cash back. Occasionally, person in line leaves to get a grape. Just one. :)
I lost cards many times. Never been asked to pay a fee to get new card. No forms to fill out either. You just call them, tell them you need new card and they send it.
The best payment experience I've had is a credit card. It's harder to get robbed, I can pay everywhere with just a tap, I never need to remember to take out cash, tips are computed for me at my request, when I travel to many other countries I don't even need to get local currency, conversion happens automatically, and I'm not stuck with unused local currency when I leave.
Credit cards was how this all started in Sweden. Cash usage has been going down since the late 1990s, and the Swish thing is fairly new, we still use credit cards mostly, but swish is popular for smaller establishments or temporary events and such. You cant transfer money to your friends using a CC, but swish solves that. Its basically a national, private owned, Paypal, and that is the problem. Everybody uses it. My fiancee works at a school cafeteria, and Swish is the only accepted payment method. Not even credit cards work there.
As much as I enjoy using cash, it isn't the best method. You have to carry it. You have to carry the change.
The store had to have enough change. The store had to keep the pile of cash, and keep it safe. Then transfer it to my the bank at the end of the day or week or whatever.
If you run out of cash on you, you have to figure out how to get more
Cash had some nice features, like it is fairly anonymous. But it is far from perfect.
Counterpoint, the best place to spend counterfeit money is a music festival....and then it gets passed down to you. I've picked up a half dozen counterfeits at music festivals. Sucks if you're not really paying attention.
The main difference being that Disney has multiple backup systems, including switching to a completely manual process in case their network or servers are offline.
I watched a presentation on this, and it's actually very interesting how they manage the ride experience so that even during a system outage they can still let people get on the rides.
You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah.
At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one.
Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choosing a tip amount the bartender is done making your drinks. No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Out of all the festivals, etc, I've been to where they do wristband-based payment instead of accepting cards directly, Avant Gardner / Brooklyn Mirage have the best setup IMO.
> No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Is there normally hassle? In Europe, and I think this generalisation holds in the countries that commonly pay with a card, the terminal is either mounted on the bar facing the customer, or is portable and left in a similar position.
In any case, there's never a pen, receipts mostly go immediately in the bin unless someone is claiming expenses, and the card never leaves the customer's hand.
So it's little different from a contactless bracelet, except I trust Europay-MasterCard-Visa more han a POS supplier.
It helps that there are no tips. If the number on the screen looks reasonable, I don't touch the terminal at all.
The pen thing for signatures is a US phenomenon. Where we have debit cards (contactless and without the need for a PIN even for small amounts in a growing number of countries), they are stuck with a very slow, reluctant transition to PIN-and-chip; something the rest of us did in the late nineties.
The upside is that the US is at this point better at holding on to the principle of being able to use cash everywhere in addition to other payment options; something that is starting to become a problem in Europe.
Most places running newer POS terminals have switched to digital signatures on the screen, which is much nicer... but some bars (especially nightclubs where they don't want bright POS terminal screen shining in your face) still do paper receipts with pen signature, yeah.
Outside of nightlife and restaurants, I almost never deal with paper signatures anymore. Pretty much all retail, etc, does digital signatures and digital receipts, paper receipt upon request.
Its still pretty backwards compared to how most things credit card related work in Europe, but gets the job done and is indeed gradually getting better over here (and, as some of the other posts have mentioned, the saving grace if you don't want to deal with any of this is that cash is almost universally accepted).
Contactless cards never took off in the US. I have 8 or 9 cards and don’t think any of them are contactless. So you can’t assume that everyone will have a contactless card and at that point you’re back to accepting swipes and cash.
By introducing a new payment method they can be sure that everyone has access to it and limit it to just the bracelets.
Those system don't have to follow the same regulations as banks and thus have many more ways to extra money that might not be as obvious. Money when converted to tokens and credit are not money in the eye of the law, even if it is used identically to money and is the only currency allowed.
If you are lucky they will return any unused credit automatic to your credit card without any fees. I would like to know how common that is and what kind of terms and conditions most such system has. My cynicism tells me its about as abusive as they can get away with but to be fair I have not tested it (since I either refuse to prepay on principle or only get the exact amount I have decided to already spend).
In my (limited) experience, you go to their website, enter your bank account details and some days/weeks after the festival when they've processed everything they send it via Swift to your bank (if in EU, haven't tried for a foreign account)
In Estonia we had something similar but instead of letting us top up via app or card remotely, you had to stand in line at a booth and give them the money and then register your bracelet online to get the refund of any additional funds left on at the end of the process. I get what they were going for but it felt like a ton of friction to me, all to eliminate a single swipe at the payment terminal?
This sounds like a real life attempt on in game money - which is designed to allow a more mindless spending. Great if you are rich, and a nice little exploit if you are poor.
Yeah I agree. Was at sziget this summer and we could pay using our bank cards NFC and you don't have to input pin for payments under 15€. Also we could pay with festival's bracelet. This is THE BEST expirience. Easy for staff and for customers
They wanted to also do that for M'era Luna in 2016 and I wasn't very much looking forward to that, hearing it in 2015 - might be because I read about them tracking your movement and having your payment history at the festival. Suddenly cash was really convenient again to me.
It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion.
The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.
Food is payed with VISA och Mastercard. Water is payed through the online banking service. Travel with VISA/Mastercard (even local buses accept credit cards). "Etc" is also payed with VISA or Mastercard. Swish is a mere conveniency for transferring money without having to log onto your online banking service. I use it once a month tops.
I think not having a bank account is unthinkable in a place like Sweden. Thanks to the strong social safety net and extremely restrictive immigration policy they don't have abject poor. At worst you're lower middle class and can get a bank account.
It does seem to be a bad deal for tourists however. I'm surprised that companies are apparently so quick to ditch traditional credit cards.
But companies aren’t ditching credit cards, we’re just using “contact less”/Apple Pay/etc. more. When Swish is used by a company (I’ve only seen a couple), they’re either super-cheap or gimmicky.
Some people would say that consumers are free to avoid vendors that don't accept cash, but in practice this "freedom" is actually a huge cost, in terms of time and mental overhead and lack of choice.
The danger is that society as a whole ends up making sub-optimal decisions because each person is (selfishly / rationally) choosing to avoid these extra costs.
Powerful entities (even those falling short of absolute monopolies) probably get away with a lot more societal harm than they would if we were more aware of this "coercion of convenience".
You have a severe lack of imagination. You must be fun at parties.
There are a myriad of ways Sweden can and probably is enforcing cashless trends through surveillance and coercion. Encouraging banks and retailers to refuse cash services, as referenced in the article, is likely done by the government. This enhances their ability to track and control all monetary transactions for any number of reasons (nefarious or otherwise).
Sound like you have an overactive imagination, and are probably Not fun at parties. I imagine you said the same thing about email, and continue to hand write all your correspondence to keep it out of the gubmints hands?
Physical money is disgusting. Might as well use poo sticks as currency...
The primary cited reason for the cashless trend is the security against money laundering. My government has done every policy and regulative action they can to guarantee that all money transaction is recorded and a bank liable if anything is not clean.
And the most obvious reason for the cashless trend is that cashless is easier and more fruitful for buyer and seller. Buyer just touches their card/phone to the machine. Who likes dealing with cash? (Answer: Germans)
It’s almost the same in Norway, but I think/hope it is easier for foreigners. You link your VISA to use Vipps, where you can pay is most bars, restaurants, taxi etc.
One reason that Vipps (came before Swish?) is not booming in Norway could be because we have almost 0% fee on our cards. This is because all the banks have come together to make BankAxccept, just to avoid the fees that VISA and MasterCard use.
I see no need for using Vipps or ApplePay. I place my bank card on the terminal and it is paid, with no fees. If it is over $20 I have to enter the pin. Super simple.. Me and my wife actually laught when we find coins in old jackets, because we haven’t seen coins in months. Almost forgot how they look and feel.
That's mostly tax dodging though. Many EU countries have that baked in to the tax regime. If it was actually enforced (a la cashless) the entire e.g. Belgian restaurant sector would disappear overnight. Everyone there knows it. It's kinda weird.
It is worth noting that the article describes how private sector decisions are crowding out cash, how the government (specifically the central bank) is concerned about this, and considering to deliver a solution (namely digital cash issued by the central bank).
The system is still based on central bank currency in the background. What is being lost is direct consumer access to central bank currency: they must rely on private-sector intermediaries.
The first time I experienced a cashless store was Amsterdam in 2013. It was a fast food restaurant. Of course at first I was a little upset but it did get me thinking what are the advantages to the store
The store no longer has to go to the bank to get heaps of change
The store no longer has to take money to the bank
The store will have no money on premises so less of a target for robbery
The store will have no money on premises so no having to trust employees not to take some.
Nothing to account. Just read the total.
In almost every way, as long as there are enough customers it's a win for the store. Many customers love it too. Most of my western friends visiting Japan get annoyed they can't go cashless in Japan because they're used to being cashless where they are from.
I did run into my first no-cash accepted store here recently. It will be interesting to see how it goes in Japan as they are more privacy oriented.
I agree with all the issues of going cashless. It scares the crap out of me, especially when traveling. But, I can't see it not happening relatively quickly.
Japan has electronic money cards which can be bought and refilled without any identifying information, and they are widely accepted. They're in a better place for privacy than the West.
Exactly, this is not stated enough. We have to grow up with our relationship with political systems, authoritarianism even dictatorship: it happens because of some population dynamics which we may or may not be currently be participating in or regularly encounter. So sure, the question of why cashless has taken off there is interesting, but maybe more importantly we need to think about the current state, what could be the next moves (the consequences), do we want to influence it and targeting what?
...
But thinking about currencies and economy in europe is always kinda doomed because the euro is double-locked. No national economic policy actually has a meaning since at most your gonna leverage some power to influence the ECB, but you're never gonna be the one to actually decide. So there is a complicated combat to do cross european countries saying ok we have to re-found the mission and the organization of the ECB, the relationship with national economies. How do we want to keep down inflation: just maintain growth in face of other world economies that actually grow or make ourselves more independent, what do we do when countries have diverging interests, how do we make sure it's regulated and we keep control on it?
I would vouch for a system where euro exists but is restricted to cross-country corporate business and easy traveling: common credit card system where you can transparently withdraw any participating national money at the current nation negociated exchange rate (eg federating by having a star topology instead of a complete graph for exchange rates: "we treat all the others the same"). Additionally the BCE should have a second decision instance (two-chamber-like) basically being the european budget commission but elected by people, not chosen by governments, to ease cross-country political action. And on a more technical/practical level we have to rethink about wire transfers. I don't know much about how SEPA works but it's probably interesting to take a look.
Every country in your system would have to use their own currency again because if banknotes are the same and (example) the German Euro is stronger than the French one (that would mean everything on Germany is cheaper than in France), the French would hoard all the Euro banknotes they can get their hands on and buy stuff in Germany. Traveling to Germany is not for everybody but there would be companies doing mass transfers of money and goods for the rest of the population. By the way, this is why the Eurozone authorities try to make every country align on debt, growth, etc, which is pretty hopeless given so many governments with different pools of voters and agendas. Like having the USA with a powerless president (who knows who's the EU president), camera and senate and governors trying to agree on everything with basically no cross country political party.
It also looks a little like those countries with their own national currency but also everyone accepting USD. Tourists can carry dollars, lose a little by unfavorable rates at every payment, maybe end up with change in the local currency to use in the next shop. I remember that on vacation in Uzbekistan.
I'm not sure i understand your scenario: germany arguably has a more powerful economy than france, so DM would have a lower exchange rate towards euro than FF towards euro. So imho things in france would actually be cheaper (as seen from germany). Anyway, for that we have customs (everyone has some sort of customs, this doesn't mean strong borders for people). And more generally i don't want any "US of europe": the ratio between in-country similarity and cross-country similarity is far to high across europe to let down economic sovereignty (different demographics, different cultures, different economies, i mean this is great but it implies some restrictions on what political structure can reasonably work). If we have a unique economic policy, this will just end up simply being the policy of some dominating nation inside EU (and that's currently the case, more or less around a strong germany), and this ends up destabilizing politically all the others. I believe that a well functioning european union should be a federation of states that eases any wanted coordination and not a single federated state enforcing unwanted coordination (which benefits no one but the nation that happens to be in a de facto power position in the federation). A wannabe strong federated state would only exacerbate power positions, thus weakening the power of the group with regard to the outside world[#].
[#] This is a well-known social/evolution dynamic: group selection. Bees suicide when attacking: individually it's a weak behavior, but globally it makes the group more resilient. The balance between cooperation and competition is a balance between individual power and group power. Europe is a group of groups, so the balance is weirder but having too strong cooperation at the top level (eg enforcing a common economic policy) will weaken countries. But only some countries because of non-homogeneity, thus destabilizing everything by lowering local national resilience (to specific local concerns, which do exist). So i believe we have to accept that we need slightly stronger countries to make the european union stick together.
Actually, if use of cash can be denied, then yes, coercion for using cards could be established. Are Swedish businesses allowed to reject cash? I think I read they can in that article.
Coercion: "To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel."
So if I'm down the street and cash won't let me get on a bus, the movie tickets can't be purchased, food can't be bought etc. There's the basis for pressure. Can't buy food without card, ok you go hungry. There's the threat. I'm sure that intimidation will turn up in a lot of little ways. Public ostracism / humiliation (even at subtle levels) due to not having a card could be seen as real enough to count. The network effects of not having a card will likely cause serious inconvenience.
If "you can't do anything without a card" then you are compelled to get one.
You can have a very similar experience in China. So many things are now paid for by mobile wallets such as WeChat Pay that do not support foreign accounts. It's great for locals and for the government that - in an authoritarian country - gets unfettered access to all that personalized spending data. For tourists, not so much.
Not really. It's very finicky at best. Activating a WeChat wallet requires a Chinese ID or a bank card, and the latter works very unreliably with any foreign cards.
Every time people talk about a cashless society, I tell them about stuff like this both abstractly and concretely, and then I just get called a luddite. I think, unfortunately, that people will have to learn this lesson the hard way. I don't own a working smartphone, my last one (like the one before it) failed randomly in the display, and was unjustifiably difficult to RMA (no box provided, no postage, unclear details on how to mark). I don't get why people want to use these cumbersome, life-running pocket computers to control access to their money on a day-to-day basis. Here in
Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen).
I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?
What you describe as "just fine" sounds a lot like the US, except that most transactions have enormous fees tacked on by credit card companies. Maybe in Canada you have negotiated better deals.
Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
> I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article?
If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.
IOUs from friends: the most resilient form of peer to peer money. There shouldn't be a rush to pay them back either unless they are hard up (or you preferred not to keep track of IOUs)
I've noticed this with mature technology. There comes a point where a product is perfect, no need to add anymore features. But the manufacturer still wants to continue adding new features so that they can use those as new selling points. Unfortunately the new features end up making the product worse.
Seems you accidently hit the bugbye-button and dropped out midsentence. What good is it if you are a industries shillbilly and still have to use the same crappy hardware as the rest of us.
You can already see that manufacturers have a hard time to come up with new features. Stuff like thinner devices (nobody cares or wants this to a certain degree, compared to a better battery life), 3+ cameras, notches because for some reason you can't integrate speakers behind the display. "AI" stuff that doesn't work when you're offline.
I would trade all this shit for a week battery time.
So yes, while smartphones are not perfect, I see no intentions from developers to fix that.
>nobody cares or wants this to a certain degree, compared to a better battery life
Then why do consumers constantly praise thinner phones, and continue to purchase them? I think you're mistaking what you want and consider a good choice compared to what everyone else actually wants and is willing to support.
The purchasing of the new best thing can also be the case, take for example that there hasn't been a flagship phone that actually fits in most peoples single hand since the SE and yet I know lots of people that will just "buy the next Iphone" because thats what they have done for 5 years with no consideration for ergonomics.
Because there is no alternative. It's not legit to say "people like thin smartphones more" when you are only making thin ones. Same for the headphone jack.
Do they? I inhabit a very different bubble then as I've only heard complaints amongst my friends and workmates lately. Even formerly enthusiastic ones.
It reminds me of the 80s ghetto blasters fad. Size was the thing. As they got ever bigger they got far worse as there was so much resonant empty plastic and they distorted and rattled madly with volume anywhere over 2. Size and LEDs counted above all. Sound? LOL look at these LEDs man.
Most recent changes, from all manufacturers, have been deliberately consumer hostile. There's not much left to actually innovate with. Consumers don't want to keep swapping ecosystems - as that means hassle and re-buying a bunch of apps. Often they'd prefer not to even switch manufacturers if they've ended up using a cloud app for photos or something. So they just buy the next iThing from whoever even if it is too big, or is anti case because of edge to edge screens, or has a fake notch.
Talk about Emperor's new clothes.
So what can I choose that's against this trend? Oh. Nothing. Yet I need a phone, and probably an app or two for work. Best buy something or risk job loss. Even if I detest all the offerings as too big for any pocket I possess.
In your eyes it's a vote for thinner or bigger because a sale was made. No that's not how it works. It's not a simple commodity with only one feature to make, break, and validate the sale. To vote by not purchasing I'd have to cease having a mobile.
My current SE fits my biking gear pockets without fiddling, my previous Android was a bit fiddly. The one before that (my one attempt at a larger phone) fit properly in nothing I own except my winter coats. It had to live in my rucksack, so got left at home a lot, and on the desk through lunch breaks. No surprise that it wasn't many months before I Ebayed it and bought something sensible. :p
Anything bigger than the SE would sometimes fall out of my spring/autumn weight jackets if I just bent over or sat. All except SE got too big for comfort in back pocket of jeans any more. Especially as they get so thin and large as to be asking for a bent or broken phone.
I don't think that's so unusual? It's my other half who's pocket limited. :)
I think what we're seeing here is that companies optimise for the store shelf rather than for actual use. A thinner, bigger phone looks much more appealing in the store, which is where customers make the purchase decision. The disadvantages of that design (comparatively short battery life, does not fit into the pockets of my favorite pants) are only noticed later when the purchase has already been made.
The notch is for the camera and face scanner. Nothing to do with speakers. Ditching the front facing camera might get you half an hour or so battery life I suppose.
It does and they do take advantage of the notch with the speaker (why wouldn't they?), but that's not the reason for the notch to exist.
Apple discussed this in interviews after the X came out. They realized they needed somewhere for the camera and face scanner, so decided since they needed a notch anyway they would take full advantage by adding in those sensors and features that could make best use of it. The proximity sensor and speakers could have worked without a notch, but work better with it. These considerations, together with aesthetics related to balancing the size of the notch and the screen areas either side, were the driving factors.
The problem with prolonging long battery life, is that most people don’t care.
They are told what to buy from flashy ads and multimillion marketing budgets. Keeping the battery week keeps you tethered to your desk and requires you to think about every night b for bend)did I plug in my phone?)
Low battery drives usage. If you had a large weeklong battery, you might put your phone down every now and again without looking at it... a big no no for big tech.
The reason we don't have week long battery life is because it is difficult to do, not to keep eyes on screens. Most companies are actively working on longer battery life.
Nobody's happy with keeping things how they are anymore, unfortunately. Got to keep moving fast and keep breaking things, no matter how well they worked. Not introducing new features feels like stagnation to investors and shareholders.
Lack of world voltage is probably deliberate. Braun/Oral-B toothbrushes are usually cheaper in the US than in other countries (e.g. the UK) that use 220/240V. The UK-bought toothbrushes will work fine in the US.
I've had one US-bought base unit fail and, given the simplicity of the device (just coils for transforming voltage and induction charging) I'm assuming it's due to being plugged in to a 220V outlet for an extended period.
Nitpick: typically they have excellent reception. _However,_ with many copper lines not being maintained and especially in some rural areas, reception can be awful to unusable.
POTS (plain old telephone service) is really amazing in many ways. Huge reliability, independent of the ordinary power grid, dead simple consistent UI, etc.
(I have an IP phone at work, and it's an unintuitive unreliable beast.)
Right. It’s no big deal for anyone if there’s no mobile signal but no dial tone is shocking. Even when there’s a power cut the landlines still work. I have probably only experienced an outage of POTS a couple of times in my life.
And it works most of the time, even if the power goes down, there are storms or floods, as long as the wired connection is not down. When NYC lost power in the early oughties, guess which phones were still working? Yep, the pay phones and the landlines. Most of the cell phones were dying or dead. That said, I don't have one but my parents still do.
Reminds me of an old scifi story. Someone in a far future or advanced alien society runs across a paper book. "A means of conveying information without needing power and without the risk of surveillance? Excellent!" (paraphrased from memory).
Captain is handed a manual when plant life is discovered. Took him a second to stop talking to the book and start using his hands on the pages. It was a pretty quick scene, but humorous.
Side note, the Wall-E short is great and one of the best Pixar shorts, imo.
There a great Asimov story on these lines. Its called 'The fun they had'. Highly recommended. I read it aeons ago as a kid, and its stuck with me ever since.
There was also that (Asimov? Clarke?) story about a space ship which has its computer knocked out by a meteoroid and can't navigate back to Earth until someone on-board turns out to know how to use an abacus.
"The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov also has a similar premise. It seems that the idea of forgetting basic mathematics due to computers was quite popular in science fiction at that time.
Replacing the 3.5mm headphone jack with USB-C or Bluetooth, even when some devices seemingly have space to accommodate them easily. I hate progress for progress sakes.
And audio quality on most Bluetooth headphone/earphones sucks. And now I have to carry a zillion dongles for everything.
Removing the headphone jack was a ballsy move, and Apple certainly knew it would irritate many.
But wireless headsets is arguably much better (at least Apple thinks so). So kudos to Apple for having going out on a limb to support something they really believe un.
There will always be other solutions at hand, these guys are doing something about it: https://www.revolut.com
Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID.
I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility.
Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.
Ok... so you went to a festival without money? How would you have solved this without Swish? As you said there was no ATMs. Card readers are expensive and not really viable for most booths. They are also kind of a monopoly.
You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too.
For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.
In other words, it became the civic responsibility of all the Swedes at the festival to ensure that foreigners-- who had no access to goods/services-- were properly fed, hydrated, and housed.
Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden.
Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.
Atleast 99% of my payments in sweden are with a totally normal credit card, the rest with swish. I only use paper money to give to homeless people, can’t remember when I bought something with bills and coins. I think it’s great, I’m more worried about tax evasion than my government knowing what I buy. I’m more interested in my speech being free than my purchases, even though I can see the problem in non-functioning democracies and dictatorships.
Its not just the government that has this data, but every intermediary in the non-cash payment chain. Mastercard for example sells its payment data to Google, who uses it to correlate online ad viewing with in store purchases. There is no way to opt out of this if you use Mastercard, and other intermediaries do similar shady things with your data.
but such purchase is untraceable to you as PII. neither google nor mastercard learns the linkage details to the data the other holds, they just learn that data is linked.
you can opt out by not using your gmail account as an addres on your mastercard.
and i believe there’s an explicit opt out as well.
this measures conversion but in a privacy safe way, so it’s actually good thing.
the google implementation that is. i guarantee anyone else doing this (i haven’t heard of such though) is leaking data like crazy
Just today I went to a concert in Malmø where the bar is cash only. This is a medium sized place.
You can withdraw cash by credit card at the ticket desk, to take to the bar and pay for drinks. It's annoying for people like me, occasional visitors from Denmark.
I don't know why they don't have the chip and pin terminal at the bar.
I have not said that it is not worth it. But it really depends on the business and the arrangement. Some banks charge you a fixed minimum rate making small purchases relatively more expensive for the seller.
Not being snarky, but there are homeless people in Sweden? In the US we're regaled with tales of the Scandanavian social safety nets. We're told everyone is taken care of. That's not the case?
Some men from Macedonia slept opposite my apartment in Copenhagen for a while in the summer. They get enough donations from passers by to keep them supplied with alcohol, and somehow avoid being deported (or return soon after?).
Interesting that they can't force people into help. Some Western democracies have provisions for forcing people into help: UK with the previous ASBO laws, US with wards of the state, and even San Francisco targeting 100 "most hopeless homeless" to be forced into help.
It's very odd to me that you need to be a citizen to get benefits. California takes care of everyone -- citizen or not.
I’m sorry for the irony in the following paragraphs, but here is how i read this post:
Thanks to the world renowned U.S social saftey net everyone get looked after!
This is why you for example never see any homeless people in SF or LA.
If you happen to stumble upon a rare occurence of a person sleeping on the steets, you can be sure it’s at least a US citizen.
<\irony>
No, but seriously, it is true that Sweden (and social _democracy_ in general) is a way of forbidding citizens to live in extreme poverty, to the benefit of everyone.
This is not imposed on the citizens themselves but rather the state.
We do this by having the state make sure there are provisions in place to TRY to take care of everyone.
You might have to be able to navigate the society to some extent though, something that can be especially hard for individuals with mental illnesses or drug addiction (in many ways these are ofc connected).
It can also be true if you are actually not a citizen.
Huh? You can get Swish on the App Store or Google Play for any country, and it works with any phone number, Swedish or not.
The only requirements are that you
1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and
2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone.
If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
Depending on your bank you might need a Swedish phone number, but you actually don't need a phone to receive money. (In reality the phone number has nothing to do with it, it's just a pre-existing ID)
You need the app to be able to send money though (iOS, android or windows phone).
Yes it is stupid. Unfortunately it is convenient, which is enough for 95% of the population.
To a degree. A bigger issue would actually be BankID, which is the secure online authentication service in Sweden, used by banks, government, insurance companies, etc.
But there are still, somehow, banks in Sweden which don't support one or the other. And, well, useful as Swish is, it's not actually obligatory for life in Sweden.
For what it's worth, BankID and Swish also support Windows Phone… for the remainder of 2018, anyway.
This has been my experience going on holiday in the Netherlands. Everything functions on cards and touch payments.
I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
Anglophones, please, please, excuse me for replying in my native tounge. The cashless society engages my aversion such that it is hard to say in my second language.
Så jävla enig alltså!
Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad.
Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter.
... huh? Or I guess this is sarcasm? This response hardly seems warranted, given it’s just a festival exclusively accepting swish. I never use swish except for sending money to friends, so I don’t think it’s widespread for businesses. Contact less credit card is easier than everything, including cash.
The Danish version, MobilePay, is fairly widely accepted by small and some medium businesses.
Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.)
Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
Swedish has three extra letters in its alphabet, åäö, so Swedish keyboard layout has 'å' where american keyboards has '['. You can type them by switching to Swedish layout and pressing [.
We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well.
Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.
Australian who travelled through Sweden and Norway in September of this year for two weeks.
I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.
The locked down nature of Swish and it’s monopoly status is worrisome. I was thinking there was just a ton of NFC readable payment devices that could accept any form of contactless payment like Apple Pay or Alipay or Google Pay etc... this is definitely not a good sign.
Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed.
There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase.
Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers.
It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there.
The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.
It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes.
All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country.
I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something).
If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.
> If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working.
How could there ever be a new mobile OS in this scenario? If stores rely on Swish, consumers have to use a mobile OS that supports Swish, so nobody can enter the mobile OS market (except if they pay Swish to provide a port for their OS on day 1).
Yes, of course, they'd have to provide a port on day 1, or people would not use that mobile OS. It's the same thing if the mobile OS lacked, say, Mobile BankID (a 2FA app used for a lot of things in Sweden). Those are simply hygiene features, like a web browser.
It's common for a new product rollout (whatever it is) to have discussions with different companies beforehand, this is how e.g. games magically appear on the market around the same time when a new game console is launched. The game studios get their hands on development hardware and documentation before anyone else.
So I don't see Swish being any kind of blocker for anyone wanting to roll out a new mobile OS in Sweden. Whoever wants to come in first contacts Swish, they do the legal paperwork and then contract someone to build the app.
And it's not like Swish is the only option to pay in stores. It's not that common, in fact. Paying with a debit card is the most common thing.
I was assuming the OP had some sort of contactless payment ability on their mobile phone. But since they had difficulty in using it especially because the platform seemingly forces a new user to have a Swedish bank that’s a huge barrier to entry.
I can’t find the article, but didn’t another Nordic country, where they’re going cashless already find a flaw? Their communication infrastructure had some sort of disruption, I don’t think it was an attack, but a failure of something for like half a day. Because of that, merchant services were screwed. Few people could buy anything since few carried cash.
Don’t get me wrong, I barely carry cash on me. I just have a bit in a safe. But I recognize the vulnerability. Natural disaster. Black out due to a node failure or two. An actual attack on the merchant services infrastructure or bank. Sure, cash can be stolen. But so can digital funds and you’re not limited to how much you can fit in a bag and carry.
It’s also funny how folks complain about privacy and not wanting private entities to have their nose in their personal lives and track what they do. Especially those Vikings whine about that regularly. Yet they trust how much data with merchant service companies?
There is a practical benefit of locality in traditional distributed systems that may get lost with companies centralizing their operations for economies of scale.
If your bank is local, as is your merchant's, you could design the payment network in such a way that, if your region is cut off from the rest of the Internet, local communication can still allow payment authorizations to go through.
The article makes Sweden into something it is not. First, Swedes are not as eager to adapt new technologies as it may seem from the text. Case in point, NFC is just arriving in the country and in one of the main grocery shops, that has its own bank as well, you can only use store cards this way. A small subset of cards are also still swipe-only. In all honesty, Poland seems like a better example of this as it is effectively the sandbox of Europe for consumer finance.
Second, this trend is visible in many countries in Europe. In my 7 years in the Netherlands before I moved to Sweden, it would be unusual for me to have any cash on me and in recent years the number of 'pin' (card) only points of sale there has been growing tremendously.
NFC terminals are growing at the same rate as NFC cards, but cards have a pretty long lifespan so my old debit card which is ~5 years old is still chip and pin, while my new credit card from the same bank is both chip+NFC.
I’m not going to go through the hassle (a few clicks) of replacing my card just to get NFC. The same goes for retailers, terminals get NFC on the next replacement.
Most of the terminals I see are NFC ready, but NFC payments are not enabled. In particular, ICA has Yomani terminals and does not accept cards not issued by them. In other countries NFC has been introduced years ago. In the Netherlands, most of the cards were replaced in 2013 and the full rollout of the tech was in 2014. The fact that a card is valid for longer does not mean that it cannot be replaced beforehand.
This is huge systemic risk (the possibility that an event at the company level could trigger severe instability or collapse an entire industry or economy).
When the systems in major Nordic bank (Nordea, Danske Bank) or payment system (Visa, MasterCard) goes down, people can't do anything until it's fixed. These things are rare but they happen. Usually it's just few hours, but if the condition persists even few days it becomes a major problem.
Mobile payment and cards are nice, but cash is good backup system.
Such as when the Irish banks went on strike for about 6 months in the 70s. Edit: It was a lockout not a strike.
They survived using olde worlde approaches with no loss of GDP growth or retail sales. The retailers and local pubs operated as banks and managed the movement of IOU credits and cheques. Publicans, as it turned out, were a pretty good gauge of credit-worthiness and extent. Cheques ended up counter signed dozens of times as they were passed on person to person many times. Retailers would offer cheque cashing to keep money circulating.
Misleading title alert!!! It says nothing about it's being a utopia or having stopped being one. It is an interesting article about the eventuality of a truly cash-free society and its consequences. Only the title is stupid.
Racism! Stong word, but this is what the Swedish cashless society is: indirect racism. Those at the margins of society are excluded from participating in society because they don't have Swedish bank accounts or Swedish credit cards. Many clubs and pubs require that to enter. Indirectly, this means that non-Swedish (non-white) people don't get into the club. Not direct racism, but indirect (the outcome is the same, no white people allowed entry, or to participate in society).
What's stopping non-white immigrants (presumably residents of Sweden staying there for a nontrivial time) from getting a Swedish bank account? If there are significant barriers to that then the "getting into a club issue" is a trifle compared to the broader participation in society. E.g. how are they getting paid for their work if almost no legal employers will pay salaries in cash?
Yeah, around here any old homeless alcoholic would have a bank account, because that's the only way how they'd get social security payments, and also any student (or working teenager) would have a bank account, because that's the only way how they'd get paid for a summer job or internship or study loan or whatever.
A bank account is a basic thing that's required (at least in come countries) for any participation in the economy and should be available to anyone; IIRC there's an EU directive about a requirement that everybody must be able to access basic banking services.
There is many borders, not just getting into Sweden, one of them is getting bank account, the other is getting a BankID, the third border is getting Swish, for example. For each, there is criteria and different requirements, and costs.
For me, I refuse to run non-free software on my computing devices, Swish is a non-free proprietary spy-ware. Just because of this decision, I am excluded and made feel like an outcast at social events where money is involved - such as splitting a bill at restaurant. Yet Im white, so I can politely tell my white friends to suck my dick if they refuse the cash I hand them. For an non-white immigrant, telling other people to suck it is not so easy.
Not necessarily aimed at white people, but also security-conscious people as well. I am white, and feel excluded due to not having Swish at many events where everyone is "swish me this swish me that", and all go high horse "cash not accepted".
Just fine. I haven’t carried cash in Scandinavia, or Europe, for years now. It’s really not any big deal, just use your check card like you would in the states.
In fact, it’s easier now. Before chip and now contactless was ubiquitous like it is now, I got all the krone mixed up. Traveling back and forth from Copenhagen and Malmo with cash was the worst. Couldn’t tell the difference but the locals absolutely could!
For the vast majority of people it would be a major inconvenience, requiring non-trivial time and effort to set up everything required to receive the equivalent of, say, $10 in crypto converted to the local currency in their bank account, which is the only place when it starts being usable money to them.
This is a major societal change. I for one believe there needs to be a tangible method of payment where a 3rd party is not requried for transactions.
I don't care if it's cash or some digital payment coin/card. The point is,people nees to be able to transact without a 3rd party and be able to buy physical tokens(as opposed to wire transfers and digital tokens).
People are too careless when changing fundamental aspects of their society. Payments can be made convenient,peer to peer and have a small amount of participation barriers.
I like physical cash. I don’t always use it, and generally use my points earning credit card at places I frequent, but don’t at places I’m new to or have no intention of returning to (unless I don’t have enough cash on me). The number of times my card has been stolen has entered into the 10s, even in our new chip card era (I’ve had three chip cards compromised, but can only definitively attribute one of those to it having been stolen after typing it into a website. i.e. no chip involved). Apple Pay and its ilk are a step in the right direction (and convenient because they still work when the physical card is cancelled), but still traceable and beholden to additional parties.
If I’m somewhere where I think the transaction might be sketchy, I can pay cash and not think about it any further. Skimming, however, is still a thing and every time my card is stolen it causes me an inconvenience that would not exist if I’d used cash.
“Bitcoin/cryptocurrency will fix this!” some of you will say. Perhaps, but it’s got a long way to go. All the USD I have in my pocket still says “this note is legal for all debts, public and private”, I don’t personally think a sign saying “we are cashless” at the cash register after I’ve ordered my food is acceptable (those establishments I’ve encountered didn’t accept bitcoin, either).
I acknowledge what it says on usd currency is somewhat tangential to a Swedish cashless society, but I still think cash should be king, or at least always accepted.
Chips use a private key to sign transactions and can't be copied, at least without being taken apart. So they are secure if all merchants require digital signatures. But for credit cards, they don't do anything to prevent your number from being stolen.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadHow would the the DHS or another US entity know about payment transactions made on a canadian bank account?
And, I realize that cannabis is not legal at the federal level in the US, but how would lawfully purchasing a cannabis product years ago disqualify you from entering the US?
But isn't there something like that already for Canadians?
Alas, such a solution would probably be extremely hard to create and therefore never will be.
> The basic concept for e-krona is as follows: it would be digital, and have a 1-to-1 conversion with an ordinary krona held in an account at the Riksbank or stored locally, for example on a card or in a mobile phone app.
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
I'd like to know what this available technology is, that can create a digital object that guarantees a 1:1 correspondence to a physical asset, cannot be duplicated or multiple-spent. Has Sweden discovered the un-copy-able bit?
The only 'novelty' here is that it'd be run by the central bank and accessed directly by consumers.
A centralized ledger would just be regular debit cards but would bypass the banks/visa/mastercard. It offers the benefit of non-cash (no physical currency) but not the benefits of cash (anonymity).
I hope we can get the benefit of both. My money stored on a card or gadget in my pocket instead of printed, but also chargeable through atms or internet banks so that the spending is anonymous.
Presumably all of the private accounts that people are currently using are measured in Kr already, and the banks already operate at fractional reserve so the actual paper doesn't exist. As an American, I make about one cash purchase a year, but that doesn't mean that I'm not spending US Dollars.
It seems to me that calling digital money "e-krona" will change exactly nothing but nomenclature.
Isn’t that a problem you have with any currency?
When a cryptocurrency has such adoption, the volatility problem will go away too.
The authorities behind the most popular crypto currencies today doesn't seem to be aiming for stability as a primary goal. The currencies would not be very meaningful as instruments for speculation if they were, which probably is the reason why stable cryptocurrencies aren't as popular.
A government system ideally guarantees access to every citizen/entity desiring to possess "cash". A system run by a private entity doesn't have to do so. If you don't agree/fall out of compliance with the terms of service of a private system, you can be banned. The same can be done on a government system, but at least you have the option of court intervention and voting people into/out of office.
> One option is to do nothing, meaning we accept that the general public no longer has access to central bank money. Such a future would imply a changed scope for the public sector. The payment market would have to be regulated and supervised in new ways to meet fulfil the objective to have a safe, efficient and inclusive payment market.
> A second alternative is to issue central bank money in a digital form, as a complement to cash and the money held in bank accounts.
One solution is simply charging cards like public transit cards instead of using credit cards which are connected to an account.
That’s where a cryptocurrency is needed.
The novel and more difficult step would be to charge the actual cryptocurrency tokens to a card, which could then be spent anonymously without contacting a central ledger. Why we “need a cryptocurrency” is because otherwise we have just let the central bank take the role of commercial banks and credit card companies. Perhaps not a bad thing in itself but not the full potential.
> no longer a utopia
was it ever? who ever claimed it was a "utopia"?
main points:
- If cash stops working, it would leave all individuals to rely on the private sector alone to get access to money and payment methods.
* One option is to do nothing, meaning we accept that the general public no longer has access to central bank money.
* A second alternative is to issue central bank money in a digital form, as a complement to cash and the money held in bank accounts.
seems like they've been thinking about this for a while
I've recently been thinking about a potential solution to the reliance on private institutions in a cashless society. I guess the problem with a "mobile chequebook" or something of the sort is that you are always to some extent dependent on a private service (e.g. phone signal provider).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_(1966%E2%80...
One of the proposed goals is to have non-traceable transactions. Seems unrealistic to me but that would be the holy grail.
No, Zcash offers the option to always use shielded transactions, if that's what you want. The choice to use a shielded or unshielded transaction rests solely in the hands of the user.
It is true that CPU and memory complexity use to be high for shielded transactions. However Sapling just activated (https://z.cash/blog/sapling-activation-complete/) and it resolves the issue: a shielded transaction used to take up to minutes of CPU time and 3GB+ of RAM, but now can be done in 1 second with ~40MB: https://medium.com/@EthAdvisor/everything-you-need-to-know-a...
Furthermore, Zcash promotes the use of TOR if users wish to hide their IP address.
Also, zcash has the trusted setup issue, which requires that you trust the developers were not compromised or did not store data during the setup, or they might be able to print infinite coins without detection if the data were to be recovered. For some, this makes it a non-starter, despite the efficiency of SNARKS over Bulletproofs which Monero now uses.
Don't let that deter you though. Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo salary. He will struggle to get by without the crowds of new adopters.
There is no "default" behavior. The software gives you the choice between shielded and unshielded, and the enduser has to choose. There is no default.
«requires that you trust the developers»
Not really. In the latest Powers of Tau ceremony, there were 87 participants. This group spans more than just the developers. Even if 86 participants were malicious or compromised, as long as there is at least 1 honest participant, the system can be trusted.
«Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo»
Not sure why this is a problem. By comparison, Satoshi "paid himself" (mined) 1M BTC =~ $6 billion dollars. I'm fine with the founders of world-changing cryptocurrencies being handsomely rewarded.
There is no wait time when recipients accept 0-conf transactions (which is always the case in a brick and mortar store, because 99% of the time it's safe enough – there is even smart tools that verify the transaction is sufficiently broadcasted to reduce risk).
But what if untraceable transactions were limited to small amounts and slow rates, such that you could personally provide for your family but not run an enterprise? (basically that's what physical cash attempts, and as long as the denominations are kept low, it sort of works)
So then you might argue that if it can enable crime, we must do something about it. Admirable ideas, but you then need to ask the question, can we do anything about it? When you ask this, you come to the conclusion that you can't do anything about it. Bitcoin happened. Nobody is in control. It does not care about your opinion.
So the real question we should be asking, is, if Bitcoin can enable crime, and we are unable to prevent the use of Bitcoin, how must our law enforcement adapt to this new world? Then we can stop wasting resources on hopelessly trying to adapt the world to suit law enforcement.
Another problem is that governments which attempt to restrict bitcoin usage will suffer the economic and brain drain which will occur as people move themselves, their businesses and their money overseas to somewhere more friendly to Bitcoin, whose economies will prosper as a result. Also aided by having a stronger monetary base which can't be devalued by central bankers.
Governments don't want to say "we're going to make Bitcoin legal," because they don't yet know how to deal with collecting tax in a world of Bitcoin use. They also don't want to just say "we're going to make it illegal," because they would be doing so at their own peril.
Good luck enforcing any prohbition anyway. We've seen how prohibition of alcohol played out in the 1920s. We also know that many drugs, despite being illegal for many decades, are easily obtainable anywhere there is a demand for them, and largely at the loss of the governments banning them, who could've been collecting taxes all along on drugs sold.
The main reason cannabis is becoming legal in many places now is because it is hugely profitable, and governments want their slice of the pie.
I grew up in Brazil during hyper inflation, and I have Argentinian friends now, so I understand what it means to obtain currency overseas or on a black market, and I can assure you it's a huge hassle and not something people want to do unless their local fiat currency has major problems. If governments with strong currencies start moving against bitcoin, transaction volume will decrease, investors will lose confidence, and the value will crash out. This doesn't require a coordinated effort, it just requires a handful of major countries to start seeing things a certain way.
This was already implemented for hundreds of years. It is called "paying with cash".
Sure, there are some minor edge cases, like dollar serial numbers that are sometimes tracked to catch bank robbers or whatever, but cash is mostly anonymous and untraceable.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
* - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides in practice, but certainly a massive privacy improvement over credit cards. In theory cash provides less privacy than ecash since stores could record the serial numbers on cash. However in practice they don't and thus cash in practice provides quite a bit of privacy.
We have known how to do untraceable transactions since 3,000 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
1. When you get cash from an ATM or Bank they record the serial numbers of the cash they gave you and attach it to your identity.
2. When you spend those funds at a store they record what you bought and the serial numbers of the cash you paid with and the serial numbers of the bills you received as change.
The government could then build a graph of spends attached to your identity. With high probability they could trace how you spent that money. One problem they would run into is if you gave or received cash from a friend. However while this might cause the tracing procedure to make some errors, it would also allow it to, in some cases, infer which of your friends you exchange cash with.
In any realistic scenario the government would also be intersecting this graph of spends with additional information such as license plate readers, RFID data from public transit, facial recognition,cell tower geolocation, etc... Serial number tracing would be just one data source.
Probably your best bet for privacy here would be pay people begging for money to swap bills with you e.g. exchanging a twenty dollar bill for a ten dollar bill.
Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits. Those people are right to fear national ID and cashlessness; their fear being from Revelations, doesn't necessarily make them religious nutjobs (of the sort whose fears we regularly and usefully ignore).
(Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)
They are completely useless until misattributed in hindsight, until further reattributed in hindsight to something slightly more coincidentally relevant. 500 years of this so far.
I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock
> Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits.
Most of our culture and philosophy comes from pre-scientific texts. Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.
> (Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)
A small number, while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.
Their choice, and I'm sure it must be good for their pretty little stained-glass filter that they keep in-place between their eyes and reality.
> Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.
All the more reason to oppose the general centralization and empowerment of authority, on principle, not just on the topic of this HN article.
> A small number
No doubt, and I feel that my phrasing conveyed that appropriately: "some Christians".
> while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.
No doubt of that either; as we all know, Christianity is very diverse in the precise natures of its adherents' fantasies; be they Revelations-enhanced or otherwise. It's still all fantasy, though, which, I suppose, is what really matters in the end.
But, my point here in all of this, is that some of the things their Bible says, do happen to be inherently wise, when extracted from the original context. The "Mark of the Beast", I daresay, is one of them. And like any piece of the Bible that is actually of-use, its wisdom is best put into our own words and then the Biblical association discarded lest it cause weakness.
* * * * *
While I do focus on Christianity specifically, since that is the immediate topic, I should make it clear that I do not discriminate:
Religion sucks. All of it. And I pity those who need it, and those who only think they need it.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/religion/
Perhaps, attack the beliefs of the Noodlers and their belief that wearing the Holy Collander protects against credit card fraud.
Outside that, I've heard mark of the beast from so many people about so many things over the decades that I'm sure it factors into a lot of political decisions where popular vote counts. The wording is kind of catch-all given mark is so ambiguous, it mentions a name, and it has a number. A person can project it on anything.
I still wish we had all followed the Yuki (base 8), it would have made computing so much easier.
Sweden made cash (practically) illegal so now everyone has one less choice.
They can't skim my cash, can't MITM my cash transactions, they can't accept payment and then not deliver (more fraud than theft, but still) because the cash and the object being purchased are both right there.
So I think you are wrong.
This would be abused in the US in very short order. How it works for the swedes should be interesting.
Not at all like cash, which just requires the entity to accept it as legal tender.
It is entirely possible to live your entire life, paying with only cash, in the United States. The hardest part would likely be paying rent, but even that isn't unheard up to pay with using cash.
Society is not cashless. The edge cases you are talking about rarely ever come up. If it is possible to only pay with cash, then the last hop is all that matters for you as an individual.
Which is exactly what happened in Sweden, according to the article.
If a politically undesirable group wants to accept donations, is this legitimate?
Paypal cite the following reasons that they may freeze or suspend an account (at their sole discretion):
Some of these are reasonable. Some of them are highly questionable. Some of them are outrageously open to abuse.> WikiLeaks' founder accused two members of Congress of pressuring MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) to block payments to his group after it published thousands of confidential messages about U.S. diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> Julian Assange charged Tuesday that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Peter King from New York influenced the moves by both companies in December 2010 to halt the payments.
> Assange, speaking to reporters from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he claimed asylum in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault, said the blockade had eliminated 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue and cost the group roughly $50 million in donations.
Of course, it could be argued that we don't have a competitive payments market. But then your proposition wouldn't reflect the real world.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
Sorry, legitimate transactions! We reject you!
This happens all of the time to lots of people.
The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies.
If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.
And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.
It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.
It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.
The solution is to use anti monopoly laws to break them up.
I don't think that companies should be forced to do something. What I instead want is for there to be enough competition in the market, such that no matter how terrible your views, there exists at least 1 one who will work with you.
And if there isn't enough competition in a market, then that's a problem.
Regimes that absolutist and authoritarian usually aren't the nicest of places to live.
Don't worry, it'll be owned by Elon Musk.
That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
You're welcome.
Hell, even the USSR had paper cash in circulation allowing some privacy and trade between individuals.
Having solely account-based money under complete regulatory control amounts to a huge increase in what is practical to put under political control. It could drastically increase the incentives to ban and regulate trade in anything of interest to special interests. E.g. the pharmaceutical industry could finally get rid of herbal medicine.
You having pieces of plastic/paper and/or metal trinkets in your pocket plays will not save you from this.
I understand the apparent privacy angle, but if you analyze it further, cash won't help in the presence of a malicious system. If the government cares enough about you to stop you from using e-cash/credit cards to buy or sell, they will also care enough to not let you roam free.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.
Edit spelling
You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.
Good luck stopping that.
It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.
A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.
Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world, are the ones who control the hashrate, who own the mining hardware, and who choose which pool to use. That is, if a pool were to use the hashrate maliciously, users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.
It is not true that "most" mining hardware is located in China. There is a good portion of it over there for sure, but because of the secrecy around most miners, we don't know how much exactly. It's certainly not ">90%".
Every single article that makes similar claims mistakenly assumes that for example it the AntPool Chinese pool represents 20% of the hashrate, then it means this hardware is located in China. This is patently false. AntPool is one of the most popular pools for various reasons (reliability, availability, flexibility, branding), so they are used by many users worldwide. They even have stratum endpoints in the US for their North American users. Only a fraction of the AntPool hashrate comes from hardware physically located in China.
Banks, on the other hand, censor transactions all the time.
The idea is that no central authority can censor your right to spend money.
I.e. the requirement to report all large cash transactions and prevent anonymity in such deals; the 'know your customer' requirement for cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. Even if your "money" is censorship resistant, transacting with a legitimate business can't be, since all legitimate businesses can be (and are) required to censor certain transactions; and if a particular "kind of money" makes it impossible to distinguish them, then it may well be that these businesses will (or will have to) simply censor the whole "kind of money".
I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.
When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.
Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.
This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.
No idea how they got the number.
But it does actually work sometimes.
Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.
Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.
Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.
I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.
People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.
... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."
That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfei...
Good we have a lot of payment options here. :)
It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.
So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.
So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.
Cash.
It works.
Its coming
For some of the other things, best practices prevent much of that. I could imagine a common practice where base layer transactions to open a channel use a joint account that requires X of Y signatures, where X-n keys are yours, and the remainder being a friend or actual intermediary business which only facilitates avoiding user error. After the channels are open it having no say in how things are transmitted. I also imagine this being seamless. Each element of a computer's boot sequence were all major stepping stones at one point, and now computers don't even show you the list of things its doing anymore. I see this technology going that way once UX designers figure out how to get paid in this space.
Just another 18 month from now and I'm sure it will be finished.
I myself need to pay for food right now and I do not have time to wait for a solution that is perpetually years from completion.
If you want to perpetuate that criticism, you'll need up to date arguments: Lightning is cumbersome to use and impractical because of the requirement to run a personal full node to connect to AND your device running the payment channel needs to always ben online for the duration of the payment channel. "Watchtowers" solve both of these issues, and they have not proliferated yet.
Yes, this isn't about what you need right now, use cash or a financial network using intermediaries. We are operating on different time frames and most forward thinking things we are talking about are on that time frame. Nobody in this movement is perturbed by your astute observation that it isn't available right now, nobody is saying "well pack it up boys, stale2002 can't be accommodated, shows over"
The problem in Bitcoin today are the same problem that have existed for years.
That problem being that there are too many people focused on esoteric solutions, like watchtowers, 2nd layers, and even 3rd layers, that only developers care about. And not enough people talking to customers or merchants, and building things that make Bitcoin work as an actual currency.
Seeing as the whole point of this stuff is to work as a currency, it seems like this should be important.
It is a rare few companies, such as BitPay, that are building things like point of sale devices that actually make it possible for consumers to buy things from merchants.
Bitpay's solution would have been okay while 0-conf transactions were not replaceable on BTC. But this had capacity limitations that lightning won't.
What you are saying would have merit, if thats what was happening on these particular topics. Wallets are totally not built for customers, but thats not one of the things you highlighted.
a contradiction right there. Security/freedom is a trade-off, and bitcoin has traded away some security for some freedom. Some people like that freedom, but some don't.
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
I am native or Sweden and I hate, from the bottom of my heart, having to use my bank card for visits to restaurants, stores, etc. It is better when staying staying away from Stockholm, Göteborg, & Malmö.
I agree.
Cash or no cash.
The vast majority of Americans rarely use cash, but that doesn't make it worthless to us.
I always have cash on me and it's extremely common here, 60 kilometres outside Stockholm, for people to not only carry cash but to actively use it.
A non-trivial amount of transactions in Sweden are still cash-based.
Yes it is the future, but we will be much worse for it.
/ Another swede.
How do you even buy a replacement phone if you have no phone to pay with?
And do the same for car.
And the hotel room when you are travelling.
Doesn’t seem too logical.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Y'all bitch it's ridiculous (and I ain't saying it's right or that I agree with the premise of having to do it in the first place), I'm just saying thats what people will do faced with the situation.
No cell phone towers for a week.
No electricity for months.
What do you do now? Pawn your backup iPhone X for $30?
As a bonus, phones sometimes explode and set fire to things - when they're not busy getting hacked :)
It's ridiculous all the way down.
So you’d have to get an extra service line :S
Even for rarer problems like phone software freezing up, touch sensor going awry, phone memory full but can't clean it (a bug but still), and losing network access because someone didn't pay the phone bill or it's pay-as-you-go and can't afford the top-up quantum - I think I've seen all of those more often than I've seen people lose all their cash.
And then there's the cost of replacement. If you urgently have to get a new phone to replace a broken, lost or stolen one, to pay for necessities - many people don't have enough short-term funds to cover it, nor access to credit.
Some of these can be addressed, but we've a long way to go.
The way I see it some person will have the opportunity to do the right thing and turn it in, or I like to imagine that a homeless will have a great a day.
The only thing that bothers me is my information in my wallet, which I will pay far more than $100 to keep safe.
I have $2 000 cash at home.
Once I’m home I can write myself a cheque, and with my passport, easily withdrawal more money at any bank (or grocery store).
Also, if a natural disaster happens (earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane, Norsemen with iPhones disembark on our shores) I don’t have to rely on any network to buy something. I just pay cash, or write a cheque.
Cash is very robust. (Booze, cigarettes and gold more so, but that’s another story)
I do have a £5 or 20 note as an emergency money in my bag and £20-40 in some drawers at home. E.g. to buy lunch if I come across a food stall that doesn't accept card payments. Rarer and rarer is it needed in the UK, and when I lived in Norway it was months between each time I needed cash.
I do however have spare debit/credit cards at home and my bag as well in case I lose my wallet. (I have never actually lost a wallet, but have left it in my coat/trousers at home etc)
With more and more stores (especially in Scandinavia as the OP details) no longer accept cash, and have not accepted cheques for decades, I am not sure your solution is a long-term solution.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/03/paying-cash-...
[2] https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/no-cash-sign...
Physical money is literally prehistoric - quite robust.
And consider:
In EU, just a few years ago, the Greek citizenry realized that “their” money was being held hostage in EU negotiations.[1] The Greeks were forbidden from withdrawing their funds (or using them for that matter)
Mind you, the Greek govt debt is the govt debt, not their personal debt.
Your country, not 30 years ago, was brought to its financial knees single handeldly by Soros (the man who broke the Bank of England). [2]
Now, facing Brexit and the potential poop storm it may end up being, you’re OK having 20 quid in your pocket?
I grew up in a third world country. For me, this naïveté is real privilege! [3]
[1] this is what power is willing to do to defend finance
[2] the UK is hardly immune.
[3] sorry for the word naive, but it really seems that way to anyone who lived through a country colapse.
I can just go up to the counter and ask to withdraw some of my money and (against my signature) they'll hand it over. No ID required, really handy if you've mislaid your wallet.
I realise this one can't really scale (!) but it is definitely a nice feature.
If I lose my wallet now I can go to my house and I have money to eat. If I lose my phone (or my wallet with card in a cashless society) I'm in a bigger problem in the short term
That has never been necessary in Sweden, or (AFAIK) most other places. I have never known anyone outside of the US who carries cash for the express purpose of tipping. To the extent that tipping even exists in Sweden, it's usually just done by rounding up whatever is owed.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9340511/perstin-experian-...
If you had credit (overdraft or credit card), it is taken away exactly at the moment you need to use it and you're put into unauthorised debt. If that happens you may not get credit from anywhere else. Where I live, even high-interest payday loans will likely be declined at that point.
If you run out of funds, you're probably going to incur compound charges as bills continue to try to be drawn.
In a cashless world run through bank accounts, at that point your friends can't lend you a little something to help with immediate necessities like food. Anything they send is instantly absorbed by charges and/or cancelling unauthorised debt (which was authorised when you incurred it - remember you're on the bad side of banks and they took away existing credit arrangements).
So you can't buy that food, and your friends can't even give/lend you a little money to help - you'll need friends who will directly feed you.
If it lasts for long, you can't rent somewhere to live, and you can't get paid for decent work. (These two things are already bad - where I live a poor credit rating means rental agencies will decline a tenancy or ask for 6 or 12 months rent (and 1-2 months deposit), and people who can't get bank accounts can't take jobs that only pay wages to an account. The two are linked and it's tough to get out of.)
Don't get on the bad side of banks in a cashless, banks-only society.
Even if you believe that, allowing private for-profit businesses (banks, credit card companies) to skim a percentage off of every single monetary transaction to line the pockets of their shareholders is utterly grotesque. It amounts to a mandatory tax, except none of the tax is going to the benefit of the taxed.
At a minimum, a reasonable cashless society would require monetary transactions to be done at zero profit and with strong regulation requiring financial institutions to minimize the cost to the seller and buyer.
Is this something you were doing before?
If not, why did you bring it up? Who do you imagine is doing this?
If you use the "wrong" bill denominations or don't have the right coins, cashiers can get irked at you too. It's so backwards compared to not having to think about it.
Cashless is more convenient. But given how fundamental money is in our society, I would never be fine with a centralized system that controls all payments. That is simply too much power in one place. I know HN is more about startup-hackers than FOSS-hackers, but I am pretty sure everyone here understands that this is a dangerous development.
Yes, sometimes cashiers ask if I have certain coins to make giving change easier.
Also you need coins for shopping carts.
You would have encountered the identical behavior in the bay area if you'd paid for things in cash. That's not because the cashier expects you to have the coins; it's an extra effort on their part to make things more convenient for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_euro_note
Often I do not want any record that I have purchased something, I will stick with cash. Thanks.
- Alcohol - Cigarettes - Drugs - Condoms - Feminist literature - Anti-feminist literature - Ammunition - Guns - Bible - The Koran - Marx’s The Capital - Low cut dress
But I do agree with the premise that it is progress in action, it just isn't the case that we are moving towards a steady state but the end goal is still constantly evolving.
They should, it's just stupid not to care about democracy and your own freedom.
Strawman.... title is built on a false premise that someone argued Sweden's cashless society was a utopia.
Can't believe I clicked on this.
The "advert" was written by the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Sweden.
Skip the read.
I have my debit card loaded in Apple Pay, for the sole purpose of making my ATM visit faster.
The ATM told me that my virtual card wasn’t acceptable to use to pull out cash; it advised me to use a debit card from my virtual wallet.
Except, that’s what I was using.
It was 8:30 PM, and I didn’t expect any prompt support from the bank. So, I used my physical debit card.
I consider both real and virtual cards to be conveniences, but they’re definitely not replacements.
Yes. It started as a curiosity and now this signs are everywhere.
> By connecting a bank account in any bank with a mobile phone number, Swish has become a popular way to share a restaurant bill
Yes. And to gather money for a friend's birthday or anything else.
> Why Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
I see the potential risks of this situation. But the article does not bother to bring an analysis of them.
One thing is already happening. The oldest part of the population have a hard time adapting to this situation. It's easier to take a bus and pay in cash than to have to buy an e-ticket in your phone.
I would prefer to see such analysis than this e-krona nonsense.
Also immigrants, non-Swedes and vulnerable people in society have a hard time. But the white people find the cashless society works well for them I suppose.
That's an extremely odd comment to make. What does being white have anything to do with this? There's loads of white immigrants in Sweden, they suffer from this exactly the same as everyone else.
To explain a little more, in the US, you are far less likely to be charged with a crime, shot, etc if you are a white person vs a black person in the same situation. This is highly controversial, with many people denying it and wanting to argue against this idea, but the easy evidence is like this: Did you ever get stopped in a car by the cops and asked get out while they frisked you, looked for trouble, etc? Never happened to me in half a century of life, but it's happened to even a black us senator multiple times.
This is pure lefty nonsense. Yes Ive been asked out of a car and frisked multiple times. Has nothing to do with race and everything to fo with class.
Take your lies elsewhere please, maybe a place like reddit is better for you and your white hating ways.
Is it a real, factual problem that old people cannot somehow pay for their mass transit in the year 2018?
[1] https://taler.net/en/index.html
I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.
For sure such information trading is illegal, but as the government doesn't give a single care, most likely it is true.
Or worse, what if they decide you had too much pub spending/fast food, so you can't get that new organ you need?
I keep my "entertainment" budget (pubs, eating out, etc) in cash for this reason.
If you do, you're a good dealer and probably an outlier. Also, the further you go up the chain of command the less likely you'd be to run into someone accepting these types of payments as well.
I.e. the middleman might let you Zelle him the money, but he is probably paying with physical currency on your behalf to the actual dealer. The dealer might do the same, but the supplier is being paid with physical currency. The dealer supplier allows it, but his suppliers are accepting cash only. Etc.
Meanwhile you can use BTC to have those same drugs shipped to your door, through an onion based marketplace or whatever, or even the clearnet if you arent buying specifically controlled substances.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lZye
Edit: See also this table
https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1803/images/tab6-A.jpg
(from https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1803g.htm )
I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).
When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.
Utopia my ass.
edit: auto complete filled in butcoin, corrected. Not sure how that got in my dictionary!
In my EU country, there are already six banks that let you do this, and I doubt we're pioneers.
In the example provided I’m sending my pal BTC for some shared purchase because there’s no cash.
My friend didn’t have a BTC address / wallet or whatever, now they do, and I’ve just transferred them 0.0028 BTC to cover my share of lunch.
Now what?
Joking aside, sure, crypto would be a great solution if they were already using it. They weren't however, and trying to introduce someone half-drunk and in a party vibe to crypto is not a good idea.
If I had asked them to use crypto afterwards I would just have imposed a lot of extra work on them, which wouldn't be nice considering they did me a service by lending to me and blindly trusting me to send it back.
Getting set up on an exchange is challenging these days, at least in the US. I didn't know if there were better options that people there in Scandinavia were using, sounds like no.
It's sad, because once you have crypto in an exchange it is super simple to send to an address, and the current exchange rate is easy to see. Seems like it solves your problems in that no one would need to use one of the different and incompatible banking systems. I'm sort of surprised the cost of signing up for a crypto exchange makes the banking system still a consideration.
It's an interesting place you are in, highly mobile within Europe, with the financial system getting more complicated when you travel within it.
Crypto's could do this. They just aren't set up as easy right now. I'm pointing at bitcoin etc. They are also slow. I can tap my MasterCard contactless card/phone and pay for coffee and the merchant is happy. I've had bitcoin take >30 minutes to transfer. Unacceptably slow.
I've never been asked for an address when doing a wire transfer.
From what I've heard banks stopped validating the name field a long time ago and you can enter whatever you want.
I don't think they validate it, though, IIRC I've gotten away with simply putting in "Germany".
I don't remember seeing issues in SEPA area, if I just use the IBAN and pay like any normal payment. If I am specifically doing a "foreign payment" some extra fields need to be filled in. That is how I recall the process, last time was 1 year ago though.
In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet.
You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet.
It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
The real problem comes when the system breaks down- which I've seen happen at plenty of festivals. At that point if cash isn't an option then commerce simply stops- screwing both vendor and customer alike.
for a $5 processing fee
Except when they have no change (forcing you to find someone willing to change it or wait for them to do so) or refuse to accept a large bill. I often choose to use cash, but it's really not frictionless.
Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke.
With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the purchasing event so that you lose track of it, like how microtransactions are never priced in actual currency.
If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money.
I’ve been to a festival which allowed us to withdraw money freely (I think they had some restrictions such as only 1 free withdrawal after the festival was over, and/or it had to be done within a week or so) but that allowed us to simply load in excess money so we never had to recharge. That worked really well for us.
The ability for poor implementations to exist is itself a strike against the general concept.
Have to load money, have to retrieve money, and have zero insight into how much I’ve already spent without even more apps or interfaces.
Even if some transactions have extra friction such as ID checks for age-restricted purchases, the less intrusive solution is color coded "dumb paper" wristbands.
Handling cash is a hassle in many ways:
1. It's slow. Obviously it is not slow in the best case when the customer throws in the exact change, but it is _really_ slow in the probably more typical case when the drunkard is at the counter and starts to dig into the pockets and find out if he has enough coins or when the seventh customer in the row wants to pay his ten cent lollipop with a hundred dollar bill and you run out of change.
2. It ties capital to keep sufficient amount of change in all of the booths.
3. It is difficult/expensive to manage securely and safely. You need to figure out how to stop personnel and other people stealing the money. Also your personnel likely feels more safe when they know that nobody can think that hey can come and try to steal money from you because you simply have none.
Or if I'm feeling extra tech-y, I can do that with my watch or phone.
2. A negligible amount for a vendor on a festival.
3. Not a problem on a festival. Booths tend to be manned by two persons because of other safety factors anyway, so staff stealing isn't an issue, and any organised criminality on a festival is usually limited to (relatively) low risk, high reward crime: pick-pocketing (smartphones in particular).
And especially the ‘takes longer’ argument just shifts the time people are waiting to the charging station, or to their own homes, if they’re charging beforehand.
I think it’s fairly easy to make any change handling easy by making everything cost multiples of $1
If every single actual implementation of an idea is bad then maybe the idea wasn’t such a great one either.
Contactless payments with a regular credit card are as far as this idea needed to go, everything else is either a gimmick or a rip-off attempt.
Music venues have some interesting procedures, Alpine valley allows under an oz of weed to be brought in. They have college girls carrying backpacks with 40k in cash. There is an off duty cop directly behind though.
Why do they allow weed to be brought in? Why do they have college girls carrying cash in a backpack? Why so much cash? Why is there an off-duty cop following her around? Isn't an off-duty cop just an ordinary member of the public? If a cop is required shouldn't it be an on-duty cop? If it's somehow a trap to catch drug dealers, how is it meant to work? Why do they limit the amount of weed? And why are they trying to catch drug dealers at all?
I'd guess the "college girls carrying 40k in cash in a backpack" were employees carrying cash out from whatever business/booth they were running and taking it to their bank or head office or whatnot, and the "off-duty" cop behind them was there acting as a security guard; since that's a somewhat common side gig for cops, and in may places, they're still given all the power and authority an "on duty" cop has.
I don't get the connection to the weed (legal or otherwise, it has never been an interest of mine), but perhaps it explains the other bit.
As for the second part, off duty cops would moonlight as security guards. And the college girls could blend in. With the large crowds it was a way keep a low profile for making cash pickups from the dozen different beer/food stations. It's pretty smart. You would never think twice.
It’s a fairly typical internal control for that type of operation.
Spending some cash sometimes increases the complexity of my pocket considerably, which is fine in practice and all, but just feels wrong to part of my brain.
This is an argument in the same vein as any number of self-assured blog posts which do the rounds through HN of "Why I stopped using X" and "Y considered harmful".
Power to your friends maybe, but it's not an argument one way or another over the merits of the system - its an argument about things they do personally to ensure self-discipline.
You meant 'more', right?
If your card gets stolen however, you go to the bank, fill out a ton of forms, pay a fee for losing your card. Wait a few days for your new card to be delivered in the mail. And then, finally can you pay again. In the meanwhile, you are forced to pay with... cash! Which nobody accepts, because not having a debit card is socially unacceptable in our society.
Not sure which country you are talking about but the vast majority of people go to an ATM not the bank to get cash. You still need a debit card to get cash from an ATM.
I haven't been to a bank for getting cash in 10 years. And as you say, ATMs are where you get cash.
Self-checkout person was going "what the hell?" on that one. I also heard her talking to others about being hungry from break being delayed. I gave her the grapes after explaining what I was doing. She was happy, too. Probably did it herself at some point haha. Cashiers trip out to this day if I tell them about that whenever someone is buying a candy bar or something to get cash back. Occasionally, person in line leaves to get a grape. Just one. :)
But I actually assumed just the cash was gone. Either bank or ATM works fine in that situation.
But try losing your card overseas and see how you feel then... Especially if you have to put a stop on your card... Slow and very painful...
Unless you have a spare you'll be asking a friend to use Western Union for bridge finance.
Depends on the card. With Amex or Diners Club it’s not a problem.
I’d rather have the bracelet solution and don’t have to worry about having 100 coins in my pockets or losing my wallet.
Disney does that at Disneyland and Disney World in America: https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/plan/my-disney-experience/...
You can also use it to unlock you hotel room and to link to those photographs that are taken of you when you're on the rides.
I watched a presentation on this, and it's actually very interesting how they manage the ride experience so that even during a system outage they can still let people get on the rides.
Makes the lines for drinks move so fast, it’s really outstanding.
How do they deal with tips?
At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one.
Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choosing a tip amount the bartender is done making your drinks. No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Out of all the festivals, etc, I've been to where they do wristband-based payment instead of accepting cards directly, Avant Gardner / Brooklyn Mirage have the best setup IMO.
Apparently Billfold is the vendor: https://www.billfoldpos.com/
I wonder how many make theirs 1234
Is there normally hassle? In Europe, and I think this generalisation holds in the countries that commonly pay with a card, the terminal is either mounted on the bar facing the customer, or is portable and left in a similar position.
In any case, there's never a pen, receipts mostly go immediately in the bin unless someone is claiming expenses, and the card never leaves the customer's hand.
So it's little different from a contactless bracelet, except I trust Europay-MasterCard-Visa more han a POS supplier.
It helps that there are no tips. If the number on the screen looks reasonable, I don't touch the terminal at all.
The upside is that the US is at this point better at holding on to the principle of being able to use cash everywhere in addition to other payment options; something that is starting to become a problem in Europe.
Outside of nightlife and restaurants, I almost never deal with paper signatures anymore. Pretty much all retail, etc, does digital signatures and digital receipts, paper receipt upon request.
Its still pretty backwards compared to how most things credit card related work in Europe, but gets the job done and is indeed gradually getting better over here (and, as some of the other posts have mentioned, the saving grace if you don't want to deal with any of this is that cash is almost universally accepted).
I can see value for certain specialist places, like a resort where everyone is wearing swimwear. Or a fetish club.
By introducing a new payment method they can be sure that everyone has access to it and limit it to just the bracelets.
If you are lucky they will return any unused credit automatic to your credit card without any fees. I would like to know how common that is and what kind of terms and conditions most such system has. My cynicism tells me its about as abusive as they can get away with but to be fair I have not tested it (since I either refuse to prepay on principle or only get the exact amount I have decided to already spend).
https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jwz.o...
It actually IS a Utopia, by Thomas More's original definition; a society that appears idyllic and perfectly organised on the surface, but is only maintained in that state by everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And that is achieved by enforcing total compliance through surveillance and coercion.
The point of the book is that the reader really wouldn't want to live in Utopia once he understands the misery it requires.
Same thing here.
It does seem to be a bad deal for tourists however. I'm surprised that companies are apparently so quick to ditch traditional credit cards.
The danger is that society as a whole ends up making sub-optimal decisions because each person is (selfishly / rationally) choosing to avoid these extra costs.
Powerful entities (even those falling short of absolute monopolies) probably get away with a lot more societal harm than they would if we were more aware of this "coercion of convenience".
There are a myriad of ways Sweden can and probably is enforcing cashless trends through surveillance and coercion. Encouraging banks and retailers to refuse cash services, as referenced in the article, is likely done by the government. This enhances their ability to track and control all monetary transactions for any number of reasons (nefarious or otherwise).
Physical money is disgusting. Might as well use poo sticks as currency...
Can we, as a society, just stop saying that?
Fake quote but also something I'd like to see removed from meaningful discussions
Edit: Please comment if things are different in your non-Swedish country (considering Europe here, but curious about other countries of course).
I see no need for using Vipps or ApplePay. I place my bank card on the terminal and it is paid, with no fees. If it is over $20 I have to enter the pin. Super simple.. Me and my wife actually laught when we find coins in old jackets, because we haven’t seen coins in months. Almost forgot how they look and feel.
The store no longer has to go to the bank to get heaps of change
The store no longer has to take money to the bank
The store will have no money on premises so less of a target for robbery
The store will have no money on premises so no having to trust employees not to take some.
Nothing to account. Just read the total.
In almost every way, as long as there are enough customers it's a win for the store. Many customers love it too. Most of my western friends visiting Japan get annoyed they can't go cashless in Japan because they're used to being cashless where they are from.
I did run into my first no-cash accepted store here recently. It will be interesting to see how it goes in Japan as they are more privacy oriented.
I agree with all the issues of going cashless. It scares the crap out of me, especially when traveling. But, I can't see it not happening relatively quickly.
...
But thinking about currencies and economy in europe is always kinda doomed because the euro is double-locked. No national economic policy actually has a meaning since at most your gonna leverage some power to influence the ECB, but you're never gonna be the one to actually decide. So there is a complicated combat to do cross european countries saying ok we have to re-found the mission and the organization of the ECB, the relationship with national economies. How do we want to keep down inflation: just maintain growth in face of other world economies that actually grow or make ourselves more independent, what do we do when countries have diverging interests, how do we make sure it's regulated and we keep control on it?
I would vouch for a system where euro exists but is restricted to cross-country corporate business and easy traveling: common credit card system where you can transparently withdraw any participating national money at the current nation negociated exchange rate (eg federating by having a star topology instead of a complete graph for exchange rates: "we treat all the others the same"). Additionally the BCE should have a second decision instance (two-chamber-like) basically being the european budget commission but elected by people, not chosen by governments, to ease cross-country political action. And on a more technical/practical level we have to rethink about wire transfers. I don't know much about how SEPA works but it's probably interesting to take a look.
It also looks a little like those countries with their own national currency but also everyone accepting USD. Tourists can carry dollars, lose a little by unfavorable rates at every payment, maybe end up with change in the local currency to use in the next shop. I remember that on vacation in Uzbekistan.
[#] This is a well-known social/evolution dynamic: group selection. Bees suicide when attacking: individually it's a weak behavior, but globally it makes the group more resilient. The balance between cooperation and competition is a balance between individual power and group power. Europe is a group of groups, so the balance is weirder but having too strong cooperation at the top level (eg enforcing a common economic policy) will weaken countries. But only some countries because of non-homogeneity, thus destabilizing everything by lowering local national resilience (to specific local concerns, which do exist). So i believe we have to accept that we need slightly stronger countries to make the european union stick together.
I would guess some surveillance is involved in terms of audits of banks, but it might not fit the technical definition of surveillance.
Coercion: "To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel."
So if I'm down the street and cash won't let me get on a bus, the movie tickets can't be purchased, food can't be bought etc. There's the basis for pressure. Can't buy food without card, ok you go hungry. There's the threat. I'm sure that intimidation will turn up in a lot of little ways. Public ostracism / humiliation (even at subtle levels) due to not having a card could be seen as real enough to count. The network effects of not having a card will likely cause serious inconvenience.
If "you can't do anything without a card" then you are compelled to get one.
Sounds like coercion to me.
plus cash it's also accepted everywhere
Canada we have Interac, which is mostly everywhere, but we also have cash, and three or four credit networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and sometimes Discover). There are only really three physical modes of operation, and they all have a time and a place: Tap card 95% of the time, insert and use pin when fraud detection gets a funny feeling, and use cash when all else fails (because sometimes that means you have to call up your creditor's fraud department and let them know you're just on a roadtrip, your card hasn't been stolen).
I don't think requiring a smartphone to accomplish what chip & pin and NFC cards do just fine is an upgrade.
Then these people talk about making state payment processors. What happens when fraud prevention completely stops you from being able trade any money? Do they drive out to fix your problem on the spot? How on earth could they expect that to work out well?
Even though the situation in Europe in fragmented, it's a lot cheaper for merchants.
Agreed. Though I also don't think that this was suggested anywhere in the article?
If you want a mapping to your situation, your wallet could have an additional card reading "Bank of Canada" next to your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover cards.
Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.
I would trade all this shit for a week battery time.
So yes, while smartphones are not perfect, I see no intentions from developers to fix that.
Then why do consumers constantly praise thinner phones, and continue to purchase them? I think you're mistaking what you want and consider a good choice compared to what everyone else actually wants and is willing to support.
Both my iPhone and Pixel 3 fit my hand. I'm 5'6.
It reminds me of the 80s ghetto blasters fad. Size was the thing. As they got ever bigger they got far worse as there was so much resonant empty plastic and they distorted and rattled madly with volume anywhere over 2. Size and LEDs counted above all. Sound? LOL look at these LEDs man.
Most recent changes, from all manufacturers, have been deliberately consumer hostile. There's not much left to actually innovate with. Consumers don't want to keep swapping ecosystems - as that means hassle and re-buying a bunch of apps. Often they'd prefer not to even switch manufacturers if they've ended up using a cloud app for photos or something. So they just buy the next iThing from whoever even if it is too big, or is anti case because of edge to edge screens, or has a fake notch.
Talk about Emperor's new clothes.
So what can I choose that's against this trend? Oh. Nothing. Yet I need a phone, and probably an app or two for work. Best buy something or risk job loss. Even if I detest all the offerings as too big for any pocket I possess.
In your eyes it's a vote for thinner or bigger because a sale was made. No that's not how it works. It's not a simple commodity with only one feature to make, break, and validate the sale. To vote by not purchasing I'd have to cease having a mobile.
What do you wear?
My current SE fits my biking gear pockets without fiddling, my previous Android was a bit fiddly. The one before that (my one attempt at a larger phone) fit properly in nothing I own except my winter coats. It had to live in my rucksack, so got left at home a lot, and on the desk through lunch breaks. No surprise that it wasn't many months before I Ebayed it and bought something sensible. :p
Anything bigger than the SE would sometimes fall out of my spring/autumn weight jackets if I just bent over or sat. All except SE got too big for comfort in back pocket of jeans any more. Especially as they get so thin and large as to be asking for a bent or broken phone.
I don't think that's so unusual? It's my other half who's pocket limited. :)
Having two back-facing cameras enables your phone to do computer stereo vision stuff, which are key for 3d sensing and augmented reality applications.
Apple discussed this in interviews after the X came out. They realized they needed somewhere for the camera and face scanner, so decided since they needed a notch anyway they would take full advantage by adding in those sensors and features that could make best use of it. The proximity sensor and speakers could have worked without a notch, but work better with it. These considerations, together with aesthetics related to balancing the size of the notch and the screen areas either side, were the driving factors.
They are told what to buy from flashy ads and multimillion marketing budgets. Keeping the battery week keeps you tethered to your desk and requires you to think about every night b for bend)did I plug in my phone?)
Low battery drives usage. If you had a large weeklong battery, you might put your phone down every now and again without looking at it... a big no no for big tech.
I still wish they had produced a 17" with dual video outputs.
I’d love to have been in the design meeting where thry decided that was more important than world voltage compatibility.
“World voltage are you mad? Who packs a toothbrush when they go travelling? Nope, what the people are clamering for is bluetooth support!”
I've had one US-bought base unit fail and, given the simplicity of the device (just coils for transforming voltage and induction charging) I'm assuming it's due to being plugged in to a 220V outlet for an extended period.
(I have an IP phone at work, and it's an unintuitive unreliable beast.)
Captain is handed a manual when plant life is discovered. Took him a second to stop talking to the book and start using his hands on the pages. It was a pretty quick scene, but humorous.
Side note, the Wall-E short is great and one of the best Pixar shorts, imo.
https://youtu.be/pQHX-SjgQvQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
And audio quality on most Bluetooth headphone/earphones sucks. And now I have to carry a zillion dongles for everything.
But wireless headsets is arguably much better (at least Apple thinks so). So kudos to Apple for having going out on a limb to support something they really believe un.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Same as swish but no need for Swedish banks nor BankID.
I use Swish extensively because it works for giving kids cash remote and at the same time buying a car. If I would stumple on someone who is unable to use it it would be troublesome, but I think most swedes would break their neck to solve it anyhow in that case. If they know they have the possibility.
Bank transactions between countries have always been a burden, I so hope that we will see big change in the near future.
You don't have to use SWIFT... you can do Paypal, Western union etc.. too.
For Swedes.. Swish is god send. I lost my credit card once at a train and had no cash. I was at a hospital out of town with my son. I was able to Swish to a doctor and then get cash from him.
Actually, this sounds like it could become a utopia given the right social strategy by the Swedes. They just need to buy beers, lunches, and festival tickets for the kinds of tourists they desire. Then ignore the loud obnoxious ones who will become hungry and irritated and end up leaving early and never coming back to Sweden.
Of course the risk is that it is even more cost effective in the short term for the citizenry to become xenophobic.
you can opt out by not using your gmail account as an addres on your mastercard.
and i believe there’s an explicit opt out as well.
this measures conversion but in a privacy safe way, so it’s actually good thing.
the google implementation that is. i guarantee anyone else doing this (i haven’t heard of such though) is leaking data like crazy
You can withdraw cash by credit card at the ticket desk, to take to the bar and pay for drinks. It's annoying for people like me, occasional visitors from Denmark.
I don't know why they don't have the chip and pin terminal at the bar.
Some men from Macedonia slept opposite my apartment in Copenhagen for a while in the summer. They get enough donations from passers by to keep them supplied with alcohol, and somehow avoid being deported (or return soon after?).
People may also beg even though they have a home.
It's very odd to me that you need to be a citizen to get benefits. California takes care of everyone -- citizen or not.
Thanks to the world renowned U.S social saftey net everyone get looked after!
This is why you for example never see any homeless people in SF or LA. If you happen to stumble upon a rare occurence of a person sleeping on the steets, you can be sure it’s at least a US citizen.
<\irony>
No, but seriously, it is true that Sweden (and social _democracy_ in general) is a way of forbidding citizens to live in extreme poverty, to the benefit of everyone.
This is not imposed on the citizens themselves but rather the state.
We do this by having the state make sure there are provisions in place to TRY to take care of everyone. You might have to be able to navigate the society to some extent though, something that can be especially hard for individuals with mental illnesses or drug addiction (in many ways these are ofc connected).
It can also be true if you are actually not a citizen.
I have a Swedish bank account, but I still can't use Swish because I have an American phone. It's infuriating.
The only requirements are that you
1) have a Swedish bank account that supports the service (not all banks do), and
2) have Mobilt BankID on your phone.
If you possess a Swedish bank account and are in the Swedish Population Register, you should be able to get Mobilt BankID on your phone (which is, like Swish, an app available on the App Store everywhere) with your Internet bank and then set up Swish.
That sounds like it makes it impossible for any other phone OS to enter the Swedish market.
You need the app to be able to send money though (iOS, android or windows phone).
Yes it is stupid. Unfortunately it is convenient, which is enough for 95% of the population.
But there are still, somehow, banks in Sweden which don't support one or the other. And, well, useful as Swish is, it's not actually obligatory for life in Sweden.
For what it's worth, BankID and Swish also support Windows Phone… for the remainder of 2018, anyway.
I’m living in Japan where everything is cash, and it’s just such a culture shock to go to a place where I cannot simply pay for everything with cash...
Speaking as a Swedish native who lived in japan for years
I believe inside of Tokyo almost all the machines also support a variety of languages now, but there might be a scattered few with only Japanese.
Så jävla enig alltså!
Fy fan för detta inskränkta, ofria land! Jag avundas norrmän, daner, och finnar för att de slipper Rosenbad.
Du, och alla andra skandinaver vet att genomsnittssvensken... har sina svårigheter.
Ser fram mot min årliga skridskosemester i Norge.
Very small businesses might only accept MobilePay or cash (e.g. come and see an obscure band perform in Copenhagen, the ticket, cloakroom and bar might have these choices.)
Larger places offer it as an alternative. The canteens at Copenhagen University, for example.
I'm a Norwegian in Australia.
We've got Paypass / Paywave just about everywhere here. With Samsung Pay supporting both, I don't bring my wallet out most days. I'm sure a lot of the readers support Apple Pay as well.
Of course we can still use cash if we want to, but tapping is just easy these days.
I just used contactless payments on my credit card the entire time and never had any issues. To me it seems more like Swish-specific issues rather than cashless in general? However, if some people are disadvantaged by different cashless options then that is a definite issue.
Regarding the article saying that if central banks become irrelevant due to cash going fully out of favor: that’s such BS. Deposits would just become credits from central banks to lending banks private or not so that customers could get credit and pay for goods digitally. No exchange of paper money is ever needed.
There’s already orders of magnitude more money in asset valuations than there is paper money to back them in the world economy why should we hold back because we are so fixated on paper currency. With the advent of token based contactless payment services like how Apple Pay works the future is secure payments without cash and those burndensome coins I have to handle while getting Che he after a purchase.
Lastly, if things go digital fully it could mean that securing and auditing and processing could be even cheaper and could allow for entrants that can still profit on transaction processing but at much lower rates than the current incumbents charge retailers.
It’s the opposite here in Germany. Some places have support for contactless payment, take credit cards, etc., but most even if they do prefer you to pay with cash as it’s cheaper for them. There’s also this German only banking alliance where they have put forth a EC card that has very low to no fees for participating entities as the funding and processing is all done in Germany amongst the member financial institutions. But my N26 account doesn’t offer one so I’m out of luck there.
The thing is the incumbents both state and private want to keep the status quo alive: the Mastercards of the world want to keep fees high and central banks want to keep control of interest rates by influencing the supply of currency in the market. I think both can still be done without cash and it leaves the possibility that with time and good legislation and technological improvement and some enterprising people there might become solutions that take the friction of paying for and make the settling accounts and such cheaper for all parties involved.
It is basically a payment overlay on top of whatever technology runs in the mobile devices. If tomorrow the dominant mobile OS is Foobar, there will be Swish for it and things just keep on working. It is not tied to a US or Chinese megacorporation, so there is no risk of geopolitically-influenced political decisions ruining the show, like those threatening SWIFT, for example. Swish works just fine inside Sweden, for Swedes.
All countries should have the equivalent of Swish and then make them interoperate if sending money to another country.
I can think of one thing why Swish and "e-krona" is not a good idea: if the lights go out temporarily, it will be difficult to pay for something (although figuring this out is a technical problem -- the payments could be queued in the terminals or something).
If the lights go out forever and we enter the quiet apocalypse, then there is very little use for cash either, aside from use as tinder or drying shoes, and plastic notes will not work for those either.
How could there ever be a new mobile OS in this scenario? If stores rely on Swish, consumers have to use a mobile OS that supports Swish, so nobody can enter the mobile OS market (except if they pay Swish to provide a port for their OS on day 1).
It's common for a new product rollout (whatever it is) to have discussions with different companies beforehand, this is how e.g. games magically appear on the market around the same time when a new game console is launched. The game studios get their hands on development hardware and documentation before anyone else.
So I don't see Swish being any kind of blocker for anyone wanting to roll out a new mobile OS in Sweden. Whoever wants to come in first contacts Swish, they do the legal paperwork and then contract someone to build the app.
And it's not like Swish is the only option to pay in stores. It's not that common, in fact. Paying with a debit card is the most common thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I barely carry cash on me. I just have a bit in a safe. But I recognize the vulnerability. Natural disaster. Black out due to a node failure or two. An actual attack on the merchant services infrastructure or bank. Sure, cash can be stolen. But so can digital funds and you’re not limited to how much you can fit in a bag and carry.
It’s also funny how folks complain about privacy and not wanting private entities to have their nose in their personal lives and track what they do. Especially those Vikings whine about that regularly. Yet they trust how much data with merchant service companies?
If your bank is local, as is your merchant's, you could design the payment network in such a way that, if your region is cut off from the rest of the Internet, local communication can still allow payment authorizations to go through.
It's no different than a VISA or MasterCard debit though.
It's a good case for e-krona which I'm looking forward too.
When you need to buy a train ticket to get away from the Germans or Russians you don't want to be asking "Sorry do you accept AmEx?".
Second, this trend is visible in many countries in Europe. In my 7 years in the Netherlands before I moved to Sweden, it would be unusual for me to have any cash on me and in recent years the number of 'pin' (card) only points of sale there has been growing tremendously.
I’m not going to go through the hassle (a few clicks) of replacing my card just to get NFC. The same goes for retailers, terminals get NFC on the next replacement.
When the systems in major Nordic bank (Nordea, Danske Bank) or payment system (Visa, MasterCard) goes down, people can't do anything until it's fixed. These things are rare but they happen. Usually it's just few hours, but if the condition persists even few days it becomes a major problem.
Mobile payment and cards are nice, but cash is good backup system.
How much cash does a person keep handy? If the condition persists a few days, cash would also become a major problem.
They survived using olde worlde approaches with no loss of GDP growth or retail sales. The retailers and local pubs operated as banks and managed the movement of IOU credits and cheques. Publicans, as it turned out, were a pretty good gauge of credit-worthiness and extent. Cheques ended up counter signed dozens of times as they were passed on person to person many times. Retailers would offer cheque cashing to keep money circulating.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/pubs-replaced-banks-in-ireland...
Now try that with an app. :)
pay and be paid
I guess if anyone can pull it off the swedes will. And I don’t think they are offering a replacement to physical cash here - just an alternative
A bank account is a basic thing that's required (at least in come countries) for any participation in the economy and should be available to anyone; IIRC there's an EU directive about a requirement that everybody must be able to access basic banking services.
For me, I refuse to run non-free software on my computing devices, Swish is a non-free proprietary spy-ware. Just because of this decision, I am excluded and made feel like an outcast at social events where money is involved - such as splitting a bill at restaurant. Yet Im white, so I can politely tell my white friends to suck my dick if they refuse the cash I hand them. For an non-white immigrant, telling other people to suck it is not so easy.
In fact, it’s easier now. Before chip and now contactless was ubiquitous like it is now, I got all the krone mixed up. Traveling back and forth from Copenhagen and Malmo with cash was the worst. Couldn’t tell the difference but the locals absolutely could!
I don't care if it's cash or some digital payment coin/card. The point is,people nees to be able to transact without a 3rd party and be able to buy physical tokens(as opposed to wire transfers and digital tokens).
People are too careless when changing fundamental aspects of their society. Payments can be made convenient,peer to peer and have a small amount of participation barriers.
If I’m somewhere where I think the transaction might be sketchy, I can pay cash and not think about it any further. Skimming, however, is still a thing and every time my card is stolen it causes me an inconvenience that would not exist if I’d used cash.
“Bitcoin/cryptocurrency will fix this!” some of you will say. Perhaps, but it’s got a long way to go. All the USD I have in my pocket still says “this note is legal for all debts, public and private”, I don’t personally think a sign saying “we are cashless” at the cash register after I’ve ordered my food is acceptable (those establishments I’ve encountered didn’t accept bitcoin, either).
I acknowledge what it says on usd currency is somewhat tangential to a Swedish cashless society, but I still think cash should be king, or at least always accepted.